A slim, yet detailed volume on the downfall of the Teutonic Knights, featuring battlescene maps and illustrations throughout. By 1400 the long running conflict between the Order of Teutonic Knights and Poland and Lithuania was coming to a head, partly as a result of the Order's meddling in the internal politics of its neighbours. In June 1410 King Wladislaw Jagiello of Poland invaded the Order's territory with a powerful allied army including all the enemies of the Teutonic Knights – Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Bohemians, Hungarians, Tartars and Cossacks. This book recounts how, when the armies clashed on the wooded, rolling hills near the small village of Tannenberg, the Teutonic Knights suffered a disastrous defeat from which their Order never recovered.

Account of two battles fought at Tannenberg, East Prussia (now Poland), the first a defeat for the Teutonic Knights, the second a German victory.

The Mongols had a huge impact on medieval Europe and the Islamic world. This book provides a comprehensive survey of contacts between the Catholic West and the Mongol world-empire from the first appearance of Chinggis Khan’s armies in 1221 down to the death of Tamerlane (1405) and the battle of Tannenberg (1410). This book considers the Mongols as allies as well as conquerors; the perception of them in the West; the papal response to the threat (and opportunity) they presented; the fate of the Frankish principalities in the Holy Land in the path of the Mongol onslaught; Western European embassies and missions to the East; and the impact of the Mongols on the expanding world view of the maturing Middle Ages. For courses in crusading history and medieval European history.

The thirty papers published here record the proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Military Orders. The principal focus on this occasion was the Hospital of St John, but the Templars, Teutonic Knights and other military orders are dealt with too. Many of the papers relate to provincial life, along with contributions on historiography, the papacy, cultural history, and religious life.

Scholarly interest and popular interest in the military orders show no sign of abating. Their history stretches from the early twelfth century to the present. They were among the richest and most powerful religious corporations in pre-Reformation Europe, and they founded their own states on Rhodes and Malta and also on the Baltic coast. Historians of the Church, of art and architecture, of agriculture and banking, of medicine and warfare and of European expansion can all benefit from investigating the orders and their archives. The conferences on their history that have been organized in London every four years have attracted scholars from all over the world. The present volume records the proceedings of the Fifth Conference in 2009 (held in Cardiff as the London venue was in the process of refurbishment), and, like the earlier volumes in the series, will prove essential for anyone interested in the current state of research into these powerful institutions. The thirty-eight papers published here represent a selection of those delivered at the conference. Three papers deal with the recent archaeological investigations at the Hospitaller castle at al-Marqab (Syria); others examine aspects of the history of the military orders in the Latin East and the Mediterranean lands, in Spain and Portugal, in the British Isles and in northern and eastern Europe. The final two papers address the question of present-day perceptions of the Templars as moulded by the sort of popular literature that most of the other contributors would normally keep at arm's length.

Reference entries, overview essays, and primary source document excerpts survey the history and unveil the successes and failures of the longest-lasting European empire. The Holy Roman Empire endured for ten centuries. This book surveys the history of the empire from the formation of a Frankish Kingdom in the sixth century through the efforts of Charlemagne to unify the West around A.D. 800, the conflicts between emperors and popes in the High Middle Ages, and the Reformation and the Wars of Religion in the Early Modern period to the empire's collapse under Napoleonic rule. A historical overview and timeline are followed by sections on government and politics, organization and administration, individuals, groups and organizations, key events, the military, objects and artifacts, and key places. Each of these topical sections begins with an overview essay, which is followed by alphabetically arranged reference entries on significant topics. The book includes a selection of primary source documents, each of which is introduced by a contextualizing headnote, and closes with a selected, general bibliography.

本书简明勾勒德意志民族和国家从古至今的基本走向与发展脉络，扼要呈现当代德国社会发展的新情况和热点问题，力求反映近一二十年来国内外德国历史研究方面的新成果、新观点，介绍多家之言而非一家之言。

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, mercenaries--professional soldiers who fought for money or other rewards--played violent, colorful, international roles in warfare, but they have received relatively little scholarly attention. In this book a large number of vignettes portray their activities in Western Europe over a period of nearly 900 years, from the Merovingian mercenaries of 752 through the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648. Intended as an introduction to the subject and drawing heavily on contemporary first-person accounts, the book creates a vivid but balanced mosaic of the many thousands of mercenaries who were hired to fight for various employers.

The 'Northern Crusades', inspired by the Pope's call for a Holy War, are less celebrated than those in the Middle East, but they were also more successful: vast new territories became and remain Christian, such as Finland, Estonia and Prussia. Newly revised in the light of the recent developments in Baltic and Northern medieval research, this authoritative overview provides a balanced and compelling account of a tumultuous era.