This book traces across the millennium of the Middle Ages the gradual crystallisation of a new and distinctive European identity. Koenigsberger covers the Islamic, Byzantine and central Asian worlds in his account which explains Europe's progression from chaos and collapse to the point where it was set to rule much of the world.

This bestselling, seminal book - a general survey of Europe in the era of `Rennaisance and Reformation' - was originally published in Denys Hay's famous Series, `A General History of Europe'. It looks at sixteenth-century Europe as a complex but interconnected whole, rather than as a mosaic of separate states. The authors explore its different aspects through the various political structures of the age - empires, monarchies, city-republics - and how they functioned and related to one another. A strength of the book remains the space it devotes to the growing importance of town-life in the sixteenth century, and to the economic background of political change.

This book traces across the millennium of the Middle Ages the gradual crystallisation of a new and distinctive European identity. Koenigsberger covers the Islamic, Byzantine and central Asian worlds in his account which explains Europe's progression from chaos and collapse to the point where it was set to rule much of the world.

Opening at the height of the Renaissance, the book chronicles the dawning of a new age on the European continent. Koenigsberger paints a detailed picture of the Reformation and its significance as increasingly powerful nations began to intrude on their subjects' public and private lives. He gives account of the Counter-Reformation and the political and economic crisis that accompanied it, and an in-depth discussion of the age of Louis XIV and the balance of power in Europe. A full chapter addresses the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and throughout attention is given to social, cultural and intellectual developments. The book concludes with a summary of the situation throughout Europe on the eve of the French Revolution, and the dramatic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of a consumer society.

This 2001 book charts the history of the States General - the parliament - of the Netherlands and its relations with two phases of monarchical rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike the English parliament, the States General was a composite body, representing the local estates of the separate provinces which were anxious to keep their autonomy. The history of the States General was determined by this structure, and by its relations with the monarchy: dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, and Spanish Habsburgs in the sixteenth. Ideally, everyone was meant to cooperate. In practice, there was already a major crisis by the 1480s, and divisions from the 1560s led to decades of civil war. By 1600 the Netherlands had split between the United Provinces - a parliamentary regime, governed as a republic by the States General - and the Spanish Netherlands.

This history of the States General of the Netherlands and its relations with the monarchy involves the dukes of Burgundy and the Spanish Habsburgs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After more than a century of mainly peaceful cooperation, the two sides quarrelled violently about religion, sovereignty and local privileges, and decades of civil war led to a split in the country. The North became a republic and a parliamentary regime, while the South remained attached to the Spanish monarchy and continued without the States General.