These four Italians and one Spaniard made a contribution to the history of the Catholic Church, positive or negative according to your view and that of historians. Each…
Author: Dean Swift
‘Dean Swift’ is a pen name: the author has been a soldier; he has worked in sales, TV, the making of films, as a teacher of English and history and a journalist. He is married with three grown-up children. They live in Spain.
Some Clement Popes
Six Italian and one French, the following pontificates flourished (or not depending on their history) during the fourteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Clement V (Bertrand de Got)…
Some Urban Popes
Three French popes and one Italian, dating from the eleventh century, the thirteenth, fourteenth and finally the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, form up for inspection in this post:…
Some Innocent Popes
From the twelfth century to the eighteenth century several Popes called Innocent stand out: they are:- Innocent III (Lotario dei Conti di Signi). He was Pope from 1198…
Latin American revolutionaries: Zapata & Villa
Emiliano Zapata was a Mexican revolutionary, son of a peasant of mixed (meztizo) blood. At around twelve he became an agricultural worker, then entered politics by arousing the…
New France & the North American fur trade
The name ‘New France’, which sounds rather arbitrary, was the name given to all the North American territories France claimed to own between 1524 and 1803. In reality,…
The Treaty of Nerchinsk
Before the seventeenth century China had been almost a myth; a legendary giant land in the Far East, barely visited by Europeans, a subject for dreams. But in…
The Nobel Peace Prize
In the case of a suitable candidate being found, this is an international prize, awarded annually, to a person or an institution considered by a Swedish/Norwegian committee, to…
Robert Owen, a founding father of Socialism
Though Owen was born in 1771, a son of a successful maker of saddles for horses and mules, he started work in a cotton mill in Manchester at…
The Piast Dynasty
Here is a strange and indeed rather wonderful thing; the Piasts were the first rulers of Poland, princes descended from a Polish legend called Piast (alive around 870…