Word: roussel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Things went reasonably well for a while, but soon Roussel discovered that Byzan tine Empire politics were veined with in trigue and deceit. When Emperor Ro-manus Diogenes and his huge force of 60,000 men were beaten by treachery at Manzikert in 1071, confusion became the real ruler of the Empire. Emperors were made and unmade overnight, and an honest free-lance soldier scarcely knew his employer from one battle to the next. Roussel tried desperately to keep on the winning side, and for a time it seemed that his chance for a personal domain might come. But when...
Byzantine Deceit. Like a lot of Frankish knights of the day,11th century Roussel de Balliol offered his sword for hire-and even then, before the Crusades, the steadiest work around was fighting the infidel. When Roussel and his troop of 300 mailed warriors got a chance to hire out to the Emperor of Byzantium to fight the Turks, he jumped at the chance. Out in Asia Minor, at the very frontiers of the Christian world, there were chances which a mercenary might never have in Europe...
...only would Roussel be paid in gold for an honest day's slaughter. There was always the chance that he could hack away a chunk of territory from the Turk and rule it himself under the Emperor. Roussel's wife Matilda, a forceful battle-ax from Lombardy, endorsed the idea. Like most mothers, she was thinking of her children's future and her own too, and there was not much future with a hus band who fought...
...government announced its intention to let the penal colony "disappear by extinction." Red tape, lassitude and the demands of World War II slowed down the process, but last February the government decided to bring home the last convicts and libérés. Last week Théodore Roussel, a freed man who had spent more than 50 of his 76 years in French Guiana for a long-forgotten robbery, gazed blankly at the soft landscape of his native land. "I can't blame anyone but myself," he said of his wasted life. "I was headstrong...
...Roussel: The Spider's Feast (Paris Philharmonic conducted by René Leibowitz; Esoteric). The composer's most popular work, in an LP première. The music was written for a ballet (vintage 1912) about insects, but it is a work of freshness and real symphonic flow...