Novedades del último mes en eBooks de Historia medieval universal

Un retrato fiel y evocador de una civilización que, más de mil años después, sigue despertando fascinación.La cultura vikinga suele presentarse envuelta en tópicos: guerreros feroces y sanguinarios, saqueadores que vivian al margen de la ley y enterraban a sus muertos en barcos, incansables exploradores capaces de atravesar mares y territorios desconocidos desafiando cualquier peligro... Sin embargo, la realidad fue mucho mas rica y compleja. Su sociedad, sus creencias y su modo de vida conformaron una de las culturas mas fascinantes que ha alumbrado la historia.Kirsten Wolf, una de las mayores especialistas en el mundo vikingo, se embarca en un viaje en el tiempo para mostrarnos como transcurria un dia cualquiera para los miembros de esta atractiva comunidad. A traves de veinticuatro inolvidables personajes una esclava, un rey, un tallador de runas, un poeta, un guerrero, un comerciante o un campesino, el lector se adentra en la vida cotidiana de este sorprendente y cautivador universo.Una mirada vivida y cercana a una civilizacion apasionante.

Marco Polos Travels has shaped Western imagination of the East for over seven centuriesa world of golden cities, wise emperors, and impossible customs. Yet historians have long debated how much of his account was eyewitness truth and how much came from hearsay or creative adaptation. This book disentangles fact from legend, tracing what Marco Polo truly saw on his journey from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan.Combining textual analysis with archaeological and linguistic evidence, it follows the Polos route through Persia, Central Asia, and China, comparing Polos descriptions with caravan records, Mongol administrative documents, and material culture uncovered across the Silk Road. What emerges is a vivid record of real observation layered with narrative crafta map of the medieval imagination as much as of Asia itself.From the bureaucracy of the Yuan Empire to the markets of Kashgar, Polos story reveals how medieval travelers became both witnesses and translators of worlds in motion. This is not an expose of fraud, but a reconstruction of truth: how memory, mediation, and wonder shaped Europes first great window into the East.

For a brief but extraordinary century, a single empire stretched from the Pacific coast to the gates of Europeand trade flowed as never before. The Pax Mongolica was one of historys great paradoxes: a peace built on unprecedented destruction, a commercial golden age made possible by the most formidable military machine the world had ever seen.This book traces the arc of that contradictory era, following merchants, diplomats, missionaries, and emissaries who walked the Silk Road under Mongol protection. It examines how the empires ruthless administrative efficiencyits postal relay system, standardized weights, and guaranteed safe passagecreated the conditions for a globalized medieval economy. Chinese silk reached Venetian looms. Persian astronomy traveled to Chinese courts. Plague, too, found its corridors.Drawing on chronicles, traveler accounts, and archaeological evidence, this narrative history explores how terror and tolerance coexistedand what that legacy means for understanding empire, trade, and cultural exchange today.

The Norse myths are among the most vivid survival narratives in human history a cosmos perpetually threatened by chaos, sustained by gods who were themselves mortal, and destined to end in Ragnarok, a final catastrophic battle from which a new world would emerge. But how much of what modern audiences know about Viking belief actually reflects the world the Norse inhabited, and how much is medieval Christian transcription, romantic nationalism, or twentieth-century popular culture?This book examines the distance and overlap between Norse mythology as recorded in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda and the archaeological, runological, and historical evidence of actual Viking religious practice. Drawing on burial site analysis, runic inscriptions, skaldic poetry, and comparative religious scholarship, it reconstructs what Norse communities appear to have genuinely believed the role of ritual sacrifice, the plurality of local cults, the fluid boundary between gods and ancestors, and the ways belief adapted across the Norse diaspora from Scandinavia to Iceland, Greenland, and the British Isles.The narrative traces how Snorri Sturlusons thirteenth-century systematization of Norse myth shaped and distorted the record, and how nineteenth-century nationalism further transformed Viking religion into something its original practitioners would not have recognized. It also examines the modern revival of Norse paganism, asking what happens when mythology is reconstructed from incomplete and ideologically filtered sources.A rigorous, accessible account of one of historys most compelling mythological traditions and the archaeological reality it both reflects and obscures.

The Crusades have been claimed by nearly every ideological tradition that followed them as holy war, as colonial prototype, as clash of civilizations, as righteous defense. Each claim contains a fragment of truth and a larger distortion. What the primary sources reveal, when read without the weight of subsequent mythology, is something more complex: a series of military campaigns driven simultaneously by genuine religious conviction, papal political ambition, feudal land hunger, and the commercial interests of Italian merchant republics that financed the logistics of salvation.This book retells the Crusades as a multi-perspectival history examining the motivations of popes, kings, knights, merchants, Byzantine emperors, and the Muslim rulers who opposed, negotiated with, and occasionally allied with crusading forces. It traces how Pope Urban IIs 1095 call at Clermont was heard differently by every group that responded to it, how the First Crusades improbable success created expectations that subsequent campaigns could never meet, and how the Crusader states functioned as fragile political entities dependent on continuous external support that eventually failed to arrive.Drawing on Latin chronicles, Arabic historical accounts, Byzantine sources, and archaeological evidence from the Levant, this is a balanced and rigorous account of two centuries of conflict that shaped the medieval world and whose misremembering continues to shape the present.

The Knights Templar are historys most mythologized military order simultaneously celebrated as crusading warriors, condemned as heretics, and claimed as ancestors by everyone from Freemasons to modern conspiracy theorists. Beneath the mythology lies something more historically remarkable: a organization that invented sophisticated financial instruments, operated the medieval worlds first international banking network, and accumulated enough institutional power to make the King of France feel threatened enough to destroy them.This book examines the Templars as a historical institution rather than a romantic legend. It traces their origins in the aftermath of the First Crusade, their evolution from a small protective brotherhood into a transnational financial and military corporation, and the specific banking innovations letters of credit, deposit accounts, interest-bearing loans that made them indispensable to monarchs, merchants, and pilgrims across three continents. It reconstructs the political machinery behind Philip IVs suppression campaign of 1307, examining how debt, ambition, and papal weakness combined to dismantle Europes most powerful private institution.Drawing on papal archives, Templar trial records, and medieval financial history, this is a rigorous account of an organization whose actual legacy the architecture of modern banking is far more consequential than any hidden treasure.

Five centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Norse sailors had already walked the shores of North America. The sagas called it Vinland a land of timber, wild grapes, and fierce indigenous resistance and for decades historians treated these accounts as legend. The 1960 excavation of LAnse aux Meadows in Newfoundland changed that permanently, producing the first confirmed archaeological evidence of European presence in the Americas predating 1492.This book reconstructs the Norse Atlantic expansion through the Vinland Sagas, Icelandic chronicles, and four decades of archaeological fieldwork tracing the voyages of Leif Eriksson, Thorvald, and Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir across Greenland and into the North American coastline. It examines what the Norse found, how they interacted with indigenous Beothuk and Dorset peoples, and why their settlements ultimately did not survive.The narrative situates Vinland within the broader pattern of Viking expansion: the same restless navigational culture that reached Iceland, Greenland, Constantinople, and Baghdad also touched the Americas driven by the same combination of overpopulation, trade ambition, and extraordinary seafaring capability. It also examines what the Norse failure to establish permanent settlements reveals about the limits of expansion without the demographic and institutional support that later European colonization would bring.A rigorously sourced account of a genuine historical discovery, and of the long process by which archaeology finally confirmed what the sagas had preserved.

No seu livro de estreia, Katherine Pangonis apresenta a história da dinastia de mulheres que governou o Médio Oriente.Em 1187, os exércitos de Saladino sitiaram a cidade sagrada de Jerusalém. Atrás das altas muralhas da cidade uma defesa desesperada era liderada por um trio improvavel - incluindo Sibila, rainha de Jerusalem.Embora muitos livros tenham sido escritos sobre as Cruzadas, um aspeto esta visivelmente ausente: as historias das mulheres. Rainhas e princesas tendem a ser apresentadas como transmissoras passivas de terras e sangue real. Na realidade, as mulheres governavam, conduziam negociaçes diplomaticas, tomavam decises militares, forjavam alianças, rebelavam-se e empreendiam projetos arquitetonicos.Este e o relato das mulheres negligenciadas pela Historia, mulheres fortes, poderosas e que deixaram uma marca profunda na politica do Medio Oriente medieval."Uma leitura extremamente interessante que finalmente aborda o papel crucial das mulheres da realeza na historia das cruzadas."All About History"Fascinante, intrigante e emocionante. Eis as governantes dos Estados cruzados apresentadas como politicas astutas, rainhas guerreiras e mes, resistindo bravamente contra senhores da guerra islamicos na arena implacavel do Medio Oriente. Negligenciadas por muito tempo, esta obra vem prestar-lhes o devido reconhecimento."Simon Sebag Montefiore, autor bestseller"Primorosamente construido, inteligente, perspicaz, humano e empatico, este livro transforma as governantes esquecidas de Jerusalem, de meras reprodutoras impotentes, em personagens complexas com poder de aço, engenho e vidas fascinantes."William Dalrymple, autor de A Rota do Ouro"As personagens deste livro importante e inspirador tem sido frequentemente relegadas para notas de rodape da historia. Mas as rainhas de Jerusalem so figuras historicas, transformadoras. Deleite-se com a companhia delas nesta estreia inspiradora e fascinante."Bettany Hughes, historiadora e autora"Estudos recentes transformaram a compreenso do papel das mulheres na Idade Media europeia. Agora, o livro maravilhoso de Katherine Pangonis lança luz sobre o lugar publico, domestico e social das mulheres nobres e da realeza nas circunstancias politicas e dinasticas unicas dos Estados cruzados multiculturais do Levante. Numa mudança revigorante de enfase historica, essas mulheres, sejam protagonistas ou meras figuras decorativas, ganham vida nos seus proprios termos, e as suas experiencias e carreiras, mesmo que moldadas por homens, so vistas a partir de uma perspetiva feminina singular."Christopher Tyerman, Professor de Historia das Cruzadas na Universidade de Oxford