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Timur's conquests
Home is Samarkand, the city closest to his birthplace. Timur is busy turning it into a great centre of Muslim architecture and art. Together with the Indian elephants come the best craftsmen of Delhi, who will be set to work in Samarkand - where they join, in 1399, a community of skilled captives from previous expeditions. This is connoisseurship of an unusually violent kind, but it is a genuine passion. Inherited by Timur's descendants, in less rapacious form, it results in a great Timurid tradition ...
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Age of the palace
Men of power in other Italian cities follow suit, making the Renaissance town palace an important element in Italian architectural history. Elsewhere in Europe, nation states are now emerging. In France, Spain and Britain the notion of a palace fits very well with the self-image of the powerful monarchs of the 16th century. In England Henry VIII moves between four palaces along the banks of the Thames. In France Francis I transforms the Louvre (from a castle) and Fontainebleau (from a hunting lodge) into palaces. ...
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Virginia
In April 1607 three ships sent out by the London Company sail into Chesapeake Bay. They continue up a broad waterway, which they name the James river in honour of their king, and a few weeks later they select an island to settle on. They call their settlement Jamestown. But to the territory itself they give a more romantic name, honouring England's late virgin queen - Virginia.More than 100 English settlers attempt to make their home in 1607 on the island of Jamestown. A year ...
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The great Dutch century
From the many practising in each field there emerge a handful of outstanding masters. In landscape Aelbert Cuyp achieves, from the 1640s, exceptionally beautiful effects of warm and gentle light in broad tranquil vistas. Jacob van Ruisdael, a few years younger, is the greatest of the Dutch landscape painters. He works a more dramatic vein than Cuyp, finding romance in wooded landscapes among which streams tumble or half-hidden roads wind their way. Ruisdael's theme is followed by his pupil Hobbema - though Hobbema's most famous ...
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Baroque Rome
The Baldacchino rises above an altar at which only the pope conducts mass. Visible between the columns, from the point of view of the congregation, is Bernini's other dramatic contribution to the interior of St Peter's. This is a golden tableau, a piece of pure theatre, above the altar at the far end of the church. Its central feature is the papal throne of St Peter, held aloft among the clouds.Sculpted golden rays stream up from St Peter's throne towards heaven. In an extra dimension ...
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Roman murals
Murals are even more fragile than the walls they are painted on, so it is not surprising that few survive from the days of the Roman empire. The accidents of being covered by ash or sand, or of being originally painted underground, have preserved some examples in Pompeii, Doura-Europos and the Roman catacombs. They are not for the most part very distinguished. But they demonstrate that it is a normal custom, in Roman communities, to decorate walls by painting on the plaster. It is equally ...
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Ajanta
A group of British officers, posted to India in the service of the East India Company, are in the hills to the northeast of Bombay. They are hoping to shoot a tiger. The hunt brings them into a steep ravine near the village of Ajanta, formed by the Wagura river after it has tumbled down a series of waterfalls. In this dramatic spot an Indian boy indicates that he has something to show them. The soldiers follow him up the steep wooded cliff edge. Pulling ...
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Chronometer
The terms are demanding. To win the prize a chronometer (a solemnly scientific term for a clock, first used in a document of this year) must be sufficiently accurate to calculate longitude within thirty nautical miles at the end of a journey to the West Indies. This means that in rough seas, damp salty conditions and sudden changes of temperature the instrument must lose or gain not more than three seconds a day - a level of accuracy unmatched at this time by the best ...
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Kakiemon porcelain
In the following century Japan makes another major contribution to the history of ceramics. In about 1644 Sakada Kakiemon, a member of a family of potters with kilns at Arita in northwest Kyushu, introduces to Japan the Chinese system of overglaze painting. In the 1670s his two sons, known as Kakiemon II and Kakiemon III, are producing exquisite wares of milky white porcelain, often square or hexagonal in shape, decorated with elegant and brightly coloured motifs of plants and birds. The decoration, covering relatively little ...
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The popes at Avignon
In many ways the move to Avignon has a rational justification. This city is close to the main power of the time, France, but it is in another kingdom - that of Naples. It is also the centre of western Europe in a way which Rome could never be. Lines drawn from Britain to Italy and from Germany to Spain would cross close to Avignon. In addition this place is much more secure than Rome. Italy is in a state of anarchy, dominated by warring ...
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The Phoney War
In France and Britain the immediate aftermath of the declaration of war is a return to the defensive tactics of World War I. The French rush troops to the Maginot Line, an elaborate complex of concrete fortifications connected by underground railway lines, which has been constructed along the Franco-German border between 1929 and 1938. (It is named after André Maginot, minister of war from 1929 to 1931.)France's border with Belgium, running northwest to the sea, is not similarly protected. So, as in World War I, ...
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Pyramids and Temples
It seems impossible to imagine how the vast cross beams and ceiling stones of the Egyptian temples at Karnak and Luxor should have been settled into place without any lifting gear. But the method is the same as for the pyramids, except that a temple is not solid. Each stone slab is edged up an earth ramp and settled into position. This means that the growing temple becomes part of the ramp. When the structure is finally complete, the entire space between and around the ...
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Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb
Europeans become a significant presence in India for the first time during the 17th century. They take home descriptions of the ruler's fabulous wealth, causing him to become known as the Great Moghul. They have a touching tale to tell of Shah Jahan's love for his wife and of the extraordinary building, the Taj Mahal, which he provides for her tomb. And as Shah Jahan's reign merges into Aurangzeb's, they can astonish their hearers with an oriental melodrama of a kind more often associated with ...
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The conqueror's declining years
In 1401, in Syria, Timur defeats a Mameluke army from Egypt. He then takes and destroys Damascus, despatching a new consignment of talented craftsmen back to Samarkand. Later in the same year Baghdad is stormed and sacked, and 20,000 of its population massacred. In 1402 the aged warrior advances into Anatolia. He defeats an army of Ottoman Turks near Ankara, capturing their sultan, Bayazid I (who dies in Timur's care). He then moves on west, as far as the Aegean, to take Izmir from the ...
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Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan's first major campaigns are to the southeast, making incursions from 1209 into northern China. In 1215 he reaches and captures Beijing. But his most ambitious expedition, starting in 1219, is to the west. Samarkand and Bukhara are taken and sacked in 1220. Genghis Khan then moves south and enters India, but he turns back from this rich prize when he reaches the Indus. By 1223 his armies have moved round the Caspian and up through the Caucasus mountains to plunder cities of the ...
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A new religion in India
The religion becomes a power in the Punjab under the fifth guru, Arjan. Between 1581 and 1606 he builds many Sikh temples (gurdwaras) and compiles the holy book of the religion (the Granth, consisting of the writings of the gurus themselves together with related Hindu and Muslim texts). More conspicuously, Arjan builds Amritsar as a holy city of pilgrimage for all Sikhs. The strength of his sect is now sufficient to alarm the Moghul emperor, Jahangir. Arjan is arrested for disrespect to Islam. He dies, ...
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Wise men of the east
The Magi, who in the Christian story bring gifts to the infant Jesus, travel from a Persia ruled by the Parthians, in origin a dynasty of nomads. But the region has been culturally under the influence of Greece ever since the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Greeks are tolerant of other religions, and the Parthians adopt much of Zoroastrianism - even erecting fire altars in honour of Ahura Mazda. So the religion survives, though not with the status which it enjoyed under the Achaemenids. ...
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Henry IV
Contrary to this principle, Henry decides to intervene in 1610 in a dispute over the inheritance of the duchy of Jülich, close to the sensitive border between the United Provinces and the Spanish Netherlands. The Habsburg emperor Rudolf II is about to seize the duchy, and Henry IV is about to march against him, when Henry is assassinated in a Paris street by François Ravaillac (a Catholic whose precise motives are unclear).Henry is one of France's most popular kings. Four years after his death a ...
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Cranach and Holbein
On this first occasion Holbein stays only two years in England, but he paints a great many portraits during his visit - including the large series of coloured drawings now in Windsor castle. In 1528 he returns to Basel, but he is back in England by 1532. On this second visit, lasting till his death in 1543, he is frequently employed by Henry VIII.The most familiar image of the self-indulgent tyrant is Holbein's sturdy portrait of him. The future Edward VI is familiar too, as ...
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Salisbury, Chamberlain and empire
The imperial conference held at the time of the queen's Diamond Jubilee, in 1897, is a much more weighty affair than its predecessor ten years earlier. This time the prime ministers of the colonies have made the long journey to attend the festivities in person. And the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (appointed to this office in 1895), is a man with a passionate commitment to strengthening the commercial and political ties between the increasingly self-governing colonies.His prime minister, Lord Salisbury, is a less ardent imperialist. ...
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