Rome's Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire's holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome's most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This is the first book that follows the hist...

The Historians of Ancient Rome is the most comprehensive collection of ancient sources for Roman history available in a single English volume, tracing the history of Rome from the city’s foundation by Romulus in 753 BCE to the rise of Christianity as the religion of the Roman emperors in the fourth century CE.After a general introduction on Roman historical writing, extensive passages from more than a dozen Greek and Roman historians and biographers as well as coins, image...

**A Vatican Secret Archive historian reveals the true story of the Templars: “**consider this little book the first-choice primer on its legend-laden subject” (Booklist).At its height, the Order of the Knights Templar rivaled the kingdoms of Europe in military might, economic power, and political influence. For 700 years, the story of these warrior-monks has been plagued by controversy and accusations of heresy. Tragically, the transcript of their Inquisit...

Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the len...

Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyses the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. This fluent new translation is accompanied by comprehensive notes and an introduction that dispels some of the myths associated with Machiavelli, and considers the true purpose of The Prince. - ;'A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought...but war, its institu...

"An indispensable point of departure for anyone interested in the cult of the saints in the Middle Ages." —Eamon Duffy, The New York Review of BooksFrom its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant...

To obtain sacred relics, medieval monks plundered tombs, avaricious merchants raided churches, and relic-mongers scoured the Roman catacombs. In a revised edition of Furta Sacra, Patrick Geary considers the social and cultural context for these acts, asking how the relics were perceived and why the thefts met with the approval of medieval Christians.

Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans, Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Meditteranean society, where the Roman p...

The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine offers students a comprehensive one-volume survey of this pivotal emperor and his times. Richly illustrated and designed as a readable survey accessible to all audiences, it also achieves a level of scholarly sophistication and a freshness of interpretation that will be welcomed by the experts. The volume is divided into five sections that examine political history, religion, social and economic history, art, and foreign relations during th...

One of the most enduring and influential of all human institutions, the papacy has also been amongst the most controversial. No one who seeks to make sense of modern issues within Christendom -- or, indeed, world history -- can neglect the vital shaping role of the popes.In Keepers of the Keys of Heaven, eminent religion scholar Roger Collins offers a masterful account of the entire arc of papal history -- from the separation of the Greek and Latin churches to the contempo...

This book advances our understanding of the place of Latin inscriptions in the Roman world. It enables readers, especially those new to the subject, to appreciate both the potential and the limitations of inscriptions as historical source material, by considering the diversity of epigraphic culture in the Roman world and how it has been transmitted to the twenty-first century. The first chapter offers an epigraphic sample drawn from the Bay of Naples, illustrating the dynamic epigraphic cu...

The traditions associated with a pope's death have changed from when they were buried in the catacombs of Rome. Various ceremonies, rites and rituals developed over time, but a formal procedure was not initiated until the early 1300s and even then was not always strictly followed. This comprehensive reference book provides information on the deaths, funerals and burial places of each pope and antipope from St. Peter (Apostle) to John Paul I. (Innocent X was almost gnawed by rats because no...