Europe

Richard Cavendish marks the anniversary of the founding of Switzerland's first university, at Basel, on April 4th, 1460.

Jan Gossaert made his name working for the Burgundian court and was among the first northern artists to visit Rome, writes Susan Foister, curator of 'Jan Gossaert's Renaissance', the only exhibition in more than 45 years of works by this archetypal ‘Old Master’.

During the disturbed tenth century in Western Europe, royal power held its ground and extended its authority only in Germany-whence the Emperor Otto III sallied into Italy with the purpose of reviving Roman classical tradition and combining it with the dream of a Christian Commonwealth under imperial aegis. By J.B. Morrall.

At what point did it begin to matter what you wore? Ulinka Rublack looks at why the Renaissance was a turning point in people’s attitudes to clothes and their appearance.

Though they originated in China, it was in the capitals of early modern Europe that fireworks flourished. They united art and science in awesome displays of poltical might, as Simon Werrett explains.

Court fashion, a love of birdsong and the pressures of being a king are some of the subjects discussed in letters between Philip II of Spain and his teenage daughters. Janet Ravenscroft explores the human side of one of Europe’s most powerful Renaissance monarchs.

Little remains of the great North African empire that was Rome's most formidable enemy, because, as Richard Miles explains, only its complete annihilation could satisfy its younger rival.

At the beginning of the ninth century, Charlemagne—already the master of Western Europe—was crowned by a calculating Pope as the supreme sovereign of the Christian world. Peter Munz asks what the real significance of his new title really was?

At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys.