Word: long
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This aura of inexorability has led some people to wax poetic about cosmic purpose. The Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing at midcentury, long before the Internet, nonetheless discerned a "thinking envelope of the earth" that he dubbed the "noosphere." This was the divinely ordained outcome of the two evolutions, and would lead to "Point Omega," where brotherly love would reign supreme...
Europe entered the century as a study in disintegrated empire. Rome had long since fallen. Charlemagne had briefly laid claim to its authority, but his heirs could not sustain a continent-wide order. Christendom was a Babel of weak and squabbling kings, aristocrats whose holdings sometimes exceeded those of royalty, and a church that would spawn two competing Popes...
...linen sky, auguring bad luck. William, who believed the English crown had been promised him, lost no time. Five hundred vessels eventually ferried 7,000 men and their 2,000 mounts. Contrary winds delayed the force on the French side of the English Channel for 15 days--just long enough for Norway to launch its own 300-ship attack on the north of England. When Harold, having defeated the Scandinavians, rushed south again with 7,000 troops, William was outside Hastings. "For God's sake, spare not," he told his men. His well-deployed knights and archers eventually overwhelmed...
That encounter took place near Hattin, within sight of the Golan Heights. Saladin had assembled a pan-Islamic force of 12,000 cavalry near Lake Tiberias. The Christians were lured on a long July march across Galilee's parched Plain of Lubiya. Saladin had the right bait--he had besieged the lakeside town in which a knight's wife was staying--and the Crusader force, frying in heavy armor and unable to fight its way to the water, was overwhelmed by the Muslims. When the Christian knights retreated to the coastal fortress of Tyre, Saladin turned his army inland. Jerusalem...
...turn over his shop and at least some of his equipment to his creditor Fust, who carried on the work, alone at first and later with the assistance of his son-in-law Peter Schoffer. The monopoly they may have had on Gutenberg's methods did not last long. Presses adapted to print from movable type rapidly spread across Europe. By 1500 an estimated 30,000 titles had been published...