Desmond Seward

Raider. Conqueror. King. Saint. This is the story of Olav Haraldsson, the greatest Viking who ever lived. A ruthless Viking warrior who named his most prized battle weapon after the Norse goddess of death, Olav Haraldsson and his mercenaries wrought terror and destruction from the Baltic to Galicia in the early eleventh century. Thousands were put to the sword, enslaved or ransomed. In England, Canterbury was sacked, its archbishop murdered and London Bridge pulled down. The loot amassed from years of plunder helped Olav win the throne of Norway, and a century after his death he was proclaimed Eternal King and has been a national hero there ever since. Despite his bloodthirsty beginnings, Olav converted to Christianity and, in a personal vendetta against the old Norse gods, made Norway Christian too, thereby changing irrevocably the Viking world he was born into. Told with reference to Norse sagas, early chronicles and the work of modern scholars, Desmond Seward paints an intensely vivid and colourful portrait of the life and times of arguably the greatest Viking of them all.

Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award Few causes have given rise to such dramatic tales of loyalty, passion and betrayal as the Jacobite dream of restoring the Stuarts to the British throne. Although its failure brought savage retribution from the Hannoverians, the Jacobite flame continued to burn decades after Culloden. This is the first modern history of the entire Jacobite movement in Scotland, England and Ireland, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that drove James II into exile and the death of his grandson, Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, in 1807. The Battle of Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlies flight through the heather are well known, but not the other risings and plots that involved half of Europe and even revolutionary America. The King Over the Water weaves together all the strands of this gripping saga into a vivid, sweeping narrative, full of insight, analysis and anecdote.

Esta es la primera obra que se ocupa conjuntamente de todas las órdenes militares, la única que traza su historia completa desde la Edad Media hasta nuestros días, siguiendo sus avatares en momentos y acontecimientos tan conflictivos como las Cruzadas o la segunda guerra mundial, y que ofrece un detallado y documentado recorrido por su historia y evolucion. Para esta edicion española, se ha contado con un apenice en el que se actualiza y amplia la parte dedicada a las ordenes religiosas y su actividad tanto en españa como en Hispanoamerica. Si bien existen algunos libros que tratan parcialmente alguno de los aspectos analizados en este amplio estudio, a menudo se trata de obras que desconocen los documentos pertinentes o los citan de segunda mano, y ese es uno de los valores importantes de esta obra: ser la historia completa de todas la ordenes, escrita a partir de un exhaustivo rastreo de las fuentes originales en los archivos pertinenetes.