William Miller eBooks
eBooks di William Miller di Formato Epub
Medieval Rome. E-book. Formato EPUB William Miller - Perennial Press, 2018 -
No one who visits both Rome and Athens at the present day can fail to be struck by one remarkable difference between the two famous cities, which stand for so much in the history of the world. While Athens is composed of a very old group of ruins and a brand-new town, which was rapidly made to order in Germany; while every trace of that mediæval splendour, which once distinguished the court of the Frank dukes, has vanished; in Rome, on the other hand, we have side by side the works of the kings, the memorials of the Republic, the monuments of the Empire, the remains of the Middle Ages, and the modern erections that have sprung up since 1870. Thus, while at Athens there is a sudden transition from buildings, which were constructed in the golden age of Periklês, to houses planned in the reigns of Otho and George, Rome furnishes us with an almost unbroken series of historical monuments from the time of Romulus down to that of Vittorio Emanuele III. The rise of the Papacy saved the Imperial city from falling in the Middle Ages to the condition of a decayed town, and, after it had ceased to be the capital of a vast Empire, it was still the centre of the religious world. No period in the history of the Papacy, and, therefore, of that mediæval Rome, which it represents, is more important than the eleventh century, that same century which witnessed the transformation of our own history by the Norman conquest of England. Under Benedict IX., the Roman Church reached a level of degradation, almost as low as that to which it descended under the Borgias. The Vicar of Christ sold his high office to Gregory VI., in return for an assignment to his private uses of the Peter's Pence that were paid by the English. The loss of the temporal power had accompanied this abandonment of spiritual aims. The pilgrim to the Holy City was lucky if he escaped the bands of robbers which infested the approaches to it. Within the walls, the churches were allowed to fall into ruin, and the priests to run riot in every kind of debauchery. Murder and outrage were of nightly occurrence in the streets, and the Roman nobles did not spare even the altar of St. Peter in their quest for plunder. They were, indeed, the arbiters of the Papacy, and made Popes at their will, just as in former days the prætorians had proclaimed emperors according as it suited their purpose. In short, about the middle of the eleventh century, Rome and its Church were in the lowest depths of humiliation, when suddenly there arose a man who raised the Papacy to a pinnacle which it had never occupied before, and made the name of Rome once more feared and respected by the great ones of the earth...
The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. E-book. Formato EPUB William Miller - Perennial Press, 2018 -
For over a thousand years, from the end of the fourth century to the middle of the fifteenth, the Byzantine Empire was the centre of a civilization equal to that of any age in brilliancy, certainly the most brilliant known to the Middle Ages, and possibly even the only real civilization which prevailed in Europe between the close of the fifth century and the beginning of the eleventh. While the barbarian states of the West were laboriously developing the elements of a new culture from the scanty remains of the Roman tradition, Byzantium—Rome’s successor, and imbued with the spirit and teachings of Hellenism—never ceased to be the centre of refinement and the home of a great movement in thought and art. Byzantium, indeed, was no mere transmitter of the tradition of antiquity. Contact with the East had modified her, and the influence of Christianity had left a deep imprint; and, contrary to a still widely-spread opinion, she was capable of originality and creation. Hellenism, Christianity, and the East met and combined in forming Byzantine civilization; and by the characteristic forms it assumed, by its superiority, as well as by the long and profound influence it exercised in both the Eastern and Western world, this civilization played a prominent part in the history of the Middle Ages, the history of thought, and the history of mankind...
The Rise and Fall of the First Bulgarian Empire. E-book. Formato EPUB William Miller - Perennial Press, 2018 -
LIKE the Serbs, but unlike the Albanians, the Bulgarians are not autochthonous inhabitants of the Balkan country to which they have given their name. It was not till 679 that this Finnish or Tartar race, after numerous previous incursions into the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire, definitely abandoned the triangle formed by the Black Sea, the Dnieper, and the Danube (the modern Bessarabia), and settled between the Danube and the Balkans (the ancient Moesia). Thus, the first Bulgarian state practically coincided with the Bulgarian principality created 1200 years later by the Treaty of Berlin. The Finnish or Tartar invaders found this country already peopled with Slays, immigrants like themselves but of different customs and language. As time went on, the conquered, as so often happens, absorbed the conquerors; the Bulgarians adopted the Slav speech of the vanquished; the country received the name of the invaders, and became known to all time as "Bulgaria." Still, after the lapse of more than twelve centuries, the "Bulgarians," as this amalgam of races came to be called, possess qualities differing from those of their purely Slav neighbours, and during the recent European war Bulgarian political writers reminded the world that the Bulgarian people was not of Slavonic origin. The Patriarch Nicephorus has left the earliest account of this Bulgarian invasion and settlement. He tells how the Bulgarians originally lived on the shores of the Sea of Azov and on the banks of the river Kuban; how their chief, Kovrat (identified with the "Kurt" of the earliest list of Bulgarian rulers), left five sons, the third of whom, Asparuch (or Isparich), migrated to Bessarabia. There he and his Bulgarians might have remained, had not the Emperor Constantine IV Pogonatus undertaken an expedition for the purpose of punishing them for their raids into the borderlands of his dominions. The strength of the Bulgarian position in a difficult country and an attack of gout obliged the Emperor to retire to Mesembria. A panic seized the troops left behind to continue the siege; the Bulgarians pursued them across the Danube as far as Varna. Neither Greeks nor Slays offered resistance; the Emperor had to make peace and pay a tribute, in order to save Thrace from invasion...