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Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.

France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.

The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

Prince Philip, the lifelong companion of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, has died, Buckingham Palace announced Friday.

The duke had been admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital in London hospital on February 17 after feeling unwell.

On March 1, he was transferred to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, also in London, where doctors continued to treat the infection as well as undertake testing for a pre-existing heart condition.

Japan's Emperor Naruhito has officially proclaimed his enthronement, in a ritual-bound, centuries-old ceremony attended by more than a hundred dignitaries from around the world.

The head of state began his reign in May, after his father, Akihito, became the first emperor to abdicate in 200 years. But on Tuesday, Naruhito, 59, announced his change in status to the world, in an elaborate series of rituals known as "Sokui no Rei"

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stood before Naruhito's throne, and read a speech. He then bowed deeply and yelled "Long live the emperor!" As Naruhito ascended the throne, boxes were placed next to him that are believed to contain a sword and ancient jewel that, according to legend, date back to the mythical forefather of Japan's first emperor, Jimmu, who ruled almost 2,700 years ago. Along with a fabled octagonal mirror, they form Japan's royal regalia, or the Three Sacred Treasures. The sword and the jewel are so sacred that they've never been seen in public.

There is a law that governs the relations between the Jews and the rest of the world.

That law was articulated in one form at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the great Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem faulted Hannah Arendt for falling short of “ahavat Israel” — for showing insufficient “love of the Jewish people.”

This love is precisely what is required of an American president in dealings affecting Israel.

Ms. Vallejo, like many of her fellow student leaders, is an avowed communist. But while she has publicly commended other regional leftists like Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, she and her generation have little in common with the older left of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. They are less ideological purists than change-seeking pragmatists, even if that means working within the existing political order.

As the protests increasingly devolve into rock and tear-gas exchanges between students and the police, it’s becoming clear that more than education policy is at stake: a nonviolent social revolution in which disaffected, politically savvy youth are trying to overthrow the mores of an older generation, one they feel is still tainted by the legacy of Pinochet. It is not just about policy reform, but also about changing the underlying timbers of Chilean society.

Chile is perhaps Latin America’s greatest success story. After decades of authoritarian rule, it has spent the last 20 years building a thriving economy with a renewed democratic culture and a booming, educated middle class. But it is also confronting a dangerous imbalance: While the liberalization of higher education has led to improvements in access, tuition has consistently outpaced inflation and now represents 40 percent of the average household’s income.

ISTANBUL — Fighter jets raced across the Istanbul sky, painting the Turkish flag with ribbons of colored smoke, as a military band with nearly 600 musicians marched below. Hundreds of thousands of people looked on, in an event that quickly took on the fervor of a religiously infused political rally.

The event being celebrated so lavishly last Saturday occurred 562 years ago, when the Ottomans conquered what was then called Constantinople

Never mind that when Turkish voters choose a new Parliament on Sunday, Mr. Erdogan will not be on the ballot. The election will still largely be a referendum on him, and on his plans to transform Turkey’s Constitution and concentrate more power in an executive presidency

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

He received ordination as the most powerful lama in Tibet only to turn his back on monastic life. As a young adult he spent evenings in taverns with his friends and enjoyed sexual relations with women. He is sometimes called the "playboy" Dalai Lama.

a young man who was sensitive and intelligent, even if undisciplined.

After a childhood locked away in a country monastery with hand-picked tutors, his assertion of independence is understandable. The violent end of his life makes his story a tragedy, not a joke.

In the cacophony of opinions, few observers and participants seem bothered by the lack of a coherent, thought-out strategy for disposing of the Confederacy's visible traces while preserving evidence of this vitally important chapter of our past.

the task at hand is to purge the imagery in a way that guards against amnesia, while also transforming the statues from celebratory monuments to objective evidence.

in Germany. Over the last 70 years, the country has accepted a simple truth: Out of sight hardly means out of mind. The removal of the relics of a hateful social order is not in itself cause for celebration. It is the aftermath that matters.

he most secretive and grotesque corner of China's extensive imperial court belonged to the fraternity of special guardians: the eunuchs, whose high voices and soft demeanors often cloaked the viciousness of their back-alley politicking and custody of the Forbidden City's magnificent exotica.

looking for a way out of poverty and into the private domain of China's highest rulers.

Aside from the emperor, eunuchs were generally the only men trusted to enter the inner courtyards of the palace, where the women of the imperial family and harem lived. Other men, including officials, military guards and even the emperor's male relatives, were often required to leave the palace grounds at night.

the widening of trade in new ports, and extraterritoriality for British subjects in China—a privilege obtained by American and French governments soon afterwards.

an imbalance that finally came to a head with the loss in the Opium Wars.

the British took revenge by targeting the Summer Palace.

largest ancient palace in the world. 

Forbidden City has been the home 500 years of dynastic rule

It has 9,999 rooms filled with ancient artifacts.

Discoveries at Sanxingdui have totally transformed our understanding of how multiple, regionally distinct yet interrelated early cultures intertwined to produce what came to be understood as “Chinese” civilization.

Why is there such a gap in the attention paid in the West to the Egyptian archaeology, as opposed to Chinese archaeology — given that each is important to our understanding of human history?

Stories of Western archaeologists competing to find tombs in the 19th century riveted Western Europeans, and today’s news coverage is a product of that imperialist tradition

Buckingham Palace has announced the Bidens will visit Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on June 13 after the president takes part in a G-7 summit in Cornwall, England, and ahead of his NATO meetings in Brussels and high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. The White House says Biden will also meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson while in England.

Biden will be the 12th U.S. president Queen Elizabeth has met face-to-face.

While plenty of other foreign policy controversies will likely be front and center during Biden's first overseas trip as president, the meeting with the queen will bring one new twist that has not hung over previous ones between the monarch and presidents: It will be the first time since members of her family – Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex – moved to the United States.

Built in the seventh century BCE, the ancient city of Byzantium proved to be a valuable city for both the Greeks and Romans. Because it lay on the European side of the Strait of Bosporus, the Emperor Constantine understood its strategic importance and upon reuniting the empire in 324 CE built his new capital there -- Constantinople.

Constantine was unsure where to locate his new capital. Old Rome was never considered. He understood the infrastructure of the city was declining; its economy was stagnant and the only source of income was becoming scarce.

Although he kept some remnants of the old city, New Rome --four times the size of Byzantium-- was said to have been inspired by the Christian God, yet remained classical in every sense.

Janina Ramirez is coming up on the inside.

Her new series of Raiders of the Lost Past (BBC Two) opens with an account of the discovery of the Palace of Knossos on Crete by Sir Arthur Evans that emphasises how very much easier it was to do these sorts of things when you were a very, very rich white man born into every advantage halfway through the 19th century in the land where the sun never set.

Evans beat various competitors in the race to procure a licence to excavate and spent the next 30 years unearthing evidence that showed ancient Greek civilisation had begun a thousand years earlier than previously thought. And he discovered an entirely unknown, forgotten culture – he called the Minoan – which preceded even ancient Greece. He wrote it all up in a series of six volumes, and that was that. History made!

Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".

Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.

Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.