Word: mading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That figure was Saladin. It is testament to his extraordinary stature in the Middle Ages that not only was Saladin the sole "modern" mentioned--he had been dead barely 100 years when Dante wrote--but also that a man who had made his name successfully battling Christianity would be lionized by the author of perhaps the most Christ-centered verse ever penned...
...still had a tough hand to play. He was a Kurd (even then a drawback in Middle Eastern politics), and he was from Syria, a Sunni state, trying to rule Egypt, a Shi'ite country. But a masterly 17-year campaign employing diplomacy, the sword and great good fortune made him lord of Egypt, Syria and much of Mesopotamia. The lands bracketed the Crusader states, and their combined might made plausible Nur al-Din's dream of a Muslim-Christian showdown...
Terror, however, was the Khan's greatest weapon. Cities that resisted the Mongols were made into examples. Their populations were slaughtered indiscriminately, with survivors marched before the Mongol armies to buffer counterattacks: human shields nearly eight centuries before Saddam Hussein. Cities that surrendered without a fight were spared, their citizens merely enslaved...
...jaded by the unnatural deconstructions of 20th century art cannot easily imagine the electric impact Giotto made by painting natural human figures that reached out of their frames to communicate directly with the observer. This was not simply a marvel in a superstitious age but also the artistic birth of the Renaissance. Giotto fathered a radical revolution of startling genius that set the course of Western art for the next 600 years...
...born around 1267 to peasants in the bucolic valleys outside Florence. Legend says the country boy tending his flocks was discovered by the painter Cimabue, who saw him draw a fine sheep upon a rock. A more likely tale has him haunting Cimabue's Florentine bottega until the painter made him an apprentice. There Giotto absorbed his mentor's strength of drawing and sense of drama, but nature was his true teacher. He divined how to depict, with brush and pigment, the human body according to the prescription of St. Francis: "Your God is of your flesh. He lives...