The fief of Coucy from the Church; it was now held directly of the King, and its seigneur paid homage only to the King’s person.
The Pastoureaux spread the fear of insurrection that freezes the blood of the privileged in any era when the mob appears. Excommunicated by Pope John XXII, they were finally suppressed when he forbade...
The Home Secretary, a young man of thirty-seven, impossible to ignore, who, from his inappropriate post, had pelted the Prime Minister during the crisis with ideas on naval and military strategy, all...
Is more unfair, as an English historian has well said, than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.
Within the army, field officers despised Staff officers as having the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam, but both groups were as one in their distaste for interference by civilian minister...
William McKinley was a man made to be managed.
The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King...
The death of the last of the three brothers in 1328 left the succession to the crown open, with results that led to the longest war—so far—in Western history. Three claimants were available—a grandson...
The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate b...
The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on...
The German obsession had two parts: that Belgian resistance was illegal and that it was organized from above by the Belgian government or by burgomasters, priests, and other persons who could be class...
Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because the king had no permanent armed force at his command.
One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of imp...
NO PEACE TREATY WAS REACHED at Bruges because the English were determined to retain their former possessions in France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was equally determined to regain the...
Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis in 1324 was a forthright assertion of the supremacy of the state.
It is a peculiar habit of Christianity to conceive the most compassionate and forgiving divinities and use them to sponsor atrocity.
I need no Chief, said the Kaiser; I can do this for myself.
History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of aff...
Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.