The Viking King Harald Hardrada: Eastern Exile and Mercenary Life, 1030-1042 (Part I)
Harald Sigurdsson (1015-1066), also known as Harald Hardrada (“hard”) was one of the most fabled kings in Norwegian history. Harald and his half-brother Olaf Haraldsson – who later became Saint Olaf – fought together in 1030 while trying to reclaim the throne from the Danish king Cnut the Great – who made an alliance with the jarls of Lade in the Trondheim region.
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General Grant Encounters Terrorism in Madrid: The 1878 Attempted Regicide of King Alfonso XII
When former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant visited Europe on a post-presidential world tour in the late 1870s political terrorism was in its nascent stage. The International Workingmen’s Association (or First International) split in 1872 between anarchist and statist factions and disbanded in 1876. After that, violence against heads of state increased.
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Medieval Dresses: The Mirror of Medieval Society
There are many ads on the internet offering medieval dresses for sale. That means they are quite popular and have their fans that like to buy them and wear them on certain occasions. What are the reasons for such a fascination with medieval dresses? Well, everyone has their motives, but it’s definitely interesting to immerse in the medieval era and see that medieval dresses weren’t just clothes. Wearing a certain dress meant much more. A dress was a status symbol that defined a woman and who she was. Wearing a certain dress meant showing within which class you belong and how rich and powerful your family was. But, “medieval fashion” was also a reflection of the whole political and social situation during the Middle Ages.
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Norway’s King Sigurd the Crusader, 1089-1130AD
There were numerous Christian crusades to the Holy Land but one of the more fabled was the Norwegian Crusade. Led by King Sigurd I Magnussen (Sigurd the Crusader) in 1107, the three-year crusade was the first led personally by a European king.
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Conquer and Divide: The Spanish Resistance that Broke Napoleon’s Second Strategy
Although he was a brilliant military tactician, one of the ways Napoleon managed to hold on to conquered regions was by employing a strategy of carving up states based on historical precedent. The Rhodanic Republic (1802-1810), the Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814), and the Republic of Danzig (1807-1814) were among a few “sister republics” created by Napoleon. These client states, formed under the guise of revanchist history, aided the control of occupied lands in the First French Empire. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, he set about to redraw its map in a similar fashion.
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