istoryworld
The age of Walpole
The thrust of his policy is lower taxation, increased trade and peace abroad - excellent intentions which Walpole does much to achieve. Late in his administration, and to his distress, he fails to prevent Britain going to war with Spain in 1739 after the dramatic episode of Jenkins' Ear (see the War of Jenkins' Ear). This conflict merges, in the following year, in the broader War of the Austrian Succession.Walpole resigns during the war, in 1742, and retires to Houghton Hall, the house which he ...
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Dutch and English houses
In 1689 a Dutch prince, William III, becomes king of England. His accession to the throne prompts a fashion for the Dutch style. England, like Holland, is rapidly becoming more prosperous. Streets of town houses are being built in London and many provincial towns, such as Bath. The English version of the Dutch house is more severe and classical, particularly when built in stone (as in Bath), but it has the same elegance deriving from a repeated vertical alignment and a generous display of sash ...
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Assyrian reliefs
In about 645 BC Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, commissions a series of carved reliefs for his new palace at Nineveh. They include several scenes of a lion hunt - a sport reserved for the king himself. Many details of this famous relief are charged with high drama. Grooms struggle to harness the king's horses, a dog strains at the leash, a lion races out of the cage opened by an attendant and another leaps at the king's chariot, to be warded off just in time ...
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England sophisticated
By the time of Richard II the English kingdom can hold its own in learning and the arts. The university of Oxford, which earlier in the century has produced William of Ockham (one of the last great figures of medieval scholasticism), is now buzzing with the radical notions of John Wycliffe. He dies in 1384, but his writings have a profound influence in Europe during the build-up towards the Reformation. In art and literature there is the same excellence. Richard II commissions some of the ...
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Centre of innovation
One of the world's first towns, Catal Huyuk, is on the southern edge of the Anatolian plateau. Excavation has revealed evidence of quite developed agricultural communities living on this site from about 6500 to 5700 BC. Several millennia later Anatolia is the site of the first of the many empires established by Indo-European tribes - eventually the dominant group in the Eurasian land mass all the way from the Atlantic to India. These first Indo-European conquerors, ruling Anatolia from the 17th to 12th century BC, ...
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Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan's first major campaigns are to the southeast, making incursions from 1209 into northern China. In 1215 he reaches and captures Beijing. But his most ambitious expedition, starting in 1219, is to the west. Samarkand and Bukhara are taken and sacked in 1220. Genghis Khan then moves south and enters India, but he turns back from this rich prize when he reaches the Indus. By 1223 his armies have moved round the Caspian and up through the Caucasus mountains to plunder cities of the ...
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Owain Glyn Dwr
The death of the glamorous young Henry Percy ('Hotspur'), in battle at Shrewsbury in 1403, is a setback for the rebels. But in 1404 Glyn Dwr captures the important English strongholds of Aberystwyth and Harlech. He begins now to rule as the prince of Wales, establishing an administration, holding parliaments, negotiating with the pope about Welsh bishops. In 1405 an alliance is even drawn up between himself, Mortimer and Nothumberland as to how they will divide England and Wales between them. But from that year ...
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Two Anglo-Afghan Wars
In January 1842 the British garrison of some 4500 troops withdraws from Kabul, leaving Shah Shuja to his fate (he is soon assassinated). Most of the retreating British and Indian soldiers are also killed during their attempt to regain the safety of India. A British army recaptures Kabul during the summer of 1842, more as a gesture of defiance than as a matter of practical policy - for the decision is subsequently taken to restore Dost Mohammed to his throne. He returns from India in ...
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Ashikaga shogunate
The Ashikaga shoguns are never as firmly in control of Japan as their predecessors in Kamakura. From 1467 the country is in an almost permanent state of civil war, until their shogunate is brought to an end in 1573. But the Ashikaga make a great contribution to the cultural life of Japan. They create Zen temples and gardens, with areas specially designed for the Tea Ceremony. The famous Golden Pavilion in Kyoto is built in 1397 by the shogun Yoshimitsu as a villa for his ...
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Jubilee Years
Senior representatives of the colonies are naturally in London for the Jubilee, and the opportunity is taken to hold an assembly which can now be seen as the first in a long line of Imperial and Commonwealth conferences. Ten years later, for the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, the mood is even more ecstatic. 2500 beacons are lit on the nation's hills, four times as many as in 1887.The queen, driven in an open carriage through six miles of London streets, notes in her diary: 'The ...
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Timur's conquests
Home is Samarkand, the city closest to his birthplace. Timur is busy turning it into a great centre of Muslim architecture and art. Together with the Indian elephants come the best craftsmen of Delhi, who will be set to work in Samarkand - where they join, in 1399, a community of skilled captives from previous expeditions. The conqueror himself, now in his mid-sixties, has more practical business to attend to. Before the end of 1399 he marches west, to restore order in his outlying provinces.
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Waterloo
With about 124,000 men Napoleon advances towards Brussels, hoping to take a position between Wellington's and Blücher's armies - with the intention of containing or driving off one of them while defeating the other. The way north is blocked by Wellington at Quatre Bras. On June 16 Napoleon leaves marshal Ney to assault this position while he tackles Blücher a few miles to the east, at Ligny. The engagement at Quatre Bras is indecisive. But Napoleon wins convincingly at Ligny, causing the Prussians to retreat ...
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Romanesque
The capitals of columns, carved with nothing more exotic than acanthus leaves in the classical tradition, provide one area in which the Romanesque sculptor lets his imagination run wild. In abbey cloisters of the period (and abbots are among the main patrons of art in the Romanesque centuries) the tops of the pillars are often alive with vivid biblical scenes or endearingly grotesque monsters, cunningly carved to make the most of the available shape. This tradition of sculpture, reaching its peak in the 11th and ...
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Ravenna
The town of Ravenna becomes a place of importance early in the 5th century when the western emperor, Honorius, moves his capital there from Rome to escape the advancing Huns. Well fortified and with a safe harbour, it remains until 751 the place from which Byzantines and barbarians in turn administer Italy. The Byzantine rulers and the greatest of the barbarians, Theodoric, decorate the holy buildings of Ravenna in glittering mosaic, the medium which by now almost symbolizes the might of Christian rule within the ...
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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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Richard II and Bolingbroke
Richard, returning from Ireland, surrenders to his cousin at Conwy without a battle. In London, on 29 September 1399, he is forced to renounce the crown. On the following day a parliament is held in Westminster Hall. The throne is vacant. Bolingbroke is seated in it by the two archbishops, of Canterbury and York, becoming Henry IV. His accession introduces the Lancastrian line on the English throne, because the title which he inherits from his father is duke of Lancaster. Richard is imprisoned in a ...
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Muslim North Africa
The Arabs continue rapidly westwards along the coast of North Africa, capturing Cyrenaica in 642 and Tripoli in 643. But these remain largely ineffective outposts. For nearly three decades the Arabs make little progress in subduing the indigenous Berber inhabitants of this coastal strip. The turning point comes in 670 with the founding of a new Arab garrison town at Kairouan, about sixty miles south of the Byzantine city of Carthage. From this secure base military control becomes possible. Carthage is destroyed (yet again) in ...
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The popes at Avignon
In many ways the move to Avignon has a rational justification. This city is close to the main power of the time, France, but it is in another kingdom - that of Naples. It is also the centre of western Europe in a way which Rome could never be. Lines drawn from Britain to Italy and from Germany to Spain would cross close to Avignon. In addition this place is much more secure than Rome. Italy is in a state of anarchy, dominated by warring ...
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Act of Supremacy
The Act of Supremacy demands public consent to the king's newly assumed role as head of the Church of England. Prominent figures in public life are required to swear on oath their acceptance of this new doctrine. A few brave men refuse to do so, among them the bishop of Rochester (John Fisher) and Thomas More. Thomas More holds a position of particular significance. A scholar of distinction, friend of Erasmus, author of Utopia, he has also been a close friend of Henry VIII and ...
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The first Greek civilization
Their fortress palaces are protected by walls of stone blocks, so large that only giants would seem capable of heaving them into place. This style of architecture has been appropriately named Cyclopean, after the Cyclopes (a race of one-eyed giants encountered by Odysseus in the Odyssey). The walls at Tiryns, said in Greek legend to have built by the Cyclopes for the legendary king Proteus, provide the most striking example. At Mycenae it is the gateway through the walls which proclaims power, with two great ...
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