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The job: put the beast down, and do it fast. She has never failed a hunt. The trail leads her to the site of a fierce, bloody battle. She finds a wounded hiker, a dead cougar, and one inescapable conclusion.
There's a new cat in town. Get your copy today! The second in the bestselling new Conqueror series on Genghis Khan, it is a wonderful, epic story which Conn Iggulden brings brilliantly to life. In the land of Imphallion, one legend is remembered with horror—the Terror of the East. Once he came to conquer it. Then to save it. And both times, he vanished without a trace. Removing his dark armor to return to his humble life, Corvis Rebaine has nothing but memories left.
Like the memory of his beloved wife and children fleeing from him in horror when they learned of his terrible legacy. Rebaine wants no more of war. But what Rebaine wants no longer matters. Because the Terror has returned. And worse, an old enemy has returned to claim revenge, aided by a woman whose soul is consumed with hatred towards Rebaine—his own daughter. Now Rebaine must again wear the dreaded dark armor if he is going to save Imphallion, as well as all he holds dear, from a terrifying impostor.
But after so much war, and so much pain, can he summon the strength to truly become the Terror once more? As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten. But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire.
In an astonishing blitz of thirty years, a handful of visionary and utterly ruthless empire builders, with few resources but breathtaking ambition, attempted to seize the Indian Ocean, destroy Islam and take control of world trade. Told with Roger Crowley's customary skill and verve, this is narrative history at its most vivid - a epic tale of navigation, trade and technology, money and religious zealotry, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwrecks, endurance, courage and terrifying brutality.
Drawing on extensive first-hand accounts, it brings to life the exploits of an extraordinary band of conquerors - men such as Afonso de Albuquerque, the first European since Alexander the Great to found an Asian empire - who set in motion five hundred years of European colonisation and unleashed the forces of globalisation. We are the women who loved Alexander the Great. We were lovers and murderers, innocents and soldiers. And without us, Alexander would have been only a man.
Instead he was a god. But he cannot ascend to power, and keep it, without the women who help to shape his destiny. Whenever settlement has not meant displacement, the new comers have been assimilated by the existing people of the land. When it has meant displacement, they have still become islanders, marked off from those whom they left behind by characteristics which were the direct result of settlement in an island world.
The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England, has been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated from without. But each of those elements has done somewhat to modify the mass into which it was absorbed.
The English land and nation are not as they might have been if they had never in later times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the German Palatine. However, William had adopted measures to deal with a night attack and his men had been standing to arms. Early in the morning he formed them into three divisions and advanced against the terrible enemy.
Fighting began around the third hour and went on until nightfall. Harold fell pierced with wounds during the first onset and when the English heard of this they turned, as night was falling, and began to flee. The duke returned to the battlefield from the pursuit at about midnight, despoiled the enemy corpses they say that many thousands of the English were killed and buried his own dead the following morning, subsequently setting out for London, where he was eventually crowned.
The number of surviving manuscripts suggests that the Gesta Normannorum Ducum was a very popular work, and not long after it was written it was used by a scholar who provides the most detailed contemporary French account of the events of , William of Poitiers.
His Gesta Guillelmi The Deeds of William was known to both Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, but like the Carmen seems not to have become widely disseminated, and the text has come down only through a seventeenth-century printed edition taken from a manuscript incomplete at both beginning and end, and which has since disappeared.
In saying that the Gesta Guillelmi was, like the Gesta Normannorum Ducum, dedicated to William to gain his favour Orderic is presumably referring to statements in its lost opening sections, and there is no difficulty in believing him to be correct; but it does not follow that William who is not known to have been a patron of learning in any sense commissioned it.
Whether he did or not, of course, its author had every motive to flatter his subject, and other eleventh-century works of a similar type sound timely warnings of just how misleading such flattery might be. The Encomium written c. Even so, he says things that are difficult to believe. He shared with two other scholars who wrote on Hastings, Guy of Amiens and Baudri of Bourgeuil see below , the tendency of learned men of this period to place within a classical framework their panegyrics of great figures, who could then be lauded by the comparison of their deeds with those of the heroes of antiquity.
As far as the Conqueror was concerned the minds of such writers turned naturally to Achilles and Aeneas victors over Hector and Turnus respectively , and even more naturally to Julius Caesar, who had not only invaded Britain but also subsequently become involved in a conflict with Pompey which could readily be likened to that between William and Harold. Professor Davis stressed that he: was a classical scholar and stylist of distinction, intent on producing a work of great literature These include an anonymous distich quoted by HH pp.
GG, pp. When he says, for example, that the Conqueror at one point concealed the loss of men who had been shipwrecked by burying them in secret, is he recounting something which actually happened, or being overcome by a desire to compare Duke William with Xerxes?
He then made a speech which William of Poitiers based on one contained in the works of Sallust, and led his men into battle behind the banner sent by the pope; in front were infantry equipped with bows and crossbows, behind them armoured infantry, and at the rear squadrons of horsemen, including the duke himself.
The duke, who was not dismayed by the roughness of the ground, climbed the steep slope and the battle opened with an exchange of missiles, the English throwing spears and projectiles of various kinds, murderous axes and stones tied to sticks. After this the French horsemen weighed in with their swords, but the fighting was evenly balanced and they gained no advantage, for their enemies were assisted by the advantage of the higher ground, their great and closely-packed numbers, and their weapons, which easily penetrated shields and other defences presumably a reference to the axes shown on 1 GG, pp.
At this they rallied, surrounded and destroyed some thousands of the English who had followed them, and continued to attack the rest, who were little diminished in strength despite their losses. Even now, they were so tightly packed that the dead could scarcely fall, but inroads were made by the weapons of the strongest soldiers fortissimorum militum ferro ,1 and the attackers included men of Maine, Frenchmen,2 Bretons, Aquitanians and above all Normans.
William of Poitiers mentions by name the exploits of Robert, son of Roger of Beaumont, fighting with his men on the right wing in his first battle, but says that he does not intend to describe all the deeds of individuals, as even an eye-witness which he, by implication, was not could hardly have followed everything. He then moves to what appears the turning point of the battle: the Normans twice feigned flight, again surrounded and annihilated thousands of their English pursuers, and then renewed their assault on the rest, shooting arrows and striking the enemy, who were still so densely massed that the wounded could not withdraw.
A list of ten notable leaders on the French side is followed by a passage extolling the military virtues of Duke William: he led from the front, and swiftly avenged the loss of the three horses killed under him; astonished at seeing him fight on foot, even soldiers who had been wounded took heart from the sight.
As the day declined the English realised that they could no longer stand against the Normans, for their losses had been heavy and included the king and his brothers.
Accordingly, they turned to flight and were relentlessly pursued, until given renewed confidence by a broken rampart and maze of ditches praerupti ualli et frequentium fossarum. Here they made a stand, and when William arrived on the scene he thought them English reinforcements; despite being advised to withdraw by Eustace of Boulogne, who was about to retire with fifty men, he charged the enemy and destroyed them, although it was here that some of the nobler Normans fell, their bravery brought to naught by the difficulty of the ground.
Returning to the main battlefield, he surveyed the English dead. William then, after burying his own dead and allowing those of the English who wished to do so to collect remains for interment, set out for Romney, where he punished those responsible for killing Frenchmen who had landed there by mistake, and then Dover. But that direct and extensive borrowing there has been, few have doubted. His familiarity with the Carmen is therefore easy to credit. Yet there is a counter-case.
Moreover, even if the strong possibility that William of Poitiers did know the Carmen is accepted, it does not necessarily follow that his own account of the battle depended heavily upon it, or had to become a refutation or modification of it, for as a contemporary who may well have known or at least met many of the principal men involved, and an ex- soldier presumably with a lively interest in it, he could have had a great many sources, and the poem is not known to have been of such importance that he would have felt obliged to question or correct its statements.
Whether this is so or not, the Gesta Guillelmi contains details which are credible enough. The description of the battlefield as with the Carmen is perfectly compatible with the present terrain, that of English fighting methods and weaponry, as far as it goes, is borne out by other evidence including that of the Bayeux Tapestry , and the significance of the French retreat is a recurrent feature of the sources, even if William of Poitiers goes further than anyone else in describing one real withdrawal followed by two that were feigned.
Baudri was born near Orleans in , studied probably in Angers and then entered the monastery of St Peter in Bourgeuil, eventually becoming abbot there in about After a failed attempt to obtain the bishopric of Orleans he was eventually appointed to the archbishopric of Dol in Brittany in , but discovered that Breton manners were little to his taste and between that date and his death in made a number of journeys to Britain and Normandy.
I am grateful to my colleague John Davie for this reference, which suggests that Guy of Amiens and WP if he did not simply take it from the Carmen had a knowledge of the Iliad which somehow went well beyond mere familiarity with the Ilias latina above, p.
Of his more than poems, which with one exception survive in their entirety in a single twelfth-century manuscript, and which were mostly written during his time in Bourgeuil, two were addressed to Adela.
Around the bed were statues of Philosophy and her seven disciples, the Quadrivium of Music, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Geometry being at its head, and the Trivium of Rhetoric, Dialectic and Grammar at its foot; a third group of figures represented Medicine, accompanied by Hippocrates and Galen. More significant in the present context are the wall hangings, worked in silks and gold and silver thread, embellished with pearls and jewels, and accompanied by titles in a manner presumably similar to that of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Their subject matter began with the Creation, the Garden of Eden and the Flood, followed by further scenes from the Old Testament and stories from Greek mythology including the siege of Troy and Roman history. Eventually, 3, vessels assembled and crossed the Channel, and the battle was apparently fought immediately; not for Baudri the lengthy preliminaries of some other sources, although he dwells on the building of the fleet and its embarkation. He says that the very large enemy army abandoned its horses and massed in a single dense formation whose spears looked like a forest, and which would have been impregnable had it held together.
As French missiles inflicted further losses, in ranks so tight-packed that the dead were unable to fall, some of the enraged English broke formation to launch a counter-attack, while the Normans simulated flight and then intercepted and annihilated their pursuers. Eventually, the French rushed upon the enemy in disordered ranks and were put to flight, the rout being fuelled by the rumour that the duke had been killed. At this point William removed his helmet and made a speech which stressed the futility of withdrawal and the fact that victory was at hand.
Then he spurred his horse and charged into battle, bettering the feats of both Hector and Achilles. Even so, much hard fighting followed, and the ground ran with the blood of the slain, until Harold was hit by an arrow1 and his forces lost heart and began to retire, being harried mercilessly by the Norman cavalry until nightfall interrupted the slaughter. The following morning the duke made a speech urging his men to take no heed of booty until the war was won, and it was subsequently brought to a successful conclusion.
Ratkowitsch, Descriptio Picturae, pp. These examples and many others are given by Ratkowitsch, Descriptio Picturae, pp. Whether he owed very much to other surviving sources is something upon which scholars have failed to agree. On this poem and its context, see Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, pp. Tilliette shows that some passages of the poem would be unintelligible to a reader not possessed of such considerable learning as was clearly attributed to Adela. Note also the speech allegedly EE, pp.
Moreover, if he had ever had any contact with Adela the authority of those traditions may have been good. It is of no small interest from this point of view that one of them had Harold killed by an arrow. Baudri did not take this from either the Carmen or the Gesta Guillelmi, which do not contain it, and there is no obvious reason to think that he drew it from the history of the Normans written in Italy c. In Orderic Vitalis was born near Shrewsbury. Bartholomaeis, pp.
On Amatus, see Wolf, Making History, pp. I am grateful to Dr Graham Loud for assistance on Amatus. There are similarities between Baudri and the Tapestry, but Abrahams n. William of Poitiers whose work Orderic probably knew at this date, as he certainly did later has a similar incident at the same stage in the battle, but he describes it in rather different terms, and it looks as if Orderic was drawing on an independent tradition.
He then wrongly assigns the exile of Tostig to , and claims that the earl visited Normandy and encouraged William to cross the Channel with an army. If he had heard 1 Orderic, in GND, ii. It had its origins as a history of his own monastery. His work was carried out in the time of Abbot Ralph d. Then he left London with all his army and came to the place now called Battle, reportedly saying that he had never done anything so willingly as come to this fight, and little knowing the punishment that almighty God was about to inflict upon his pride.
William and the Normans came to a hill opposite that occupied by the English, and a speech said to have been made by the most Christian duke as he was putting on his armour is worthy to be transmitted to posterity.
He was accidentally offered his coat of mail back to front, and calmly told the soldiers standing near him that if he believed in omens he would not go into battle that day, but in fact he had never believed in such things, only in the Creator. The Chronicon Monasterii de Hida account see below, p. Not much later a Norman unit cuneus of almost a thousand horsemen attacked elsewhere and rushed upon the English with a great impetus as if wishing to slay them, but when they reached the enemy line pretended to flee as if they were afraid.
The English believed they were really fleeing and set off in pursuit in the hope of killing them, but when they saw this the Normans, who were more cautious in war than the English, soon turned back and, placing themselves between the pursuers and their main line, quickly annihilated them.
Thus the Normans and the English began fighting each other, but the battle lasted almost all day and into the evening, until the defeated English fled, and those who could not flee remained to die. In that battle Harold and his two brothers were killed, and with them the greater part of the English nobility, and in that place Duke William ordered an abbey to be built in memory of his victory and for the absolution of the sins of all those who had died there.
It does share with other sources the belief that the fighting lasted virtually all day, but if the community at Battle knew anything of deaths in ditches, or of reverses of any kind suffered by the French forces, this author preferred to remain silent about them. The final source which needs to be considered by the historian of the battle of Hastings is the longest and one of the most colourful, the Roman de Rou History of Rollo by Master Wace.
A native of Jersey then part of the duchy of Normandy born c. Burgess, p. Burgess, pp. The events of occupy a major place in the Roman de Rou, taking up more than 3, lines in all, while the account of the battle of Hastings alone is about a tenth of the whole.
Eventually they agreed to serve, and the duke then called on areas bordering Normandy, promising lands and payment to those who would follow him. He also had the place surrounded by a good ditch with entrances on three sides, and the following morning the two brothers rode out to reconnoitre the French positions. Further negotiations followed in which William offered Harold all Northumbria if he would submit and Gyrth all the lands of their father Earl Godwin; he also threatened any of the English who supported them with excommunication, much to their concern.
As for Harold, he had summoned men from castles, cities, ports, villages and boroughs, and they included peasants armed with clubs, iron forks and stakes; none had come from north of the Humber, but the names of many of the shires and towns south of it are listed as having sent contingents.
Wace at this point rejects the widespread belief that the English army was small, and gives it as his own opinion that their numbers equalled those of the French. They had, he says, erected a barricade to their front,4 and Harold ordered the men of Kent to go where the first attack would be made, for it was the custom that the first blow belonged to them,5 as it was also that the Londoners should be stationed around the standard and guard the king himself.
It was then that the French archers began to fire into the air so that their arrows fell upon the heads and faces of their enemies, and Harold was struck on the right eye, which was put out; only after he was wounded, according to Wace, did the Normans stage a feigned flight to break up the enemy line. The English foolishly followed them, thus abandoning a position in which they could hardly have been defeated, and as their enemy turned to face them once again the Roman de Rou becomes for many lines a recital of fighting involving the alleged actions of Norman lords, 74 of them simply designated by the territory which they ruled and without a personal name being given.
There the wounded Harold still stood, until beaten down twice, first by a blow to his helmet and then by one which cut his thigh to the bone.
His brother Gyrth fell under a blow from the duke himself, and then Harold too was killed, although Wace says that the press around the king was so great that he knew not the identity of the slayer. As for William, two horses had been killed beneath him, and as he removed his armour and his attendants saw the damage it had sustained they exclaimed that there had not been such a knight since the days of Roland and Oliver. He raised his standard and tent, took his evening meal and slept at the place where the English standard had been, and the following day the French buried such of their friends as they could find, while native noblewomen took the corpses of their relatives to be interred in village churches; Harold himself was borne to Waltham in Essex for burial.
Such are the surviving sources on the battle of Hastings. Those from the English or, more strictly speaking, Anglo-Norman side do not exist in any quantity until the first half of the twelfth century, when authors such as John of Worcester, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon were influenced by native resentment at the effects of the Conquest, a tendency to make excuses for the defeat and the very common medieval belief that disastrous events could only be the judgement of God upon a sinful people.
Nevertheless, these accounts are relatively straightforward compared with the problems posed by the significant body of almost contemporary material from French writers. Moreover, some of the similarities between the sources are the result of direct borrowing, thus reducing their value as evidence: Orderic Vitalis and Wace certainly used earlier material, for example, and the accounts of the Carmen, William of Poitiers and Baudri of Bourgeuil may well be related; similarly, both Baudri and William of Malmesbury may have seen the Bayeux Tapestry.
Nevertheless the picture is far from being an entirely negative one. Wace, despite the fact that he was writing a century later, probably had access to a certain amount of valuable information independent of our other surviving sources, and the same is true of most of his predecessors. Moreover, one can hardly stress too much that there was once a very much greater body of evidence which has not come down to us. Moreover if these themes recur so frequently because they reflect what was commonly said, it is no great distance from this to the argument that what was commonly said was itself some sort of reflection of what had actually happened, or at least what was believed to have happened.
It will never be possible to reconstruct Hastings on this kind of scale; its story can never be told as can those of Waterloo and of Gettysburg, of the first day of the Somme and of D-Day. Nevertheless, it is not completely beyond recovery as a historical event. Given the great fame of the battle, and the probable access of those responsible for the sources produced before c. The Chronicon Monasterii de Hida account, pp. The Draco Normannicus of Stephen of Rouen is a Latin verse treatment of Norman history derived from a number of earlier writers including WJ and composed in the late s ll.
Nor is it a picture which a closer look might seem to contradict. Between about and England was the scene of more fighting than at any other time in its history, apart probably from the opening decades of the Roman invasion. During the s, English rulers survived in England by only the narrowest of margins.
Keynes and Lapidge, pp. At Maldon the Vikings landed on an island, probably because it offered some protection to their ships, and found the English facing them at the other end of the causeway which connected it to the mainland. The native commander, Ealdorman Byrhtnoth, rightly or wrongly allowed them to cross the causeway without opposition so that the battle could take place on equal terms, and was subsequently killed, whereupon part of his army fled.
According to the poem The Battle of Maldon the remainder then affirmed, in some of the most moving words in Old English literature, their determination to show their loyalty to their lord by dying where they stood.
At Hastings defeat came about, if William of Poitiers can be believed, through apparent indiscipline, when English forces three times left the position which had served them so well to chase a French army which then encircled and destroyed its pursuers. If there is added to this the depiction on the Bayeux Tapestry of figures who are clearly poorly- armed peasants, anyone might be forgiven for thinking that Anglo-Saxon armies were little more than armed mobs which trusted to bravery and luck more than to elaborately-organised logistics, military technology and tactical skill.
Yet this cannot be so, as can be readily demonstrated by a rather more detailed survey of late Anglo-Saxon history than that undertaken so far. The location of the battle is not certain. Perhaps composed shortly after the battle, its historical reliability has been much disputed; see briefly, The Battle of Maldon AD , ed. Scragg, pp. Like Edgar, Cnut copied the German emperors, for there is a contemporary drawing of him in which he is being given a crown which, with its arched bar, was a deliberate imitation of the German imperial crown, and his daughter married the future Emperor Henry III of Germany, who was eventually to request the help of the English navy against one of his enemies, Count Baldwin V of Flanders.
That this must to an extent be the truth can be powerfully suggested by momentarily turning aside from military matters to what is known about the late Anglo-Saxon period generally, and late Anglo-Saxon government in particular. In the last thirty years this subject has been revolutionised by the work of Professor James Campbell. This involved, among other things, issuing a new coin type every six years or so after every two or three , probably so that the authorities could make a substantial profit by insisting on a favourable rate of exchange of old coins for new.
When tenth-century laws state that all trading must take place in towns before witnesses it is virtually certain that this was not legislation which was amusingly ambitious and ineffective, but deadly serious and strictly enforced.
It is known what strict enforcement might involve. These orders were partly carried out. Taking a young noblewoman as hostage, he escaped, vanishing into darkest memory. Years later, Corvis Rebaine is a simple man, content with his loving wife and children.
The terrible deeds and glories of his past life are dead and buried along with his former name and its monstrous legacy-until his daughter is taken by fiends under a maniacal young warlord looking to complete the Terror's conquest. Now, spurred to action by a newborn fury and thirst for vengeance, Rebaine must do the unthinkable-don the dark armor once again, gather his once-loyal cadre of killers, and fight to save both the family he loves and the country he once almost destroyed.
And all who stand in his way will have one final thought before death The Terror has returned. Ari Marmell has made his mark in the genre. Kemp, author of the Erevis Cale trilogy "A tale that begins where most stories end and features a most unlikely protagonist. Twists of humor leaven this story of desperate people in dangerous times, as a conqueror discovers that perhaps those who live by the sword are sometimes doomed to face the business end of one.
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