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A brand new podcast dedicated to exploring history's most iconic periods through the battles that shaped them.
Featuring multi-episode series with each episode around just 15-20 minutes long, we bring history to life in bitesize bursts, recreating real-life stories you can enjoy in a spare moment. Or if you want to listen for longer, just binge them back to back.
Featuring multi-episode series with each episode around just 15-20 minutes long, we bring history to life in bitesize bursts, recreating real-life stories you can enjoy in a spare moment. Or if you want to listen for longer, just binge them back to back.
54 Episodes
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On this dark Halloween night, meet the real life Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. If you don't like spooky and gruesome tales, turn off now. If you do, listen to be horrified.
Vlad the Impaler was born in Transylvania, and is the inspiration behind the most famous of all vampires - Dracula. With a legendary taste for blood, and for impaling his victims, it's easy to see why.
In this story, Vlad battles the invading Ottoman Empire and uses sheer gruesome horror to turn his enemies away at the gates.
Happy Halloween.
The Battle of Osowiec in 1915 was darkly horrifying despite the bright summer's morning. The Germans gassed the stubborn Russian defenders of the Osowiec Fortress with a vicious mix of chlorine and bromine, killing every single one.
Or so they thought.
Because as the Germans advanced they spotted a single figure jerk suddenly upright, skin blistered and torn, eyes peeled back, teeth bared where lips had once been.
The dead had risen and now they were coming for their revenge.
Subscribe to us here on your favourite podcast channel, follow us @bitesizebattles on Instagram and Facebook, and visit www.bitesizebattles.com. Thanks for listening.
Nearly a thousand years ago, a Game of Thrones was played for real across the old Kingdom of England. In the struggle between Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, and Viking Scandinavians, it’s the Battle of Hastings of 1066 that won fame and glory as the seismic moment that ended a dynasty and began another. But a conquest is rarely so simple, and battles both before and after Hastings played pivotal roles in the sculpting of English, British and European destiny.
Our debut series, the English Game of Thrones, begins with a battle exactly 50 years to the week before Hastings – a battle at which a single act of betrayal changed the course of English history – the Battle of Assandun in 1016.
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Our second episode in the English Game of Thrones looks at a battle which has often been overshadowed by events at Hastings just three weeks later. But this was a key moment at Stamford Bridge near York in England, a clash between Viking and Anglo-Saxon without which may have seen an entirely different outcome to the whole game. It’s place in this story is monumental.
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This was one of the most colossal moments in English history. On this, the 954th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, we look at the battle which ended a dynasty and began another.
This was no ordinary battle. It was a titanic struggle between elite units - Anglo-Saxon housecarls vs Norman cavalry. The Anglo-Saxons were exhausted after two forced marches and the battle at Stamford Bridge three weeks earlier. The Normans were in a foreign land with no safe place to retreat to.
Nearly a thousand years ago it would have been anyone's guess who would come out on top. Listen to our retelling of this famous story which changes the course of history. England and Europe would never be the same again.
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When Edgar Aetheling's northern army fled into Scotland in 1069, William the Conqueror took his frustration out on the civilian population of Northumbria, Yorkshire and the other northern shires of England.
In order to end the seemingly ceaseless rebellions emerging from the region, William ordered every foodstuff, animal and dwelling in northern England to be utterly destroyed, and every armed man killed.
By sword, fire, exposure and starvation, Orderic Vitalis tells us 100,000 died.
Hear about the Anglo-Saxon resistance which sparked this shocking event, and why it was so important in the Norman Conquest of England.
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The English Game of Thrones is nearly at an end.
William the Conqueror had spent the three years since Hastings crushing one rebellion after another, culminating in the terrible Harrying of the North in 1069/70. Through tactical brilliance and sheer brutality, he finally must have sensed that the Kingdom of England was truly his.
But, a last flame of resistance spat into life in the form of a dispossessed English thegn, named Hereward. This was the Anglo-Saxon last stand.
Find out how close William came to giving in to Hereward, how Vikings, again, nearly turned the tide, and how the victors and vanquished alike continued to play a game of thrones in other European states for centuries to come.
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When the Goths turned up on the banks of the Roman frontier of the Danube river, they were desperate asylum seekers.
But through some utterly inept Roman policy-making, they were turned into enemies and the Gothic War of 376-382 erupted.
The Battle of Adrianople was the turning point in this war, allowing the Goths more or less free rein to rampage throughout Thrace, the Balkans and Greece - and it was the local Roman population which bore the brunt.
The battle, the war, and the subsequent peace that was made had huge consequences for the integrity of the Roman Empire.
There was a long way to go to the Fall of Rome, but it was a decisive moment with long-lasting repercussions.
Welcome to the first episode in our series on the Fall of Rome.
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The moment some Romans started to think the end was nigh.
The Rhine invasion of Gaul in December, 406, was an unprecedented incursion by up to 200,000 men, women and children of the Vandal, Alan and Suevi nations.
As a direct result, Spain was lost, Gaul ransacked and Britain abandoned. Hear about it all here, only @bitesizebattles.
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The Sack of Rome by Alaric's Goths was a seismic moment which sent shockwaves throughout the Empire.
Find out why and how it happened right now, and what it meant for the Fall of the Roman Empire.
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Britain and Spain were lost, Gaul in the hands of a usurper, and Italy ravaged following the Sack of Rome. The Empire looked doomed.
By then rose Flavius Constantius, a brilliant and experienced Roman commander. Just seven years after Rome's sack, he had put much of the Empire back together and it seemed to be about to embark on a new golden age.
Find out how he did so, against overwhelming odds.
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Part 1 of our epic episode on Attila the Hun and his titanic showdown with the Western Roman Empire on the Catalaunian Plains in 451.
The fate of both the Hunnic and Roman Empires rested on its outcome.
Come and join the action here at Bitesize Battles.
Subscribe to us here on your favourite podcast channel, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook @bitesizebattles
Part 2 of our epic episode on Attila the Hun and his titanic showdown with the Western Roman Empire on the Catalaunian Plains in 451.
The fate of both the Hunnic and Roman Empires rested on its outcome.
Come and join the action here at Bitesize Battles.
Subscribe to us here on your favourite podcast channel, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook @bitesizebattles
Now comes the body-blow that would rock the Western Roman Empire on its heels. The Vandals, part of the original Rhine invasion of 406, now surged out of Spain and made a beeline for Roman North Africa.
North Africa was Rome's bread basket and money-maker - any threat to it would create a food and financial crisis from which it would be nearly impossible to recover.
Find out what happened and how the brilliant Roman commander, Flavius Aetius, reacted alongside the powerful Eastern Empire.
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This is the season finale, the climactic finish to this epic story of the Fall of the Roman Empire.
While the West was hanging from a thread after the Vandals had taken North Africa, the Eastern Roman Empire wasn't so quick to let it fade away.
The Eastern Emperor, Leo, spend 100,000 pounds of gold putting together an immense armada, and sent it straight to Vandal Africa.
At the Battle of Cape Bon, the Romans and Vandals would face off in a decisive and destructive naval battle in 468.
The outcome would decide the fate of the Roman Empire, and the history of Europe.
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The opening episode of the rollercoaster ride of the Scottish Wars of Independence.
On a pitch-dark night, Scotland's King Alexander III urged his horse to ever-greater speeds, galloping across vales and glens in a wind-driven storm.
He was hurrying to see his young and beautiful Queen, Yolande of Dreux. Alexander was 44, she just 22. It was her birthday the next day, and it's likely that Alexander was rushing to help her, let's say, see it in.
But in the lashing rain his horse lost its footing, causing them both to crash down a steep and rocky embankment. He was found the next morning on the sand of the shore. With a broken neck.
Little did he know that his lust for his young Queen was about to throw Scotland into decades of civil strife, and plunge it into a bitter war with England where it would struggle for its very existence.
Find out what happened and where the famous names of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and Edward Longshanks fit in.
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Longshanks seems in control of Scotland - he has the towns and cities, he has the castles, and he even has the King.
But soon to rise would be a Scottish Knight, William Wallace, for whom living under English domination was unbearable. He and other leaders, like Andrew de Moray, roused the country to rebellion and gathered an army with which he fought the English at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk.
This famous freedom fighter would shatter the image of English invincibility and be a Scottish talisman for centuries to come.
Find out what happened at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, what fate befell William Wallace, and what it meant for Scottish Independence.
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After Longshanks' used the world's largest ever trebuchet, War Wolf, to batter Stirling Castle into submission, he had captured William Wallace and had him brutally executed in London in 1305. Once again, it seemed that Scotland's destiny as an independent Kingdom was doomed.
But inspired by Wallace's stand and appalled by Longshanks' brutality, there rose a new and even greater leader - Robert the Bruce - who would lead Scotland to triumph over England in a victory even more shattering than Stirling Bridge had been.
In 1314, he led a force of just 6,000 men to take on Longhshanks' son, Edward II, and an English army of 20,000 men. They met at a small river, called the Bannock Burn.
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William Wallace's victory at Stirling Bridge had shattered the English psyche, but Bannockburn was the turning point. Now Scotland had to push a final time to win the independence she had been fighting for, for so long.
But Edward II's England was riven with dissent, and powerful factions were about to rise up and demand firmer action against the Scots.
The die was cast and Scotland's freedom was in the balance.
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Why do we fight? Why go to war? This series looks at 9 of history's biggest motivations and causes for conflict, and a final episode on the psychology of the individual and what drives people to risk life and limb by going to war.
In this first episode we look at the power of Ego, and how time and again it has propelled leaders, and the men and women who follow them, to cause nations and empires to rise and fall.
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