When Successionfirst aired, audiences were transfixed by its portrait of a modern dynasty at war with itself: scheming heirs, a manipulative patriarch, and a fortune vast enough to make loyalty negotiable. But centuries before Logan Roy was terrifying his children in glass-walled boardrooms, another ruthless family feud was playing out across medieval Europe.

In 1173, the most powerful man in Christendom—King Henry II of England—faced a rebellion led not by rivals or barons, but by his own wife and sons. Chroniclers called it the Great Rebellion; historians often dub it the Revolt of the Eaglets, after the young “eagles” who turned on the parent bird.

And just like inSuccession, the real question was: who inherits the empire?

In the third century CE, as Rome teetered on the brink of fragmentation, a woman from the desert city of Palmyra rose to challenge the empire itself.

Her name was Zenobia — scholar, strategist, queen, and for a brief, extraordinary moment, empress of the East.

In legend he struck the final blow; in fiction, he will cause a torrent of trouble for his friend William FitzErneis in Lady of Lincoln.

When Archbishop Thomas Becket was cut down before the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170, the man who delivered the fatal stroke was Richard de Brito—sometimes styled le Breton. His sword, witnesses said, split Becket’s skull so deeply that the blade snapped on the flagstones.

Unlike the other knights, de Brito cried out as he struck:

“Take that for the love of my lord William FitzEmpress!”

The words stunned those who heard them. He was killing the archbishop not in Henry II’s name, but in that of Henry’s brother—the late William FitzEmpress, Henry II’s brother.