istoryworld
French delicacies
There is a sudden lightening of the tone in French society in the second decade of the 18th century. The treaty of Utrecht, concluding the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, seems to promise the end of the almost continuous warfare which has characterized the long reign of Louis XIV. And the death of the king himself, in 1715, offers possible liberation from the stifling formality which has been the mark of his court.In these same years a young artist, Antoine Watteau, is producing ...
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Fra Angelico and San Marco
The Dominican order has among its ranks a superbly talented painter. As a friar he is referred to as 'brother' (frater in Latin, fratello in Italian), and the name by which he becomes known is Fra Angelico - the angelic brother. From 1443 Dominicans in Florence employ him to provide contemplative images for the walls of their convent of San Marco. Over the next four years he and his assistants create an extended masterpiece of Italian Renaissance art - though they would not have thought ...
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Fatehpur Sikri
The building most characteristic of Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri is his famous diwan-i-khas, or hall of private audience. It consists of a single very high room, furnished only with a central pillar. The top of the pillar, on which Akbar sits, is joined by four narrow bridges to a balcony running round the wall. On the balcony are those having an audience with the emperor. If required, someone can cross one of the bridges - in a respectfully crouched position - to join Akbar in ...
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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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Ashur and the Assyrians
Since about 2000 BC the Assyrians, a Semitic group, have worshipped their god Ashur at a shrine on the Tigris known by his name. The city of Ashur has had periods of influence, trading and conquering westwards into Turkey, but the Assyrians have also often been subject to more powerful groups from those regions, such as the Hittites. And they have tended to be overshadowed by their great neighbour to the south, Babylon. The balance changes markedly in Ashur's favour with the accession, in 883, ...
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The caravan
This trade route brings prosperity to Petra, a natural stronghold just north of the Gulf of Aqaba on the route from the Red Sea up to the Mediterranean coast. In the heyday of the kingdom of Israel, around 1000 BC, this important site is occupied by the Edomites - bitter enemies of the Israelite kings, David and Solomon. In the 4th century BC the Edomites are displaced by an Arab tribe, the Nabataeans. They soon come into conflict with new neighbours in Mesopotamia, the Seleucid ...
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Machu Picchu
Ever since the arrival of the Spaniards in Peru there have been rumours of a lost city of the Incas. Many have searched for it before the challenge inspires Hiram Bingham, an American historian. In 1911 he arrives in Cuzco with a party from the university of Yale. After several disappointments, following up rumours of ruins, the group stops for the night by a canyon of the Urubamba river. An old Indian, named Arteaga, walks into the camp. He says that he knows a ruined ...
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Pennsylvania
In 1737 the colony of Pennsylvania decides to claim the full extent of this supposed agreement. Athletes are trained for the occasion; a path is cut through the scrub; on August 25-6 the quickest among them covers sixty-four miles in the day and a half, bringing some 1200 square miles of Indian territory securely into British hands.There is a further irony attached to this loss by the Lenape. When they reject the so-called Walking Purchase, both sides agree to accept arbitration by the Iroquois League. ...
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Thus spake Zarathustra
Zoroaster (the Greek name by which the Iranian prophet Zarathustra has become known) is traditionally believed to have lived and taught in the early part of the 6th century BC. His home is probably in the region to the east of the Caspian Sea. The main theme of Zoroaster's teaching is to replace the numerous ahuras or gods of the traditional Indo-Iranian religion with just one ahura, the supreme God or 'Wise Lord', Ahura Mazda.
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Roman expansion in Italy
Rome reinforces this network of alliances with a sound system of communication. In 312 the first of the great Roman roads, the Via Appia, is built by Appius Claudius to link Rome with an important new ally - the city of Capua, north of Naples. Additional security is provided by small colonies planted at strategic places. In each of them 300 Roman families are settled in a walled encampment, becoming in effect a self-sufficient military outpost. Each family is given its own plot of land; ...
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Battles on western front
The pressure on Verdun is eased in July, when the Allies advance in the valley of the Somme, in the centre of the line, in what becomes the most deadly single engagement of the entire war. On the very first day 60,000 of the British troops running forward from their trenches are mown down by enemy fire. Four months later, when torrential rain brings the battle finally to an end with little gained, the British have lost 420,000 men, the French 195,000 and the Germans ...
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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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The Moghuls after Aurangzeb
When the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb is in his eighties, and the empire in disarray, an Italian living in India (Niccolao Manucci) predicts appalling bloodshed on the old man's death, worse even than that which disfigured the start of Aurangzeb's reign. The Italian is right. In the war of succession which begins in 1707, two of Aurangzeb's sons and three of his grandsons are killed.Violence and disruption is the pattern of the future. The first six Moghul emperors have ruled for a span of nearly 200 ...
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Multi-racial Britain
The first ship to leave Jamaica is the Empire Windrush. She docks in the Thames, at Tilbury, on 22 June 1948. The new arrivals easily find work, at wages high by Jamaican standards. They are soon followed by many others from throughout the British Caribbean.The arrival of the West Indians transforms Britain into a multiracial society. There is as yet little religious diversity because the new immigrants are nearly all Christians. At this stage only one long established British group differs from the majority in ...
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Greek vases
The red-figure style is a much more realistic convention. Many of the most popular scenes on vases involve mythical heroes or revelling satyrs. Such figures, to a Greek audience, seem natural if naked. The reddish-brown colour of the pottery is appropriate to Mediterranean skin, and a few linear additions to the figure provide convincing modelling for the limbs or for the suggestion of a thin garment. From about 530 to 480, the period considered the high point of the Greek ceramic achievement, the red-figure style ...
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Henry II
In the centre, at court, the royal administration is strengthened by several significant innovations - among them the development of the exchequer. This is a regular meeting of the nation's finance committee, held round a table with a chequered pattern of squares. The squares are used as an abacus for instant calculations of revenue. Often chaired by the king himself, and attended by the great officers of state, this committee is a more professional and centralized method of government than the relatively impromptu arrangements of ...
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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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British portraits
Reynolds often paints his subjects full length, in splendid poses and in close proximity to a classical column or urn. These are the sort of people who go on the Grand Tour. Their easy self-confidence in Reynolds's canvases revives the great tradition of the English portraits of van Dyck.If anything is missing in these powerful images by Reynolds, it is perhaps the fleeting quality of fashion - a quality abundantly supplied by his slightly younger rival Thomas Gainsborough. When Gainsborough catches William and Elizabeth Hallett ...
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Italian Gothic
The most impressive Italian contribution to the story of Gothic architecture is in secular buildings. In 1298 the authorities in Siena publish regulations for the city's central piazza, the semicircular Campo. The height and style of the surrounding houses are to be carefully regulated. Over the next few decades the commune builds the town hall, the Palazzo Publico, on the straight side of the gently sloping semicircle (the great tower is completed in 1348). The other sides fill in, as decreed, to provide a sense ...
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Italian Gothic
More typical of Venetian Gothic is the exquisite Ca' d'Oro, built betwen 1421 and 1440. There is a wonderful contrast and harmony between the wall with its nine inset windows on the right (stone with an occasional pattern of space) and the three tiers of balconies with their filigree arches on the left (space with an occasional pattern of stone). This design blends the Gothic with other influences, deriving from Venice's connections with the Byzantine and Muslim east. The result is a beauty, purely Venetian, ...
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