istoryworld
Mongols
The aggressive energy of one man, Genghis Khan, lies behind the amazing eruption of the Mongols in the 13th century. In 1215 he reaches and captures Beijing. Samarkand and Bukhara are taken and sacked in 1220. The marauder then heads 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 Crimea and southern Russia. This journey of conquest, ...
Read More
Gold rushes
From the middle of the 19th century the nature of Australia's colonies is transformed by gold. The first mining boom has been in South Australia with the discovery of copper in 1845. But the real rush begins in 1851, just two years after the California gold rush has turned men's thoughts to instant fortunes. Gold is found at several sites in New South Wales and in Victoria. The richest finds are at Ballarat and Bendigo. These are fields rather than mines of gold. The nuggets ...
Read More
Kakiemon porcelain
In the following century Japan makes another major contribution to the history of ceramics. In about 1644 Sakada Kakiemon, a member of a family of potters with kilns at Arita in northwest Kyushu, introduces to Japan the Chinese system of overglaze painting. In the 1670s his two sons, known as Kakiemon II and Kakiemon III, are producing exquisite wares of milky white porcelain, often square or hexagonal in shape, decorated with elegant and brightly coloured motifs of plants and birds. The decoration, covering relatively little ...
Read More
The Old Kingdom
The period known as the Old Kingdom runs from the 4th to the 6th of Manetho's dynasties and begins several centuries after the unification of Egypt. During the intervening period little is known of the pharaohs except their names, deriving from stone inscriptions (from as early as the 1st dynasty the Egyptian civilization enjoys the advantages of writing, soon to be followed by a sophisticated calendar). Of some pharaohs even the names are missing.The change to more solid evidence comes in the time of Zoser, ...
Read More
Sui dynasty
The man who reunites China in 589, forming the Sui dynasty, is an enthusiastic patron of Buddhism. He takes as his title Wen Ti, meaning the Cultured Emperor, and devotes much effort to building Buddhist stupas throughout the land. The local version of a stupa develops into a specifically Chinese form, that of the pagoda. His son, Yang Ti (the Emblazoned Emperor), undertakes an even more ambitious project, requiring so much forced labour that it contributes to the rapid end of this brief dynasty. But ...
Read More
Roman murals
Murals are even more fragile than the walls they are painted on, so it is not surprising that few survive from the days of the Roman empire. The accidents of being covered by ash or sand, or of being originally painted underground, have preserved some examples in Pompeii, Doura-Europos and the Roman catacombs. They are not for the most part very distinguished. But they demonstrate that it is a normal custom, in Roman communities, to decorate walls by painting on the plaster. It is equally ...
Read More
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. This is connoisseurship of an unusually violent kind, but it is a genuine passion. Inherited by Timur's descendants, in less rapacious form, it results in a great Timurid tradition ...
Read More
Christianity in Ireland
The most telling images of early Christianity in Ireland are the beehive cells on the inhospitable rock of Skellig Michael, off the coast of Kerry. In these, from the 5th century, Celtic monks live in an ascetic tradition which relates back to the first desert fathers in Egypt. Cold, rather than heat, is here their local penance. Missionary efforts in Ireland during the 5th century - including those of St Patrick - give the Christian religion a firmer footing. By the 6th century the time ...
Read More
From tents to round houses
Once human beings settle down to the business of agriculture, instead of hunting and gathering, permanent settlements become a factor of life. The story of architecture can begin. The tent-like structures of earlier times evolve now into round houses. Jericho is usually quoted as the earliest known town. A small settlement here evolves in about 8000 BC into a town covering 10 acres. And the builders of Jericho have a new technology - bricks, shaped from mud and baked hard in the sun. In keeping ...
Read More
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 ...
Read More
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 ...
Read More
The Dome of the Rock
It is appropriate that the Dome of the Rock is the world's only historic building with 'dome' in its title. For this shrine has a profound influence in making the dome a feature of Islamic architecture. The originality of the Dome of the Rock is the flamboyance of the dome itself, equal in height to the rest of the building and brightly gilded. Seen from a distance, the dome virtually is the building. Situated on the highest point of a hill, this is a dramatic ...
Read More
Two English parliaments
When Simon de Montfort summons his parliament in Westminster Hall in 1265, he knows that he has relatively little support among the nobility (in the event only five earls and eighteen barons attend). Hoping to involve other sections of the community in his cause, he invites to Westminster two knights from each county, two citizens from each city and two burgesses from each borough. This is not a representative assembly, since any known opponents of Montfort are excluded. But something closer to representation evolves in ...
Read More
The sculptures of Chartres
The earliest porch of Chartres cathedral - the triple entrance in the west façade - introduces Gothic sculpture in its most extreme form. Each of the biblical kings and queens stands on a tiny platform projecting from a tall, thin pillar. To suit their circumstance, their bodies are impossibly elongated within the tumbling pleats of their full-length robes. Yet their faces, by contrast, are realistic and benign. The result is an effect of ethereal calm, entirely in keeping with Gothic architecture. One of the Chartres ...
Read More
Greek and Roman gods
In both Greece and Rome the many gods of the pantheon have their own local shrines. The most important of these are magnificent buildings, set in elaborate architectural precincts. Famous examples are the temple to Apollo at Delphi, and the Parthenon, sacred to Pallas Athene, in Athens. Priests attend to the needs of the god, whether by preparing ceremonial food or drink or by decorating and anointing the cult statue, and they supervise the temple rituals. The role of ordinary worshippers consists largely in bringing ...
Read More
Spanish Armada
The encounter between the Spanish Armada and the English fleet in the Channel in August 1588 is the first of a new kind of naval battle, and one in which the English tactics suggest the way forward. The Spanish have been accustomed to fighting at sea with galleys, as at Lepanto only seventeen years previously. A galley imposes a certain pattern on a battle. Guns can only point forward from the bow, where the main weapon, the ram, is also located. Assault consists in rowing ...
Read More
The great Dutch century
From the many practising in each field there emerge a handful of outstanding masters. In landscape Aelbert Cuyp achieves, from the 1640s, exceptionally beautiful effects of warm and gentle light in broad tranquil vistas. Jacob van Ruisdael, a few years younger, is the greatest of the Dutch landscape painters. He works a more dramatic vein than Cuyp, finding romance in wooded landscapes among which streams tumble or half-hidden roads wind their way. Ruisdael's theme is followed by his pupil Hobbema - though Hobbema's most famous ...
Read More
Abdication of Charles V
Early in 1557 Charles retires to a residence close to the monastery of Yuste in Spain. For the emperor, still only in his late 50s, this is an unprecedented period of seclusion, in holy surroundings, at the end of a life of constant travel, turmoil and warfare. For his son Philip, by contrast, seclusion in a monastery becomes almost a style of government. He returns to Spain from the Netherlands in 1559; in the remaining thirty-nine years of his life he never again leaves the ...
Read More
Angkor and Pagan
In Cambodia the Khmer dynasty makes its capital, from the 9th century, in the city of Angkor. A series of huge Hindu temples culminates in the great 12th-century Angkor Wat. The temples are engulfed by the jungle, after the fall of the city first to Chams from the east (in 1177) and then to Thais from the west (in 1431). Angkor is rediscovered in the 1860s, to become one of the wonders of the world. To the west, the new Burmese dynasty has its capital ...
Read More
Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb
Europeans become a significant presence in India for the first time during the 17th century. They take home descriptions of the ruler's fabulous wealth, causing him to become known as the Great Moghul. They have a touching tale to tell of Shah Jahan's love for his wife and of the extraordinary building, the Taj Mahal, which he provides for her tomb. And as Shah Jahan's reign merges into Aurangzeb's, they can astonish their hearers with an oriental melodrama of a kind more often associated with ...
Read More