Italy

Michael E. Martin recounts how Normans from Italy invaded the Byzantine Empire and Robert Guiscard sought to inherit the Imperial Crown.

J.J.N. McGurk describes the life of the tall, corpulent and silent Aquinas, the greatest of medieval philosophers, who worked and taught in Italy, France and Germany during the thirteenth century.

Alan Haynes profiles a satirist, playwright and man of letters; Aretino led a prodigal and adventurous life in late Renaissance Italy.

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, writes E.R. Chamberlin, a young French King took advantage of the Italian ‘genius for dissension’.

Peter Partner describes how resentment against the exile of the Papacy in Avignon led to the ‘War of the Eight Saints’ in 1375 by the ‘Guelf’ cities of Italy.

Judith Hook profiles the genius of Rome during the great Catholic Reformation.

Judith Hook describes how, during the sixteenth century gifted churchmen in Italy tried, against crosscurrents of foreign influence, to heal the divisions of Christianity

Despite his shortcomings, writes Colin Davies, the great orator served his city with unselfish zeal; sensitiveness, determination and humanity characterized both Cicero's public and private life.

This cultured but energetic ruler left behind him ‘a governmental machine that was the wonder and envy of Europe’.

Stewart Perowne describes how, in the fourteenth century ‘the last of the Roman tribunes’, but one of the first of political liberators.