History to explore, teach and keep

is, plotted on real coastlines and rivers and joined by six generalised trade corridors. Around the map: the ladder from apprentice to master, the crafts counted where the sources allow it, a timeline of twelve dated turning points, and the historians’ disagreement stated rather than settled. No political border is drawn, because every one of them moved inside these five centuries.

distance payable — from the Hanseatic Kontore at Bergen and Novgorod, through the Champagne fairs, to the Italian banking houses and the Levant terminals. Every dot marks a documented institution with its date, on a Natural Earth base.

Each trial venue carries a ring showing what the record says about that province, and a panel sets the confession rates side by side: 97 per cent at Paris where torture was systematic, none at all in Aragon, Castile or Cyprus.

emperors, and where the fiction finally broke.

and how the machinery came apart. With a chronology and a full bibliography.

themselves, with a note on which parts of the confessions the sources will and will not support.

in order, with the Greek and Latin accounts read against each other.

guilds and prospered anyway, and the two-hundred-year quarrel between historians that will not settle. No primary source is quoted, because translating a statute is itself an argument about meaning; provisions are summarised and the scholarly edition is named.

while insisting the Republic still governed itself: the settlements of 27 and 23 BC, the Julio-Claudian succession crises, the adoptive “golden century,” and the Crisis of the Third Century that ended it.

after fifty years of civil war. Traces his rise, the administrative and currency reforms, the Edict on Maximum Prices, the Great Persecution, and the succession crisis that tore the system apart within a year of his retirement.

Council of Nicaea, the civil wars after his death, Julian the Apostate's twenty-month reign, and Theodosius I's Edict of Thessalonica — the empire's turn to a Christian monarchy.

florin and the bill of exchange, the guilds, and the famine and pestilence of 1315-1351. A sixth chapter maps five live disputes where the same thin evidence has produced incompatible readings among serious historians. A4 and US Letter PDFs in the same download.

papally exempt, holding commanderies from England to Cyprus and the French crown's own treasury in its Paris house. This book traces how that institution was built, and why the independence — not the charges — was what killed it.

Constantinople. But how catastrophic was it really? This book reconstructs the pandemic's documented path and then turns, at length, to the argument historians are still having about what it destroyed.

It does not mean the row is wrong. It means the people who have looked hardest at the evidence do not agree, that the disagreement is live, and that anyone building on the row should know before they start.

of the vernacular languages, the spread of literacy and, in some versions, the very idea of the modern individual. The story is usually told as a short, bright sequence: a goldsmith in Mainz perfects a new way of making books around 1450, a Bible appears, and within two generations Europe is a different place. Our free articles on the history of technology tend to follow that sequence because it is a good story and because much of it is true.

continent-wide convention. This dossier goes back half a century earlier, to the single building campaign where historians most often locate the moment the combination of features later called "Gothic" was first assembled in one place: the abbey church of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, rebuilt in two stages under Abbot Suger between about 1135 and 1144.

what is now France. Its declared purpose was to root out a heresy that troubled Pope Innocent III. Its eventual effect was to hand the county of Toulouse and the old Trencavel viscounty — a swathe of territory as large as many kingdoms, ruled for generations by lords who owed the French crown only nominal allegiance — into the direct hands of the kings in Paris.

sources call Civetot. They had come, by the standards of the age, an astonishing distance. Many of the men who now looked at the shore had left their homes in northern and southern France, in Lorraine, in Normandy and in Italy some months earlier, and they had been fed and ferried across the Bosporus by an emperor who had asked the West for soldiers and received a flood.

His languages bring him onto the fleet that conquers the Banda Islands in 1621 to secure the world's nutmeg, and to a reckoning with what his own ledgers record. A novel of complicity and conscience, set against the documented history of the Banda conquest.

in Christendom had failed. Giovanni Villani was a chronicler, but he was also a businessman of the kind his readers knew well: a partner in a commercial company, a holder of civic office, a man who knew what a ledger was for. He had been a partner in the Buonaccorsi company, which came to grief in the same years as the houses he was writing about, and he knew what it was to owe more than could be paid.

This dossier asks a different question of the same century and a half. Between the fall of Cardinal Wolsey in 1529 and the settlement of 1689, the monarchies of England, Scotland and Ireland changed more than in any comparable span before or since: a national church was created by statute, dissolved, restored to Rome, and reconstituted; a king was tried and executed by his own subjects; the monarchy was abolished and then brought back; and a second…

best-informed and most heavily taxed societies in Europe. It had no king. It was born in a rebellion against the most powerful monarch of its age, survived a war that lasted, with interruptions, from 1568 to 1648, and then fought three wars against England and two against France without losing its independence.

Each row references the book and chapter of the Commentarii where it appears.

schema, plus a README carrying the method and the full source register: crusader nobility deaths, Richard I on the Third Crusade, Dutch Golden Age naval battles, prehistoric collective violence and Rote Armee Fraktion attacks. 128 checked rows in total. Nothing is merged and nothing is left out — the bundle is a discount, not a different product. Five separately: EUR 99.75 - together: EUR 79.95 - save EUR 19.80.