Kenneth W Harl

A narrative history of how Attila, Genghis Khan and the so-called barbarians of the steppes shaped world civilization. "The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world's greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads...

Byzantium is too-often considered merely the "Eastern rump" of the old Roman Empire, a curious and even unsettling mix of the classical and medieval. Yet it was, according to Professor Harl, "without a doubt the greatest state in Christendom through much of the Middle Ages," and well worth our attention as a way to widen our perspective on everything from the decline of imperial Rome to the rise of the Renaissance. In a series of 24 tellingly detailed...

Professor Kenneth W. Harl of Tulane University delivers thirty-six lectures on the history of the Crusades, from its origins to the final Muslim victory over the Crusaders in 1291.

As explorers and traders, the Vikings played a decisive role in the formation of Latin Christendom, and particularly of Western Europe. In this course the Vikings will be studied not only as warriors, but also in other roles for which they are equally extraordinary: merchants, artists, kings, raiders, seafarers, shipbuilders, and creators of a remarkable literature of myths and sagas.

A study of the Byzantine Empire from earliest times to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

This course addresses three broad chronological spans. The first third of the course covers the nomadic steppe peoples from antiquity to 550 A.D., from their domestication of the horse through their interactions with the civilizations of China, the Near East, the Greeks, and Imperial Rome. The second third of the course deals with the early Middle Ages, a period of time that was dominated by the spread of the Turkish language across the steppe zones....

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides called it "a war like no other"--Arguably the greatest in the history of the world up to that time. The Peloponnesian War pitted Athens and her allies against a league of city-states headed by Sparta. Thucydides's eyewitness account of the war has been a classic for 24 centuries and is still studied for its profound truths about the nature of human strife. In The Peloponnesian War, Professor Kenneth Harl draws...