Pius XI was born in 1857 and was Pope from 1922 for eighteen years, during which he inadvertently caused the collapse of the Catholic Popular Party. He did…
Category: History of Rome
The Middle Ages
Historians disagree about exact dates, but I believe it is generally accepted that the phrase ‘Middle Ages’ denotes the period in Europe from around 700 A.D. to around…
The Emperor Constantine (known as ‘the Great’)
Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus was born around 274 AD. His was a patrician family in Rome and his father was Constantius I who died in the year 306,…
The Roman emperor who died in Britain
A few of you clever bloggers will deny it, but it is a fair bet that nobody knew that a Roman emperor died in Britain. Everybody knows that…
The time when there were THREE Popes
At this very moment the cardinals gathered in the Vatican are arguing about who shall be the next Pope, following Benedict XVI’s resignation on grounds of health….
Frederick II (‘Stupor Mundi’)
To avoid confusion, one remembers that there were two Frederick IIs, Frederick ‘The Great’, an eighteenth century monarch, and our subject in this article, Frederick ‘Stupor Mundi’ a…
The Battle of Cannae
This was not just an armed, bloody struggle between fighting men. It was one of the classic victories in military history. Carthage’s general Hannibal (q.v.) faced a Roman…
Historians Polybius, Sallust, Seneca, Suetonius & Tacitus
POLYBIUS (204 – 122 BC) had the good luck (from the intellectual point of view) to be a historian during the rise of Rome after the 2nd Punic…
Scipio, Aemilianus (Africanus Numantius)
This extraordinary Roman general was born in 185 BC, and was later adopted by Publius Cornelius Scipio. One must be careful to avoid confusion, because both adoptive grandfather…
Who were the Anglo-Saxons?
They were Jutes, a Germanic tribe whose names are preserved today in Jutland and Juteborg. They invaded Britain in the 5th century under the leadership of Hengist and…