From Byzantium to the Mongols to the Sultans of Rum, this acclaimed book offers an important insight into the evocative history of Turkey before the coming of Ottoman power.Turkey forms a historical bridge between Europe and Asia and as such has played a pivotal role throughout history. The rise of Constantinople and the later Ottoman Empire are well known: less well understood are developments in the three centuries in-between. What led to the decline of the Byzantine Empire and w...

Six Records of a Floating Life (1809) is an extraordinary blend of autobiography, love story and social document written by a man who was educated as a scholar but earned his living as a civil servant and art dealer. In this intimate memoir, Shen Fu recounts the domestic and romantic joys of his marriage to Yün, the beautiful and artistic girl he fell in love with as a child. He also describes other incidents of his life, including how his beloved wife obtained a courtesan for him and refl...

"Elegiac, quirky, readable, deeply knowledgeable . . . The best cultural-historical introduction to that tempestuous land," the Georgian republic. (Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs)Georgia has been called the world's most beautiful country, yet little is known about it beyond its borders. This topical and vital book by Peter Nasmyth, the "ideal chronicler" ( Literary Review) is the much-celebrated introduction to Georgia's remarkable...

This welcome second edition of A History of Eastern Europe provides a thematic historical survey of the formative processes of political, social and economic change which have played paramount roles in shaping the evolution and development of the region.Subjects covered include:Eastern Europe in ancient, medieval and early modern timesthe legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empirethe impact of the region's powerful R...

Long the dominant religion of the West, Christianity is now rapidly becoming the principal faith in much of the postcolonial world--a development that marks a momentous shift in the religion's very center of gravity. In this eye-opening book, Lamin Sanneh examines the roots of this "post-Western awakening" and the unparalleled richness and diversity, as well as the tension and conflict, it has brought to World Christianity. Tracing Christianity's rise from its birth on the edge of the Roma...

"The Scourge of God" tells the tale of the terrible Tartar invasion of Hungary during the reign of Bela IV. (1235-1270), when the Mongol hordes devastated Magyarland from end to end.Baron Miklos Josika (1796–1865), the Walter Scott of Hungary, was born at Torda, in Transylvania, on April 28th, 1796. While a child, he lost both his parents, and was brought up at the house and under the care of his grandmother, Anna Bornemissza, a descendant of Jokai's heroine of the same name in "'M...

This is a major new study of the successor states that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the great Russian, Habsburg, Iranian, Ottoman and Qing Empires and of the expansionist powers who renewed their struggle over the Eurasian borderlands through to the end of the Second World War. Surveying the great power rivalry between the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for control over the Western and Far Eastern boundaries of Eurasia, Alfred J. Rieber provides a new framework for...

The book assesses the role of three pro-European pressure groups (the European Union of Federalists, the Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe and the European League for Economic Cooperation) and their impact in fostering new relations between Europe and the colonies between 1947 and 1957. It argues that the association of the overseas territories into the European Economic Community in 1957, the founding stone of today’s European policy for aid and development, was to a larg...

The restrictions applied to Catholics in the early eighteenth century to curtail their political and economic power in Ireland were gradually removed by the British government in response to changing circumstances. By 1800 the remaining restrictions related to membership of Parliament and a few senior judicial positions. The removal of these, while important symbolically, could have direct implications for very few people, given the limited franchise. Yet the campaign for their abolition, ...

This book describes struggles of different countries and their development after World War II. It presents a panorama of different ideologies of accelerated development, which dominated the world just before the war and in the next 40 years. The author explains why in the 1970s global and local elites began to turn away from the state, exchanging statism for the belief in the «invisible hand of the market» as a panacea for underdevelopment. He focuses not only on the genesis of underdevelo...

In the second half of the third millennium BC the Indo-European tribe known as the Hittites migrated and settled in Central Anatolia, at that time a land of small city-states whose rulers lived in fortresses.These fortifications enabled the Hittites to transform themselves into a Bronze Age super-power, defeating the Egyptians at Kadesh in c.1274 BC. Konstantin Nossov examines the fortifications constructed by the Hittites in their efforts to sustain and then halt ...

The acclaimed author of Byzantium and the Crusades "offers a fresh take on this fabled but hidden civilization" across 11 centuries of history (Colin Wells, author of Sailing from Byzantium).For more than a millennium, the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Rather than recounting the standard chronology of emperors and battles, leading Byzantium schol...