Sublime

Until well into the seventeenth century, the Ottoman sultans balanced their dependence on the political and military service of the Turkish aristocracy by recruiting a slave army of Muslim converts (perhaps seven or eight thousand a year) separated in childhood from their Christian parents. Devshirme recruitment obliterated the ties of kinship and

34Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim son of Josiah king in place of his father Josiah, and changed his name to Jehoiakim.

Now ‘Citizen Tippoo’ was discovered by British interceptions to be in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he formally invited to visit India to liberate the country and expel the British. He had even sent ambassadors to Paris along with a draft treaty in which he proposed an alliance to drive the British out of India.73

Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or

battle. For this reason he and Aristu Jah were very anxious to forge an alliance with the English through William, and to enlist the armies of the Company on their side. Aristu Jah was the most Anglophile of the Nizam’s advisers, and alone in the durbar realised the real and growing military strength of the Company. His ideas, however, were not wid

[The King] was called ungrateful for rising against his benefactors. He was no doubt a weak and cruel old man; but to talk of ingratitude on the part of one who saw that all the dominions of his ancestors had been gradually taken from him until he was left with an empty title, and more empty exchequer, and a palace full of penniless princesses, is

Brother Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte — Napoleon III (1808-1873) was both the first elected president of France and its last reigning monarch. A tumultuous autocrat, he was exiled three times, escaped after being sentenced to life in prison and on other occasions welcomed as a hero. A member of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of France, t

Yet now, at the moment of the most crucial decision Zafar would ever take, with most of the Delhi elite already instinctively lined up against the looting, mutinous sepoys, Zafar made an uncharacteristically decisive choice: he gave them his blessing. The reason is not hard to guess. With the armed, threatening and excitable sepoys surrounding him