Word: emperor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years of military oppression." Mahgoub saw no "insuperable blockades" to good relations with neighboring Egypt and hinted that the Sudan will no longer serve as a transit route for arms shipments either to the Congo rebels or to the Eritrean insurgents who are battling the Ethiopian regime of Emperor Haile Selassie...
...Habsburg emperor, Rudolf II was exceptionally inept. During his rule, from 1576 to 1612, he was forced to cede Hungary, Moravia, Austria and Bohemia. Yet he had vision of sorts. He was an amateur astronomer, brought Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe to the Hradčany, his imperial castle in Prague, to perfect his stargazing. Rudolf's keen eye carried over into the arts, which he collected with all the magpiety of a Renaissance nobleman worshiping beauty. It was one of the world's greatest collections, but Rudolf could not hold on to it either...
Beastly Nature. If the Devil is a woman, her name is undoubtedly Lady Wu. She was Cleopatra, Catherine the Great and Lucrezia Borgia rolled into one, and from A.D. 655 to 704, first as Empress and later as "female Emperor," she subjected China to a reign of unprecedented terror. In this lightly fictionalized and gruesomely readable account of her career, Lin Yutang dispassionately describes the nature of the beast and the events of an era that still stands as history's most horrible experience of petticoat government...
Lady Wu was born a commoner, the daughter of an army officer. At 14, she caught the Emperor's eye and became -a royal concubine. At 24, she seduced the Emperor's successor and became his favorite. The throne was now her goal. To attain it she strangled her own baby, the new Emperor's daughter, and blamed the crime on the reigning Empress. The Empress was deposed; Lady Wu took her place. Within a year she held all the strings of power, manipulated the Emperor like a puppet. On her secret instructions, the former Empress...
...When the Emperor died, Lady Wu assumed the regnancy and soon transformed government by murder into government by massacre. Hundreds died every day in the torture chambers operated by her secret police; whole villages were wiped out by ambitious commanders who invented a sedition whenever they wanted a promotion. When all possible opposition was crushed, Lady Wu abolished the Tang succession, established the Wu dynasty, and in 690 had herself crowned as the first Wu Emperor. To everyone's amazement, she proved in most respects a model monarch. She demolished the apparatus of terror and installed a Cabinet...