Word: courtiers
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...about the little known origins of Irish hurly (TIME, Sept. 28) is most unTIMEworthy. It savors of the they-kept-the-pig-in-the-parlor ditties. It is no more probable that hurly started in a clubbed dispute over a potato than it is that tennis began in a courtier's attempt to ward off with a plate a hot dog bandied at him by an irate Louis the Whosis. Elsewhere you state that hurly is at least a thousand years old and the potato was not known in Europe until the 16th century. If you must link...
...Velasquez. The year was 1500. Columbus, with the rank of Admiral, was conducting his third series of American explorations (he later made a fourth and final voyage from Spain). Without his knowledge charges had been made against him at the Spanish Court, had been believed. King Ferdinand had appointed Courtier Francisco Bobadilla to be Governor of Hispaniola (The Spanish Isle) empowered to arrest Columbus and ship him off to Spain...
...were men's screams. "Stop! Call the guard!" cried the Empress. "Something terrible is happening!'' "Your Majesty need experience no alarm," soothed a punctilious equerry. "This is merely the hour for flogging military delinquents." Flashing-eyed, the petite Empress insisted on alighting from her coach. Amid courtier consternation she actually walked the short distance back to the Hofburg, rushed impulsively up the marble stairs to find her young husband Franz-remembered today as the venerable, majestic Emperor Franz Josef of Austria Hungary. "You must stop them from flogging your soldiers!" cried Elizabeth. To Franz Josef this...
Peter tore the capital of Muscovy from Moscow and planted it at St. Petersburg which he had created on a marsh. Peter gave his people the Cyrillic alphabet which seven-tenths of them have not yet mastered. He introduced tobacco and knouted any courtier who did not take to a pipe. Finding the women of Russia cooped Asiatically in harems, Peter dragged them out with a ukase. Fancying a lowly laundress whom soldiers called Katinka, he made her the Tsarina Catherine I. He decreed a new calendar. With knowledge won by toiling incognito as a shipwright in Holland he built...
...Mercy, mercy, Sire!" begged Courtier Streshnief (according to Historian Dolgoroukov). "How can I tell? I was not the only...