Sublime

of silver with an adder’s head on top.” They were again defeated by the weather. Barbaro’s men had dug into a rubbish tip. They had missed by a few hundred yards the burial chamber of a Scythian princess, adorned with enough jewelery to ignite all their wildest Venetian dreams of oriental gold. It was not discovered until 1988.

Thus ended the protracted defiance of Nathaniel Courthope.

In both Byzantium and the Frankish West, it was the fusion of secular with religious influences that created societies cohesive enough to withstand the aftershocks of imperial breakdown, barbarian invasion and Islamic expansion.

Conquest and consequences

Nathaniel Courthope,