History Today

For nearly four hundred years the “Peaceful and Tranquil City” was the administrative centre of Japan, writes George Woodcock, and for more than a thousand years remained the home of the Japanese Emperors.

Ross Watson describes how, as sovereign of Sweden until 1654 and later as an exile in Rome, Queen Christina was a lavish and discriminating patron of the arts.

Seven hundred years ago King Henry III was defeated at Lewes by Simon de Montfort; their abiding joint memorial is Edward the Confessor’s Abbey which Henry III refounded. By Martin Holmes.

J.L. Carr documents the abolition of the powerful Society of Jesus, by royal decree and after long controversy, in France in 1764.

Soldier, dramatist and architect, Vanbrugh has left a magnificent legacy of palatial building to the country of his Flemish grandfather’s adoption. By Christopher Lloyd.

While the Pilgrim Fathers were drawing up plans for sailing to America, writes Iris Macfarlane, Thomas Roe in India was laying the foundations in a very different form of British Empire.

“Glory” and “good sense” were the watchwords adopted by Louis XIV for his reign, writes J.H. Salmon, and “good sense” on the whole prevailed so long as Colbert was the King's chief Minister.

J.H. Bennett introduces William Dampier, the circumnavigator of the globe, and the first Englishman to land in Australia, who spent part of his youth as a planter in Jamaica and a Caribbean buccaneer.

An accomplished Latin poet, no less distinguished in “council and prudent matters of state,” an expert cartographer and an enterprising ship-builder, William Petty was a many-sided man, typical of the scientific spirit of the later seventeenth century. By K. Theodore Hoppen.

Four centuries ago the title of Dalai Lama was conferred on a Tibetan abbot by a Mongol sovereign, writes George Woodcock. Fourteen incarnations of the Compassionate Bodhisattva have since ruled Tibet as priest-kings.