Word: emperor
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...growing spirit of German nationalism, his treatises complained that a soft and corrupt Rome was robbing Germany of its wealth. Within weeks after he wrote them, Luther's latest polemics were printed and circulated throughout the Holy Roman Empire. By 1521, when he was invited by Emperor Charles V to answer the charges against him at the Diet of Worms, the unknown friar had become a folk hero. There, Luther once more insisted that only Biblical authority would sway him. "My conscience is captive to the Word of God," he told the court. "I will not recant anything...
...evening last week the regulars began arriving around nine. "Emperor" brought the cards. Before each game one of the players will stop at Cahaly's and buy two packs of Bee's playing cards. They have to be Bee's. "As soon as a card looks slightly ratty we throw out the deck. We were burning something like 14 decks a night. The janitor who emptied the waste-baskets was going mad," the "Emperor" explained...
...apparent serenity of China has often hidden the recurring tensions between central government and regions, between Emperor and officialdom or ambitious war lords-and, above all, the sometimes intolerable inner tensions of trying to maintain harmony. As China Scholar Etienne Balazs put it: "The smiling landscape is found to be a veil which, when torn asunder, reveals a craggy vista of precipices and extinct volcanoes, reminiscent of the visions with which most Chinese landscape painters were obsessed...
...China, anything resembling nationhood was understood only in terms of a kind of superfamily, with the Emperor as the patriarch. Ultimately, in the Confucian view, all government was based on virtue. So long as the head of the great Chinese family was virtuous, all was well with the land; but if the country fared ill, it must be because the Emperor had fallen into evil ways and the "mandate of heaven" had been withdrawn. That was the traditional rationale for the periodic rebellions that brought down every Chinese dynasty. Mencius, a revered follower of Confucius, proclaimed the people...
...Confucian order is profound, one indication being the low social status of the soldier. Men who know how to employ ruse, the traditional weapon of the weak against the strong, are particularly admired. A famous Chinese story describes how a poet wrote a novel considered dangerous by the Emperor and was summoned to court to be punished; he bribed the boatman to travel as slowly as possible, and by the time he arrived, he had written a new novel so fantastic that the Emperor decided he must be insane and spared his life. To many Chinese, that poet is more...