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Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Banker'sine,

Britain's best-selling History magazine.

I'm Ellie Corthon. Today you'll be hearing from the Spanish-based historian author and journalist

Jarls Tremlet. Jarls has recently published a major new history of the international brigades

who came from across the globe to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War. BBC History magazine

editor Rob Attar spoke to him to find out more. The international brigades famously saw

tens of thousands of volunteers from across the world fighting on behalf of the Republic

in the Spanish Civil War. At this point, how unusual was it for international volunteers

to join a conflict in a foreign country? Well at that stage it was highly unusual for so many

volunteers to join a conflict. There have always been volunteers in different wars for

lots of different reasons whether they're ideological or romantic or simply for making money

as mercenaries. But this was an entire army as it was called 35,000 people from more than 80 of

today's countries all coming together in a single army or rather in six different brigades.

And that really was extraordinary at the time and observers at the time found it really difficult

to find anything that they could compare this with. And really the only thing they could turn to

was the crusades. And I think that shows just how exceptional it was for the period. So that's

...