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La Croix Et Le Croissant
Paperback
Series: La Bleue
ISBN13: 9782234064447
Publisher: Stock
Published: Dec 1 2019
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French
The Cross and the Crescent is the second volume in a major three-volume historical work which explores the dark centuries between the end of the Roman Empire in the West (476 AD) and the Eleventh Century, when kingdoms were established as the forerunner to our modern states. These were centuries of slow cultural change: the extension of Christianity and of its political and social role; the appearance of Roman art as distinct from Greco-Latin art; the emergence of literature and common languages; and the development of the Arab-Islamic civilisation south of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, east of Constantinople, the Roman Empire endured and continued with its own evolution. .
Taillandier's L'Écriture du monde used the lives of Cassiodorus and Theolinda to take us up to the end of the Western Roman Empire and the establishment of new barbarian kingdoms. The Cross and the Crescent continues the story, still told through the trajectories of real people (Emperor Heraclius, King Dagobert, Charles Martel...), with the birth and expansion of Islam up to the ill-fated Battle of Poitiers (734).
Characters whose lives have been pitted at a crossroads in history try to carve out a future in an era of darkness. Female figures leave their mark on this narrative, underlining the political role of women at the time: Martina, the image of the maternal protector Fredegund and Brunhilda, cruel and ambitious women of power; Bathilde, who was bought as a slave on the shores of the English Channel and went onto to reign over the Francs.
As a novelist, François Taillandier is best known for his Anielka (winner of the Grand Prix for a novel from the Académie française) and a series of five books, La Grande Intrigue. With these volumes he brings back to life the distant origins of our modern European civilisation.
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