Latest news with #MiddleAges
Fox News
6 days ago
- General
- Fox News
Angler expecting a fish pulls up rare 700-year-old sword: ‘Real treasures'
A 700-year-old sword was recently reeled in by a fisherman in Poland — offering a rare glimpse into warfare in the Middle Ages. The discovery was announced by the Capital Conservator of Monuments in Warsaw last month. In a Facebook post, the department said the lucky angler found the sword in the Vistula River. "It was supposed to be this big a fish – but it turned out to be this big a sword!" the post read. "As you can see, the Vistula hides some real treasures." The fisherman surrendered the sword to local authorities, who transferred it to local experts. A team is now working to preserve the artifact for future study. "A sword this old, found in what is now Warsaw, is unique." The Facebook page's post noted that the sword is preserved "almost in its full length" and features both a spherical pommel and a cross mark on its grip. Anna Magdalena Łań, a chief specialist with the city of Warsaw, told Fox News Digital that experts are still studying the sword. "The sword is dated to the 13th or 14th century, which is the time when Warsaw was founded," Łań noted in an email translated from Polish to English. "A more precise date may be determined thanks to the cross mark, which is the 'signature' of the blacksmith who made it," she added. "Research is ongoing." She said the length of the sword, including the hilt, is over 31 inches. "I don't know the weight, but the sword is quite light because [of a] very large extent of corrosion," Łań said. "A sword this old, found in what is now Warsaw, is unique." "The sword was found in a river, meaning it was discovered without context – that is, without other artifacts that could tell us more about it." The circumstances of why the sword was dropped in the river are now lost to time. Łań noted that swords were not deposited ritually in 13th-century Poland; they were more of a pagan tradition than a Christian one. She concluded, "The sword was found in a river, meaning it was discovered without context – that is, without other artifacts that could tell us more about it." The weapon is one of many fascinating archaeological discoveries made in Poland this year. In Gdańsk, Poland, archaeologists recently found a medieval knight's tomb beneath a former ice cream parlor. Months earlier, a pair of pedestrians found a 2,500-year-old dagger on a Polish beach, on the coast of the Baltic Sea.
Irish Times
29-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Sydney got the Opera House and we had Ardnacrusha. It's time for that kind of ambition again
The imposing cathedral of St Cecilia of Albi sits in the middle of a modest French town in the Languedoc region, towering over everything around it. Built as a fortress against heresy and rebelliousness and as a symbol of episcopal power, it is the largest brick cathedral in the world, with an estimated 25 million bricks used to build it. Constructing such a monumental symbol of authority takes time and immense resources. Albi Cathedral took 200 years to build. It is estimated that the cost of building it would have run to hundreds of millions if not billions of euro in today's money. READ MORE One study suggests that between 1100 and 1250 the building of Gothic churches in the Paris Basin alone consumed on average 21.5 per cent of the regional economy. Luckily Bishop Bernard de Castanet of Albi was able to sell spiritual indulgences to his parishioners which helped to pay for its construction. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were built at a time when the Catholic church was the dominant source of power in Europe and long before the nation state had emerged to shape and direct the aspirations of the masses. Many, if not most, of these remarkable buildings have also become cultural icons and house artistic and architectural treasures intended to inspire – and terrify – the parishioners into religious obedience. Nowadays it is impossible to imagine such a project. I'm guessing that present generations lack the patience or naivety to bet their faith and taxes on a project that would take generations to complete, and religious threats are unlikely to have much sway these days. Yet the 20th century saw the completion of magnificent megaprojects, the construction of which was often controversial at the time. One example is the Sydney Opera House. Originally commissioned in 1959, it took 10 years longer to build than originally envisaged and it went over budget by 1,360 per cent. The project was plagued by political interference, changes in government and constant budget scrutiny that ultimately led to lead architect Jørn Utzon's resignation in 1966. He left Australia and never came back to see the project completed. Yet within two years after opening, the Opera House had been paid for, thanks to a lottery that had been set up to fund it. The Sydney Opera House is now a Unesco world heritage site. In comparison to other European countries, Ireland has few modern standout buildings. Our national contribution to world architecture and engineering is modest and associated with colonial grandeur rather than public buildings or large infrastructural projects. There are compelling historical reasons for the impoverished state of Ireland's public infrastructure until independence in 1922, though perhaps the nation's railway network is an exception. One of the first initiatives of the Irish Free State was the construction of the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme in Co Clare, which was completed in 1929. At a projected cost of £5 million (which was about 20 per cent of the national budget in 1925), it was an enormous sum for a post-Civil War state. Critics argued for smaller, less ambitious projects or said the money would be better spent directly on agriculture. Today's megaprojects are more likely to serve functional rather than cultural needs, such as the national children's hospital or MetroLink , a tunnelled metro system that will connect the city centre with the airport and towns of Fingal. (I am a member of the board of Transport Infrastructure Ireland , which is the sponsoring agency for MetroLink.) Many large-scale infrastructure projects have been hugely damaging to the environment, for example the Three Gorges Dam in China. But large-scale projects do not necessarily need to be environmentally destructive. We need to think of supergrids, forests, bog restoration, metro and light railway schemes as megaprojects that are consistent with our climate goals. Nature restoration and climate adaptation, too, are a long-term, expensive endeavours that require government leadership and multigenerational financial commitments. Such megaprojects benefit the public good and the environment, and their economic benefits are spread widely. For this reason, committing to nature restoration, public transport and a renewable energy system is ultimately the hallmark of a mature democracy in the 21st century. The State (or its proxies) will have to plan for the future, acquire land portfolios and shoulder long-term investments that inevitably carry risk. Long-term, large-scale projects require a political vision combined with a strong administrative state to secure the funding to see them through to completion. Megaprojects are complex, expensive, high-risk but ultimately transformational. When MetroLink is ready to take passengers from the early 2030s, there will be no doubt it was worth the long wait. Sadhbh O'Neill is an environmental and climate researcher. She is writing in a personal capacity
Times
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Bettany Hughes: I couldn't finish reading Das Kapital
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. I read it first when I was 11 and it exploded my head with this world of female understanding and the tragedies of life. Emily Hauser's Mythica, a very cool book about the true stories in archaeology and history behind the women of all the famous myths. The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. It's about these crazy grassroots movements in the Middle Ages across Europe, where people thought that the second coming was about to happen. They reacted to it by leaving villages en masse and becoming choreomaniacs, where they went and danced their way through salvation. It's based on fascinating original research.
Bloomberg
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
The Medieval Mindset Behind Modern Politics
World leaders are using language from the Middle Ages that reflects a dark shift in global politics, explains Bloomberg Opinion columnist Adrian Wooldridge. (Source: Bloomberg)
Telegraph
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The 20 best novels of all time
To nominate the 20 greatest novels of all time, even if you've spent decades reading and writing about fiction, is far from an easy task. I swapped books in and out of the running for weeks; I was haggling with myself over a couple until the end. The project made me think about all of them afresh: to remember why I had enjoyed them, and understand why they spoke to me. The attentive reader will immediately spot omissions. There is, for instance, no Austen, no Dickens, no Forster – and that's just some of the British names. Yet no list can be complete – even if we had 30, or 50, or 100 entries. And in order to avoid an arbitrary list of great novels, or of novels that are obviously canonical, I've tried to opt for books that have changed the way we think about the novel form. Each of the 20 books below, then, has in some way moved the novel forwards, whether stylistically, structurally or politically. The literary tradition would look very different without them. You may disagree with some of my choices, and some of my reasoning. But that's fine; in fact, I hope you do. Let the conversation commence! Jump to a particular era: Middle Ages 17th and 18th centuries 19th century 20th century 21st century Middle Ages The Tale of Genji (1021) by Murasaki Shikibu
