istoryworld
Wives of Henry VIII
Less than three weeks after the annulment of the marriage to Anne of Cleves, and on the very day when Thomas Cromwell is executed, Henry marries one of Anne's ladies-in-waiting - the 19-year-old Catherine Howard. For a year Henry is enchanted with his young bride. Then he discovers that she has had affairs both before and during her marriage. She is beheaded in 1542. Finally, in 1543, he marries his third Catherine. Already twice widowed herself, and now aged thirty-one, Catherine Parr is an intelligent ...
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Nimrud and Nineveh
Layard continues to dig at Nimrud, finding many more reliefs (Assyrian kings decorate their palace rooms and even their corridors in this way, as freely as lesser mortals apply wallpaper). He also extends his searches to another site by the name of Kuyunjik. This turns out to be the last great Assyrian capital, Nineveh. Here he discovers the superb cuneiform library of Ashurbanipal. Layard leaves Mesopotamia in 1851, but his assistant Hormuzd Rassam continues at Nineveh. In December 1853 he uncovers the palace built by ...
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Isfahan
The new centre of the city is a vast rectangular space, the Maidan-i-Shah (Royal Parade), designed for parades and polo. At its southern end there rises the most magnificent of Isfahan's swelling blue domes, on the Masjid-i-Shah (Royal Mosque). The tiles are shaped where necessary to fit the curve of the dome, as are those which clad the mosque's circular minarets. The dome is reflected in a great pool in the courtyard. On the east of the Maidan-i-Shah is a smaller blue dome, on the ...
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St Peter's
In April 1506 Julius II and his architect, Bramante, are ready to lay the foundation stone of the new St Peter's. A commemorative medal is struck with the classical inscription Templi Petri Instauracio (Renewal of the Temple of Peter), showing a view of a great domed basilica with a classical portico. In spirit - though not in detail - this design is similar to the church which is eventually completed in 1590, by which time Raphael and Michelangelo and several others have succeeded Bramante as ...
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The spread of printing
An invention as useful as printing, in a Europe of increasing prosperity, readily finds new customers. The first Italian press is founded in 1464, at the Benedictine town of Subiaco in the papal states. Switzerland has a press in the following year. Printing begins in Venice, Paris and Utrecht in 1470, in Spain and Hungary in 1473, in Bruges in 1474 (on a press owned by Caxton, who moves it to London in 1476), in Sweden in 1483. By the end of the century the ...
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The roots of Chinese culture
Most of the elaborate bronze vessels made in Shang times are for use in temples or shrines to ancestors. The richly decorated urns are for cooking the meat of the sacrificed animals. The most characteristic design is the li, with its curved base extended into three hollow protuberances - enabling maximum heat to reach the sacrificial stew. The bronze jugs, often fantastically shaped into weird animals and birds, are for pouring a liquid offering to the ancestor - usually a hot alcoholic concoction brewed from ...
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Act of Supremacy
More refuses the oath because it implies denial of the pope's supremacy. Imprisoned from May 1534 in the Tower of London, he is tried in Westminster Hall in July 1535 (ten days after the beheading of John Fisher on the same charge of treason). Found guilty, and returned to the Tower, More declares on the scaffold that he dies 'the king's good servant, but God's first'. He and Fisher, and a group of Carthusian monks who make the same stand, become England's first Catholic martyrs.
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Buddhist sculpture
Buddhism moves out of India and into Afghanistan (where the two great rock-carved Buddhas of Bamiyan, from the 6th century, reveal the influence of Gandhara until destroyed by the Taliban in 2001). It then continues east along the Silk Road towards China. Mahayana Buddhism, the variety progressing along this route, offers a range of legendary figures which provide ample opportunity for the imagination of the sculptors. Some of the settlements which develop along the road, at places such as Yün-kang (lying safely just south of ...
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Philip II and Louis IX
The piety of Saint Louis (he is canonized in 1297) is very much in the spirit of his time. He creates one of the most spectacular of Gothic buildings, the Sainte Chapelle, to house a relic - the supposed Crown of Thorns. And he twice goes on crusade to the Middle East, dying in north Africa during the second expedition. Louis' domestic policy to some extent reflects this piety. Solemn edicts are issued against prostitution, gambling and blasphemy. But he also runs an honest and ...
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Voyages of Captain Cook
The voyages of James Cook are the first examples of exploration undertaken on scientific principles. His first expedition, sailing in the Endeavour from Plymouth in 1768, has a scientific task as its central mission. It is known to the astronomers of the day that in June 1769 the planet Venus will pass directly between the earth and the sun. An international effort is made to time the precise details of this transit, as seen from different parts of the world, in the hope of calculating ...
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Virginia
John Smith is one of seven men appointed by the London company to serve on the colony's council. His energy, his resourcefulness and his skill in negotiating with the Indians soon establish him as the leader of the community. Smith soon becomes involved in a famously romantic scene (or so he claims many years later, in a book of 1624). He is captured by Indians and is about to be executed when Pocahontas, the 13-year-old daughter of the tribal chieftain, throws herself between victim and ...
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Inca architecture
The Incas share with another much earlier civilization, that of Mycenaean Greece, a habit of building with massive blocks of masonry. But the precision of the Peruvian masons puts all others to shame. In their capital at Cuzco, or in subject cities where they wish to emphasize their presence, the Incas leave their trade mark in great slabs of stone, often of eccentric shape, fitting together with an uncanny and beautiful precision. The modern city of Cuzco has grown upon and around its Inca origins. ...
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The first farmers
The earliest place known to have lived mainly from the cultivation of crops is Jericho. By around 8000 BC this community, occupying a naturally well-watered region, is growing selected forms of wheat (emmer and einkorn are the two varieties), soon to be followed by barley. Though no longer gatherers, these people are still hunters. Their source of meat is wild gazelle, cattle, goat and boar. It is no accident that Jericho is also the first known town, with a population of 2000 or more. A ...
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Waterloo
When the engagement begins at Waterloo, on June 18, Wellington is in a defensive position with about 68,000 troops and 156 guns; Napoleon has 72,000 men and 246 guns. An extremely hard-fought battle looks almost certain to go Napoleon's way until the arrival in the afternoon of Blücher and the Prussians, regrouped after their flight of two days previously. They tip the balance. By the early evening the French are in full retreat, and Napoleon is on his way back to Paris.He arrives in the ...
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The unsettling and the settled
The regions bordering the Asian shores of the Mediterranean are where mankind appears first to have settled in villages and towns - a development requiring at least the beginnings of agriculture. Two of the earliest settlements to deserve the name of towns are Jericho in Palestine and Catal Huyuk in Anatolia. For the emergence of a more developed society, justifying the name of civilization, history suggests that there is one incomparable advantage, indeed almost a necessity - the proximity of a large river, flowing through ...
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Reformation
Martin Luther, a man both solemn and passionate, is an Augustinian friar teaching theology at the university recently founded in Wittenberg by Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony. Obsessed by his own unworthiness, he comes to the conclusion that no amount of virtue or good behaviour can be the basis of salvation (as proposed in the doctrine known as justification by works). If the Christian life is not to be meaningless, he argues, a sinner's faith must be the only merit for which God's ...
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Second Fronts
The assault on the Ruhr is followed by equally intense attacks on Hamburg (July to November 1943, causing a million people to flee the city) and on Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944). The destruction is devastating, but there is also a huge loss of bombers and their crews. And as with Britain in 1940, the Blitz fails to break the morale of the German people. More effective, at minimal cost, is the brilliantly daring and ingenious raid in which two hydroelectric schemes in the ...
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Pharos at Alexandria
The sun god Helios features also in the last of the seven wonders. This is the lighthouse put up on the island of Pharos at Alexandria (as a result pharos becomes the Greek word for any lighthouse). It consists of a three-tier stone tower, said to be more than 120 metres high, which has within it a broad spiral ramp leading up to a platform where fires burn at night. They are reflected out to sea by metal mirrors. Above the fires is a huge ...
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A mood of rebellion
During the years after the end of the French and Indian War there is mounting tension between Britain and her American colonies. The contentious issues are British taxes and the presence of British troops on American soil. Unrest centres particularly on the most radical of the colonial cities, Boston.In 1770 there is an incident in Boston of a kind familiar in northern Ireland two centuries later. An unruly crowd throws stones at the much resented troops. The soldiers open fire, killing five. The event becomes ...
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Henry IV
After winning his kingdom in nine years of continuous war, Henry IV brings France twelve years of very productive peace. The state's finances are put on a sound footing, industry and commerce are encouraged (an ambitious scheme for a network of inland waterways includes the beginning of the Briare canal) and the army is strengthened.In his foreign policy Henry takes the same conciliatory approach as with the bitterly opposed religious factions in France. His aim is to achieve peace on France's borders. To this end ...
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