Showing titles in 16th Century

In the best-selling Warriors of God and Dogs of God, James Reston Jr. limned two epochal conflicts between Islam and Christendom. Here he examines the ultimate battle in that centuries-long war, which found Europe at its most vulnerable and Islam on the attack. This drama was propelled by two astonishing young sovereigns: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Turkish sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Though they represented two colliding worlds, they were remarkably similar.

The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate 16th-century villagers.

In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards became the first nation in history to have worldwide reach--across most of Europe to the Americas, the Philippines, and India. The Golden Age of the Spanish Empire would establish five centuries of Western supremacy across the globe and usher in an era of transatlantic exploration that eventually gave rise to the modern world. It was a time of discovery and adventure, of great political and social change. Robert Goodwin delves into previously unrecorded sources to bring this tumultuous and exciting period to life

From peasants to princes, no one was untouched by the spiritual and intellectual upheaval of the 16th century. Martin Luther's challenge to church authority forced Christians to examine their beliefs in ways that shook the foundations of their religion. The subsequent divisions, fed by dynastic rivalries and military changes, fundamentally altered the relations between ruler and ruled. Geographical and scientific discoveries challenged the unity of Christendom as a belief community.

Catherine de Medici's father-in-law, King Francis of France, was the perfect Renaissance knight, the movement's exemplar and its Gallic interpreter. An aesthete, diplomat par excellence, and contemporary of Machiavelli, Francis was the founder of modern France, whose sheer force of will and personality molded his kingdom into the first European superpower. Arguably the man who introduced the Renaissance to France, Francis was also the prototype Frenchman - a national identity was modeled on his character.

England's Tudor monarchs - Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I - are perhaps the most celebrated and fascinating of all royal families in history. Their love affairs, their political triumphs, and their overturning of the religious order are the subject of countless works of popular scholarship. But for all we know about Henry's quest for male heirs or Elizabeth's purported virginity, the lives of the Tudor monarchs away from the public eye remain largely beyond our grasp, mostly not chronicled by previous historians.

Nothing drove Henry VIII, England's wealthiest and most powerful king, more than producing a legitimate male heir and perpetuating his dynasty. To that end he married six wives, became the subject of the most notorious divorce case of the sixteenth century, and broke with the Pope, all in an age of international competition and warfare, social unrest and growing religious intolerance and discord.

August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the "creation myth" of settler colonialism and how the US was formed.

Master Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for his magnificent autobiography. In this work, which was actually begun in 1558 but not published until 1730, Cellini beautifully chronicles his flamboyant times. He tells of his adventures in Italy and France, and his relations with popes, kings, and fellow artists.

In this dazzling global history that charts five centuries of innovation and change, Alec Ryrie makes the case that Protestants made the modern world. Protestants introduces us to the men and women who defined and redefined this quarrelsome faith. Some turned to their newly accessible bibles to justify bold acts of political opposition, others to support a new understanding of who they were and what they could and should do. Above all, they were willing to fight for their beliefs.

In this engaging, anecdotal history of food, world conquest, and desire, a chef-turned-journalist tells the story of three legendary cities, Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam, that transformed the globe in the quest for spice.

Author Stewart Gordon has fashioned a fascinating and unique look at Asia from AD 700 to 1500, a time when Asia was the world, by describing the personal journeys of Asia's many travelers - the merchants who traded spices along the Silk Road, the apothecaries who exchanged medicine and knowledge from China to the Middle East, and the philosophers and holy men who crossed continents to explore and exchange ideas, books, science, and culture.

Henry VIII is best known in history for his tempestuous marriages and the fates of his six wives. However, as acclaimed historian Tracy Borman makes clear in her illuminating new chronicle of Henry’s life, his reign and reputation were hugely influenced by the men who surrounded and interacted with him as companions and confidants, servants and ministers, and occasionally as rivals - many of whom have been underplayed in previous biographies.

The Teutonic Knights were powerful and ferocious advocates of holy war. Their history is suffused with crusading, campaigning, and struggle. Feared by their enemies but respected by medieval Christendom, the knights and their Order maintained a firm hold over the Baltic and Northern Germany and established a formidable regime that flourished across Central Europe for 300 years. William Urban's narrative charts the rise and fall of the Order and, in an accessible and engaging style, throws light on a band of knights whose deeds and motives have long been misunderstood.

For five centuries, Martin Luther has been lionized as an outspoken and fearless icon of change who ended the Middle Ages and heralded the beginning of the modern world. In Rebel in the Ranks, Brad Gregory, renowned professor of European history at Notre Dame, recasts this long-accepted portrait. Luther did not intend to start a revolution that would divide the Catholic Church and forever change Western civilization. Yet his actions would profoundly shape our world in ways he could never have imagined.

Best-selling author Deborah E. Harkness explores the streets, shops, back alleys, and gardens of Elizabethan London, where a boisterous and diverse group of men and women shared a keen interest in the study of nature. These assorted merchants, gardeners, barber-surgeons, midwives, instrument makers, mathematics teachers, engineers, alchemists, and other experimenters, she contends, formed a patchwork scientific community whose practices set the stage for the Scientific Revolution.

This deeply textured dual biography and fascinating intellectual history examines two of the greatest minds of European history - Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther - whose heated rivalry gave rise to two enduring, fundamental, and often colliding traditions of philosophical and religious thought.

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman's Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt's executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment.

This is the story of Elizabeth I's inner circle and the crucial human relationships which lay at the heart of her personal and political life. Using a wide range of original sources - including private letters, portraits, verse, drama, and state papers - Susan Doran provides a vivid and often dramatic account of political life in Elizabethan England and the queen at its center.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety.