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From the beginning, Byzantium manifested highly creative and original impulses to re-fashion rich, pre-existing traditions. Its inner Greek fire came from a unique combination of traits. When Constantine created his new capital, he brought together Roman administrative skills, law and military traditions; the Hellenic wisdom long sustained by ancient Greek education; and the dynamic new Christian belief (which later became the state's driving force).

The city quickly generated a highly sophisticated work force. Its artisans produced the Mediterranean world's most elegant silks, carved ivories and gold enamels. Its engineers constructed the immense walls that kept all enemies out of Constantinople until 1204. The recent excavations of the harbor of Theodosius (today Yenikapi) have yielded more than 30 boats and their cargoes and shown how the capital attracted traders and craftsmen from across the Mediterranean. Venice, Genoa and Pisa established quarters within the city, while Syrian and Russian merchants stayed in particular residences when they came to trade. In the 1090s, as the western forces of the First Crusade arrived at Constantinople, they were overcome with awe at the wealth and sophistication of the eastern capital, the like of which they had not even imagined. The city was larger than any in Western Europe, with a population of about 500,000— a level not attained by Paris until the 17th century.

The Byzantines knew that negotiating peace terms was infinitely preferable to risking the loss of highly trained and hard-to-replace fighting forces. By developing a trained service of diplomats—a typical embassy would comprise a general, a bishop and a high-ranking eunuch, accompanied by secretaries with records of past negotiations—the empire nurtured the skills we associate with a modern state.

historians established, half a century ago, how difficult Byzantium's position was between aggressive states east and west.

Both Peter Heather's "Empires and Barbarians " (2009), although it only treats the first millennium A.D., and John Darwin's "After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 " (2007) consider Byzantium in such a comparative perspective.

it always had to balance the two very distant fronts with the immense lines of communication and logistical support extending from the Caucasus to the Adriatic.

The last phase of Byzantine power, from 1261 to 1453, was marked by military failure and shrinking control but also by a great cultural explosion.

Mr. Harris provides a sympathetic reading of the civil wars and conflicts engendered by the empire's fundamental problem in this era: how to balance Byzantine traditions with the need for military aid from the West in order to confront the Ottoman Turks.

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The empire checked the first great wave of Muslim expansion in the 630s, and by 740 a more secure border with the caliphate in Damascus was established at the Taurus mountains in southeastern Turkey.

One also requires

knowledge of the political heritage and divisions in certain countries that played a leading role in the drama

The historiography of the war began when the war did. On the most basic level there was a running commentary in the press. Further up the scale of debate and analysis, Oxford University Press quickly published Why We Are At War

there is the question of life away from the front. The political pressures and civilian unrest that led to the dissolution of first the Romanov, and then the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires in 1917-18 say as much about the effect of the war and its pervasive influence in the ensuing decades as the final outcome itself.

Second, one needs the skills of the advanced military historian not simply to outline strategy and tactics after war breaks out, and to recount the movements of troops and the joining of battle, but also to link these with the political direction (or, sometimes, lack of it) of the chancelleries of Europ

The book went through several editions in the first few months of the conflict as governments made available correspondence and documents that presented each nation’s justification for its course of action – Britain’s Blue Book, the German White Book, the Russian Orange Book and the Belgian Grey Book.

Of the general histories still read today the first truly rigorous one that probed more deeply was Captain Basil Liddell Hart’s. He was a veteran of the Somme; his The Real War was published in 1930 and is still in print today under the title History of the First World War.

Wars are fought in cabinet rooms as well as on battlefields, and Repington’s eyewitness accounts of both make his book an essential source today. He was also the man who first used the term “the First World War”, in September 1918: not so much to coin a phrase to describe a conflict involving international empires and, since the previous year, America, but to warn that there might one day be a second one. 

The modern school of First World War history has its origins in the 1960s, at around the time of the 50th anniversary of the conflict. It is from this time onwards that popular history – that is, books written with the intention of being read by an intelligent general public, rather than just a small circle of elevated academics – begins to evolve to its present sophisticated state, and standards of scholarship rise considerably

the new vogue for popular history of the First World War began with a book that displays none of these qualities – Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, published in 1961.

Sir Michael Howard called it “worthless” as history because of its “slovenly scholarship”. Unlike later historians, Clark did not attempt to explore whether there might be two sides to the story of apparently weak British generalship.

The book is a clever piece of propaganda and manipulation of (usually) the truth, and its revisionism created an entirely new view of the war and how it was fought. It is, however, a view that more reputable historians have sought to correct for the past half-century.

The BBC’s landmark documentary series of 1964, entitled The Great War, stimulated great interest in the subject, not least because of the realisation that the generation that survived it was beginning to die. The series filmed numerous veterans and prompted a vogue for oral history; the Imperial War Museum undertook an enormous, and hugely valuable, project. For the rest of that generation’s life oral history was given more emphasis than documentary records

In America, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had appeared in 1962. George Malcolm Thomson covered similar ground in his highly acclaimed The Twelve Days, published in 1964, a detailed account of the diplomatic activity between 24 July and 4 August 1914.

A J P Taylor, the highest-profile historian of the time, published in 1969 War by Timetable, which argued that the mobilisation timetables of all the great powers – whose generals had prided themselves on being able to mobilise faster than their potential enemies – led to an inevitable drift towards a war no one actually wanted.

led to the birth of the two rival schools of thought that have dominated the study of the war in recent years: one that says Germany was hell-bent on world domination, the other that says the war happened by accident.

In 1998 two serious British historians of different generations published authoritative histories of the conflict. Sir John Keegan’s The First World Warwas based almost entirely on secondary sources, but written with a measured expertise that made it the perfect entry-level guide to the fighting, taking into account almost all of the scholarship since 1914

Professor Niall Ferguson’sThe Pity of War was a different beast; a more political book, making greater use of primary sources, and offering a more controversial judgement: that the kaiser had not wanted war, and Britain’s security did not rely on Germany’s defeat.

The next great landmark of British war studies – and in one respect the most frustrating – was the first volume of Sir Hew Strachan’s The First World War, published in 2001

The anniversary has prompted not just more publications, but also a renewed argument about the necessity of fighting such a horrendous conflict.

In a magisterial review in the Times Literary Supplement last autumn of Sir Max’s and two other books – Professor Margaret MacMillan’s bizarrely titled but widely acclaimed The War That Ended Peace and Brigadier Allan Mallinson’s 1914: Fight the Good Fight – William Philpott, professor of the history of warfare in the world-renowned war studies department at King’s College London, drew some distinctions between rigorous and populist histor

Of all the recent works of history, one stands far above all others, and should be regarded as an indispensable read for anyone who wishes to understand why the war happened: Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers, published in 2012

relying on a grasp of the main languages involved and a serious study of foreign archives, Clark gets to the heart of the two principal questions: why Gavrilo Princip felt moved to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife when they went to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and why the ensuing quarrel could not be contained to one between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. After much inquiry, presentation of evidence and discussion, he reaches a judgement: that the kaiser didn’t want war, and that a war occurred was largely down to the bellicosity, incompetence and weaknesses of others.

I suspect that Clark’s view will gain more adherents, not least as a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding of this abominable conflict becomes more possible now that those who remember it are dead

Britain and France already had some significant interests in the region between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf, but a victory offered a great deal more. Russia as well hungered for a piece.

From November 1915 to March 1916, representatives of Britain and France negotiated an agreement, with Russia offering its assent. The secret treaty, known as the Sykes–Picot Agreement, was named after its lead negotiators, the aristocrats Sir Mark Sykes of England and François Georges-Picot of France.

Its terms were set out in a letter from British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey to Paul Cambon, France's ambassador to Great Britain, on May 16, 1916.

Russia's change of status, brought on by the revolution and the nation's withdrawal from the war, removed it from inclusion. But when marauding Bolsheviks uncovered documents about the plans in government archives in 1917, the contents of the secret treaty were publicly revealed.

After the war ended as planned, the terms were affirmed by the San Remo Conference of 1920 and ratified by the League of Nations in 1922. Although Sykes-Picot was intended to draw new borders according to sectarian lines, its simple straight lines also failed to take into account the actual tribal and ethnic configurations in a deeply divided region. Sykes-Picot has affected Arab-Western relations to this day.

In recent years, though, Turks have been engaged in an ideological contest over Gallipoli’s legacy. With the rise of the country’s Islamist government under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have come efforts to diminish the role of Ataturk, who established Turkey under secular principles. The military, which once had a predominant role over politics in Turkey, has also been pushed aside under Mr. Erdogan.

In victory, the Turks ended decades of Ottoman defeats on the edges of the empire and emerged with a new sense of nationalism — and a leader, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, who would lead the country to independence after the war ended. Mustafa Kemal, then a young officer, met the invading Australians with his men on the day of the landing and earned a reputation as a military genius for his success.

In defeat, the Australians gained what many historians have described as the first embers of a national consciousness, apart from their British colonial legacy. “It’s certainly seen today as the beginning of a real Australian self-identity,” Rupert Murdoch said.

The trenches are still there, carved in the green hills of the slim Gallipoli Peninsula just across the Dardanelles,

It is hallowed ground for battlefield tourists, mostly Turks and Australians

Almost a hundred years ago, it was the place where World War I was supposed to turn in the Allies’ favor, but instead it became one of the great slaughters of the Great War.

Gallipoli campaign has taken on an outsize importance as the bloody event that became the foundation of a modern national identity.

In September 1915, with the slaughter unfolding on Gallipoli but news limited in Australia because of military censorship

Australian prime minister authorizing him to look into the postal service for the soldiers.

were needlessly being sent to slaughter by incompetent British officers, he agreed to

When the commanding general at Gallipoli, Sir Ian Hamilton, learned of Keith Murdoch’s plan to evade the censorship rules, he had him detained at a port in France and the letter was destroyed.

“As he was writing his letter, the editor of The Times looked in and said, ‘What are you doing, young man?’ ”

“I’ve got to show this to the chief.” B

The 8,000-word letter, detailing what Keith Murdoch called “one of the most terrible chapters in our history,”

Keith Murdoch later came under sharp criticism in Britain for breaking the censorship rules, and many in the British establishment, including Churchill, never forgave him,

He had a perfectly clear conscience,”

The Australian government recently selected 8,000 people from a lottery to attend anniversary commemorations next year at the beaches in Turkey.

In those days, people believed that nations were born in blood,” he said.

named for the acronym of the force that landed there, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, just as thousands of his fellow Australians do each year.

“My grandfather fought here,” he said. “But he never talked about it.”

“Our kids, our grandkids, want to come here more than us or our parents did,” he said.

“Gallipoli is the place that for the first time, after a century of defeats, the Turks were successful,”

The Islamists say, ‘We defeated the infidels,'”

Many conservative Turkish municipal governments have been organizing free battlefield tours, with a message delivered

“They don’t have much education. They’ll believe in anything.”

In 1934, Ataturk famously wrote a letter to Australian mothers, saying, “having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”

The truth is, they just wanted to kill one another and win the war, something evident in the letters from the front.

“Everything is so quiet and still one would never dream that two opposing forces, each eager for the other’s blood, were separated by only a few yards – and in places only a few feet.”

The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began,

Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through.

The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt.

He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope

presenting Princip his victims at close range.

on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia,

As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines.

So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992

in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs,

which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.

Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union

To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are

ommunities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines,

Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now.

Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions.

“Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village.

World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia.

It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new

Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia

For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion.

while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army.

he memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,”

The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they

Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939,

Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East,

Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917.

If Tyne Cot is the largest military cemetery for the Commonwealth, this is the smallest American military cemetery.

his main setting is England and his chief concern the Western Front. In this hecatomb along the minor rivers of Flanders and Picardy, the British people lost the cream of their working class and the flower of their aristocracy

This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later

We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi

he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.

Ruthless as they were in the killing of others, the generals were also shockingly profligate and callous when it came to their “own.” In some especially revolting passages, we find Gen. Sir Douglas Haig and his arrogant subordinate Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson actually complaining when British casualties were too low, and exulting — presumably because enemy losses were deemed comparable — when they moved into the tens of thousands

In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor

He had the build of a warrior – sturdy and broad-shouldered – but his wrinkled face was warm and relaxed.

Oikonomeas grew up in the village of Neochori on the Mani Peninsula’s north-west coast and never left.

Oikonomeas explained that I was savouring a snack that was likely eaten thousands of years ago by Greece’s infamous soldiers.

“Lelegas, the first king of Sparta, was probably the first one to manufacture it,”

n 371BC, the Spartans were defeated by soldiers from the city-state of Thebes, sparking the downfall of Sparta.

But the Spartans living on the Mani peninsula, sheltered from the rest of the Peloponnese by the Taygetos mountains, held strong, defending their territory for centuries from the Thebans, and later Ottoman, Egyptian and Franc forces, among others

The region remained self-governing until the mid- to late 19th Century, when the Greek government reduced the peninsula’s autonomy.

until the 1970s, when construction of new roads opened the peninsula to the rest of the Peloponnese, that the Maniots began to embrace newcomers.

During its time as an autonomous region, the peninsula was governed by different families, or clans;

e clans struggled for power, violent vendettas erupted that could last for years.

“The punishment was inflicted on the whole clan and not just the perpetrator

Such was the Maniot sense of pride.” He noted that until recently Maniots would refer to their sons as ‘guns’ and their daughters as ‘barrels with gunpowder at the foundations of their house’.

That’s not the only reminder. Almost anyone who was born and raised on the Mani peninsula will tell you they have Spartan blood in their veins.

Oikonomeas still remembers his mother spooning hardboiled eggs into his mouth to make him stronger, insisting that as the only boy it was up to him to continue the family legacy.

ral to recite mourning songs at h

Any trace of authentic Spartan DNA long ago disappeared; all that’s left of the warriors are their legends. Some historians and anthropologists say similarities between ancient and modern rituals – like the mourning songs – are strong indicators of a relationship between Ancient Spartans and modern Maniots,

Charlemagne regarded himself as a lawgiver in the style of Moses or the ancient Jewish king Josiah. 

the caliphs relinquished legislative authority beginning in the 830s when a hard-nosed mullah named Ibn Hanbal argued that such powers belonged exclusively to the religious scholars.  Unable to make law in their own right, caliphs found themselves reduced to the role of enforcers of law that others formulated, interpreted, and adjudicated.  Muhammad’s successors were marginalized by their own society. 

while Kennedy, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the author of more than a dozen books about Muslim history, tells us what happened, he has much less to say about why.

this hardly describes the outrage of Muslim troops at irreligious upstarts whom they said had hijacked a divinely-sanctioned movement for their own purposes.

Our earliest written accounts of who Muhammad was, what he did and how Islam began come more than a century after his death. This is an authorized, canonical biography written by ibn Ishaq in Baghdad in the mid-8th century. But even that book has been lost. It only survives in editions and excerpts from two other Muslim scholars (ibn Hisham and al-Tabari) writing in the 9th and early 10th centuries, respectively.

These narratives come far too long after the events in question to be taken at anything like face value in historical terms. Memories of who Muhammad and his milieu were and what they did were passed down as oral traditions for three or four generations before being written down. They then passed through new rounds of editing and reshaping and recension for another century. We know from ancient and contemporary examples that such oral traditions usually change radically over even short periods of time to accommodate the present realities and needs of the communities in which they are passed down

To get your head around the challenge, imagine we had no written records fo the American Civil War and our only knowledge of it came from stories passed down orally for the generations until the the US government had a scholar at the library of Congress pull them together and create an authorized history in say 1985.

Unsurprisingly, recent studies using the tools and standards historians apply to other eras suggest that the beginnings of Islam were quite different from the traditional or canonical accounts most of us are familiar with.

If these two things, the conventional narrative of events and the process of making sense of the sources and weighing their credibility, can be woven together the end result is fascinating and more compelling than a more cinematic narrative. This Morris accomplishes very well

Morris, the author, begins with a discussion of just this issue, how the historian can balance the need for comprehensible narrative of William’s conquest of England with a candid explanation of how little we know with certainty and how much we don’t know at all. This is a literary challenge of the first order, simultaneously building your narrative and undermining it

Like the Norman Conquest but on a vastly greater scale, the victory at Yarmouk would have a profound linguistic and cultural impact which lasts down to today. It is why the Levant, Syria and Egypt now all speak Arabic. It is also why the Middle East is dominated by Islam rather than Christianity.

History has a small number of these critical linguistic inflection points. Alexander the Great’s conquests made Greek the lingua franca and the language of government and most cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, which it remained for almost a thousand years.

The fact that the Arab conquests so rapidly erased Greek from this region is a clue that its roots never ran that deep and that the Semitic languages that remained the spoken language of the rural masses, particularly Aramaic, may have been more porous and receptive to the related language of Arabic.

Earlier I referred to Heraclius as perhaps the last Roman Emperor. This is because most historians mark the change from the Roman to the Byzantine periods at the Muslim conquests

The people we call the Byzantines never called themselves that. They remained “Romans” for the next eight centuries until the Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.

But after the Muslim conquest, the Roman state starts to look less like a smaller Roman empire and more like the other post-Roman successor states in the West. It is smaller and more compact, more tightly integrated in language, religion, economy and culture. From here what we can now call Byzantium enters into a dark, smoldering and more opaque period lasting some two centuries of holding on against repeated Muslim incursions and threat.

What captures my attention is this peculiar kind of reversal of fortune, spectacular victories which are not so much erased as rendered moot because they are rapidly followed by far more cataclysmic defeats.

Centuries of humiliation and subjugation, first by the Turks, and then by the European powers that carved up the Middle East into its present configuration after World War I, rankle with traditionalists among the faithful. They look back to the Golden Age of Islam, during the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, when the Muslim world was the cultural and scientific center of the western world, and Europe a barbaric backwater.

ISIS, however, finds itself in a different situation than al-Qaeda did and has prioritized the creation of a new caliphate over making direct strikes on the western world. 

Conveniently for ISIS, the two modern nations that contain the former capitals of the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates are in chaos. Iraq, once the seat of the Abbassid world, is still reeling from the Iraq War (2002 - 2011), and its Kurdish, Shi'ite, and Sunni populations threaten to splinter the country into separate states. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War rages in neighboring Syria, former home of the Umayyad state.

ISIS has succeeded in seizing a fairly large, contiguous area of Syria and Iraq, where it acts as the government. It imposes taxes, imposes rules on the local people according to its fundamentalist version of law, and even sells oil drilled from the land it controls.

The self-appointed caliph, formerly known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is gathering young militants to his cause with his success in seizing and holding this territory. However, the Islamic State that they are trying to create, with its stonings, beheadings, and public crucifixions of anyone who does not adhere to their exact, radical brand of Islam, does not resemble the enlightened multicultural centers that were the earlier caliphates. If anything, the Islamic State looks more like Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

Neither he nor his courtiers knew much about England

Charles V’s ambition and Mary’s suggestibility

Both the Ottoman threat and the schism would go (he thought) with Germany to his brother Ferdinand, but the French rivalry would remain to Spain

A marriage to the Queen of England provided the perfect solution – a powerbase in the north from which the Netherlands could be secured

Mary secured the English succession in July 1553

Throughout Edward’s reign (1547-53) she had attempted to defend her father’s religious settlement, and when her brother died young in July 1553 she was the heir by law, and a notorious religious conservative

She also owed, and willingly acknowledged, a debt of gratitude to Charles, who had defended her by diplomatic means over many years

There were only three candidates: Dom Luis of Portugal, the brother of King Juan; Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter (executed in 1539) and related through his mother to Edward IV; and Prince Philip

Elizabeth would never have come to the throne, the country would have remained Roman Catholic, and England would have been linked for an indefinite period with the Netherlands in a dynastic union

Although his support remained, there is no evidence that the Queen ever had any intention of marrying him

There were protests in Parliament which Mary brushed aside, and a briefly serious rebellion in Kent in January 1554, which was with some difficulty suppressed

As a result, the prince found himself with little more than the title of King of England

had no authority in England independent of the Queen, and must surrender his title if she should die childless

Their numerous titles had been officially proclaimed, and ‘King and Queen of England, France and Ireland …’ duly took precedence.

Whether by calculation or oversight, he found that he had two households, one Spanish, one English, and in spite of fair-minded attempts to divide his service between them, he was besieged with complaints on all sides

Mary’s much heralded pregnancy turned out to be an illusion

If Henry’s settlement was reversed, the whole process of dissolution could be declared invalid, and the land reclaimed by the Church, at the cost of immense disruption. Such a situation would be unacceptable to the English Parliament

Philip therefore used Habsburg clout in Rome to persuade Pope Julius III to do a deal. If he waived the Church’s claim to these lands, the King and Queen would reconcile England to his ecclesiastical authority

By the middle of January 1555, Philip had performed his first major service to the realm of England

The Queen consorts of Henry VIII had all been given generous settlements, but Philip got nothing

The Queen was sick, bewitched, even dead; there was a substitution plot in which Philip was implicated

On August 3rd the royal couple removed to Oatlands, and on the 5th, as soon as he could decently leave her, Philip departed for the Netherlands

Within a few weeks he had taken over his father’s authority in the Low Countries, and the real test of Charles’s intentions had arrived

Charles V abdicated in Brussels in September 1555, and handed over the Crowns of Spain to Philip in January 1556

There was talk of the council being divided into King’s men and Queen’s men, and the Duke of Alba urged him to get a grip on the appointments to English offices

The war with France, temporarily suspended by truce in February 1556, flared up again in the autumn, and Mary’s increasingly desperate pleas for Philip’s return were met with professions of affection, and bland excuses

Both his honour and his shortage of resources necessitated that England join him in his war against France. Mary was only too anxious to do something to gratify him that would not compromise her authority in England, so she was keen to oblige

Philip had left in July, and when in January 1558 the Queen announced that she was again pregnant, no one believed her. This was not only immensely sad, it was also a warning that there was something seriously wrong with her health, and Philip got the message. Ever since he had abandoned his campaign for a coronation in 1556, the King had had his eye upon Elizabeth

At first the King sought to neutralise Elizabeth by marriage to one of his loyal dependents, the Duke of Savoy

The princess was the heir by English law – the same law which had brought Mary to the throne – but the heir in the eyes of the Catholic church should have been Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret. Mary was in France and betrothed to the Dauphin, so that neither Philip nor Mary wanted her on the English throne

As her health deteriorated in the early autumn of 1558, to Mary’s intense distress, her husband concentrated on ensuring that Elizabeth’s succession would be as smooth as possible

Mary’s death was a relief to Philip. The affection in their relationship had been all on her side, and he urgently needed a fertile wife who would bear him more children. In the event he had failed to transcend the limitations of his marriage treaty, and his power in England had remained extremely limited. In the course of time, the country became a liability

he also brought it into the war which cost Calais; but he protected Elizabeth during the latter part of the reign, and made sure that she came safely to the throne. Paradoxically, that was his most lasting achievement as King of England

An arranged marriage to Margaret of Valois, daughter of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, brought Parisian Catholics and visiting Huguenots together

Upon the death of François, Duke of Anjou, in 1584, Henry of Navarre became heir to the throne of France

Henry of Navarre became King Henry IV, but it would take a nine-year siege of Paris to secure his crown from the influence of the Holy League and Spanish interference

The situation brought about the War of the Three Henrys, pitting Henry of Navarre against King Henry III of France and the staunchly Catholic Henry, Duke of Guise. Henry of Navarre acted boldly, defeating the army of Henry III

Spanish interference with French succession prompted Henry III to join forces with Henry of Navarre to take control of Paris and the French countryside

Henry III was stabbed on August 1, 1589, and died the next day after declaring Henry of Navarre his successor

He was opposed by the Holy League

Paris finally capitulated on March 22, 1594. Pope Clement reversed Henry's excommunication, and Henry brokered the Peace of Vervins between France and Spain on May 2, 1598

Having united the kingdom and attained peace at home and abroad, Henry IV proceeded to bring prosperity back to France. He lowered taxes on French citizens, made peace with the Ottoman Empire and opened up trade routes to East Asia

Despite his accomplishments, Henry IV endured multiple assassination attempts

He was stabbed to death by a Catholic fanatic on May 14, 1610

He was the “most Christian King” who entered into an alliance with the enemy of Christendom. He was the destroyer of the integrity and tradition of the Gallican Church. He was the voluptuary who allowed his court to be divided into factions

His father, Charles of Angouleme, resembled his namesake and uncle, the graceful lyric poet, Charles of Orleans

The group accepted the easy guardianship at Amboise of Louis, Duke of Orléans, who two years later became King as Louis XII.

The adulation of his mother and sister shielded him from the hatred of Anne of Brittany. The Queen had borne Louise XII an only child, the Princess Claude, who was heiress of Brittany in her mother’s right

Francis was heir-presumptive to the French Crown. A marriage between Francis and Claude seemed a natural arrangement, which would prevent the alienation of the Duchy of Brittany from the French royal house. But the Queen was firmly opposed to it, and the marriage took place only after her death in 1514

the future of the heir-presumptive remained in doubt. In October 1514, Louis XII

married Mary of England, the sister of Henry VIII. Francis was less distressed than his mother

Bonnivet was made Admiral of France, and the long-vacant title of Constable was bestowed upon his cousin, Charles of Bourbon

The election of Charles V marked the beginning of a two-hundred-year conflict between the French monarchy and the Hapsburgs

In February 1516, the grandson of the Emperor, Charles of Austria, inherited the thrones of Aragon and Castile. Six months later, he recognized the French conquest of Milan. At this time there was no hostility between him and Francis I.

Political responsibilities were not neglected in the flush of military success.

opposed to a rival whose encircling dominions included Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and southern Italy, and whose strength was augmented by the wealth of the New World

The contrast between the ebullient King of the Renaissance and the melancholic Emperor has always attracted the attention of historians

The one reliving the ancient myths of the universal monarchy and the crusade against the infidel: the other replacing the symbolic attitudes of the past with the realistic values of the nation state

The two Kings were too much alike in age and temperament to allow common interests to still the spirit of mutual competition

Henry VIII, reading through the terms of a declaration, obligingly omitted his title of King of France

When hostilities began in the following year, the Tudor King, after making some show of mediation, aligned himself with the Emperor. The war went badly

For a year Francis I remained the captive of the Emperor in Madrid, while Louise of Savoy rallied national sentiment for the continuation of the war

The great-grandfather of the Emperor was Charles the Bold of Burgundy. It was as a Burgundian that Charles V claimed the lands that had been seized by Louis XI. The release of the King was not secured until a pledge had been given for the cession of Burgundy

The subsequent death of Catherine of Aragon removed the cause of English disagreement with the Emperor. In the last two wars of the reign Henry VIII reverted to the imperial alliance

In the course of the war, Bourbon was killed during the ferocious assault of his mutinous forces on Rome in May 1527

In the sack of Rome Henry VIII saw an opportunity to win the favour of Clement VII and obtain the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. For several years he remained the ally of France

Even after the revelation of the marriage with Anne Boleyn, Francis pleaded the English case during his meeting with the Pope at Marseilles in October 1533

The King had never intended to observe the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Fresh allies were found in Italy, notably Pope Clement VII

Turkish armies were threatening the eastern imperial marches. In his league with the Sultan Sulaiman he inaugurated one of the most enduring of French policies

a vast Turkish army had erupted into Hungary and overwhelmed the Emperor’s Hungarian allies

The infidel was regarded with mingled curiosity and horror

The Ottoman alliance appalled the conscience of Europe; but the King found it difficult to resist the temptation offered by the expeditions of Charles V to North Africa and the campaigns of his brother, Ferdinand, upon the Bohemian border

Although the King’s diplomacy with the Papacy, the Turk, England and the Princes of the Empire, contained many failures and much duplicity, it was pursued with a realism and a flexibility that offset his lack of strategic ability in war

By June 1538, when Paul III personally negotiated the truce of Nice, it appeared possible to achieve a genuine reconciliation

The significant campaigns of the future were not to be fought in Italy, but on the frontiers of France

The altered texture of French society in the first half of the sixteenth century was, in part, a response to the demands of the monarchy

Francis I never summoned a full Estates-General

In July 1527, in the presence of the King, the Parlement heard from the lips of secretary Robertet a statement so imperious and unequivocal that it represented an unprecedented declaration of monarchical absolutism. The King, like Louis XII before him, was called the father of his people; but, whereas Louis earned his patriarchal status through his benevolence, Francis claimed it as his right

His sister, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, was scarcely less influential

Factions long concealed within the court became more apparent after the death of the Dauphin in 1536

The plain and modest Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V, whom the King had married five years after the death of Claude in 1525, became the centre of the pro-Hapsburg party at the court

He held the office once occupied by de Boisy and, finally, that which the traitor Bourbon had forfeited

the King’s death in 1547

In the last years of the reign the glories of the new monarchy seemed tarnished and outworn

bowed to the zealots of the Sorbonne and aped the gallant ways of his youth

Francis married Claude in May 1514 and, in October of the same year, Louis XII married the young and beautiful Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Had she conceived a son, all Francis' hopes would have been dashed. Yet, less than three months after his marriage, Louis XII was dead and the 20-year-old Francis was proclaimed king of France on January 1st, 1515

He inherited Charles VIII's claim to the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily and most of southern Italy. He claimed certain territories along the ill-defined border between France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, whose Habsburg overlord was the future emperor, Charles V. Francis also wanted the city of Tournai, conquered by Henry VIII in 1513, to be returned to France. For roughly 20 of his 32 years as king, Francis was preparing for war, active in it, or managing its consequences in expensive and convoluted diplomacy

Barely nine months after his accession, in September 1515, Francis conquered Milan, after defeating a Swiss mercenary army at the battle of Marignano

He secured this prominence through peace treaties and alliances, culminating in his inclusion in the 'Universal Peace' of 1518, agreed in the name of Pope Leo X but actually organised under the auspices of Henry VIII, who felt a keen and life-long rivalry with Francis

Francis had hoped to impress and intimidate Henry into committing himself as an ally against Charles V, whose power in Italy unnerved Francis

appreciated that securing and maintaining the support of interest groups, particularly the nobility, was vital to effective kingship

Francis was taken to Spain as the emperor's prisoner. France was left vulnerable to its enemies and to internal dissent, which Louise de Savoie, as her son's regent, had much to do to overcome while trying to secure Francis' release. She immediately sought the assistance of the English and sympathetic Italian states, who were wary of the immense power of Charles V in the wake of his triumph at Pavia

Disappointed by Charles V's lack of support for his own claim to France, Henry once more turned the tables on the emperor. A renewed Anglo-French alliance enabled Francis to repudiate the treaty of Madrid and led indirectly to a more acceptable agreement

Francis maintained peace with his English counterpart until 1542

He never finally secured Milan from Charles but he did, nevertheless, maintain his dynastic rights against the emperor's potentially overwhelming power. This he did in part by allying with the papacy, with various Italian states, with the heretical Henry VIII and with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. These last two alliances scandalised Catholic Europe, but keeping Charles' enemies close for as long as he could assisted Francis in projecting royal power well beyond the borders of the French state throughout his reign

Another important factor in Francis' capacity to project this power was his widespread reform of crown fiscal administration after his return from Spain in 1526. These were prompted first and foremost by the need to pay huge debts incurred in the war and in securing peace with Henry and Charles

His sale of judicial offices set up long-lasting difficulties for the monarchy

He made an ill-advised pre-emptive strike against imperial territory in the Netherlands and Spain in early 1521

Daily life there was never as elaborately choreographed under Francis as it would be under his successors. He is perhaps second only to Henry IV in his reputation for informality and spontaneity as a French king.

The 'big boy' had come close at times to ruining everything, but had also made France a power to be reckoned with and made his own mark on its history

Under Francis, the court of France was at the height of its prestige and international influence during the 16th century.

Adolf Fredrik, Gustav III’s father, was described by one English contemporary as having ‘the title of king, with hardly the privileges of a subject’. Unlike his British counterpart George II, he had no power to summon or dissolve his parliament.

Gustav was an unimpressive figure physically, weedy and foppish, and slightly lame since birth, but when he addressed the members of the Riksdag he made them flinch with his phrases of masterful contempt

The new constitution that Gustav now promulgated, in place of that of 1720-72, brought Sweden more into line with contemporary Britain.

The main difference between the British and Swedish systems was that, whereas in Britain the monarch’s executive power was in practice delegated to ministers more industrious, more  proficient and, for the most part,  more intellectually gifted than their royal master, in Sweden it was Gustav III himself who was indisputably in day to day charge

No other of the Enlightened Despots was more fond than Gustav of the time-wasting rituals of court life, the levées, formal audiences and ceremonial entries and exits.

Whereas Napoleon, in his coup d’etat of 19e Brumaire 1799 broke down and began mumbling in front of the popular assembly he was trying to overawe, Gustav III easily faced down his opponents in the Riksdag

Gustav III may well have held a record among monarchs prior to the nineteenth century for the number of other crowned heads he met. What Louis XV and Louis XVI of France or Ferdinand IV of Naples thought of him is uncertain, though none of these Bourbons were exactly noted for their insight into character. Pope Pius VI pretended to be delighted with Gustav (the first Protestant monarch ever to meet a pope) and made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. The other Enlightened Despots, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, agreed in thinking Gustav charming in a wearying sort of way, and faintly ridiculous. Leopold II, Joseph II’s brother and successor, perhaps the ablest politician among the Enlightened Despots – he was still only Grand Duke of Tuscany when Gustav met him

the Swedish king was a positive menace with his incessant scheming and readiness to interfere in other governments’ affairs

all radical improvements in national character take place during the severest wars’. Russia, having annexed the Crimea, had embarked on a titanic struggle with the Ottoman Empire which was absorbing stupendous quantities of manpower and treasure. At the beginning of 1788 he began making plans to attack Russia from the rear.

Gustav found himself far from his capital, stuck with an army that would not obey him. He was rescued  by the Danish government declaring war on him. Hurrying back to Sweden, Gustav rode to Gothenburg, 250 miles cross country in forty-eight hours – the last sixty miles quite alone and on borrowed farm horses, in blinding hailstorms – to rally the defences of the city against the invading Danes

The senior Swedish officers rejected all the courses of action proposed by Gustav and his latest discovery, William Sidney Smith, a British naval captain who had turned up without the permission of his own government; they even, according to Smith, talked of ‘proposing terms of Capitulation independent of the King’.

Catherine, still preoccupied with the war with Turkey, was glad to patch up a compromise peace

While the Stockholm crowds stood outside cheering him, Gustav confronted the chamber of nobles with a new constitution, and when they howled it down he coolly ordered the secretary of the chamber to record their vote as yes: a piece of blatant illegality combined with intimidation that anticipates the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. In fact, apart from giving the King the power to make war without the Riksdag’s consent, the new constitution marked little advance on that of 1772

Eleven weeks after Gustav rammed his new constitution down the throats of the nobles, the Estates General met at Versailles and by the time of the peace settlement with Russia the French ancien régime was well on the way to dissolution.

I cannot allow that it is right to support rebels against their Lawful King

Despite the fact that Sweden was virtually bankrupt in the aftermath of the Russian war he now offered to land 16,000 Swedish and 8,000 Russian troops at Ostend, in Austrian territory, and to march on Paris to overthrow the Constituent Assembly, with the support of an Austrian army advancing from the Rhine. In June 1791 he went to Aachen and was greeted there as a saviour by the French royalist exiles. While he was there Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made their bid to escape from Paris

Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, who had succeeded Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria the year before, was enraged by Gustav’s interference: there were some too, including Gustav’s uncle Henry of Prussia, who believed that his schemes for an armed intervention in France were merely a cover for a secret plan to seize Norway from the Danes

On March 1st, 1792, Leopold died – poisoned, it is said, by an aphrodisiac of his own concoction – but Gustav was destined never to learn that there was no longer any challenge to his self-appointed role as leader of the monarchist opposition to the French Revolution

Gustav III was only forty-six when he died. That was at least eight years older than the most brilliant of his predecessors on the Swedish throne, Gustav II Adolf, Karl X and Karl XII – and if he had lived a normal span he would still have been king at the time of Waterloo.

The economic weakness of his country, the inveterate opposition of the social class that elsewhere might have been a king’s chief support, and the increasing influence of the revolutionary ferment in France may have meant that, even if he had lived, he would not have been able to go as far as he dreamed: he is one of the great might-have-beens of history.

After more than three decades as Russia's absolute ruler, she died in 1796

Catherine II, often called Catherine the Great, became empress consort of Russia when her husband, Peter III, ascended to the throne following the death of his aunt, Elizabeth of Russia, on December 25, 1761

During his brief time in power, Catherine II conspired with her lover, Gregory Orlov, a Russian lieutenant, and other powerful figures to leverage the discontent with Peter and build up support for his removal

Catherine II finally produced a heir with son Paul, born on September 20, 1754. The paternity of the child has been a subject of great debate among scholars, with some claiming that Paul's father was actually Sergei Saltykov, a Russian noble and member of the court

Concerned about being toppled by opposing forces early in her reign, Catherine II sought to appease the military and the church

she also returned the church's land and property that had been taken by Peter, though she later changed course on that front, making the church part of the state

While Catherine believed in absolute rule, she did make some efforts toward social and political reforms

During Catherine's reign, Russia expanded its borders. She made substantial gains in Poland, where she had earlier installed her former lover, Polish count Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the country's throne

Catherine gave parts of Poland to Prussia and Austria, while taking the eastern region herself.

Russia's actions in Poland triggered a military conflict with Turkey. Enjoying numerous victories in 1769 and 1770, Catherine showed the world that Russia was a mighty power. She reached a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1774, bringing new lands into the empire and giving Russia a foothold in the Black Sea

Catherine II started out as a minor German princess. Her birth name was Sophie Friederike Auguste, and she grew up in Stettin in a small principality called Anhalt-Zebst. Her father, Christian August, a prince of this tiny dominion, gained fame for his military career by serving as a general for Frederick William I of Prussia

Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, Catherine II's mother

By the mid-1790s, Catherine had enjoyed several decades as Russia's absolute ruler. She had a strained relationship with her son and heir, Paul, over her grip on power, but she enjoyed her grandchildren, especially the oldest one, Alexander

Historians have also criticized her for not improving the lives of serfs, who represented the majority of the Russian population. Still, Catherine made some significant contributions to Russia, bringing forth educational reforms and championing the arts. As leader, Catherine also extended the country's borders through military might and diplomatic prowess

When Frederick of Hessen died in 1751, he was succeeded by Adolf Frederick, who ruled until his death in 1771. While visiting Paris, Gustav III (ruled 1771–92) acceded to the throne.

But Gustav’s politics were unstable. Until 1786 he put into effect social reforms that belonged to enlightened despotism, thus enmeshing himself in its traditional dilemma: alienating the “haves” without satisfying the “have nots.”

After Turkey attacked Russia in 1787, Gustav went to war against Russia in 1788 to recapture the Finnish provinces. The Swedish attack failed, partly because of a conspiracy by noble Swedish officers—the Anjala League—who, during the war, sent a letter to Catherine II (the Great) of Russia, proposing negotiations.

In 1731 the Swedish East India Company was founded, which was extremely successful until it was forced out of business during the Napoleonic Wars.

Two local councils, one in judicial affairs and the other in public finance and administration, centralized Spanish government from the reign of Charles V.

Sardinia’s links to the kingdom of Aragon dated from the 14th century.

As in Naples and Sicily, the Spanish introduced little change into government, preferring instead to support an aristocratic-monarchist regime.