
Acre
Ancient port on the eastern Mediterranean shore. It was lost by Byzantium to Chosroes II in 614, briefly regained, and lost to the Arabs in 638. Conquered in 1104 during ...

Aleppo
An ancient city in northern Syria, which was formerly an important commercial centre on the trade route between the Mediterranean and the countries of the East.

Alexandria
The chief port and second‐largest city of Egypt, on the Mediterranean coast, northwest of Cairo. Founded in 332 bc by Alexander the Great, after whom it is named, it became a major centre of ...

Angevins of Naples
The Angevins of Naples, princes of French royal blood, were two successive families from Anjou, who ruled the kingdom of Naples in the late Middle Ages. It officially kept the ...

Antwerp
Before the medieval settlement that grew into the city, the site had known Roman and late antique inhabitants. The early castrum/civitas was destroyed by Vikings in 836, and its successor ...

Bari
An Adriatic Port in Apulia, now a regional capital; the old town (which alone existed before the reign of Murat) occupies a low promontory. In Antiquity, it was a city ...

Battle of Svensksund
Oared warfare is usually associated with the Mediterranean, and it is often supposed to have ceased to be important after the Battle of Lepanto (Greece) in 1571. However, galleys were ...

Beirut
Ancient Phoenician city, a bishopric by the late 4th century, it also had a famous law school. Damaged by earthquake in 551, the city was captured by the Arabs in ...

Bergen
Norwegian town. Bergen probably became a bishop’s seat and a legally confirmed urban community in the reign of King Olaf III Haraldsson (1067–93). The town grew into the all-important export ...

blockade
N. an act of sealing off a place to prevent goods or people from entering or leaving.run a blockade (of a ship) manage to enter or leave a blockaded port.[...]

Bombardment of Copenhagen
The British capture of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807 must be accounted one of the most successful combined operations in the history of warfare—swift, ruthless, a nearly faultless ...

Bruges
A city in NW Belgium, capital of the province of West Flanders, which until the 15th century was a centre of the Flemish textile trade.Bruges Group a political pressure group formed with the ...

Buenos Aires
Capital of Argentina, perhaps the most extreme Latin American example of a megalopolis which defines national cultural production. The port city's historic status as an immigration, commercial, ...

Cádiz
With the discovery of America in 1492, the port of Cádiz in southern Spain became the wealthiest port in Europe, as it was here that Spanish treasure ships returned from ...

Caen
A city and river port in Normandy in northern France, on the River Orne, which is the burial place of William the Conqueror. The town was the scene of fierce fighting between the Germans and the ...

Calcutta
Was founded on 24 August 1690 by Job Charnock of the English East India Company at Kalikata on the banks of the Hooghly river in Bengal. It grew quickly as Bengal displaced Madras as the company's ...

Callao
The important and strategically located Peruvian port of Callao is situated in a wide bay opposite the island of San Lorenzo, which protects the city from the prevailing southerly winds. ...

Christianity in China
According to legend, St Thomas the Apostle preached in China. The Sigan-Fu stone shows that missionaries from the Church of the East reached China in the 7th cent.; Syriac Christianity survived there ...

Cilicia
A Roman province, in SE Asia Minor. Tarsus, birthplace of Paul (Acts 22: 3) was one of its towns. Paul twice passed through the area (Acts 15: 40–41 and 18: 23).

Colombo
The Arabs were, in the fifteenth century, the first to use the open roadstead of Colombo on the west coast of Sri Lanka (called Ceylon until 1972), the strategically located ...