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Capella Palatina in Palermo
The small palace chapel in Palermo, with its walls covered in bright pictorial mosaic, is one of the most exquisite buildings of the Middle Ages. Known as the Capella Palatina (Latin for 'palace chapel'), it is begun in 1132 and completed in about 1189. The mosaics are in the Greek tradition, created by craftsmen from Constantinople. Christ Pantocrator is in the apse and cupola, in traditional Byzantine style. Round the walls are sequences of scenes from the Old Testament, and from the lives of St ...
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Baroque Rome
During these same years Bernini's great contribution to the exterior of St Peter's is also under construction. The open space in front of the church, where pilgrims gather to hear the pope's Easter address, needs to be enclosed in some way to form a welcoming piazza. Bernini achieves a perfect solution in the form of an open curving colonnade. The four concentric rows of columns provide covered walkways and a shape for the piazza, but they do so without closing it in - for there ...
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The Pala d'Oro
In addition to its Byzantine mosaics, St Mark's contains in the Pala d'Oro the most spectacular surviving altarpiece of a kind familiar in imperial Byzantine churches. Small scenes in cloisonné enamel of Jesus, the Virgin and saints are set in a gold background encrusted with jewels. Commissioned from the workshops of Constantinople by a doge of the 10th century, the original Pala d'Oro is dismantled and extended several times to incorporate new panels. It acquires its present form in 1345. Some of the added panels ...
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Pennsylvania
In 1737 the colony of Pennsylvania decides to claim the full extent of this supposed agreement. Athletes are trained for the occasion; a path is cut through the scrub; on August 25-6 the quickest among them covers sixty-four miles in the day and a half, bringing some 1200 square miles of Indian territory securely into British hands.There is a further irony attached to this loss by the Lenape. When they reject the so-called Walking Purchase, both sides agree to accept arbitration by the Iroquois League. ...
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Wives of Henry VIII
Less than three weeks after the annulment of the marriage to Anne of Cleves, and on the very day when Thomas Cromwell is executed, Henry marries one of Anne's ladies-in-waiting - the 19-year-old Catherine Howard. For a year Henry is enchanted with his young bride. Then he discovers that she has had affairs both before and during her marriage. She is beheaded in 1542. Finally, in 1543, he marries his third Catherine. Already twice widowed herself, and now aged thirty-one, Catherine Parr is an intelligent ...
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Pilgrims and relics
The pilgrims tramping round Europe have a good time in a good cause (as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales vividly suggests). They pray to the saints whose relics they visit, and the saints - they hope - put in a word for them above. The particular appeal of the Virgin Mary, in addition to her feminine and maternal qualities, is that she has special influence within the family circle. The indulgences available at each shrine provide an added inducement to set out on pilgrimage. Medieval christendom is ...
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The First Fleet
On January 21 Phillip sails a few miles north and finds the great natural harbour of Port Jackson. Here he selects an inlet with a good water supply as the site for the new colony. He names the place Sydney Cove in honour of the home secretary, Viscount Sydney.A prefabricated house of wood and canvas, designed in London for the governor, is erected at the centre of the settlement. Tents are put up for the marines and the convicts, with a separate encampment a little ...
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Toltecs
The Toltecs lose control of their empire during the 12th century, when both Tula and Chichén Itzá are destroyed. But the Toltecs are not immediately replaced by another ruling dynasty in central Mexico. Instead the region lapses into a prolonged period of chaos and anarchy. Not until the 14th century does a migrant tribe create a base, at what is now Mexico City, from which they will establish the last and the most powerful of the Indian empires of central America. They are the Aztecs.
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Falklands War
On May 3 the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano is torpedoed and sinks with heavy casualties (368 dead). This becomes the most controversial event of the war, because of allegations that the ship was outside the exclusion zone and was heading away from it. The following day the British destroyer HMS Sheffield is hit by an Exocet missile, with the loss of twenty men.The first British landing is on East Falkland, where a bridgehead is established by May 21. Within the following week Port Darwin and ...
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The sphinx
The most colossal sculpture of the ancient world is the Egyptian sphinx. The great lion with a human face is carved from the centre of a limestone quarry, after the tons of stone which once surrounded it have been hacked and dragged away to form the greatest of the three nearby pyramids, that of the pharaoh Khufu. The sphinx lies guarding the pyramids at Giza. Its face is believed to bear the features of Khafre, son of Khufu, whose own pyramid is only slightly more ...
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Edward II and Edward III
In January 1327 Edward II is forced by his wife, Isabella, to renounce the throne in favour of their 15-year-old son, Edward III. Before the end of the year Edward II dies, a captive in Berkeley castle, almost certainly murdered. (His death is soon followed by a gory rumour, fuelled by rumours of the king's homosexuality, that the instrument of death is a red-hot skewer plunged up into the instestines.) For four years Mortimer rules with Isabella in the young king's name, but in 1331 ...
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The spread of printing
During the early decades, German printing predominates. More books are published in Germany than anywhere else (by 1500 there are printers in some sixty German towns); German printers carry the craft secrets abroad; and foreign printers come to Germany to study as apprentices. The earliest typography is therefore in the black-letter style of contemporary German manuscripts. But by the end of the century the most fashionable and influential printing is being done in Italy, with a corresponding change in appearance.
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Act of Supremacy
The Act of Supremacy demands public consent to the king's newly assumed role as head of the Church of England. Prominent figures in public life are required to swear on oath their acceptance of this new doctrine. A few brave men refuse to do so, among them the bishop of Rochester (John Fisher) and Thomas More. Thomas More holds a position of particular significance. A scholar of distinction, friend of Erasmus, author of Utopia, he has also been a close friend of Henry VIII and ...
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The Dome of the Rock
The Dome of the Rock, completed in 691 and the earliest surviving example of Muslim architecture, borrows in spectacular fashion the themes of Byzantine mosaic and domed roof. This city of Jerusalem, taken from the Christians only half a century previously, still has the skills and crafts first developed for use in imperial churches. The dome itself is a great wooden structure. The caliph has both interior and exterior of the shrine lavishly decorated in a combination of polished marble and glittering glass mosaic against ...
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Spanish Armada
The encounter between the Spanish Armada and the English fleet in the Channel in August 1588 is the first of a new kind of naval battle, and one in which the English tactics suggest the way forward. The Spanish have been accustomed to fighting at sea with galleys, as at Lepanto only seventeen years previously. A galley imposes a certain pattern on a battle. Guns can only point forward from the bow, where the main weapon, the ram, is also located. Assault consists in rowing ...
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Communes in Italy
Between about 1080 and 1140 many of the towns of northern Italy (among them Pisa, Siena, Florence, Bologna, Milan and Genoa) acquire municipal councils in which the elected councillors call themselves consuls - in a deliberate echo of Italy's republican past. As these republican communes grow in wealth, and assert control over large tracts of the surrounding countryside, they become in effect independent. Technically they acknowledge either pope or emperor as feudal overlord. Unable to restrain these fledgling city states, popes and emperors often authorize ...
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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 Greek theatre
In the first Greek theatres the stage is a full circle, in keeping with the circular dance - the choros - from which the theatrical performance has evolved. This stage is called the orchestra (orchester, a dancer), because it is the place where the chorus sing and dance. Epidaurus, built in about 340 BC, provides the best example of a classical Greek theatre. In the centre of the orchestra is the stone base on which an altar stood, reflecting the religious aspect of theatre in ...
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Age of the dome
The superb Islamic domes of the 17th century fall within two very different groups, even though both descend from the same tradition. In one group, associated particularly with Persia, the gentle curves of the dome are sheathed in ceramic tiles - usually blue. This style reaches its perfection in Isfahan. The other theme, associated with India, concentrates all attention on the subtle shape of the dome itself, making its surface as sheer and simple as possible. For this, white marble is the perfect material. The ...
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Pottery of the Song dynasty
Of the many arts which thrive in China at this time, Song ceramics are outstanding. The simple shapes of the pottery and porcelain of this dynasty, and the elegance of the glazes (usually monochrome), have set standards of refinement admired in subsequent centuries throughout the world. Among the best known of these wares are the celadons, with their thick transparent green glazes, which are made at Longquan, near the southern Song capital of Hangzhou. Also influential are the black wares known as temmoku, popular with ...
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