Nausicaa
Nausicaa is a character in Homer's Odyssey. She is the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia, her name, in Greek, means "burner of ships". In Book Six of the Odyssey, Odysseus is shipwrecked on the coast of the island of Scheria. Nausicaä and her handmaidens go to the sea-shore to wash clothes. Awoken by their games, Odysseus emerges from the forest naked, scaring the servants away, begs Nausicaä for aid. Nausicaä gives Odysseus some of the laundry to wear, takes him to the edge of the town. Realizing that rumors might arise if Odysseus is seen with her and the servants go ahead into town, but first she advises Odysseus to go directly to Alcinous' house and make his case to Nausicaä's mother, Arete. Arete is known as wiser than Alcinous, Alcinous trusts her judgment. Odysseus follows this advice, approaching Arete and winning her approval, is received as a guest by Alcinous. During his stay, Odysseus recounts his adventures to his court; this recounting forms a substantial portion of the Odyssey.
Alcinous generously provides Odysseus with the ships that bring him home to Ithaca. Nausicaä is young and pretty. Nausicaä is known to have several brothers. According to Aristotle and Dictys of Crete, Nausicaä married Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, had a son named Ptoliporthus. Homer gives a literary account of love never expressed. While she is presented as a potential love interest to Odysseus – she says to her friend that she would like her husband to be like him, her father tells Odysseus he would let him marry her – no romantic relationship takes place between the pair. Nausicaä is a mother figure for Odysseus. Odysseus never tells Penelope about his encounter with Nausicaä, out of all the women he met on his long journey home; some suggest. The 2nd century BC grammarian Agallis attributed the invention of ball games to Nausicaä, most because Nausicaä was the first person in literature to be described playing with a ball. An asteroid discovered in the year 1879, 192 Nausikaa, is named after her.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, said: "One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it." In his 1892 lecture, "The Humor of Homer", Samuel Butler concludes that Nausicaa was the real authoress of the Odyssey, since the laundry scene is more realistic and plausible than many other scenes in the epic. His theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman was further developed in his 1897 book The Authoress of the Odyssey. An episode in James Joyce's Ulysses echoes the "Nausicaa" story to a degree: the character Gerty McDowell tempts Bloom. In 1907, the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály wrote the song "Nausikaa" to a poem by Aranka Bálint. Kodály showed great interest in Greek antiquity in his whole life: he not only studied the language and read up on the different editions of Homer’s Iliad and Odysseus, but he planned an opera about the latter figure since 1906. Only one song, "Nausikaa", survived from this opera plan. In 1915 the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski completed Métopes, Op. 29.
It is a cycle of three miniature tone poems drawing on Greek mythology. Each of the three movements features a female character encountered by Odysseus on his homeward voyage; the movements are: "The Isle of the Sirens", "Calypso" and "Nausicaa". William Faulkner named the cruise ship Nausikaa in his 1927 novel Mosquitoes. Armenian poet, prose writer Yeghishe Charents wrote his poem "Navzike" in 1936 about longing for his Nausicaa, himself being "lost" in the political storms of the forties. Robert Graves' 1955 novel Homer's Daughter presents Nausicaa as the author of the Odyssey, which draws on experiences and influences of her own life; the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote an opera entitled Nausicaa, first performed in 1961 at the Athens Festival. The Nobel Prize-winning Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott's poem; the manga and 1984 animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, was indirectly inspired by the character in the Odyssey. Miyazaki read a description of Nausicaa in a Japanese translation of Bernard Evslin's anthology of Greek mythology, which portrayed her as a lover of nature.
Miyazaki added other elements based on animist tradition. In 1991, the public aquarium Nausicaä Centre National de la Mer, one of the largest in Europe, opened in Boulogne-sur-Mer in France. In 2010, the band Glass Wave recorded a song entitled "Nausicaa", sung in the voice of the Phaeacian maiden. Nausicaans are a race of tall, aggressive humanoids in the Star Trek universe. Portions of this material originated as excerpts from the public-domain 1848 edition of the Classical Dictionary by John Lemprière. Media related to Nausicaa at Wikimedia Commons
Jane Ellen Harrison
Jane Ellen Harrison was a British classical scholar and linguist. Harrison is one of the founders, with Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology, she applied 19th century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a ‘career academic’. Harrison thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, during the period from 1898 to her death in 1903. Harrison was born in Cottingham, Yorkshire on 9 September 1850, her mother died shortly after she was born and she was educated by a series of governesses. Her governesses taught her German, Ancient Greek and Hebrew, but she expanded her knowledge to about sixteen languages, including Russian. Harrison spent most of her professional life at Newnham College, the progressive established college for women at Cambridge.
At Newnham, one of her students was Eugenie Sellers, the writer and poet, with whom she lived in England and in Paris and even had a relationship with in the late 1880s. Between 1880 and 1897 Harrison studied Greek art and archaeology at the British Museum under Sir Charles Newton. Harrison supported herself lecturing at the museum and at schools, her lectures became popular and 1600 people ended up attending her Glasgow lecture on Athenian gravestones. She travelled to Germany, where she met the scholar from Prague, Wilhelm Klein. Klein introduced her to Wilhelm Dörpfeld who invited her to participate in his archaeological tours in Greece, her early book The Odyssey in Art and Literature appeared in 1882. Harrison met the scholar D. S. MacColl, who asked her to marry him and she declined. Harrison suffered a severe depression and started to study the more primitive areas of Greek art in an attempt to cure herself. In 1888 Harrison began to publish in the periodical that Oscar Wilde was editing called The Woman's World on "The Pictures of Sappho."
Harrison ended up translating Mythologie figurée de la Grèce by Maxime Collignon as well as providing personal commentary to selections of Pausanias, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens by Margaret Verrall in the same year. These two major works caused Harrison to be awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Durham and Aberdeen. Harrison was engaged to marry the scholar R. A. Neil, but he died of appendicitis in 1901 before they could marry, she became the central figure of the group known as the Cambridge Ritualists. In 1903 her book Prolegomena on the Study of Greek Religion appeared. Harrison became close to Francis MacDonald Cornford, when he married in 1909 she became upset, she made a new friendship with Hope Mirrlees whom she referred to as her "spiritual daughter". Harrison retired from Newnham in 1922 and moved to Paris to live with Mirrlees, she and Mirrlees returned to London in 1925 where she was able to publish her memoirs through Leonard and Virginia Woolf's press, The Hogarth Press.
She lived three more years, to the age of 77, passed away at her house in Bloomsbury. She is now buried in East Finchley. Harrison was an atheist. Harrison was, at least a moderate suffragist. Rather than support women's suffrage by protesting, Harrison applied her scholarship in anthropology to defend women's right to vote. In responding to an anti-suffragist critic, Harrison demonstrates this moderate ideology: is not an attempt to arrogate man's prerogative of manhood. To this end, Harrison's motto was Terence's homo sum, her early work earned Harrison two honorary doctorates, an LLD from University of Aberdeen in 1895 and DLitt from the University of Durham in 1897. This recognition afforded Harrison the opportunity to return to Newnham College as a lecturer in 1898, her position was renewed continuously until Harrison retired in 1922. Harrison's first monograph, in 1882, drew on the thesis that both Homer's Odyssey and motifs of the Greek vase-painters were drawing upon similar deep sources for mythology, the opinion that had not been common in earlier classical archaeology, that the repertory of vase-painters offered some unusual commentaries on myth and ritual.
Her approach in her great work, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, was to proceed from the ritual to the myth it inspired.: "In theology facts are harder to seek, truth more difficult to formulate than in ritual." Thus she began her book with analyses of the best-known of the Athenian festivals: Anthesteria, harvest festivals Thargelia, Kallynteria and the women's festivals, in which she detected many primitive survivals, Arrophoria, Skirophoria and Haloa. Harrison commented on the cultural applications of Charles Darwin's work. Harrison and her generation depended upon anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (who was himself influenced by Darwin and evolutionary
Seville
Seville is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville, Spain. It is situated on the plain of the river Guadalquivir; the inhabitants of the city are known as sevillanos or hispalenses, after the Roman name of the city, Hispalis. Seville has a municipal population of about 690,000 as of 2016, a metropolitan population of about 1.5 million, making it the fourth-largest city in Spain and the 30th most populous municipality in the European Union. Its Old Town, with an area of 4 square kilometres, contains three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Alcázar palace complex, the Cathedral and the General Archive of the Indies; the Seville harbour, located about 80 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean, is the only river port in Spain. Seville is the hottest major metropolitan area in the geographical Southwestern Europe, with summer average high temperatures of above 35 °C. Seville was founded as the Roman city of Hispalis, it became known as Ishbiliyya after the Muslim conquest in 712.
During the Muslim rule in Spain, Seville came under the jurisdiction of the Caliphate of Córdoba before becoming the independent Taifa of Seville. After the discovery of the Americas, Seville became one of the economic centres of the Spanish Empire as its port monopolised the trans-oceanic trade and the Casa de Contratación wielded its power, opening a Golden Age of arts and literature. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan departed from Seville for the first circumnavigation of the Earth. Coinciding with the Baroque period of European history, the 17th century in Seville represented the most brilliant flowering of the city's culture; the 20th century in Seville saw the tribulations of the Spanish Civil War, decisive cultural milestones such as the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929 and Expo'92, the city's election as the capital of the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. Hisbaal is the oldest name for Seville, it appears to have originated during the Phoenician colonisation of the Tartessian culture in south-western Iberia and it refers to the God Baal.
According to Manuel Pellicer Catalán, the ancient name was Spal, it meant "lowland" in the Phoenician language. During Roman rule, the name was Latinised as Hispal and as Hispalis. After the Umayyad invasion, this name was adapted into Arabic as Ishbiliyya: since p does not exist in Arabic, it was replaced by b. NO8DO is the official motto of Seville, popularly believed to be a rebus signifying the Spanish No me ha dejado, meaning "She has not abandoned me"; the phrase, pronounced with synalepha as, is spelled with an eight in the middle representing the word madeja "skein ". Legend states that the title was given by King Alfonso X, resident in the city's Alcázar and supported by the citizens when his son Sancho IV of Castile, tried to usurp the throne from him; the emblem is present on Seville's municipal flag, features on city property such as manhole covers, Christopher Columbus's tomb in the Cathedral. Seville is 2,200 years old; the passage of the various civilizations instrumental in its growth has left the city with a distinct personality, a large and well-preserved historical centre.
The mythological founder of the city is Hercules identified with the Phoenician god Melqart, who the myth says sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Atlantic, founded trading posts at the current sites of Cádiz and of Seville. The original core of the city, in the neighbourhood of the present-day street, Cuesta del Rosario, dates to the 8th century BC, when Seville was on an island in the Guadalquivir. Archaeological excavations in 1999 found anthropic remains under the north wall of the Real Alcázar dating to the 8th–7th century BC; the town was called Hisbaal by the Phoenicians and by the Tartessians, the indigenous pre-Roman Iberian people of Tartessos, who controlled the Guadalquivir Valley at the time. The city was known from Roman times as Hispal and as Hispalis. Hispalis developed into one of the great market and industrial centres of Hispania, while the nearby Roman city of Italica remained a Roman residential city. Large-scale Roman archaeological remains can be seen there and at the nearby town of Carmona as well.
Existing Roman features in Seville itself include the remains exposed in situ in the underground Antiquarium of the Metropol Parasol building, the remnants of an aqueduct, three pillars of a temple in Mármoles Street, the columns of La Alameda de Hércules and the remains in the Patio de Banderas square near the Seville Cathedral. The walls surrounding the city were built during the rule of Julius Caesar, but their current course and design were the result of Moorish reconstructions. Following Roman rule, there were successive conquests of the Roman province of Hispania Baetica by the Vandals, the Suebi and the Visigoths during the 5th and 6th centuries. Seville was taken by the Moors, during the conquest of Hispalis in 712, it was the capital for the kings of the Umayyad Caliphate, the Almoravid dynasty first and
Odysseus
Odysseus known by the Latin variant Ulysses, is a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in that same epic cycle. Son of Laërtes and Anticlea, husband of Penelope and father of Telemachus and Acusilaus. Odysseus is renowned for his intellectual brilliance and versatility, is thus known by the epithet Odysseus the Cunning, he is most famous for his nostos or “homecoming”, which took him ten eventful years after the decade-long Trojan War. In Greek the name was used in various versions. Vase inscriptions have the two groups of Olyseus, Olysseus or Ōlysseus, Olyteus or Olytteus. From an early source from Magna Graecia dates the form Oulixēs, while a grammarian has Oulixeus. In Latin the figure was known as Ulyssēs; some have supposed that "there may have been two separate figures, one called something like Odysseus, the other something like Ulixes, who were combined into one complex personality." However, the change between d and l is common in some Indo-European and Greek names, the Latin form is supposed to be derived from the Etruscan Uthuze, which accounts for some of the phonetic innovations.
The etymology of the name is unknown. Ancient authors linked the name to the Greek verbs odussomai “to be wroth against, to hate”, to oduromai “to lament, bewail”, or to ollumi “to perish, to be lost”. Homer relates it to various forms of this verb in puns. In Book 19 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus' early childhood is recounted, Euryclea asks the boy's grandfather Autolycus to name him. Euryclea seems to suggest a name like Polyaretos, "for he has much been prayed for" but Autolycus "apparently in a sardonic mood" decided to give the child another name commemorative of "his own experience in life": "Since I have been angered with many, both men and women, let the name of the child be Odysseus". Odysseus receives the patronymic epithet Laertiades, "son of Laërtes". In the Iliad and Odyssey there are several further epithets used to describe Odysseus, it has been suggested that the name is of non-Greek origin not Indo-European, with an unknown etymology. Robert S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin.
In Etruscan religion the name of Odysseus were adopted under the name Uthuze, interpreted as a parallel borrowing from a preceding Minoan form of the name. Little is given of Odysseus' background other than that according to Pseudo-Apollodorus, his paternal grandfather or step-grandfather is Arcesius, son of Cephalus and grandson of Aeolus, while his maternal grandfather is the thief Autolycus, son of Hermes and Chione. Hence, Odysseus was the great-grandson of the Olympian god Hermes. According to the Iliad and Odyssey, his father is Laertes and his mother Anticlea, although there was a non-Homeric tradition that Sisyphus was his true father; the rumour went. Odysseus is said to have a younger sister, who went to Same to be married and is mentioned by the swineherd Eumaeus, whom she grew up alongside, in book 15 of the Odyssey; the majority of sources for Odysseus' pre-war exploits—principally the mythographers Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus—postdate Homer by many centuries. Two stories in particular are well known: When Helen is abducted, Menelaus calls upon the other suitors to honour their oaths and help him to retrieve her, an attempt that leads to the Trojan War.
Odysseus tries to avoid it by feigning lunacy, as an oracle had prophesied a long-delayed return home for him if he went. He starts sowing his fields with salt. Palamedes, at the behest of Menelaus' brother Agamemnon, seeks to disprove Odysseus' madness and places Telemachus, Odysseus' infant son, in front of the plow. Odysseus veers the plow away from his son. Odysseus holds a grudge against Palamedes during the war for dragging him away from his home. Odysseus and other envoys of Agamemnon travel to Scyros to recruit Achilles because of a prophecy that Troy could not be taken without him. By most accounts, Achilles' mother, disguises the youth as a woman to hide him from the recruiters because an oracle had predicted that Achilles would either live a long uneventful life or achieve everlasting glory while dying young. Odysseus cleverly discovers which among the women before him is Achilles when the youth is the only one of them to show interest in examining the weapons hidden among an array of adornment gifts for the daughters of their host.
Odysseus arranges further for the sounding of a battle horn, which prompts Achilles to clutch a weapon and show his trained disposition. With his disguise foiled, he joins Agamemnon's call to arms among the Hellenes. Odysseus is one of the most influential Greek champions during the Trojan War. Along with Nestor and Idomeneus he is one of advisors, he always champions the Achaean cause when others question Agamemnon's command
Novel
A novel is a long work of narrative fiction written in prose form, and, published as a book. The entire genre has been seen as having "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in classical Greece and Rome, in medieval and early modern romance, in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella. Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji has been described as the world's first novel. Spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of classical Chinese novels by the Ming dynasty. Parallel European developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, suggested that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century. Walter Scott made a distinction between the novel, in which "events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society" and the romance, which he defined as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse.
However, many such romances, including the historical romances of Scott, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are frequently called novels, Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". This sort of romance is in turn different from the genre fiction love romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman." A novel is a fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences. The novel in the modern era makes use of a literary prose style; the development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing, the introduction of cheap paper in the 15th century. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Most European languages use the word "romance" for extended narratives.
A fictional narrativeFictionality is most cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period authors of historical narratives would include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social and personal realities of a place and period with clarity and detail not found in works of history. Literary proseWhile prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of the modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France those by Chrétien de Troyes, in Middle English. In the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan, Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, competed with prose novels. Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel.
Content: intimate experienceBoth in 12th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations. On the other hand, verse epics, including the Odyssey and Aeneid, had been recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters. A new world of individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct", "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance. LengthThe novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella. However, in the 17th century, critics saw the romance as of epic length and the novel as its short rival. A precise definition of the differences in length between these types of fiction, is, not possible; the requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that a novel should encompass the "totality of life." Although early forms of the novel are to be found in a number of places, including classical Rome, 10th– and 11th-century Japan, Elizabethan England, the European novel is said to have begun with Don Quixote in 1605.
Early works of extended fictional prose, or novels, include works in Latin like the Satyricon by Petronius, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, works in Ancient Greek such as Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, works in Sanskrit such as the 4th or 5th century Vasavadatta by Subandhu, 6th– or 7th-century Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā by Daṇḍin, in the 7th-century Kadambari by Banabhatta, Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century Japanese work The Tale of Genji, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail, who wrote in Arabic, the 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, another Arabic novelist, Blanquerna, written in Catalan by Ramon Llull, the 14th-century Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Gua
World War I
World War I known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history, it is one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the July Crisis. In response, on 23 July Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia. Serbia's reply failed to satisfy the Austrians, the two moved to a war footing. A network of interlocking alliances enlarged the crisis from a bilateral issue in the Balkans to one involving most of Europe.
By July 1914, the great powers of Europe were divided into two coalitions: the Triple Entente—consisting of France and Britain—and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Russia felt it necessary to back Serbia and, after Austria-Hungary shelled the Serbian capital of Belgrade on the 28th, partial mobilisation was approved. General Russian mobilisation was announced on the evening of 30 July; when Russia failed to comply, Germany declared war on 1 August in support of Austria-Hungary, with Austria-Hungary following suit on 6th. German strategy for a war on two fronts against France and Russia was to concentrate the bulk of its army in the West to defeat France within four weeks shift forces to the East before Russia could mobilise. On 2 August, Germany demanded free passage through Belgium, an essential element in achieving a quick victory over France; when this was refused, German forces invaded Belgium on 3 August and declared war on France the same day. On 12 August and France declared war on Austria-Hungary.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Alliance, opening fronts in the Caucasus and the Sinai Peninsula. The war was fought in and drew upon each power's colonial empire as well, spreading the conflict to Africa and across the globe; the Entente and its allies would become known as the Allied Powers, while the grouping of Austria-Hungary and their allies would become known as the Central Powers. The German advance into France was halted at the Battle of the Marne and by the end of 1914, the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, marked by a long series of trench lines that changed little until 1917. In 1915, Italy opened a front in the Alps. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 and Greece joined the Allies in 1917, expanding the war in the Balkans; the United States remained neutral, although by doing nothing to prevent the Allies from procuring American supplies whilst the Allied blockade prevented the Germans from doing the same the U. S. became an important supplier of war material to the Allies.
After the sinking of American merchant ships by German submarines, the revelation that the Germans were trying to incite Mexico to make war on the United States, the U. S. declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Trained American forces would not begin arriving at the front in large numbers until mid-1918, but the American Expeditionary Force would reach some two million troops. Though Serbia was defeated in 1915, Romania joined the Allied Powers in 1916 only to be defeated in 1917, none of the great powers were knocked out of the war until 1918; the 1917 February Revolution in Russia replaced the Tsarist autocracy with the Provisional Government, but continuing discontent at the cost of the war led to the October Revolution, the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by the new government in March 1918, ending Russia's involvement in the war. This allowed the transfer of large numbers of German troops from the East to the Western Front, resulting in the German March 1918 Offensive.
This offensive was successful, but the Allies rallied and drove the Germans back in their Hundred Days Offensive. Bulgaria was the first Central Power to sign an armistice—the Armistice of Salonica on 29 September 1918. On 30 October, the Ottoman Empire capitulated. On 4 November, the Austro-Hungarian empire agreed to the Armistice of Villa Giusti after being decisively defeated by Italy in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. With its allies defeated, revolution at home, the military no longer willing to fight, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on 9 November and Germany signed an armistice on 11 November 1918. World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural and social climate of the world; the war and its immediate aftermath sparked numerous uprisings. The Big Four (Britain, the United States, It
Peter of Castile
Peter the Cruel redirects here. It can refer to Peter I of Portugal. Peter, called the Cruel or the Just, was the king of Castile and León from 1350 to 1369. Peter was the last ruler of the main branch of the House of Ivrea. Peter was born in the defensive tower of the Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Burgos, Spain, his parents were Alfonso XI of Maria of Portugal. According to chancellor and chronicler Pero López de Ayala, he had a pale complexion, blue eyes and light blonde hair, he was accustomed to long, strenuous hours of work, lisped a little and "loved women greatly". He was well read and a patron of the arts, in his formative years he enjoyed entertainment and poetry. Peter began his reign when sixteen years old and subjected to the control of his mother and her favourites, he was to be married to daughter of Edward III of England. Since the plague had not yet entered England, it is that they understandably underestimated the danger. Joan, fourteen years old and Edward's favorite, by his own admission, soon contracted the disease and died.
Though at first controlled by his mother, Peter emancipated himself with the encouragement of the minister Alburquerque. Becoming attached to María de Padilla, he married her in secret in 1353. María turned him against Alburquerque. In the summer of 1353, the young king was coerced by his mother and the nobles into marrying Blanche of Bourbon; this marriage necessitated Peter's denying that he had married María, but his relationship with her continued and she bore him four children. He apparently went through the form of marriage with Juana de Castro, widow of Don Diego de Haro, convincing her that his previous marriage to Queen Blanche was a nullity; the bishops of Avila and Salamanca were asked to concur, were afraid to say otherwise. Peter and Juana were married in Cuellar, Juana was proclaimed Queen of Castile. After two nights he deserted her. A period of turmoil followed in effect imprisoned; the dissension within the party striving to coerce him enabled him to escape from Toro, where he was under observation, to Segovia.
In 1361, Queen Blanche died at Medina Sidonia. French historians claim; that year, Maria de Padilla died in Seville. From 1356 to 1366, Peter engaged in constant wars with Aragon in the "War of the Two Peters", in which he showed neither ability nor skill in his support of his English ally or Castilian interests in the Mediterranean against the French and Aragonese; the king of Aragon supported Peter's bastard brothers against him. It was during this period. In 1366 began the calamitous Castilian Civil War, which would see him dethroned, he was assailed by his bastard brother Henry of Trastámara at the head of a host of soldiers of fortune, including Bertrand du Guesclin and Hugh Calveley, abandoned the kingdom without daring to give battle, after retreating several times in the face of the oncoming armies. Peter fled with his treasury to Portugal, where he was coldly received by his uncle, King Peter I of Portugal, thence to Galicia, in the northern Iberian Peninsula, where he ordered the murder of Suero, the archbishop of Santiago, the dean, Peralvarez.
Peter's rival Henry of Trastámara continuously depicted Peter as "King of the Jews", had some success in taking advantage of popular Castilian resentment towards the Jews. Henry of Trastámara instigated pogroms beginning a period of anti-Jewish riots and forced conversions in Castile that lasted from 1370 to 1390. Peter took forceful measures against this, including the execution of at least five anti-Jewish leaders of a riot; the prominence of Samuel ha-Levi, King Peter's treasurer, has been cited as evidence of Peter's supposed pro-Jewish sentiment, but Ha-Levi's success did not reflect the general experience of the Spanish Jewry in this period, marked by discrimination and pogroms. And Samuel's career, including his arrest and death by torture, shows that the opportunities for Jews were restricted to certain offices and positions whereas other forms of advancement were denied to them. In the summer of 1366, Peter took refuge with Edward, the Black Prince, who restored him to his throne in the following year after the Battle of Nájera.
But he disgusted his ally with his faithlessness and ferocity, as well as his failure to repay the costs of the campaign, as he had promised to do. The health of the Black Prince broke down, he left the Iberian Peninsula. Meanwhile, Henry of Trastámara returned to Castile in September, 1368; the cortes of the city of Burgos recognized him as King of Castile. Others followed, including Córdoba, Valladolid, Jaén. Galicia and Asturias, on the other hand, continued to support Peter; as Henry made his way toward Toledo, who had retreated to Andalusia, chose to confront him in battle. On 14 March 1369, the forces of Peter and Henry met at Montiel, a fortress controlled by the Order of Santiago. Henry prevailed with the assistance of Bertrand du Guesclin. Peter took refuge in the fortress
