1.
Holy Roman Empress
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Holy Roman Empress or Empress of the Holy Roman Empire is the title given to the consort or regent of the Holy Roman Emperor. Their consorts were thus Empresses, but not necessarily German Queens, the following were all Queens of Germany as well as Roman Empresses. List of German queens List of Italian queens List of Burgundian consorts
2.
Kiev
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Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population in July 2015 was 2,887,974, Kiev is an important industrial, scientific, educational, and cultural centre of Eastern Europe. It is home to many industries, higher education institutions. The city has an infrastructure and highly developed system of public transport. The citys name is said to derive from the name of Kyi, during its history, Kiev, one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe, passed through several stages of great prominence and relative obscurity. The city probably existed as a centre as early as the 5th century. A Slavic settlement on the trade route between Scandinavia and Constantinople, Kiev was a tributary of the Khazars, until seized by the Varangians in the mid-9th century. Under Varangian rule, the city became a capital of the Kievan Rus, completely destroyed during the Mongol invasion in 1240, the city lost most of its influence for the centuries to come. It was a capital of marginal importance in the outskirts of the territories controlled by its powerful neighbours, first the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, followed by Poland. The city prospered again during the Russian Empires Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, in 1917, after the Ukrainian National Republic declared independence from the Russian Empire, Kiev became its capital. From 1919 Kiev was an important center of the Armed Forces of South Russia and was controlled by the White Army. From 1921 onwards Kiev was a city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was proclaimed by the Red Army, during World War II, the city again suffered significant damage, but quickly recovered in the post-war years, remaining the third largest city of the Soviet Union. During the countrys transformation to an economy and electoral democracy. Kievs armament-dependent industrial output fell after the Soviet collapse, adversely affecting science, Kiev emerged as the most pro-Western region of Ukraine where parties advocating tighter integration with the European Union dominate during elections. As a prominent city with a history, its English name was subject to gradual evolution. The early English spelling was derived from Old East Slavic form Kyjev, the name is associated with that of Kyi, the legendary eponymous founder of the city. Early English sources use various names, including Kiou, Kiow, Kiew, on one of the oldest English maps of the region, Russiae, Moscoviae et Tartariae published by Ortelius the name of the city is spelled Kiou. On the 1650 map by Guillaume de Beauplan, the name of the city is Kiiow, in the book Travels, by Joseph Marshall, the city is referred to as Kiovia
3.
Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor
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Henry IV ascended to King of the Germans in 1056. From 1084 until his abdication in 1105, he was also referred to as the King of the Romans. He was the emperor of the Salian dynasty and one of the most powerful. His reign was marked by the Investiture Controversy with the Papacy, several civil wars over his throne took place in both Italy and Germany. He died of illness, soon after defeating his sons army near Visé, in Lorraine, in 1056 at Aachen, Henry IV was enthroned as the King of the Germans by Pope Victor II, while his mother, Agnes of Poitou, became regent. In 1062 the young king was kidnapped as a result of the Coup of Kaiserswerth, Agnes retired to a convent, and the government was placed in the hands of Anno. His first action was to back Pope Alexander II against the antipope Honorius II, the education and training of Henry were supervised by Anno, who was called his magister, while Adalbert of Hamburg, archbishop of Bremen, was styled Henrys patronus. Henrys education seems to have been neglected, and his willful, the malleable Adalbert of Hamburg soon became the confidante of the ruthless Henry. Eventually, during an absence of Anno from Germany, Henry managed to control of his civil duties. Henrys entire reign was marked by apparent efforts to consolidate Imperial power, in reality, however, he carefully worked to maintain the loyalty of the nobility and the support of the pope. In 1066, he expelled from the Crown Council Adalbert of Hamburg, Henry also adopted urgent military measures against the Slav pagans, who had recently invaded Germany and besieged Hamburg. In June 1066 Henry married Bertha of Savoy/Turin, daughter of Otto, Count of Savoy, in the same year, at the request of the Pope, he assembled an army to fight the Italo-Normans of southern Italy. Henrys troops had reached Augsburg when he received news that Godfrey of Tuscany, husband of the powerful Matilda of Canossa, in 1068, driven by his impetuous character and his infidelities, Henry attempted to divorce Bertha. Henry obeyed and his wife returned to Court, Henry believed that the Papal opposition was less about his marriage than about overthrowing lay power within the Empire, in favour of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the late 1060s, Henry demonstrated his determination to reduce any opposition and he led expeditions against the Lutici and the margrave of a district east of Saxony, soon afterwards he had to quell the rebellions of Rudolf of Swabia and Berthold of Carinthia. Much more serious was Henrys struggle with Otto of Nordheim, duke of Bavaria and it was decided that a trial by combat should take place at Goslar, but when Ottos demand for safe conduct to and from the place of meeting was refused, he declined to appear. He was declared deposed in Bavaria, and his Saxon estates were plundered, however, he obtained sufficient support to carry on a struggle with the king in Saxony and Thuringia until 1071, when he submitted at Halberstadt. Henry aroused the hostility of the Thuringians by supporting Siegfried, archbishop of Mainz, in his efforts to exact tithes from them
4.
Vsevolod I of Kiev
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Vsevolod I Yaroslavich, ruled as Grand Prince of Kiev from 1078 until his death. He was the fifth and favourite son of Yaroslav I the Wise by Ingigerd Olafsdottir, on his seal from his last years, he was named Andrei Vsevolodu in Greek, implying that his baptismal name was Andrew. However, the couples son Vladimir Monomakh bore the name of the Roman/Byzantine emperor. Together with his elder brothers Iziaslav and Sviatoslav he formed a sort of triumvirate which jointly waged war on the steppe nomads, polovtsy. In 1055 Vsevolod launched an expedition against the Torks who had in the previous years expelled the Pechenegs from the Pontic steppes and he also made peace with the Cumans who appeared for the first time in Europe in the same year. The Cumans invaded his principality in 1061 and routed Vsevolod in a battle, Vsevolod persuaded his brother, Iziaslav, and their distant cousin, Vseslav to join him and they together attacked the Torks in 1060. In 1067 Vsevolods Greek wife died and he married a Kypchak princess. She brought him another son, who drowned after the Battle of the Stugna River, the Cumans again invaded Kievan Rus in 1068. The three brothers united their forces against them, but the Cumans routed them on the Alta River, after their defeat, Vsevolod withdrew to Pereyaslav. However, its citizens rose up in rebellion, dethroned Iziaslav. Vsevolod and Sviatoslav made no attempt to expel the usurper from Kiev and they forced their brother to flee from Kiev in 1073. Feodosy, the hegumen or head of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev remained loyal to Iziaslav. Iziaslav granted Sviatoslavs former principality to Vsevolod, but Sviatoslavs sons considered the Principality of Chernigov as their own patrimony or otchina, Oleg Sviatoslavich made an alliance with the Cumans and invaded Chernigov. Iziaslav came to Vsevolods rescue and they forced Oleg to retreat, after Iziaslavs death, Vsevolod, as their fathers only surviving son, took the Kievan throne, thus uniting the three core principalities—Kiev, Chernigov and Pereyaslavl—in Kievan Rus. He appointed his eldest son, Vladimir Monomach to administer Chernigov, Vsevolod spoke five foreign languages, according to Vladimir Monomachs Autobiography. Historian George Vernadsky, these probably included Greek and Cuman, because of the nationality of his two wives, and he likely spoke Latin, Norse and Ossetian. He lost most of his battles, his eldest son, Vladimir Monomakh, the last years of his reign were clouded by grave illness, and Vladimir Monomakh presided over the government. Vsevolod and his first wife Anastasia had only one known son, ianka or Anna Vsevolodovna who was engaged to Constantine Dukas in 1074, but she never married She became a nun and started a school for girls
5.
Anno Domini
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The terms anno Domini and before Christ are used to label or number years in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The term anno Domini is Medieval Latin and means in the year of the Lord, There is no year zero in this scheme, so the year AD1 immediately follows the year 1 BC. This dating system was devised in 525 by Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor, the Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world today. Traditionally, English followed Latin usage by placing the AD abbreviation before the year number, however, BC is placed after the year number, which also preserves syntactic order. The abbreviation is widely used after the number of a century or millennium. Because BC is the English abbreviation for Before Christ, it is sometimes concluded that AD means After Death. However, this would mean that the approximate 33 years commonly associated with the life of Jesus would not be included in either of the BC, astronomical year numbering and ISO8601 avoid words or abbreviations related to Christianity, but use the same numbers for AD years. The Anno Domini dating system was devised in 525 by Dionysius Exiguus to enumerate the years in his Easter table. His system was to replace the Diocletian era that had used in an old Easter table because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians. The last year of the old table, Diocletian 247, was followed by the first year of his table. Thus Dionysius implied that Jesus Incarnation occurred 525 years earlier, without stating the year during which his birth or conception occurred. Blackburn & Holford-Strevens briefly present arguments for 2 BC,1 BC, There were inaccuracies in the list of consuls There were confused summations of emperors regnal years It is not known how Dionysius established the year of Jesuss birth. It is convenient to initiate a calendar not from the day of an event. For example, the Islamic calendar begins not from the date of the Hegira, at the time, it was believed by some that the Resurrection and end of the world would occur 500 years after the birth of Jesus. The old Anno Mundi calendar theoretically commenced with the creation of the based on information in the Old Testament. It was believed that, based on the Anno Mundi calendar, Anno Mundi 6000 was thus equated with the resurrection and the end of the world but this date had already passed in the time of Dionysius. The Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede, who was familiar with the work of Dionysius Exiguus, used Anno Domini dating in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731. e. On the continent of Europe, Anno Domini was introduced as the era of choice of the Carolingian Renaissance by the English cleric and scholar Alcuin in the late eighth century
6.
Kipchaks
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The Kipchak were a Turkic nomadic people. The Cuman-Kipchak confederation was a predecessor of the Kazakh Khanate and, later, the Kipchaks described their name as meaning hollow tree, as it was, according to them, inside a hollow tree that their original human ancestress gave birth to her son. They are called Polovtsy in Russian and Ukrainian and similar names in other Slavic languages, the Kipchaks were a tribal confederation that originally settled on the River Irtysh, possibly connected to the Kimäks. According to Ukrainian anthropologists, Kipchaks had racial characteristics of Caucasians and Mongoloids, namely a broad flat face, researcher E. P. Alekseeva drew attention to the fact that European Kipchak stone images have both Mongoloid and Caucasoid faces. However, in her opinion, Kipchaks, who settled in Georgia in the first half of the 12th century, were predominantly Caucasoid in appearance with some admixture of Mongoloid traits and they were already joined by Cumans. In the course of the Turkic expansion they migrated into Siberia, eventually they occupied a vast territory in the Eurasian steppe, stretching from north of the Aral Sea westward to the region north of the Black Sea, establishing a state known as Desht-i Qipchaq. Cumans expanded further westward, by the 11th century reaching Moldavia, Wallachia, in 1089, they were defeated by Ladislaus I of Hungary, and again by Knyaz Vladimir Monomakh of the Rus in the 12th century. They were finally crushed by the Mongols in 1241, after the fall of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde rulers continued to hold Saraj until 1502. The Cumans fled to Hungary, and some of their warriors became mercenaries for the Latin crusaders, members of the Bahri dynasty, the first dynasty of Mamluks in Egypt, were Kipchaks/Cumans, one of the most prominent examples was Sultan Baybars, born in Solhat, Crimea. Some Kipchaks served in the Yuan dynasty and became the Kharchins, the Kipchaks and Cumans spoke a Turkic language whose most important surviving record is the Codex Cumanicus, a late 13th-century dictionary of words in Kipchak, Cuman, and Latin. The presence in Egypt of Turkic-speaking Mamluks also stimulated the compilation of Kipchak/Cuman-Arabic dictionaries, some Kipchaks and Cumans are also known to have converted to Christianity, around the 11th century, at the suggestion of the Georgians as they allied in their conflicts against the Muslims. A great number were baptized at the request of the Georgian king David IV, from 1120, there was a Kipchak national Christian church and an important clergy. Following the Mongol conquest, Islam rose in popularity among the Kipchaks of the Golden Horde, during the 16th and 17th centuries the Turkic language among the Armenian communities of the Kipchak people was Armeno-Kipchak. They were settled in the Lviv and Kamianets-Podilskyi areas of what is now Ukraine, the modern Northwestern branch of the Turkic language is often referred to as the Kipchak branch. The languages in this branch are considered to be descendants of the Kipchak language. Some of the traditionally included are the Karachays, Siberian Tatars, Nogays, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Volga Tatars. There is also a village named Kipchak in Crimea, kypshak is one of the constituent tribes of the Middle Horde confederation of the Kazakh people. The name Kipchak also occurs as a surname in Kazakhstan, some of the descendants of the Kipchaks are the Bashkirian clan Qipsaq
7.
Stade
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Stade is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany and part of the Hamburg Metropolitan Region. It is the seat of the named after it. The city was first mentioned in a document from 994 and it includes the urban districts of Bützfleth, Hagen, Haddorf and Wiepenkathen which have a district council of their own with some autonomous decision making rights. Stade is located on the lower Elbe river and the German Timber-Frame Road, the first human settlers came to the Stade area in 30,000 BC. Since 1180 Stade belonged to the Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen, in early 1208 King Valdemar II of Denmark and his troops conquered Stade. In August Valdemar IIs cousin being in enmity with the king, in 1209 Emperor Otto IV persuaded his ally Valdemar II to withdraw into the north of the Elbe, and the deposed Prince-Archbishop Valdemar took Stade. On 2 May 1209 Otto IV granted important town privileges to Stade, Otto IV confirmed the burghers to be personally free and recognised them constituting a political entity of their own law, the burgenses and optimi cives of Stade. Property within the boundaries could not be subjected to feudal overlordship and was to be freely inherited without feudal claims to reversion. Fair juridical procedures were constituted and maximal fines fixed, Otto IV obliged himself to prevent burghers from being taken as hostages and to liberate captured burghers. After Otto IV had changed his mind and reinvested Prince-Archbishop Valdemar with the See in 1211, in 1213 Ottos elder brother Count Palatine Henry V of the Rhine, reconquered Stade for the Prince-Archbishop. In 1215 Henry repelled another Danish attack on Stade, in the winter of 1216 Valdemar II and his Danish troops, unable to take the city of Stade, ravaged the County of Stade. From then on Stade remained a part of the Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen, in medieval times, Stade was a prominent member of the Hanseatic League, but was later eclipsed by Hamburg. In 1611 the city signed a contract with Sephardic Jews, allowing the foundation of a community, in 1648, by the Treaty of Westphalia, the Prince-Archbishopric of Bremen underwent a constitutional transformation from a prince-bishopric into a monarchy, the Duchy of Bremen. The duchy and the neighboured Principality of Verden, colloquially referred to as Bremen-Verden, were granted by the Treaty of Westphalia as an appanage to the Swedish crown, Stades heyday lasted until the Thirty Years War. In 1628 Tilly conquered the town, shortly thereafter, Sweden took possession of it until 1636. After a period of Danish occupation, Sweden finally recaptured it in 1643 and was officially granted possession of it, together with the Archbishopric of Bremen. Two-thirds of the town were razed in the town fire on 26 May 1659. The town was again to the same plan
8.
Margrave
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Margrave was originally the medieval title for the military commander assigned to maintain the defense of one of the border provinces of the Holy Roman Empire or of a kingdom. That position became hereditary in certain feudal families in the Empire, thereafter, those domains were absorbed in larger realms or the titleholders adopted titles indicative of full sovereignty. Etymologically, the margrave is the English and French form of the German noble title Markgraf. As a noun and hereditary title, margrave was common to the languages of Europe, a Markgraf originally functioned as the military governor of a Carolingian mark, a medieval border province. The greater exposure of a province to military invasion mandated that the margrave be provided with military forces. As a military governor, the margraves authority often extended over a larger than the province proper. The margrave thus usually came to exercise commensurately greater politico-military power than other nobles, the margrave maintained the greater armed forces and fortifications required for repelling invasion, which increased his political strength and independence relative to the monarch. Most marks, and their margraves, sprung up along the Eastern border of the Carolingian Empire, the Breton Mark on the Atlantic Ocean and on the border of peninsular Brittany, and the Marca Hispanica on the Muslim frontier are notable exceptions. The Crusaders created new perilous borders, prone to war against the Saracens, hence had use for real border marches. These margraves became substantially independent rulers of states under the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Emperor, similar to the evolution of dukes, landgraves, counts palatine. The Golden Bull of 1356 was issued by Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, the Mark Brandenburg became the nucleus of the House of Hohenzollerns later Kingdom of Prussia and the springboard to their eventual accession as German Emperors in 1871. They also inherited several, mainly Eastern European and Burgundian, principalities, Austria was originally called Marchia Orientalis in Latin, the eastern borderland, as Austria formed the eastern outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, on the border with the Magyars and the Slavs. Since the 19th century the term has been translated as Ostmark by some Germanophones, another Mark in the south-east, Styria, still appears as Steiermark in German today. The Margraves of Brandenburg and the Margraves of Meissen eventually became, respectively, by the 19th century, the sovereigns in Germany, Italy and Austria had all adopted higher titles, and not a single sovereign margraviate remained. However, from 1817 his male-line descendants of both marriages were internationally recognised as entitled to the prefix, which all used henceforth. The title of Margrave of Baden has been borne as a title of only by the head of the House of Zähringen since the death of the last reigning Grand Duke, Frederick II. Likewise, Margrave of Meissen is used as a title of pretence by the claimant to the Kingdom of Saxony since the death in exile of its last monarch, King Fredrick Augustus III, the margrave/marquis ranked below its nations equivalent of duke or of prince, but above count. The wife of a margrave is a margravine, in Germany and Austria, where titles were borne by all descendants in the male line of the original grantee, men and women alike, each daughter was a Markgräfin as each son was a Markgraf
