Charles I, better known to posterity as Charlemagne, is the most famous ruler of the Middle Ages. King of the Franks and Emperor of the West, great conqueror and skillful administrator, he gave his name to a dynasty, that of the Carolingians. His empire was so vast that it is featured in the history books of several countries in Western Europe, including France and Germany.
Marco Polo was an Italian explorer and writer, whose writings gave Europeans a first glimpse of life in the Far East. From 1271, he crossed the whole of Asia on the famous Silk Road, taking advantage of the & 34; pax mongolica & 34; period. of the Mongol Empire, while artistic and commercial exchanges are actively developing between China, Genoa and Venice.
Alcohol played an integral part in Norse culture. People drank ale more than water because the brew had to be boiled as part of the process and so was safer to drink. The Norse of Scandinavia had four...
Student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini send shock waves across America when they storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The radical Islamic fundamentalists took 90 hostages. The students were enraged that the deposed Shah had been allowed to enter the United States for medical treatment and they threatened to murder hostages if any rescue was attempted.
In 1912 Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Vladimir Lenin moved to Krakow in Galicia to be closer to Russia. On the outbreak of the First World War they were forced to move to the neutral Switzerland.
The era of the Grand Tour was rife with banditry; and yet the rite of passage remained popular amongst the aristocracy. What reported methods did nobles use to either evade banditry or mitigate the
First Samnite War, 343-341 BCThe First Samnite War (343-341 BC) was the first of three clashes between Rome and the Samnite hill tribes, and ended in a Roman victory that saw the Republic begin to expand into Campania.The first war broke out as a result of a Samnite attempt to expand to the west. In 343 BC they attacked the Sidicini, a smaller tribe on their south-western border.
