Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Crown

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
manhefnawi

Charles XIV John | king of Sweden and Norway | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Charles-XIV-John

Sweden Bernadotte Napoleon Gustave IV

shared by manhefnawi on 17 May 18 - No Cached
  • original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte
  • French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).
  • formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • he enlisted in the French army
  • supporter of the Revolution
  • Bernadotte first met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 in Italy. Their relationship, at first friendly, was soon embittered by rivalries and misunderstandings
  • In November 1799 Bernadotte refused to assist Bonaparte’s coup d’état that ended the Directory but neither did he defend it
  • When, on May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed the empire, Bernadotte declared full loyalty to him and, in May, was named marshal of the empire
  • he was invited to become crown prince of Sweden. In 1809 a palace revolution had overthrown King Gustav IV of Sweden and had put the aged, childless, and sickly Charles XIII on the throne. The Danish prince Christian August had been elected crown prince but died suddenly in 1810, and the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice.
  • Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. On October 20 he accepted Lutheranism and landed in Sweden; he was adopted as son by Charles XIII and took the name of Charles John (Karl Johan). The Crown Prince at once assumed control of the government and acted officially as regent during the illnesses of Charles XIII. Napoleon now tried to prevent any reorientation of Swedish foreign policy and moreover sent an immediate demand that Sweden declare war on Great Britain
  • he respected his military ability, his skillful and humane administration of Hanover and the Hanseatic towns, and his charitable treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany
  • Charles John was anxious to achieve something for Sweden that would prove his worth to the Swedes and establish his dynasty in power. He could, as many Swedes wished, have regained Finland from Russia, either by conquest or by negotiation
  • the conquest of Norway from Denmark, based on a Swedish alliance with Napoleon’s enemies. An alliance was signed with Russia in April 1812, with Great Britain in March 1813—with the British granting a subsidy for the proposed conquest of Norway—and with Prussia in April 1813. Urged by the allies, however, Charles John agreed to take part in the great campaign against Napoleon and to postpone his war with Denmark. The Crown Prince landed his troops at Stralsund, Ger., in May 1813 and soon took command of the allied army of the north
  • conserve his forces for the war with Denmark, and the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting
  • After the decisive Battle of Leipzig (October 1813), Napoleon’s first great defeat, Charles John succeeded in defeating the Danes in a swift campaign and forced King Frederick VI of Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), which transferred Norway to the Swedish crown. Charles John now had dreams of becoming king or “protector” of France, but he had become alienated from the French people, and the victorious allies would not tolerate another soldier in charge of French affairs
  • Charles John conducted an efficient and almost bloodless campaign, and in August the Norwegians signed the Convention of Moss, whereby they accepted Charles XIII as king
  • At the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), Austria and the French Bourbons were hostile to the upstart prince, and the son of the deposed Gustav was a potential pretender to the throne. But, thanks to Russian and British support, the status of the new dynasty was undisturbed
  • Upon the death of Charles XIII on Feb. 5, 1818, Charles John became king of Sweden and Norway, and the former republican and revolutionary general became a conservative ruler.
  • His foreign policy inaugurated a long and favourable period of peace, based on good relations with Russia and Great Britain
manhefnawi

Henry VII and the Shaping of the Tudor State | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...ry-vii-and-shaping-tudor-state

Tudor Medieval England Henry VII

shared by manhefnawi on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • Shakespeare's later Tudor view of Henry VII changed very little between the first study of the reign by Francis Bacon in 1622 and Henry's last academic biography, by Stanley Chrimes, in 1973
  • Henry Tudor could not understand the problems he faced, and was essentially a bad medieval king. He could only have changed their policies after he had learned how to be an effective king. However, this interpretation takes little account of Henry's particular circumstances in 1485. It was precisely because of his unique upbringing and disconnection from England that Henry Tudor was able to bring new ways of doing things to his kingdom. Between about 1480 and 1520 England was certainly transformed from what Nicholas Pronay described as the 'merry but unstable England ruled by Edward IV to the tame, sullen and tense land inherited by Henry VIII'
  • It was control of personal relationships and mental attitudes among the people who represented the king that Henry VII saw as the key to forcing change upon the medieval ruling structures he inherited
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • What Henry VII did have great expertise in also grew from the circumstances of his exile
  • Henry's power base of support did cut across existing and inherited allegiances. This was an advantage if it could be transformed into Tudor loyalty.
  • That Henry VIII became such a gross figure of monarchy must be due partly to the freedom given to ministers like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell to direct royal policy
  • Henry VII also began to free the crown from the direct influence of the aristocracy
  • Fifteenth-century kings, dukes and earls were royal cousins with a common descent from Edward III (1327-77). They held a shared elite outlook. Henry VII arrived from relative obscurity in 1485 and began to rule more like a landlord than the first among aristocratic equals.
  • Henry VII stayed closely involved in the daily tasks of ruling because he had a suspicious personality and was obsessed with the security of his Tudor dynasty
  • It removed the politically active gentry from the king's personal chambers, although over time figures such as the groom of the stool, Hugh Denys, became important because they had the ear of the king
  • Henry's permanent adult exile separated him entirely from England's ruling elite, both literally and in terms of his outlook and experiences. On the one hand, this gave Henry an opportunity to unlock the closed network of personal service that had surrounded medieval royal heirs as Princes of Wales or royal nobles. On the other, it created a great dependence upon the advice and skills of others. Some, like Sir Giles Daubeney and Sir Edward Poynings, had joined Henry after 1483 in opposition to Richard III. Others, like John de Vere, earl of Oxford, followed Henry because he was the only chance they had of recovering their lands and influence. Henry could not fully trust them to remain loyal if political circumstances changed again.
  • Henry VIII's early years, with a vibrant youthful court and military glory in France and Scotland, were certainly more like those of Edward IV's second reign (1471-83) than the more sombre final years of Henry VII's
  • To keep their status these men became agents of the Tudor crown
  • Henry pressed these prerogative rights to the very edge of the law, and many subjects complained of injustice. But the ability of the crown to intervene in their life became much more apparent
  • By regulating their roles as JPs, sheriffs, escheators and jury members, the Tudor crown further encroached upon the political and social freedoms of the ruling elite. Under weak leadership in Henry VI's reign (1422-61), they had been partly responsible for the descent into lawlessness and civil war. The Tudor king sought to remedy both deficiencies
  • Henry created few new nobles and was reluctant to promote or reward his servants excessively.
  • Henry also kept the personal estates of the crown (the demesne lands) in his own hands
  • The king's men soon learned that they could still wield great power: Sir Thomas Lovell's retinue, based on a number of scattered crown stewardships, was as large as any noble connection during this period. But Henry's knights were closely monitored. In another case, the king was willing to sacrifice Sir Richard Guildford's influence in Kent, when it became clear after 1504 that he could no longer represent the crown's interests effectively.
  • Towards the end of Henry VII's reign, members of the elite were competing for office and influence within a clearly defined structure of crown service. They were not challenging independently for resources of land and men that could threaten Tudor stability. Nobles could still be great landowners, courtiers or commissioners, like the restored earl of Surrey in the north before 1500
  • Henry VII's reliance on the policies of his Yorkist predecessors is well known
  • No historian has so far explained how Henry VII gained a foothold on power long enough to exploit the few advantages he held in 1485, or how he withstood the very serious early threats to his dynasty.
  • Henry VII began to use these tools on a large scale to enforce loyalty during the conspiracies of the first decade of Tudor rule. The backlash to the Tudor accession arose in the heartland of Richard III's support in Yorkshire
  • This was most obvious with the pretender Perkin Warbeck's call upon the loyalty of former servants of Edward V for most of the 1490s. Henry did try to heal the factionalism that had prevented a harmonious resolution of the civil wars in earlier reigns, and he did this by reshaping the political loyalties of the ruling classes
  • If the system worked as Henry VII intended it to, then little revenue would be generated from this source. The extent to which this aspect of the use of bonds was developed has been hidden from most Tudor historians
  • Henry VII's reign therefore remains an intriguing period to study. With several historians now working exclusively on Henry, we can expect a major growth in our level of understanding of the first Tudor reign in the near future
manhefnawi

Louis XII of France: The Unlikely Lad | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...louis-xii-france-unlikely-lad

Louis XII France Political

shared by manhefnawi on 22 May 18 - No Cached
  • Louis XII became king of France by accident. Or, more precisely, because of an accident. On April 7th 1498, his cousin, the reigning monarch Charles VIII, stumbled and hit his head on the lintel of a doorway through which he was passing on his way to watch a tennis match in the royal chateau at Amboise. The king had recently been ill. He seemed to be recovering but this final blow in a life full of hard knocks finished him off. Having no surviving male heir, the crown passed to his nearest male relative, Louis duke of Orleans, who was crowned king in Rheims cathedral on 27 May 1498
  • Louis ended his reign having reformed the French legal system, reduced taxes, having enjoyed some military success in Italy and bearing the loving accolade, 'Father of the People'. In many respects he stands comparison with his contemporary, Henry VII of England
  • Louis was born in 1462 during the reign of his second cousin Louis XI. His father was Charles duke of Orleans, a celebrated poet and the head of a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Louis XI was succeeded by his son, Charles VIII, in 1483
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • his first priority was political security. This is the first respect in which his reign parallels that of Henry VII. The first Tudor had also rebelled against his sovereign, ultimately seizing the crown itself from Richard III in 1485
  • Within six months of his accession Louis had his first marriage, to Louis XI's daughter, Jeanne, annulled. He then married Charles's widow, Anne of Brittany, the daughter of duke Francis. Louis thereby retained the French crown's hold on Brittany. Like Henry VII's marriage to Elizabeth of York, Louis's marriage to Anne also enabled him to extend his domestic power base beyond his immediate family and those favoured by the previous monarch.
  • Henry did besiege Boulogne in October 1492, ostensibly to assert his claim to the crown of France following Anne of Brittany's marriage to Charles VIII in 1491. To buy him off, Charles offered Henry a pension of 745 000 crowns under the treaty of Etaples.
  • Like Henry VII, Louis was expected to ‘live off his own’. He was reasonably successful at this task. He did not make the monarchy profitable in the way Henry was able to, but neither did he impoverish it. Louis inherited a deficit of about 1.4 million livres and left Francis I a deficit of about the same amount – and this despite several very expensive military campaigns of the kind which Henry VII studiously avoided and Louis’s reduction of the taille
  • There was nothing in France to parallel the renowned English system of 'Chamber' finance begun by Edward IV and adopted by Henry VII to increase control over the collection and disbursement of domainal revenues.
  • This suggests that the system worked well enough until the end of his reign, but it was overhauled substantially by Francis I.
  • Louis was less innovative than Henry VII in developing legal machinery and institutions with which to control the nobility. Bonds and recognizances or institutions such as the Council Learned at Law were once seen as evidence that Henry VII was a 'new' monarch whose regime was dominated by lawyers and financial officials upon whom he depended to marginalise the unreliable nobility, the traditional royal servants
  • Louis continued Henry's pension conducted relatively warm relations with him, although he worried about England's ties with the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. He had good cause to after Henry VIII's accession in April 1509
  • Louis's fortunes began to fade in 1510. The new pope, Julius II, was determined to recover the papal lands which Borgia predecessor, Alexander VI, had with French help, alienated to his son Cesare
  • Then in August the Swiss invaded Burgundy and besieged the city of Dijon. They only withdrew on Louis's promise to relinquish his claim to Milan and to pay then a sizeable indemnity. On top of all of this, Queen Anne died in January 1514 leaving Louis no surviving male heir
  • Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain followed suit, deserting their erstwhile ally Henry VIII, who was furious. Under pressure from Leo X, Henry dramatically reversed his isolation by becoming Louis's ally. His young and very beautiful sister Mary married Louis in October 1514.
  • Compared with that of his successor, Louis' artistic and intellectual patronage was not exceptional. He did not influence Henry VII in the direct way that Francis I did Henry VIII
  • Louis XII died on New Year's Day 1515. Despite his apparently fatal vigour with which he took to his third marriage, it provided him with no son. He was succeeded by Francis of Angouleme, during whose reign Louis's was oevrshadowed on every count except. perhaps, popularity among commoners. His various campaigns against Milan were disparaged by the new regime. However, Francis's campaigns may have been more glamorous but ultimately they were no more successful. It would be idle to claim Louis as one of France's great military commanders, but for 12 of his 16 years as king he did practise successful warfare, outdoing the deeds of Maximilian, Ferdinand and Henry VII
  • Louis's ambitions were to secure his kingdom politically and to enhance the glory of his dynasty. For him, as for Henry VII, increased financial or judicial controls over the kingdom were means to these ends, not ends in themselves, As the founder of a new dynasty Henry's task was undoubtedly more difficult than Louis's and he showed greater ingenuity in developing methods of making his subjects accountable to him
  • Having begun uncertainly, both quickly projected a strong sense of their authority, but the efforts of some historians to characterise Louis as a 'proto-absolutist', anticipating the supposed ambitions of Francis I or even Louis XIV to centralise the state, were wide of the mark. Louis's 'good government' was essentially traditional
manhefnawi

In the Blood - The Secret History of the Habsburgs | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/10201

Maria Theresa

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • 18th-century succession crisis unlocks a tale of dynastic obsession and myth-history in Austria's first family
  • Charles had devoted his whole adult life to maintaining the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. From 1705 when he first arrived in Barcelona he saw himself as the only rightful king of Spain. He never accepted the accession of the Bourbon claimant, Philip V, under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and thereafter anything that smacked of a French influence was guaranteed to rouse him to fury
  • his brother Joseph I
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • his father Leopold I
  • With his death, that pre-eminence of the House was challenged
  • So, even if the last Habsburg's death had no sinister implications, it was potentially a catastrophe for the dynasty. Charles had no male heir, and his daughters could not succeed him to the Imperial throne. The laws of the Empire permitted only a male to sit on the throne of Charlemagne
  • Among the Habsburgs, gender was less important than blood
  • among the Habsburgs, as opposed, to say, the Valois or the Bourbons, the reality of female power and authority was accepted. Thus Charles' daughters could succeed to his titles and lands but they could not become Holy Roman Emperor
  • Since Frederick III had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1452, the Imperial title had become almost synonymous with the Habsburgs. They had been elected since 1438 in an unbroken succession to the most dignified and honourable office in Christian Europe. Sometimes there had been other challengers and, on occasion, it had seemed likely that the title would pass to another claimant. But the Habsburgs had always succeeded in persuading sufficient electors to favour their candidate
  • it obscured the real power that a Holy Roman Emperor could exercise
  • While the power and effectiveness of the Reich was undoubtedly waning, especially after the peace settlement at Westphalia in 1648, it was, paradoxically, becoming a more effective instrument of Habsburg power
  • its sanctions still carried weight
  • The Emperor Leopold I, in 1687 and 1705, had moved away from the notion of the equal claim towards establishing the precedence of the senior line, with males inheriting first and then females.
  • deprived the daughters of Joseph I, and established that the new primogeniture would begin with his own children. When Charles presented this edict he was initiating a constitutional revolution
  • It is worthwhile noting that Charles' concerns were for the future. In 1715, despite ten years of marriage, he had no heir
  • the lands ruled by the Habsburgs should never be divided, and he was mindful of the wrangles over the Spanish inheritance of his cousin Carlos II, which ultimately deprived him (he believed) of the throne of Spain
  • However, there was a strong body of legal opinion that suggested that so powerful were these claims ‘of blood' that no prior agreement could abrogate them, and certainly nothing could prevent their rights being transmitted to the future children of a female Habsburg
  • The Pragmatic Sanction assumed that males would come before females in order of inheritance, but if there were no male heirs, then a female could inherit all the powers and rights due to the head of the house of Habsburg
  • it was accepted that a female Habsburg could wear the Crown of St Stephen. Constitutional lawyers would insist that, technically speaking, Maria Theresa should become ‘King of Hungary’, although she was always referred to as Queen of Hungary
  • The sudden death of Charles produced a crisis for the Habsburgs, firstly in the political domain, but secondly, in the area of dynastic ideology
  • set apart from ordinary humanity, the chosen vessels of God's will
  • The Habsburgs had made so much of their long ancestry, of the male descent through the generations, since the time of the first Rudolf
  • To describe Charles VI as the ‘last of the Habsburgs’ plays to a widely-held legend of the enfeeblement of the Habsburg line
  • it marked their ancient heritage
  • his descendent Carlos II of Spain
  • This grotesque appearance lay behind the assumption that the Habsburgs had died out in the male line for genetic reasons, as a consequence of their deliberate policy of marrying within the family which they had followed since the middle of the sixteenth century
  • In fact the failure of the Habsburg line had much more to do with epidemic disease and poor standards of infant care in the Habsburg palaces than with any genetic taint
  • The lack of a male heir may have had a hereditary element, because there were many more female than male births in the House of Habsburg, but the disappearance of the male line was more an accident than a sign of waning procreative powers.
  • or this reason he never accepted that it was his elder daughter Maria Theresa who would succeed him, and had done nothing to introduce her to the complexities of government
  • The rules and taboos which constrained other ruling houses were transmuted by the Habsburgs' notion of their own unique collective identity
  • The Habsburgs, from the founder of the family's fortune, Emperor Rudolf I in the thirteenth century, had sedulously constructed a myth of their origins which set them apart from ordinary humanity
  • And most Habsburg rulers year by year, right up until the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916, played a solemn part in the annual Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Vienna
  • It was for this reason that the Darks of Habsburg identity, like the jutting jaw, were a mark of honour not a disfigurement
  • It had been the grimly practical Wallenstein and not the Virgin Mary who had rescued the Habsburg cause in the 1630s. In the 1740s Maria Theresa saved her inheritance with a steely will and an unswerving determination to succeed
  • Her response, conditioned both by her character and the exigencies of the circumstances, was very different from her fussy and pedantic father, obsessed with the lost throne of Spain
  • A young woman inherited the crowns and possessions of her father, but also an empty treasury and an army commanded by dotards. The process by which she stiffened the resolve of her generals, won the nobility and gentry of Hungary to her cause, and organised the resistance to the Prussian, Bavarian and French armies has itself achieved the quality of myth
  • Maria Theresa was as involved with the identity of the house of Habsburgs as he had been. She followed her father in his obsessive concern for the safe keeping of the bones of their ancestors
  • Maria Theresa's son Joseph II has been nicknamed ‘The Revolutionary Emperor' by one of his biographers
  • The transformation which she inspired and then enforced on her territories was less dramatic (and less publicised) than Joseph’s: it was also a lot more successful and longer lasting. The crisis of Maria Theresa's first years and the subsequent revival of Habsburg power is most often looked upon in external terms, both political and economic
  • She moved away from the reliance on the Imperial title as a principle source of Habsburg legitimacy
  • However, even then, she refused to be crowned as Empress, preferring the titles she held in her own right to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia
  • Mother of the Country
  • who ruled briefly as Leopold II, knew better than either of them how to play the twin chords of coercion and free expression
  • But the Habsburgs, from Maria Theresa onwards, turned their backs on the tradition of grandeur and portrayed themselves as the first servants of the nation
  • he believed as ardently as any of his predecessors in the unique role and mission of his clan
  • Historians have come to regard Maria Theresa as one of the most significant and innovative of the long line of Habsburg rulers
  • The potential catastrophe of the 1740s was that the Habsburg lands, like Poland a generation later, might have been dismembered or at best much reduced in scale and power
aidenborst

Mohammed bin Salman: Biden administration never considered MBS sanctions a viable optio... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics Culture Biden Saudi-Arabia Biden-Administration MBS

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Biden administration never considered sanctions as a viable option against the powerful Saudi crown prince named as responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, even though the new President promised to punish senior Saudi leaders during the election.
  • Administration officials tell CNN there was little debate or tension inside the White House last week in the leadup to the release of a long-awaited intelligence report into the brutal 2018 murder of Khashoggi— and that the notion of sanctioning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, was never really on the table.
  • The White House has been hammered over what many critics say was its weak response to the report's findings, especially given the administration's tough talk about recalibrating the relationship with Saudi Arabia, and Joe Biden's campaign promises of making the Saudis pay a price for their role in Khashoggi's murder.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • As CNN's KFile reported, in the years before taking office, many of the administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and bin Salman.
  • Sanctioning the crown prince, known as MBS, would have been "too complicated," according to two administration officials, and could have jeopardized US military interests in the kingdom.
  • One central reason: MBS has near complete control over all the country's levers of power. He is not only the crown prince, he is the deputy prime minister, defense minister, chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs and the head of Aramco, the state-owned oil and natural gas company.
  • The White House has stood its ground over the last few days, defending its decision to spare MBS, though struggling at times to explain its rationale.
  • Psaki added that as President, Biden's role "is to act in the national interest of the United States. And that's exactly what he's doing."
  • "I don't think he does go far enough, although you have to give him credit because he's actually increased sanctions and he's increased the travel bans on those individuals who were directly responsible," Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."
  • That's all done little to appease angry lawmakers, including many Democrats, who have lashed out at the Biden team's decision not to sanction MBS. Despite the Biden administration's tough talk, the full recalibration that they promised "did not happen," said a Democratic aide on Capitol Hill.
  • The Biden administration also failed to keep Congress informed in the run-up to the actions they planned to take, two congressional aides said.
  • A bipartisan group of lawmakers immediately announced last week that more needed to be done to hold MBS accountable, and some are working up legislation.
  • "We are working to put the US Saudi relationship on the right footing," Price told reporters on Monday.
  • "I don't think anybody thinks that the crown prince was not responsible, in other words, that he knew about it and that he approved of it," Portman added. "So, I do think there ought to be something additional that focuses on him."
  • "There's obviously a difficult balance that the Biden administration is trying to strike here," she added. "The administration is doing a really good balancing act where Biden is saying they are not going to condone the transactional approach or Whatsapp diplomacy."
  • "There's no question he and other top advisors view Saudi Arabia as far too important to justify" MBS sanctions, the former administration official said.
anonymous

Saudi crown prince softens Iran rhetoric in balancing act | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...toric-balancing-act-2021-04-28

saudiarabia iran internationalrelations

shared by anonymous on 28 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia's crown prince has taken a more conciliatory public stance towards Iran, trying to balance long-held animosity with economic considerations and bridge differences with Washington over how to tackle Tehran's regional behaviour.
  • Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an interview aired late on Tuesday that Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia wanted a good relationship with Shi'ite Iran. read more "We do not want for Iran to be in a difficult situation, on the contrary we want Iran to prosper and grow. We have interests in Iran and they have interests in the Kingdom to propel the region and the world to growth and prosperity," he said.
  • Saudi and Iranian officials held direct talks this month, six years after cutting diplomatic ties, about Yemen and the 2015 nuclear accord between global powers and Iran, which Riyadh opposed for not tackling Tehran's missile programme and regional proxies.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The prince, who vowed to crush the Houthis when Riyadh intervened in Yemen in 2015 at the head of a military coalition, also softened his rhetoric towards the Iran-aligned movement that has launched missile and drone attacks on the kingdom."There is no doubt the Houthis have strong ties with the Iranian regime, but they are Yemenis with Arab instincts," he said, urging the group to accept a ceasefire deal.
manhefnawi

Poland's Fugitive King | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...poland%E2%80%99s-fugitive-king

Poland France Henry II Election

shared by manhefnawi on 13 May 18 - No Cached
  • One of the most extraordinary events of the 16th century was the election in 1573 of a French prince to the throne of Poland. The prince was Henri, the third son of Henry II of France.
  • Catherine’s two eldest sons, François and Charles, were kings of France successively. Henri also succeeded to that throne in 1574. Their sister, Marguerite, became queen of Navarre by marrying the future Henri IV of France in 1572
  • The Polish throne, unusually, was elective. Since 1386 the election had been in practice limited to members of the Jagiellon dynasty, but now, for the first time, it was to be free. Five candidates offered themselves including John III of Sweden, Ivan IV, Tsar of Muscovy, the Archduke Ernest, son of the Emperor Maximilian II, and Henri, Duke of Anjou
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Henri seemed set to win the election when news of the massacre in Paris reached Poland. Overnight the atmosphere changed: lurid depictions of cruelty began to circulate
  • We want Henri of Valois to be our king!
  • The former provided for a Diet every two years, forbade the king to name his successor or to marry without its consent, limited his power over legislation and bound him to accept a permanent council of 16 senators. To safeguard religious toleration, the terms of the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573 were included in the Henrician Articles, together with a clause releasing the king’s subjects of their obligation of obedience if he broke the contract
  • little more than a figurehead
  • For Poland was far from backward culturally. A strong humanistic tradition had developed there in the 15th century
  • You will be powerless to do evil’, he said, ‘but all powerful to do good.
  • Poland as such did not interest him; he was only going there to please his mother.
  • Two conditions were particularly repugnant to Henri: the obligation to hand over his private fortune to the Polish state and that which released his subjects from their obedience if he should break any condition attached to his election
  • Henri sat as king of Poland alongside his brother, Charles IX, king of France
  • This meeting revealed sharp differences among the Poles over religious toleration
  • German Protestants had been outraged by the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. Yet Henri was received courteously
  • Protestant members of the Diet feared that, once crowned, he would expel all non-Catholics from Poland
  • He sentenced Zborowski to banishment, thereby unleashing a furious reaction. Considered too harsh by the Zborowskis and too light by the Wapowskis, the sentence ignited bitter criticism of Henri
  • He was accused of breaking his oath
  • By now Henri was heartily tired of Poland
  • On June 14th, 1574, however, news of Charles IX’s death reached Henri. Keeping it to himself, he declined to take part in a tournament that evening and instead consulted four of his French councillors as to what action to take. They were equally divided: some thought a clandestine departure would do lasting damage to Henri’s reputation, while others argued that he needed to return to France urgently
  • Having decided to go, Henri asked two of his French courtiers to find out how to leave Cracow unnoticed and to prepare horses and guides. For it was essential that the Poles should not suspect that he was about to ditch them. If they tried to retain him he might lose the throne of France, which he valued far more than that of Poland. He was being pressed by his mother to return without delay. His brother Alençon remained a threat. On June 15th Henri deceitfully informed the Senate that he was not planning to leave for the time being and summoned a meeting of the Diet for September
  • In Cracow Henri’s flight was discovered. Tenczynski and a large troop of horsemen set off in pursuit. On reaching the river the chamberlain spied Henri on the far bank: ‘Your Majesty’, he cried, ‘why are you fleeing?’ He then joined Henri at Ples, a small Austrian town. ‘My friend’, explained the king, ‘while I am taking up the succession given to me by God, I am not renouncing that which He has given me by election, for my shoulders are strong enough to support both crowns
  • The king gave him a valuable diamond instead. Tenczynski then returned to Cracow, leaving Henri and his company to continue their journey
  • Discontent and confusion erupted in Poland after Henri’s flight.
  • the nobles turned instead to Stephen Bathory, Prince of Transylvania. He was acclaimed by a Diet on January 18th, 1576 and, soon afterwards, accepted the conditions laid down by the Polish nobles. He was crowned in Cracow on April 29th and married Princess Anna the next day
  • Poles felt let down. No king of theirs had ever given up his crown voluntarily. A popular saying expressed their resentment: King Henri has done the Poles a bad turn: elected at night, he came at night, and, like a traitor, he fled at night
manhefnawi

Manuel I | king of Portugal | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Manuel-I

Portugal and Spain Union of Crowns

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Manuel was fortunate to have reigned at all; he was the ninth child of Dom Fernando, who was the younger brother of Afonso V. Manuel’s father died a year after Manuel was born. King Afonso had one of Manuel’s sisters married to his heir, John II, and another to the powerful Duke of Bragança. On his accession John II had Bragança executed on a charge of treason and later murdered Manuel’s only surviving brother on suspicion of conspiracy.
  • On the death of his own legitimate son in 1491, John recognized Manuel as his heir. Although he later contemplated legitimizing his remaining son, Jorge, he finally left the crown to Manuel.
  • Manuel’s claims to these newly discovered lands were confirmed by the papacy and recognized by the Spanish, with whom Manuel maintained close relations.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The first was Isabella, eldest daughter of cosovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella and widow of John II’s heir.
  • Manuel and Isabella became heirs to the Spanish crowns on her brother’s death. They visited Toledo and Saragossa to receive oaths of allegiance in 1498, but the possibility of the union of the crowns ended when Isabella died in the same year while giving birth to their son Miguel, who died in infancy.
  • Manuel married Eleanor of Austria, sister of the emperor Charles V, in 1518, and had one daughter by this marriage. He died at Lisbon in 1521 and was buried in the Jerónimos monastery.
manhefnawi

Spain - Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, 1276-1479 | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...talonia-and-Valencia-1276-1479

Aragon Castile Peter III Alfonso James I Urgel

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Peter III’s conquest of Sicily, where he reigned as Peter I, was the second major step in the Mediterranean expansion of Catalonia, marking the beginning of a long international struggle with serious domestic complications.
  • Alfonso III (1285–91), who inherited the mainland dominions, and his younger brother James, who received Sicily, valiantly tried to overcome the formidable opposition of the pope, the king of France, and the house of Plantagenet (Anjou). Alfonso seized Majorca because his uncle James had aided the French during their Crusade against Aragon. Once again the Aragonese nobles challenged the king, forcing him in 1287 to confirm his father’s General Privilege and to permit the nobles to control the appointment of certain royal councillors. After succeeding his brother as king of Aragon, James II (1291–1327) tried to secure an unchallenged title to that kingdom by yielding his rights to Sicily in 1295 and returning Majorca to his uncle James.
  • After securing a favourable alteration of his frontier with Murcia, James II occupied Sardinia in 1325. As Genoa disputed Aragonese rights there, his successors, Alfonso IV (1327–36) and Peter IV (the Ceremonious; 1336–87), were forced to wage a series of wars. Accusing his cousin, the king of Majorca, of disloyalty, Peter IV annexed Majorca permanently to the Crown of Aragon in 1343. In 1347 Peter provoked a constitutional crisis by naming his daughter as heir to the throne rather than his brother, the count of Urgel, who argued that women were excluded from the succession.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • After mid-century, Peter I of Castile invaded the Crown of Aragon, prompting Peter IV to back Henry of Trastámara’s claims to the Castilian throne, but Henry subsequently refused to reward him with any territorial concessions. That disappointment was offset to some extent by the reincorporation of Sicily into the dominions of the Crown of Aragon in 1377. Peter IV remained neutral during the Great Schism, but his son John I (1387–95) acknowledged the pope of Avignon. Both John and his younger brother and successor, Martin (1395–1410), had to attend constantly to agitation and unrest in Sardinia and Sicily.
  • Alfonso V (the Magnanimous; 1416–58) opted to pursue ambitions in Italy and generally neglected his peninsular domains.
  • Louis XI of France seized the opportunity to occupy Roussillon and Cerdagne, thereby laying the foundation for future enmity between France and Spain. By 1472 John II had suppressed the Catalan revolt; subsequently he aided his daughter-in-law Isabella in acquiring the Castilian crown. His son Ferdinand succeeded him as king of Aragon and Sardinia, and his daughter Eleanor inherited Navarre.
knudsenlu

The Guardian view on Saudi Arabia and Yemen: Britain's shame, Britain's duty | Opinion ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-britains-shame-britains-duty

saudi arabia yemen britain duty humanitarian

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The visit by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has highlighted UK responsiblities in the devastating war
  • wo announcements marked the end of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the UK on Friday. First came a £100m aid deal, promptly branded a “national disgrace”. While DfID says it will pool expertise to boost infrastructure in poor countries, critics say that it is meant to whitewash the reputation of Saudi Arabia, which needs such PR thanks to its leading role in the war in Yemen.
  • The UN says that 8.5 million Yemenis are at risk of famine. Its humanitarian chief describes conditions as “catastrophic”. The shattered health system battles diphtheria and cholera. The country’s new special envoy, former British diplomat Martin Griffiths, must try to revive the moribund attempts to find a political exit. Whatever the hopes of the Saudi crown prince, there is not a military solution
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A successful peace initiative will need to involve them all, as complex as that will be; a simple deal bearing no relation to realities cannot hold. It will also require persuading Riyadh to be clearer and more realistic about its aims. Britain’s shameful role in Yemen gives it an extra duty to press that case. But for now it seems more focused on security and promoting Typhoon sales.
manhefnawi

The Succession and Foreign Policy | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...succession-and-foreign-policy

Elizabeth Philip II Mary Queen of Scots France Spain

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
  • the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign
  • The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Rivalries within the royal family lay at the heart of English politics between the reigns of Edward III (1327-77) and Henry VII (1485-1509), not least the Wars of the Roses. This was also the case in France and Scotland in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Habsburgs provide the exception: with only a few lapses, they were almost the model of family loyalty
  • As an heir of Henry VII, Mary could not challenge the legitimacy of the Tudor line as a whole
  • If Anne Boleyn was as promiscuous as was charged, then Henry VIII’s paternity was in doubt
  • Illegitimacy was used to justify the removal of Elizabeth and Mary from the succession in Edward VI’s settlement of the crown on Lady Jane Grey in 1553. This was of major significance. If the events of 1553 united Mary and Elizabeth in common defence of their rights as heirs to Henry VIII, they also brought the Queen of Scots to the fore as a rival to both. The basis of Mary Stuart’s claim from this point on was that she was the one descendent of Henry VII untainted by either illegitimacy or heresy
  • The Wars of the Roses effectively destroyed the male members of the House of Lancaster (the descendants of John of Gaunt) and Henry VII and Henry VIII completed the process. By Edward VI’s death in 1553 all the main claimants to the English crown were women, and such men as had a claim owed it to a female descent. This was the case with Henry VII himself, and moreover his mother (Lady Margaret Beaufort) was descended from John of Gaunt’s illegitimate family
  • Philip of Spain had a strong claim as descendant of the legitimate daughters of Gaunt’s second marriage
  • The events of 1553 made Elizabeth’s place in the succession an international issue.
  • Elizabeth’s ability to turn to France on her accession was hampered by Mary Stuart’s position as Dauphine and, after July 1559, Queen of France. Until her death in 1587, Mary was the pole around which Elizabeth’s foreign policy revolved
  • The furthest concession Elizabeth appears to have made to Mary was to offer a new settlement that would have circumvented the treaty of Edinburgh in the months following James VI’s birth in June 1566.
  • The revelation of Mary’s understanding with Philip II and their plans for Elizabeth’s deposition marked the next stage in Elizabeth’s foreign relations
  • Elizabeth’s alienation from Philip also inspired a reconciliation with France that effectively lasted for the rest of her reign
  • Elizabeth’s hesitation over the Netherlands was overcome by the arrival of Don Juan of Austria as the new Governor General in late 1576
  • Throughout the ensuing negotiations she made no secret of the fact that what she really wanted was an alliance with Henry III. What she could not control was the decision of William of Orange in the winter of 1579-80 (partly on the strength of the marriage negotiations) to break with Spain and offer the lordship of the Netherlands to Anjou
  • Enterprise of England she could not allow Philip II to regain the Netherlands, whatever Henry III did
  • She now had the opportunity to form a new relationship in defence of his claim to the succession
  • Navarre was heir to the childless Henry III under the Salic Law, but bitterly opposed on account of his religion. This – it was now appreciated in England – was something that Henry III was trying to circumvent. In 1589 the two kings allied and following Henry III’s assassination in July, Navarre succeeded him as Henry IV
  • Throughout the 1590s, even if the war with Spain was not as successful as was occasionally hoped, defeat was not an issue
  • Henry IV may have converted and then made a separate peace with Philip II in 1598, but he remained an ally
  • If there was an ironic aspect to Elizabeth taking Mary’s place as James’s mother, this was also the case with Essex
  • However, Elizabeth, James and Henry formed a triumvirate of monarchs
  • She is a haughty woman, falling easily into rebuke, and above all when any speak of the king [Henry IV] whom she considers for a long time to have been greatly beholding to her
  • Philip II’s last years were embittered by disparaging comparisons
  • These last twenty-one years that the queen of England has spent in the service of the world will be the most outstanding known of in history
manhefnawi

Philip I Crowned King of France | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...philip-i-crowned-king-france

Philip King France Political Medieval

shared by manhefnawi on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • The name Philip was Greek and uncommon in the Western Europe of the 11th century
  • He was only seven when his father Henry I had him crowned at Rheims as co-king
  • Philip’s mother and Count Baldwin V of Flanders acted as his regents
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Philip won the support of many of the French bishops, but he got a bad press from the ecclesiastical chroniclers of the day.
  • Pope Urban II excommunicated Philip in 1095 and the anathema was renewed by his successor Paschal II
  • from 1097 his formidable son took charge
  • He thought himself not a great enough monarch to rest there
manhefnawi

Louis XII: Medieval King or Renaissance Monarch? | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...al-king-or-renaissance-monarch

Louis XII Monarch France Renaissance Medieval Political Kingship 1500

shared by manhefnawi on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • Early in the afternoon of April 7th, 1498, Charles VIII of France escorted his queen, Anne of Brittany, to an antiquated gallery at his chateau of Amboise, to watch a game of tennis
  • After the travails of Valois France during the Hundred Years War and the kingdom's subsequent recovery under Charles VII and Louis XI, few magnates any longer felt inclined to contest the title of a mature heir apparent.
  • Louis himself had been brought up in relatively impecunious circumstances, thanks partly to the antipathy of the late Louis XI towards him and his house. There were nobles who had felt that the ruler's treatment of them and their kind as well as his alleged general misgovernment warranted conspiracy and even revolt against him. Although Louis d'Orleans had been far too young to engage in that reign's most concerted expression of magnate resentment, the War of the Public Weal, he had rationalised in comparable terms his own behaviour under Charles VIII.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • And in all this he had invoked a version of medieval constitutionalism rooted in feudal law: that, regardless of the will of Louis XI, it was his right with his fellow princes to control the royal council and to exercise powers of regency during Charles VIII's minority
  • Such judgements spring partly from the impact of French incursions upon Italy itself, closely followed as they were by interventions from a Spain newly unified under its Catholic kings.
  • 'For France', according to Henri Lapeyre, 'a new destiny opened with the expedition of Charles VIII'. And according to Roger Doucet, although 'neither Charles VIII nor Louis Xll had any great gifts of government', during their reigns 'a great change took place, a change which may be regarded as a transformation of the monarchical system itself'
  • Whilst noblemen languished in rural penury or occupied themselves with court intrigues, the monarch held sway through the agency of his new men over a territory which, thanks not least to the acquisition of Brittany, was more unified under the Crown than ever before
  • So some jurists and humanists were ready to avow; and in propagating the ideology of monarchy, scholars were joined by artists who gave it visual expression through images pregnant with symbolism
  • On Louis XII's council nobles continued, as they had under his immediate predecessors, to rub shoulders with members of commoner extraction
  • Feudal independence might be long since gone; royal policy might no longer be susceptible to the dictates of magnate coalitions, as Louis d'Orleans had discovered to his cost. But royal resources and royal government remained very much the preserve of oligarchs amongst whom the nobility more than held their own
  • When economic recovery eventually got under way, hard on the heels of military revival under Charles VII, the conditions for reconstituting noble fortunes were not automatically restored
  • A notable instance is the house of La Tremoille, based mainly in western France, whose income from all sources fell by two-thirds between the end of the fourteenth century and the death of Louis XI, only to rise within two generations beyond its former level, owing not least to the efforts and system of estate-management developed by Louis II de La Tremoille, head of his house under Louis XII
  • Louis II de La Tremoille took care to cultivate royal favour. His distinguished service to Charles VIII in the wars of the 1480s which Louis d'Orleans helped to precipitate did not prevent his enjoying the patronage of the latter, once king
  • The phenomenon is obscured by the prominence in public affairs of some of Louis XII's best-known servants.
  • Personal secretary in due course to Louis XII, Robertet held numerous fiscal offices and married into the circle of Tours-based financiers upon whom successive monarchs relied to find them funds
  • and towards the 'absolutism' of the following centuries. Its formation, we are assured, was at least in some degree the achievement of Louis XII, for all that ruler's personal deficiencies and youthful waywardness
  • Confronted with economic difficulties, the nobles of Renaissance France rallied to the service of the Crown and were rewarded accordingly. What the kingdom experienced, in Bernard Chevalier's view, was 'not the rise of the bourgeoisie, but the triumph of the nobility'
  • Apanage after apanage had reverted to the Crown while, under Louis XII, the princes of the blood happened to be unusually young and the heads of other major dynasties to be preoccupied with affairs in their lands on the fringes of the kingdom
  • The most sensational domestic episode of Louis XII’s reign was the fall of one of his principal councillors and commanders, the notoriously grasping Marshal de Gie, accused in 1504 of crimes amounting to treason, owing in good measure to the machinations of the queen and her associates against him. Yet such incidents were exceptional
  • So much is evident from the legislative record of Louis XII's reign
  • Despite his advocacy of the role of the Estates-General under his predecessor, only once, in 1506, did Louis XII convene that assembly, and on that occasion as a device to extricate himself from a dilemma in his foreign affairs
  • Louis XII issued his most ambitious legislative act within his first regnal year: the ordinance of Blois on the 'justice and police' of the realm.
  • Shortly before his death Charles VIII had declared 'that there is no more clear and evident proof of custom than that which is made by the common agreement and consent of the Estates' of the relevant communities. Louis XII proceeded in a similar spirit, dispatching commissioners from his sovereign courts to consult with such Estates and so to record their customs in written form
  • The Renaissance monarchy as exemplified by Louis XII was aristocratic in its complexion, consultative in its methods and also, in a sense, popular. The reputation for benignity with which Du Moulin credited him echoed the appellation which the Estates-General of 1506 plucked from classical precedent to confer upon this monarch. Louis was the 'father of the people'; much later, the citizens of eighteenth-century Paris would remember him aw such when trying to rouse their king Louis XVI to a livelier sense of monarchical duty.
  • o far as the extant evidence will allow historians to judge, the average annual yield of direct taxation in his reign was significantly less than in Charles VIII's, and Iess than one half of Louis XI's demands in the early 1480s
  • How, then, are we to account for beliefs that Renaissance monarchy as exemplified in this reign paved the way for the authoritarianism and splendour associated with 'absolute' monarchy in the following centuries? The answer scarcely lies in the personal attributes of Louis XII
  • Despite – or because of – his excesses, he failed to beget a legitimate heir. His ultimate attempts to do so provoked ribaldry a good deal more overt than the rumours and suspicions that had accompanied his succession to the throne. Nine months after the death of Anne of Brittany in January 1514, Louis, in his fifty-third year, married Mary Tudor, teenage sister of Henry VIII of England
  • Exactly twelve weeks after his wedding, Louis XII died
  • But the impact of monarchy and interpretations of its nature did not depend upon the physical capabilities of its incumbent. The king had two bodies. Whatever the frailty of his body natural, his body mystical, epitome of the realm itself, existed before him and did not perish with his death
  • Under Louis XII, however, such propaganda reached fresh heights, with some infusion of new themes often of Italian inspiration, but above all through intensified and diversified use of traditional symbolism whereby artists and scholars cultivated portentous images of monarchy
  • Replete with time-honoured allusions, such images proliferated to an exceptional degree in the reign of Louis XII. They obliterated all impressions of the questionable character of Louis d'Orleans and his suspect biological antecedents. They elevated royal power to divine status. And they contributed significantly to clear the ground for the growth of the ideology of absolutism to full flower in the era of the Sun King
manhefnawi

Austria - Early reign of Joseph II, 1780-85 | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...rly-reign-of-Joseph-II-1780-85

Maria Theresa Habsburgs Reforms Religion

shared by manhefnawi on 18 May 18 - No Cached
  • Maria Theresa died in 1780 and was followed by Joseph II. The problem of succession had caused Maria Theresa considerable grief in her early years, and she had vowed to create not only governmental institutions to protect her lands but familial ones as well, most notably by making certain that there would never again be a shortage of Habsburgs to rule the monarchy (after her marriage, the official name of the family changed from Habsburg to Habsburg-Lorraine
  • Maria Theresa kept most of the authority in her hands
  • frequent clashes between the strong-willed mother and the strong-willed son
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • While Maria Theresa regarded Protestants as heretics and Jews as the embodiment of the Antichrist
  • Joseph’s most radical measures in church matters were the Edict of Toleration (1781) and his monastic reforms.
  • When Joseph became sole ruler, he was determined to implement his own policies
  • To add to the Hungarians’ horror, Joseph refused to submit to a coronation in Hungary lest he have to swear to uphold laws that he did not wish to, and then he had the sacred crown of the kingdom moved to Vienna.
  • Toward the end of Joseph’s reign, there was indeed increasing dissatisfaction. Religious elements were unhappy with many of his reforms
  • Another of Joseph’s famous reforms was the abolition of serfdom, which was not quite a total abolition but certainly changed considerably the status of the peasants.
  • By 1787 resistance to Joseph and his government was intensifying. One Habsburg possession that had escaped reforms during the reign of Maria Theresa and Joseph was the Austrian Netherlands,
  • Joseph’s reforms might not have generated as much opposition had it not been for his foreign policy.
  • Kaunitz firmly believed that Austria could check Prussia only with the help of Russia. Consequently, in 1781 he and Joseph negotiated with Catherine the Great a pact that provided for Russian help for Austria in case of war with Prussia
  • In exchange, Austria promised to help Russia in case of war with the Ottoman Empire.
  • Catherine then engaged in a series of provocations toward the Turks that resulted in 1787 in a declaration of war by the sultan. Although Joseph had no real desire to participate in this war, his treaty obligations with Russia required him to do so
  • In 1788 the Austrians waited for the Russians to take the offensive in Romanian lands—which they failed to do—only to be themselves attacked by the Turks and sent scurrying north from the Danube in an effort to reconsolidate their lines
  • Faced with these difficulties, Joseph revoked many of the reforms that he had enacted earlier
  • he consented to return the crown to Hungary and to his own coronation as that country’s king. The crowning never came to pass, however, for Joseph died the following month.
manhefnawi

Papa and his Brood: Henry IV of France | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...-and-his-brood-henry-iv-france

Henry IV Children Foreign Policies

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • Henry IV of France was an engagingly flamboyant monarch, famous for his vitality and wit, his forcefulness and determination
  • Accepting the heavy responsibilities of his crown, he used or planned to use his offspring to strengthen the Bourbon monarchy
  • As Henry’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois (the occasion of the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day) proved childless and was annulled, his legitimate line derived from his second wife, Marie de Médicis.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The King’s delight in his children was boundless, and his affection recognized no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
  • he recognized the political significance of the eldest legitimate son in an hereditary monarchy, and as a matter of course the Dauphin was accorded special status. The King knew well the importance of forging personal ties between the sovereign and his people, and at the age of one month the future Louis XIII was introduced to public life:
  • Henry’s premature death ended César’s role in government; lacking his royal father’s support, he was reduced instantly to that anomalous status attendant upon a former monarch’s illegitimate offspring. During the reign of his half-brother he was naturally a rebel against the Crown
  • Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon and Marie-Henriette de Bourbon suffered the usual fate of unmarriageable daughters; they were relegated to convents
  • Throughout the last decade of Henry’s reign, speculation centred around the ‘Spanish marriages,’ a system of alliances
  • These schemes were encouraged by the Pope, who wished to unite the two great Catholic powers of Europe; and the Queen herself (who was half-Habsburg) voiced approval of alliance with Spain.
  • Her marriage to the Dauphin would have incorporated Lorraine in the French crown by peaceful annexation, strengthening France’s north-eastern frontier
  • The contract, signed a few weeks before the King’s murder, provided for an offensive and defensive league against Spain in which Henry agreed to support Savoy’s claims to Milan
  • Henry’s assassination in May of 1610 left Marie de Médicis Regent of a kingdom poised for attack against the forces of Austria and Spain, and she scrambled frantically to extricate France from the anti-Habsburg coalition without leaving herself diplomatically isolated. Charles Emmanuel of Savoy finally agreed to accept the younger princess, Christine, as his son’s bride
  • Thus Elisabeth was available for another alliance, and the long-discussed ‘Spanish match’ was realized in a double marriage in 1615: Louis XIII received the Infanta as his wife and Elisabeth went to Spain as the bride of the future Philip IV
  • In order to win Habsburg good will, the Regent had sacrificed the advantages of a match with Lorraine
manhefnawi

The Art of Kingship: Louis XIV, A Reconsideration | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...ship-louis-xiv-reconsideration

Louis XIV France Absolute Monarch

shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • On June 7th, 1654, Louis XIV was crowned in the traditional manner at the cathedral of Reims
  • It was indeed one of the least significant events in the whole reign of Loins XIV
  • The minority had ended at rather an early age, but kings of France were not as ordinary men, in that, among other things, they had the capacity of coming of age prematurely
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • For ten years after he had come of age Louis XIV left the government in the hands of Mazarin, apparently willingly
  • Louis XIV would as soon have neglected his Council as his grand couvert, when he dined in public
  • Louis never forgot the flight from Paris or the humiliations inflicted on his childhood by the Fronde. Saint-Simon said that he often spoke of those times with bitterness, even telling how he was so neglected that one evening he had been pulled dripping out of the fountain in the Palais Royal, where he had fallen and been left to lie. The lesson he drew from the Fronde was that the king must be absolute
  • The same standards were demanded from those who surrounded the King
  • A population of some twenty millions, when England or Spain had under five and the largest German states barely one or two millions, was, given able generals and domestic unity, a guarantee of military success. But such a cautious monarch as Louis did not fling himself into a course of foreign conquest without preparation
  • Given this, and a King like Louis XIV to play the central role, it became the scene of something like a perpetual ballet performed before an audience of twenty millions
  • An Italian visitor compared Louis XIV leaving his chateau, surrounded by body-guards, carriages, horses, courtiers, valets, to the Queen bee when she takes flight into the fields with her swarm
  • The Queen died about this time; and Louis, who by now was wanting to settle down, married Mme Scarron secretly
  • Versailles, court, etiquette, mistresses, were all part of the ornamental framework of monarchy, but Louis XIV was no mere playboy king. His pride was in his mastery of what he called the metier de roi, and it is important to note what this meant, because it has sometimes been given too extensive an interpretation
  • It was natural that Louis XIV should devote his attention above all to foreign affairs, but it was with his characteristic moderation and sense of the possible that he began his career of conquest
  • A king was in those days still primarily a great landowner and his first aim was to add to the extent of the lands possessed by his dynasty. In this sense the state was identified with the monarch and this was the meaning of I’Etat e’est moi. Louis XIV put the position quite clearly himself: “In working for the state, the monarch is working for himself; the good of the one is the glory of the other; when the former is happy, noble and powerful, he who has brought this about is glorious.
  • The devastating invasion of a German state was calculated to do so, and in this sense it succeeded, but only at a price
  • Under Louis XIV the higher nobility were domesticated at Court and ceased to be even a nuisance. Robbed of their leadership, the lesser nobles and gentry—of course they did not come to Versailles, as is sometimes implied, there would not have been standing room if they had—could safely be left to rot in idleness in their chateaux and manor-houses. With one exception Louis had no minister of noble birth throughout his reign
  • Under Louis XIV the royal bureaucracy, which had been so many centuries in the growing, reached its apogee
  • The government of France was now a complete bureaucracy and Louis XIV the grand bureaucrat.
  • If the Catholics were loyal, the Huguenots were not less so. It almost seemed as if there were a competition which religion could elevate the King on a higher altar
  • Louis XIV did not have to initiate the persecution of the Huguenots
  • In the cause of religion Louis XIV had lost, as Sorel put it, more than he could have gained by the most victorious war or than could have been demanded by his enemies as the price of the most disastrous peace
  • He had seen a whole generation of his subjects pass away. Within a few months, in 1711, his son, his grandson and his elder great-grandson all died, leaving only a weak baby to carry on the Bourbon dynasty
  • The last of the agreements was signed in November 1715, but the King of France had died at Versailles on September 1st, at the age of seventy-seven and in the fifty-sixth year of his personal rule
  • The sun king had gone down not in splendour but amid clouds of foreign defeat and domestic distress, to be succeeded, against his will and testament, not by his bastard Maine, whom he loved, but by Philip of Orleans, whom he hated. The Regent was to try to put the clock back, to undo the work of the great monarch in every field. In foreign policy, religion, government, finance, the Regency was an attempt at revolution from above
  • Three-quarters of a century after Louis XIV had died the monarchy which had reached its height, and been given its final majestic proportions under him, came crashing down in ruins; and in this case it is just to tax the architect with ill-matched aims
  • Every time the King creates an office, it was said, God creates a fool to buy it. In fact, the purchasers were not quite so foolish as the saying suggests
  • Finally, it must be said that Louis XIV had not even successfully completed his especial task of securing the emancipation of the monarchy from the danger of a future Fronde. He had bound the noblesse to the Crown, but he had equally bound the Crown to the privileged orders. If Louis XIV was the master of his Court, his successors were to be the dependants of their own courtiers. Parlements, provincial estates still remained; and, powerless under a strong king, they were to be a menace under weak ones. The wheel came full circle in 1787 with the révolte nobiliaire, when the last Fronde began the revolution against Louis XVI, and the privileged orders destroyed the absolute monarchy, though in doing so they also destroyed themselves
manhefnawi

United Spain under the Catholic Monarcha - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Culture-of-Muslim-Spain

Union of Crowns Aragon and Castile Ferdinand II Isabella Trastámara Monarchs

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • When Ferdinand II (1479–1516; also known as Ferdinand V of Castile from 1474) succeeded to the Crown of Aragon in 1479, the union of Aragon (roughly eastern Spain) and Castile (roughly western Spain) was finally achieved, and the Trastámara became the second most powerful monarchs in Europe, after the Valois of France.
  • different royal houses of the Iberian Peninsula had long sought a union of their crowns and had practiced intermarriage for generations.
  • The reasons that led John II of Aragon to arrange the marriage of his son and heir, Ferdinand, with Isabella of Castile in 1469 were essentially tactical: he needed Castilian support against French aggression
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In Castile an influential party of magnates, led by Alfonso Carillo, archbishop of Toledo (who later reversed himself), and opposed to King Henry IV, supported the succession claims of the princess Isabella, the king’s half sister, against those of his daughter, Joan.
  • It needed a forged papal dispensation for the marriage, the blackmailing of Henry IV into (wrongly) denying the paternity of his daughter (Joan), and, finally, several years of bitter civil war before Ferdinand and Isabella defeated Joan’s Castilian supporters and her husband, Afonso V of Portugal.
  • Ferdinand and Isabella ruled jointly in both kingdoms and were known as the Catholic Monarchs
  • In Spain the Catholic Monarchs had no formal right of exequatur, but they and their Habsburg successors behaved very much as if they did.
manhefnawi

Henry VIII | Biography, Wives, & Facts | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Henry-VIII-king-of-England

England Foreign Policy Henry VII Tudor

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Henry was the second son of Henry VII, first of the Tudor line, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, first king of the short-lived line of York. When his elder brother, Arthur, died in 1502, Henry became the heir to the throne; of all the Tudor monarchs, he alone spent his childhood in calm expectation of the crown, which helped give an assurance of majesty and righteousness to his willful, ebullient character.
  • More serious was Henry’s determination to engage in military adventure. Europe was being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and, against the advice of his older councillors, Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France and ostensibly in support of a threatened pope, to whom the devout king for a long time paid almost slavish respect.
  • The cardinal had some occasional ambition for the papal tiara, and this Henry supported; Wolsey at Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. In fact, there was never any chance of this happening, any more than there was of Henry’s election to the imperial crown, briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In Charles, the crowns of Spain, Burgundy (with the Netherlands), and Austria were united in an overwhelming complex of power that reduced all the dynasties of Europe, with the exception of France, to an inferior position.
  • at Pavia (1525), for the moment, destroyed the rival power of France.
  • It provoked a serious reaction in England, and Henry concluded that Wolsey’s usefulness might be coming to an end.
  • Since Henry knew how to work with parliaments, the immediate effect was to make him appear more dominant than ever and to give to his reign a spurious air of autocracy—spurious because in fact the rule of law remained to control the sovereign’s mere will.
  • Between 1538 and 1541 the families of Pole and Courtenay were destroyed by the axe for treasons linked with efforts abroad to reverse the course of events in England but mainly because they could claim royal blood and represented a dynastic danger to the unprolific Tudor line.
  • from Cromwell’s fall (which he regretted too late), the only maker of policy. Policy in the hands of a sick, unhappy, violent man was not likely to be either sensible or prosperous, and so it proved. Left to himself, Henry concentrated on keeping the realm united, despite the growing strife between the religious factions, and on keeping before the world his own image as the glorious monarch of the age. The first resulted in frequent explosions against the ingratitude of his subjects and against his councillors. The second brought him back to his first love—war and conquest, the sport of kings.
  • In 1542 the emperor and the king of France resumed hostilities. After a pretense of independence, Henry again joined the former; the Scots promptly joined the French.
  • But the Scottish dream quickly collapsed as Henry’s crude handling of that nation gave control to a pro-French party, determined to resist even an alliance with England; physical conquest was beyond the king’s means.
  • As king of England from 1509 to 1547, Henry VIII presided over the beginnings of the English Reformation, which was unleashed by his own matrimonial involvements, even though he never abandoned the fundamentals of the Roman Catholic faith.
  • Henry VIII has always seemed the very embodiment of true monarchy. Even his evil deeds, never forgotten, have been somehow amalgamated into a memory of greatness.
Javier E

The Majestic Untruths of 'The Crown' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617278

historical fiction video series TV tv shows UK royals

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The real source of unease with The Crown comes from the dissonance between the high naturalism of the program’s costumes, staging, and set design and the liberties taken with its plotlines. The current discussion would not be happening if the show were not so rigorously faithful to the historical record in every department except for its script.
Javier E

Spanish colonization of the Americas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...h_colonization_of_the_Americas

Spain colonial Americas history latin america

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Colonial expansion under the crown of Castile was initiated by the Spanish conquistadores
  • The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.
  • The Spanish conquest of Mexico is generally understood to be the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–21) which was the base for later conquests of other regions.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.
  • A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.
  • Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.
  • During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain
  • The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.
  • These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s
  • In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era
  • It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.
  • The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.
  • The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.
1 - 20 of 153 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page