English Medieval History

While the Moors have always been associated with Spain due to their lengthy stay on the Iberian Peninsula, the most famous battle they were involved in was actually fought in modern France. While the Franks were consolidating a kingdom there, Muslim forces were pushing out of North Africa and into the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century, and by the dawn of the 730s, the Umayyad dynasty had expanded its territory from the Atlantic to the Pyrenees, a series of seasonally snow-capped mountains in Europe that forms a border between the nations of Spain and France.

In the mid-15th century, a new “febrile” disease of an entirely unknown cause struck again in Britain in a series of erratically paced and lethal outbreaks between 1485 and 1551. Confined almost entirely to England, the new and unfamiliar wave of illness paled before the statistical destruction caused by the Black Death. However, what came to be known as the “English sweating sickness” reappeared through the decades in a stunning display of unpredictable timing and terrifying symptoms.

The road to the modern age of cultural harmony and acceptance is one of the finest feats of human progress, but having said that, there was once a time when the mere doubt of a religious figure's existence was not only punishable by law, it could very well cost a man his life. This was the crime of heresy.

It could be said that European kings and nobles in the Middle Ages were Crusade mad. The enormous amount of fighting men who periodically sailed off to the Near East to do battle with Muslims are evidence of the widespread popularity of overseas adventurism at the time. The notion of a Crusade, in which large armies assembled from various regions of Europe for the purpose of doing battle with Turkish and Arab Muslims, became so fixed that it was expanded to include Crusades against heretical European Christian sects.

Some of the greatest heroes and villains in British history were thrown together in these turbulent times: Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt and prudent rule at home marked the high point of the medieval monarchy; Edward IV, who was handed his crown by the scheming soldier Warwick the Kingmaker, before their alliance collapsed into a fight to the death; and the last Plantagenet, Richard III, who stole the throne and murdered his own nephews, the Princes in the Tower.

It was with horror and sadness that the people of the world opened their social media or switched on their televisions on April 15th, 2019, only to see terrifying pictures of smoke and flames roaring around one of the most iconic outlines in France: That of Notre-Dame de Paris. There is more to Notre-Dame, however than just a tragic fire. Almost nine centuries of history lie behind its weathered towers, and its history is closely interlinked with that of France and its people. Its story has rung out through the ages as one of hope and survival.

As the Christian hold on the Holy Land crumbles, Templar Knight, Salvatore and his leader, the Mason fight to defend the ancient city of Acre. They have a duty to defend their last bastion in the region and to defend a mysterious artifact whose very existence cannot be revealed to the man tasked with its safety. In today's world. Peter Sparke and Professor Tilly Pink take on the challenge of uncovering the fate of the fabled Silver Scroll, unsure whether it even exits.

In AD 476, the last of Rome's emperors, known as "Augustulus", was deposed by a barbarian general, the son of one of Attila the Hun's henchmen. With the imperial vestments dispatched to Constantinople, the curtain fell on the Roman empire in Western Europe, its territories divided among successor kingdoms constructed around barbarian military manpower. But, if the Roman Empire was dead, Romans across much of the old empire still lived, holding on to their lands, their values, and their institutions.

In Wild, Amy Jeffs journeys—on foot and through medieval texts—from landscapes of desolation to hope, offering the listener an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home. The seven chapters, entitled Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe, Paradise, open with fiction and close with reflection. They blend reflections of travels through fen, forest and cave, with retelling of medieval texts that offer rich depictions of the natural world.

It goes without saying that Eleanor of Aquitaine was a force of nature. She was the wife of kings, the mother of kings, a duchess in her own right, and a tool of no man. She was headstrong and independent in an age when women were essentially to be seen and not heard.

This book is a history of early medieval Spain. The book begins with the early histories of Castile, Galicia, Leon, Navarre, Aragon, and Portugal. The history of both Spain and Portugal start in the early 800s. The ruling families' histories are interrelated through their marriages. There are also sections devoted to the early history of each of the major counties.

Arguably one of the most provocative, puzzling, and misunderstood organizations of medieval times, the legendary Knights Templar have always been shrouded in a veil of mystery, while inspiring popular culture from Indiana Jones to Dan Brown. The order of the Knights Templar was founded by Hugh de Payens, a French nobleman from the Champagne region, along with eight of his companions, in Jerusalem around 1119. They originally consisted of a group of knights who protected Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land.

On October 21, 1600, two massive Japanese armies, totaling an estimated 200,000 soldiers armed to the teeth with swords, yari (spears), arrows, muskets, and cannons, faced off on a battlefield near the town of Sekigahara. A bitter fight to the death ensued, and the results would determine the course of Japanese history for the next 250 years. On the battlefield was the warlord Leyasu Tokugawa, a man desiring domain over the entire island of Japan, but standing in his way was Ishida Mitsunari, a warlord controlling vast swaths of western Japan.

In this intimate portrait of one of the Middle Ages' most consequential men, Brian Patrick McGuire delves into the life of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to offer a refreshing interpretation that finds within this grand historical figure a deeply spiritual human being who longed for the reflective quietude of the monastery even as he helped shape the destiny of a church and a continent. Heresy and crusade, politics and papacies, theology and disputation shaped this astonishing man's life, and McGuire presents it all in a deeply informed and clear-eyed biography.

What do you think of when you consider the Middle Ages? Knights in armor and damsels in distress? Vikings plundering monasteries? Religious dissenters burning at the stake? The dead bodies piling up as war, famine, and plague devastated Europe? Think again. While all these are part of the tapestry of the medieval era, the threads of politics, personality and war, culture, religion, education and the arts are vastly more intricate and fascinating.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismark, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war.

Mary Stuart was born into a powerful royal dynasty that was at war with the rest of Europe and with itself. Mary’s ascent to the throne was disarmingly easy and she reached adulthood completely unprepared for the plots and betrayals she would be subject to. As the head of a resolutely unstable country, Mary struggled to maintain her grip on the precarious crown on her head and was removed from the throne by an armed rebellion.

The Apology of Socrates, by Plato, is the dialogue that presents the speech of legal self-defense, which Socrates presented at his trial for impiety and corruption, in 399 BC. Specifically, The Apology of Socrates is a defense against the charges of “corrupting the youth” and “not believing in the same gods as the city, but in other gods which are novel” to Athens.

Nowhere else in Britain in the modern era, or indeed in Europe, did civil order break down over such a wide area, or for such a long time, as on the border country between Scotland and England. For more than a century, the hoofbeats of countless raiding parties drummed over the border. From Dumfriesshire to the high wastes of East Cumbria, from Roxburghshire to Redesdale, from the lonely valley of Liddesdale to the fortress city of Carlisle, swords and spears spoke while the law remained silent

Western exceptionalism - the idea that European civilizations are freer, wealthier, and less violent - is a widespread and powerful political idea. It has been a source of peace and prosperity in some societies, and of ethnic cleansing and havoc in others. Yet in The Invention of Power, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita draws on his expertise in political maneuvering, deal-making, and game theory to present a revolutionary new theory of Western exceptionalism: that a single, rarely discussed event in the 12th century changed the course of European and world history.