Middle Ages 2009

He was King of England from 1483 until his death. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field was the decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses and is sometimes regarded as the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the central character of a well-known play by William Shakespeare.When his brother Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord protector of the realm for Edward's son and successor, the 12-year-old King Edward V. As the new king travelled to London from Ludlow, Richard met him and escorted him to London where he was lodged in the Tower. Edward V's brother Richard later joined him there.A publicity campaign was mounted condemning Edward IV's marriage to the boys' mother, Elizabeth Woodville as invalid and making their children illegitimate and ineligible for the throne. On 25 June an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed these claims. The following day Richard III officially began his reign. He was crowned in July. The two young princes disappeared in August and there were a number of accusations that the boys were murdered by Richard.There were two major rebellions against Richard. The first, in 1483, was led by staunch opponents of Edward IV and most notably Richard's "kingmaker", Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. The revolt collapsed and Buckingham was executed at Salisbury near the Bull's Head Inn. In 1485 there was another rebellion against Richard, headed by Henry Tudor, 2nd Earl of Richmond (later King Henry VII) and his uncle Jasper. The rebels landed troops, consprised mainly of mercenaries, and Richard fell in the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last English king to die in battle.

The bubonic plague is an infection, usually resulting from the bite of an infected flea. The fleas are often found on rodents, such as rats and mice, and seek out other prey when their rodent hosts die. The bacteria form aggregates in the gut of infected fleas and this results in the flea regurgitating ingested blood, which is now infected, into the bite site of a rodent or human host. Once established, bacteria rapidly spread to the lymph nodes and multiply. pestis bacilli can resist phagocytosis and even reproduce inside phagocytes and kill them. As the disease progresses, the lymph nodes can haemorrhage and become swollen and necrotic. Bubonic plague can progress to lethal septicemic plague in some cases. The plague is also known to spread to the lungs and become the disease known as the pneumonic plague.

The plague resurfaced in the mid-19th century; like the Black Death, the Third Pandemic began in Central Asia. The disease killed millions in China and India and then spread worldwide. The outbreak continued into the early 20th century. In 1897, Pune in British India, was severely affected by the outbreak. The government responded to the plague with a committee system that used the military to perpetrate repression and tyranny as it tackled the pandemic. Nationalists publicly berated the government. On 22 June 1897, two young brahmins, the Chapekar brothers, shot and killed two British officers, the Committee chairman and his military escort. This act has been considered a landmark event in India's struggle for freedom as well as the worst violence against political authority seen in the world during the third plague pandemic.Plague was used during the Second Sino-Japanese War as a bacteriological weapon by the Imperial Japanese Army. These weapons were provided by Shirō Ishii's units and used in experiments on humans before being used on the field. For example, in 1940, the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service bombed Ningbo with fleas carrying the bubonic plague. During the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials the accused, such as Major General Kiyashi Kawashima, testified that, in 1941, some 40 members of Unit 731 air-dropped plague-contaminated fleas on Changde. These operations caused epidemic plague outbreaks.

Arabic, the main unifying feature among Arabs, is a Semitic language originating in Arabia. From there it spread to a variety of distinct peoples across most of West Asia and North Africa, resulting in their acculturation as Arabs, or Arabization, often though not always, in conjunction with Islamization.With the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE as the language of the Qur'an, Arabic became the lingua franca of the wider Mediterranean region. It was in this period that Arabic language and culture was widely disseminated with the early Islamic expansion, both through conquest and cultural contact.Arabic culture and language, however, began a more limited difusion before the Islamic age, first spreading in West Asia beginning in the 2nd century, as Arab Christians such as the Ghassanids, Lakhmids and Banu Judham began migrating north from Arabia into the Syrian Desert and the Levant.