I Take History With My Coffee

He was born illegitimate in a provincial Dutch backwater, a region that produced herring fishermen and transit traders — not intellectuals. He entered a monastery he had not chosen. He served a bishop who never fulfilled his ...

In the fifteenth century, the Burgundian Low Countries became Europe's premier musical center, and no composer embodied this achievement more fully than Guillaume du Fay. From the soaring polyphony of Cambrai Cathedral to the ceremonial grandeur of papal Rome, du Fay's music captured the cultural p…

May 6, 1432. Inside a cathedral in Ghent, a crowd gathers to witness something extraordinary—an altarpiece so lifelike that viewers can count individual flowers in a painted meadow and watch blood flow into a golden chalice. ...

In November 1530, Margaret of Austria lay dying in Mechelen after twenty-three years as regent of the Habsburg Netherlands. Her final letter to her nephew, Emperor Charles V, urged him above all to preserve peace—a testament ...

When Mary of Burgundy died in a riding accident in March 1482, she left a four-year-old heir and a succession crisis that would tear apart the richest territories in northern Europe. Her widower, Maximilian of Austria, claime...

On January 5, 1477, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, died on a frozen battlefield outside Nancy. His death sparked one of the most intense constitutional crises of the fifteenth century. Charles left behind his nineteen-ye...