Images

A number of cannons at the 16-17th-century fortress of Cartagena, Colombia. Cartagena was one of the principal treasure ports of the Spanish Main and its mighty fortress was sufficient to deter the buccaneers.

An early 20th-century illustration by Howard Pyle showing a buccaneer. The buccaneers terrorized the Spanish Main from 1620 to 1697. (From Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish...

An early 20th-century illustration by Howard Pyle showing buccaneers obliging prisoners to reveal the whereabouts of their valuables in Cartagena. The buccaneers terrorized the Spanish Main from 1620 to 1697. (From Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates...

Illustration from the Russian folktale The Frog Princess, by Ivan Bilibin, 1899.

Illustration from the Russian folk tale The Frog Princess, by Ivan Bilibin, 1930.

A map depicting the two transatlantic voyages of Amerigo Vespucci between 1499 and 1502. It is based on the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemüller, a German clergyman and cartographer, which first referred to the southern hemisphere where Amerigo...

Silver bust of the Greco-Egyptian deity Serapis, Roman, 2nd century CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Eusebius' Preparation for the Gospel, edited by Franciscus Vigerus, published by Michael Sonnius, Sebastian Cramoisy & Charles Morel, Paris, 1628.

Codex Vaticanus, which may contain Constantine I’s original Bible. Photo taken in Warsaw in 2015.

The Fair Melusine, oil on canvas painting by German artist Julius Hübner, 1844. National Museum, Poznan. The painting depicts the moment in the legend when Raymondin spies on his wife, Melusine, and discovers she is half-serpent on Saturdays...