eBooks de Historia medieval universal, página 23 de 29

The natural desire to visit places which have been the scene of memorable actions, or the abode of distinguished personages, had from a very early period drawn pious pilgrims from the east and the west to view those spots which had been hallowed by the presence of the Son of God. The toils and the dangers of the journey were unheeded, when set in comparison with the bliss of pouring forth prayer on Calvary, and bathing in the waves of Jordan, whose waters had consecrated the Saviour to his holy office.And, accordingly, we find that, so early as the ninth century, there was in the valley of Jehoshaphat, near the church of the Holy Virgin, an Hospital composed of twelve dwellings, for pilgrims from the west, which possessed corn lands, vineyards, and gardens, and an excellent library, established by the bounty of Charlemagne...

On a summer day nearly twelve hundred years ago, three ships with bright red sails drew near to one of the little ports of the Dorset coast in the south of England.The townsfolk saw the ships, and paying no heed to the bright sails, said carelessly one to another, The merchantmen will be in port to-day. And the harbour-master gathered together a few of his men and hastened to the quay. For he, too, had seen the ships, and, as in duty bound, he went to meet them, to demand from the captains the port taxes which were lawfully due to the king.But townsfolk and harbour-master alike had made a grievous mistake that summer day. For, as they soon discovered to their cost, and as the red sails might have forewarned them, the three ships were no peaceful merchantmen.No sooner had the vessels drawn up along the quay than a wild, strange-looking crew sprang to the shore, drew their swords, and speedily slew the harbour-master and his few unarmed followers. They then entered the town, plundering and burning the houses of all, both rich and poor. Leaving the little town in ruins, the strange crew, dragging their booty with them, marched down again to the quay. There they embarked, and without delay sailed away out to sea. Perhaps you have already guessed that the strange crew was a Viking band, that the three ships were Viking ships. So, indeed, they were, and this summer day in the year seven hundred and eighty-nine was the first time that the wild Northmen had been seen in England, or in any part of Europe where the White Christ was worshipped...

THE mother of King Richard the Third was a beautiful, and, in many respects, a noble-minded woman, though she lived in very rude, turbulent, and trying times. She was born, so to speak, into one of the most widely-extended, the most bitter, and the most fatal of the family quarrels which have darkened the annals of the great in the whole history of mankind, namely, that long-protracted and bitter contest which was waged for so many years between the two great branches of the family of Edward the Thirdthe houses of York and Lancasterfor the possession of the kingdom of England. This dreadful quarrel lasted for more than a hundred years. It led to wars and commotions, to the sacking and burning of towns, to the ravaging of fruitful countries, and to atrocious deeds of violence of every sort, almost without number. The internal peace of hundreds of thousands of families all over the land was destroyed by it for many generations. Husbands were alienated from wives, and parents from children by it. Murders and assassinations innumerable grew out of it. And what was it all about? you will ask. It arose from the fact that the descendants of a certain king had married and intermarried among each other in such a complicated manner that for several generations nobody could tell which of two different lines of candidates was fairly entitled to the throne. The question was settled at last by a prince who inherited the claim on one side marrying a princess who was the heir on the other. Thus the conflicting interests of the two houses were combined, and the quarrel was ended.But, while the question was pending, it kept the country in a state of perpetual commotion, with feuds, and quarrels, and combats innumerable, and all the other countless and indescribable horrors of civil war...

Once upon a time there was an ugly little boy called Peter, who lived in his fathers castle in France. He was a restless boy, and liked always to do or to hear something new. His home was very quiet, for his father was a great fighter, and was often away at the wars for months at a time.But though one day was very like another in Peters life when he was young, he used to hear tales of pilgrimage and of battle that made him long to be free to go out into the world himself.The country round his home and in the other northern lands near it was bare and and the towers and walls of the cities were gloomy, but the boy heard of other lands and other cities. He heard that in Byzantium, where the Greek Emperor had his palace, the houses were built of marble, and their walls were lined with gold, and that in the lands around it rich fruits and grain grew. He often heard of another city called Jerusalem, for many pilgrims went to it because it was at Jerusalem that Jesus Christ died. Hundreds of years before Peter was born, Helena, the mother of the Greek Emperor Constantine, found a cross which she thought must be the Cross on which Christ died. She was full of awe and wonder, and in order that all who served Christ might see the Cross, it was set up in Jerusalem on the spot where it was thought to have stood when Christ died upon it. Long after Constantine and his mother were dead, a king who did not serve Christ carried the Cross away from Jerusalem. The Emperor who then reigned in Greece fought with this king for ten years before he could subdue him. At last he won the cross again, and with it lands and gold, but these gave him far less joy than the thought that the cross would again stand in Jerusalem. He kept part of it in his city of Byzantium; with the rest he went to Jerusalem...

King Richard the First, the Crusader, was a boisterous, reckless, and desperate man, and he made a great deal of noise in the world in his day. He began his career very early in life by quarreling with his father. Indeed, his father, his mother, and all his brothers and sisters were engaged, as long as the father lived, in perpetual wars against each other, which were waged with the most desperate fierceness on all sides...

FOR three hundred years a bitter controversy has raged around the actions of Philip II. of Spain. Until our own times no attempt even had been made to write his life-history from an impartial point of view. He had been alternately deified and execrated, until through the mists of time and prejudice he loomed rather as the permanent embodiment of a system than as an individual man swayed by changing circumstances and controlled by human frailties. The more recent histories of his reignthe works of English, American, German, and French scholarshave treated their subject with fuller knowledge and broader sympathies, but they have necessarily been to a large extent histories of the great events which convulsed Europe for fifty years at the most critical period of modern times. The space to be occupied by the present work will not admit of this treatment of the subject. The purpose is therefore to consider Philip mainly as a statesman, in relation to the important problems with which he had to deal, rather than to write a connected account of the occurrences of a long reign. It will be necessary for us to try to penetrate the objects he aimed at and the influences, personal and exterior, which ruled him, and to seek the reasons for his failure. For he did fail utterly. In spite of very considerable powers of mind, of a long lifetime of incessant toil, of deep-laid plans, and vast ambitions, his record is one continued series of defeats and disappointments; and in exchange for the greatest heritage that Christendom had ever seen, with the apparently assured prospect of universal domination which opened before him at his birth, he closed his dying eyes upon dominions distracted and ruined beyond all recovery, a bankrupt State, a dwindled prestige, and a defeated cause. He had devoted his life to the task of establishing the universal supremacy of Catholicism in the political interests of Spain, and he was hopelessly beaten...

King Charles the Second was the son and successor of King Charles the First. These two are the only kings of the name of Charles that have appeared, thus far, in the line of English sovereigns. Nor is it very probable that there will soon be another. The reigns of both these monarchs were stained and tarnished with many vices and crimes, and darkened by national disasters of every kind, and the name is thus connected with so many painful associations in the minds of men, that it seems to have been dropped, by common consent, in all branches of the royal family...

Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. Henry was the second Tudor monarch, succeeding his father, Henry VII. Henry is best known for his six marriages and, in particular, his efforts to have his first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon, annulled. His disagreement with the Pope on the question of such an annulment led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority and appointing himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Despite his resulting excommunication, Henry remained a believer in core Catholic theological teachings.

Edward I, also known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. He spent much of his reign reforming royal administration and common law. Through an extensive legal inquiry, Edward investigated the tenure of various feudal liberties, while the law was reformed through a series of statutes regulating criminal and property law. Increasingly, however, Edwards attention was drawn towards military affairs.

The murder of the Princes in the Tower is the most famous cold case in British history. Traditionally considered victims of their ruthless uncle, there are other suspects too often and too easily discounted. There may be no definitive answer, but by delving into the context of their disappearance and the characters of the suspects, Matthew Lewis examines the motives and opportunities afresh, as well as asking a crucial but often overlooked question: what if there was no murder? What if Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, survived their uncles reign and even that of their brother-in-law Henry VII?In this new and updated edition, compelling evidence is presented to suggest the Princes survived, which is considered alongside the possibility of their deaths to provide a rounded and complete assessment of the most fascinating mystery in history.

The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. This ground-breaking work examines "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them.

The century spanning the wars of the roses and the reigns of the Tudor kings was a volatile time of battle and bloodshed, execution and unexpected illness. Life could be nasty, brutish and short. Some met their end in battle, others were dragged to the block, losing everything for daring to aspire to the throne. Some were lost in mysterious circumstances, like Edward V, the elder of the Princes in the Tower. But the majority of these young men died in their teens, on the brink of manhood. They represent the lost paths of history, the fascinating "what-ifs" of the houses of York and Tudor. They also diverted the route of dynastic inheritance, with all the complicated implications that could bring, passing power into some unlikely hands. This book examines ten such figures in detail, using their lives to build a narrative of this savage century.

The Renaissance was a period in European history, from the 14th to the 17th century, regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe, marking the beginning of the Modern age. The Queens of this period and this publication were Catherine of Siena, Beatrice dEste, Anne of Brittany, Lucretia Borgia, Margret DAngouleme, Renee, Duchess of Ferrara.

The history of Mediaeval Europe is so vast a subject that the attempt to deal with it in a small compass must entail either severe compression or what may appear at first sight reckless omission.The path of compression has been trodden many times, as in J. H. Robinsons Introduction to the History of Western Europe, or in such series as the Periods of European History published by Messrs. Rivingtons for students, or text-books of European History published by the Clarendon Press and Messrs. Methuen.To the authors of all these I should like to express my indebtedness both for facts and perspective, as to Mr. H. W. Davis for his admirable summary of the mediaeval outlook in the Home University Library series; but in spite of so many authorities covering the same ground, I venture to claim for the present book a pioneer path of omission; it may be reckless but yet, I believe, justifiable.It has been my object not so much to supply students with facts as to make Mediaeval Europe live, for the many who, knowing nothing of her history, would like to know a little, in the lives of her principal heroes and villains, as well as in the tendencies of her classes, and in the beliefs and prejudices of her thinkers. This task I have found even more difficult than I had expected, for limits of space have insisted on the omission of many events and names I would have wished to include. These I have sacrificed to the hope of creating reality and arousing interest, and if I have in any way succeeded I should like to pay my thanks first of all to Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor for his two volumes of The Mediaeval Mind that have been my chief inspiration, and then to the many authors whose names and books I give elsewhere, and whose researches have enabled me to tell my tale.IERNE L. PLUNKET.

Focusing on languages political power, these essays discuss how representation, through language norms, plays and court spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images, both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu. The volume brings together various disciplinary approaches, offering a complex appreciation of these questions. While a core of the essays focuses on France, the contributions engage a broad range of geographical contexts, from Byzantium to eastern Germany and England from the early centuries of the Common Era to the seventeenth century, revealing the prevalence and persistence of the key interconnected issues of images and authority. Contributors: Carla Bozzolo; Philippe Caron; Robert L. A. Clark; Paul Cohen; Thomas Conley; Jean-Philippe Genet; Douglas Kibbee; Gillette Labory; Nicole Pons; Mara R. Wade.

Richard III, King of England from 1483 to 1485, made good laws that still protect ordinary people today. Yet history concentrates on the fictional hunchback as depicted by Shakespeare: the wicked uncle who stole the throne and killed his nephews in the Tower of London.Voices have protested during the intervening years, some of them eminent and scholarly, urging a more reasoned view to replace the traditional black portrait. But historians, whether as authors or presenters of popular TV history, still trot out the old pronouncements about ruthless ambition, usurpation and murder.After centuries of misinformation, the truth about Richard III has been overdue a fair hearing. Annette Carson seeks to redress the balance by examining the events of his reign as they actually happened, based on reports in the original sources. She traces the actions and activities of the principal characters, investigating facts and timelines revealed in documentary evidence. She also dares to investigate areas where historians fear to tread, and raises some controversial questions.In 2012 Carson was a member of Philippa Langleys Looking For Richard Project, which provided important new answers from the DNA-confirmed discovery of the kings remains. Her involvement in Langleys Missing Princes Project, with its international research initiative on the princes in the Tower, has now informed her revelatory extra chapter.

In 1095 Pope Urban II granted absolution to anyone who would fight to reclaim the Holy Land. With God at their backs, the first Christian crusaders embarked on an unprecedented religious war. While addressing the contribution of flamboyant characters like Saladin and Richard the Lionheart, Malcolm Billings also looks at the experiences of the peasants, knights and fighting monks who took the cross for Christendom and the Holy Warriors of Islam who, after battle on battle, emerged victorious. He analyses the ebb and flow of crusade and counter-crusade and details the shifting structures of government in the Levant, which became the perennial battleground of East and West.

The general rules by which this series is governed have been fully stated by the Editor in the first published volume, The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory. It will therefore not be necessary for me to do more than endeavour to justify the particular application of them in this book. Mr Saintsbury has fully recognised the magnitude of the task which has to be overcome by the writer who should undertake to display "intimate and equal knowledge of all the branches of European Literature at any given time." Nobody could be more conscious of his insufficiency to attain to any such standard of knowledge than I have had occasion to become in the course of executing the part of the plan intrusted to me. Though I hope my work has not been shirked, I still cannot venture to boast of "intimate and equal knowledge" of all the great bulk of literature[vi] produced during the later sixteenth century. Happily so much as this is not required. Some ignorance ofor at least some want of familiarity withthe less important, is permitted where the writer is "thoroughly acquainted with the literature which happened to be of greatest prominence in the special period." I must leave others to decide how far my handling of the Spanish, English, and French portions of the subject can be held to excuse my less intimate familiarity with the Italian and Portuguese. The all but unbroken silence of Germany during this period made it unnecessary to take account of it. Modern Dutch and modern Scandinavian literature had hardly begun; such Scottish poets as Scott and Montgomerie are older than their age. These and other things, on the principles of the series, fall into the previous or the next volume.Although the reasons for the course taken with the literature of Spain are given in the text, they may be repeated here by way of preliminary excuse.

In 1465, the Nevills must have thought theyd reached the pinnacle of power and influence in England. Richard Nevill was the kings right-hand man and married to the richest woman in the kingdom; John Nevill was an accomplished soldier whod done much to stabilise the new dynasty; and George Nevill was not only chancellor but newly enthroned as Archbishop of York. The Nevill women were as active as their male counterparts. As sisters and wives, daughters and daughters-in-laws, they had the ears of the elite in England and were not afraid of wielding their influence. And they were not always on the same side. Cracks in the stability of the most powerful family in England began to show. Rivalries led to serious conflict that worsened when King Edward IV impulsively married Elizabeth Wydeville, a choice of bride that did not please everyone. The Nevills had already lost a great deal for the Yorkist cause. Within six years, as the Wars of the Roses turned into one of the bloodiest periods of English history, theyd lose even more for the Lancastrians.

The economic crises since 2008, the tensions concerning the Euro, the Greek question and the refugee problem have fuelled a strong "Eurosceptic" movement. At the 2014 European elections, the rise of Eurosceptic forces could be observed in virtually all Member States of the EU. This publication regroups the contributions to a Conference organized 2014 in Strasburg by the CNRS-University of Strasbourg research unit "UMR Dynamiques europeennes", in the framework of the IDEX excellence project "The European Integration and the New Anti-Europeanism". In this first of two volumes, anti-Europeanism and Euroscepticism are examined as political phenomena and objects of interdisciplinary research. The focus is on "traditionally" Eurosceptic Great Britain and on sometimes very recent anti-European movements within the EC founding states (France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands), their discourses and voters. What reasons prompt anti-European voters: rejection of immigration, xenophobia, fear of the future, nationalism or the rejection of capitalism and globalization? Or is it the collective disappointment with the incapacity of the European elites to communicate with the majority of voters?