Empires and Cathedrals

Anne was tried on substantially fabricated charges of adultery (including incest with her own brother George Boleyn) and beheaded with a French swordsman's sword — imported specially because the standard English execution axe was considered too crude for a queen. She had failed to produce a male heir; Henry wanted to marry Jane Seymour (which he did ten days after Anne's execution). Catherine of Aragon, Henry's first wife, was the one who died of natural causes (probably cancer, 1536). Catherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, was also beheaded (1542). No English queen was ever burned at the stake.

25 December 800. The coronation revived the title of Roman emperor in the West — extinct since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 — and founded what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire. 962 was Otto I's later coronation that the medieval institutional continuity sometimes starts from. 1066 was the Norman Conquest. 1215 was Magna Carta.

Michelangelo did the ceiling on commission from Pope Julius II, mostly working on his back on scaffolding for four years and complaining bitterly the entire time. Leonardo was the same generation but mostly painted small panels and the *Last Supper* (a fresco in Milan, not a Vatican commission). Raphael was painting the Pope's living rooms — the Stanze, right next door to the Sistine — at the same time. Botticelli had actually painted some of the *wall* frescoes in the Sistine 30 years earlier, but not the ceiling.

14 October 1066 is the most famous date in English history — a battle that lasted nine hours and ended with King Harold dying with an arrow somewhere in his face (the famous Bayeux Tapestry image). Within twenty years William had replaced approximately 95% of the English landed elite with Normans. The other dates are all real but later: 1100 was Henry I's accession, 1215 was the Magna Carta, 1485 was Bosworth and the Tudor succession.

Cromwell ruled as *Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland* under the Instrument of Government (December 1653) — England's only written constitution to date. In 1657 the Second Protectorate Parliament offered him the crown; he agonised over it for six weeks before declining. The reasons were practical and ideological: too many of his senior army officers were committed republicans who would have rebelled against a Cromwellian monarchy. He died in office on 3 September 1658; his son Richard was a brief and unsuccessful Lord Protector before the monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660.

Runnymede is a meadow on the Thames between Windsor and Staines. The charter had 63 clauses; most were specific feudal grievances the barons wanted addressed; one — clause 39, on the prohibition of arbitrary imprisonment — is the medieval ancestor of due process. The pope annulled it within ten weeks, John died of dysentery the next year, and the surviving 1225 reissue is what actually entered English law. The other dates are all real but unconnected: Christmas Day 1066 was William the Conqueror's coronation; 6 January 1066 was the coronation of Harold Godwinson; 14 July 1453 was the French capture of Bordeaux, ending the Hundred Years' War.

Charlemagne (768–814) was the Frankish king who built a continental empire roughly twice the size of modern France. The pope crowned him Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800 — the formal beginning of what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire, although in his lifetime it was just *the Empire*. After his death the empire was divided among his grandsons at the Treaty of Verdun (843), producing the rough geographic templates of modern France, Germany, and Italy. The eastern European territories were ruled by separate non-Frankish dynasties his whole life.

Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066; coronation at Westminster Abbey on 25 December 1066. William followed up with twenty years of substantial conquest consolidation — by the time of the Domesday Book (1086) approximately 95% of English landholders had been replaced by Normans and other continental followers of William. Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042–1066) had been the immediately-preceding Anglo-Saxon king whose disputed succession produced the 1066 crisis.

29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting at the walls; his body was never reliably identified. The siege gun — built by the Hungarian engineer Orban — had a 27-foot bronze barrel and fired stone balls weighing 600 pounds. The 1204 sack was the Fourth Crusade's catastrophic detour; the Byzantines recovered the city in 1261. Manzikert (1071) was the earlier Seljuk Turkish victory that lost most of Anatolia. The 1683 Siege of Vienna was 230 years later, after the Ottomans had become a different kind of empire.

The Saint Vitus shrine at Saverne in the Vosges was the recognised late-medieval European pilgrimage destination for *Sankt-Veit-Tanz* — Saint Vitus's dance — the religious-medical category for involuntary collective dancing afflictions. The Strasbourg authorities transported the surviving dancers in carts to the shrine over several weeks; the dancing substantively ended over the following month, probably more from the separation of affected individuals from each other and from the original triggering environment than from the religious intervention itself. Frau Troffea, the initial Strasbourg dancer, was not executed; her later fate is not documented.

Pope Clement VI banned the flagellants in the bull *Inter sollicitudines* on 20 October 1349. The movement had become a parallel religious authority distributing forgiveness without clerical mediation, and was increasingly anti-clerical and anti-Jewish in its public performances. The papal ban was substantively effective: the public movement collapsed across most of Europe within six months. Underground successor movements continued through the 14th and 15th centuries (Konrad Schmid's Thuringian heretics being the best-documented), but the public organised processions ended. Charles IV had no doctrinal authority. The Council of Constance was 65 years later (1414–1418).

Catherine of Aragon (divorced, after a 24-year marriage and the political crisis that broke England from Rome), Anne Boleyn (beheaded for fabricated adultery, 1536), Jane Seymour (died of postpartum complications, 1537), Anne of Cleves (divorced after six months because Henry didn't like the look of her), Catherine Howard (beheaded for actual adultery, 1542, at age 18 or 19), and Catherine Parr (outlived him, married someone else, died 1548). Henry himself died at Whitehall on 28 January 1547, aged 55. None were burned — execution by burning was for heretics, not queens.

Suleiman besieged Rhodes from June to December 1522 with an army of about 200,000. The Hospitallers (under Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam) held out for six months before surrendering on generous terms. They evacuated to Europe with their archives, their movable property, and their honour; eight years later Charles V granted them Malta, which they ruled until Napoleon displaced them in 1798. Mehmed II had taken Constantinople 69 years earlier (1453); Selim I had taken Cairo (1517); Murad IV reigned a century later (1623–1640).

Charles IV of France died in February 1328 without a male heir, ending three centuries of Capetian male succession. The French magnates invoked the Salic Law to exclude Edward III of England (whose mother Isabella was Philip IV's only surviving daughter) and gave the throne to his more distant male-line cousin Philip of Valois. Edward initially accepted the decision and even paid homage to Philip for Aquitaine in 1329. He revoked his acceptance in 1337 after a sequence of subsequent diplomatic provocations. The other three answers all describe real disputes between the English and French crowns of the period, but the constitutional succession question is the spine of the war.

Isabella was the daughter of King Philip IV of France and the wife of Edward II. She invaded England with her lover Roger Mortimer in September 1326, deposed her husband, and ran the kingdom as regent for her teenage son Edward III. The son grew up, organised a coup at Nottingham Castle in October 1330, executed Mortimer, and confined his mother to comfortable house arrest. Isabella lived another 28 years and died at Castle Rising in Norfolk. The 18th-century English label *She-Wolf of France* was retrospective and partisan; her contemporaries used more neutral terms.

Joan was captured by Burgundian forces in May 1430 and sold to the English. The English wanted her dead but needed cover, so she was tried by an English-aligned ecclesiastical court at Rouen on charges of heresy and cross-dressing. She was burned in Rouen's marketplace on 30 May 1431. She was 19. A 1456 retrial — convened by the king whose coronation she had made possible — formally rehabilitated her. She was canonised as a saint in 1920, almost 500 years later. The Spanish Inquisition was founded in 1478 and had nothing to do with her.

Wittenberg, in Saxony, was the small university town where Luther taught theology. The Castle Church (the *Schlosskirche*) had a notice-board door used for academic announcements; that's where the theses went, in standard Latin academic format. The nailing-to-the-door story is contested — the actual mechanism may have been mailing the theses to the archbishop — but the 31 October 1517 date is solid. The proceeds from indulgence sales Luther was protesting were being used to rebuild St Peter's. Cologne Cathedral is medieval but irrelevant; the Frauenkirche in Munich is 15th-century but had nothing to do with the Reformation.

Edward III specifically denied Mortimer the beheading privilege that was normally extended to noblemen. He was hanged naked at Tyburn on 29 November 1330 on the common gallows. Tyburn (modern Marble Arch) would be London's main public execution site for the next 453 years. Beheading on Tower Green was the comparatively dignified end reserved for senior aristocrats — Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey. Hanging, drawing, and quartering at Smithfield was the punishment for treason against the Crown by commoners. Burial alive was practiced in medieval Europe but not at this level of state ceremony.

Hattin, on 4 July 1187. The Crusader army marched through Galilean summer drought to relieve Tiberias; Saladin manoeuvred them onto the waterless Horns of Hattin and destroyed them in a single day. Most of the surviving Templars and Hospitallers were executed; the captured True Cross was carted off. Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin in October. Manzikert was 1071, a century earlier. Damietta was a Crusader target in the Fifth and Seventh Crusades but never the decisive engagement. Acre's fall in 1291 was the end of the Crusader states — also significant, but more than a century after Hattin.

The Armada lost about 50 ships out of 130. The Channel engagements (Plymouth, Portland, the Isle of Wight, Gravelines) killed relatively few. The disaster came on the way home: unable to return via the Channel with the English fleet behind them, the Spanish sailed north around Scotland and through the rough North Atlantic in autumn weather, with damaged ships and bad charts. About 35 ships were wrecked on the Scottish and Irish coasts. Survivors who washed ashore in Ireland were mostly killed by English colonial authorities. The Channel storms had nothing to do with the Dutch directly, but Dutch rebel ships did blockade Parma's army at Dunkirk and prevent the planned invasion link-up.

Urban II preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. Gregory VII is the pope of the Investiture Controversy — he made Emperor Henry IV stand barefoot in the snow at Canossa in 1077. Innocent III, a century after Urban, was the pope of the catastrophic Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204 instead of going to Jerusalem. Clement V, two centuries later, was the Avignon pope who suppressed the Knights Templar in 1312.

Clement VI banned the *Brethren of the Cross* — the flagellants — in October 1349. The movement had grown into a parallel religious authority, distributing forgiveness without clerical mediation and producing several anti-clerical and increasingly anti-Jewish pogroms across the Rhineland in 1348–49. Clement himself spent the worst of the Black Death sitting in a chamber between two large fires on his physician's instructions and survived. Charles IV was the secular ruler of the Holy Roman Empire but had no jurisdiction over Catholic doctrinal questions. The Patriarch of Constantinople led the Eastern Orthodox church — separate institution since 1054. The University of Paris was a theological authority but did not issue binding decrees.

Maimonides served Saladin's vizier Al-Qadi al-Fadil and later Saladin's son Al-Afdal. His *Guide for the Perplexed* (c. 1190) is the major work of medieval Jewish philosophy. Avicenna had been dead for 130 years by then (980–1037) and lived in Persia, never Cairo. Averroes was a contemporary of Maimonides — also from Córdoba, also a doctor — but he stayed in Andalusia and served the Almohad rulers there. Al-Razi (c. 854–925) was even earlier, the great Persian physician and freethinker.