The Land of the Great Image: Historical Narrative

Product Information

It means asking questions, and asking them again and again, and asking fresh questions as the experience of life causes fresh questions to arise. The holy sacraments, such as Holy Communion and Baptism, which only the priest could administer, had been understood as the authentic avenues of God’sgrace, not available outside the Church or apart from the ministry of an ordained priest.

Before making an offer on a property you will want to consider your financial situation, your income and outgoings. Lutheranism also became associated with the political efforts of the princes who ran the free cities and states of the Holy Roman Empire to resist the authority of Catholic emperor Charles V and claim more of that authority for themselves. As readable as it is profound, The Great Land Rush is a path-breaking work of global history, offering exceptional insights into the formation of modern nations and attitudes.

His preoccupation with finding a new way to reach the riches of the East was the force that had propelled him into a far more momentous discovery in the West, the mysterious land of mythic renewal. The incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention and defeat all our efforts to connect past, present, and future, thereby diverting us from an understanding of the human things that unfold in time, including the paths of our own lives. After a month at sea without sight of land, his crew began to feel overwhelmed by the dread of a watery death, and they threatened to mutiny. The physical pictures the author gives us are more than beautiful; they are wonderfully neat and often ironic ….

He was not the first European to reach the Americas, but he was the first to establish enduring contact between the Old World and the New.The book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique’s career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma (land of the “great image” of the Buddha) to the Church and to Portuguese trade, Dispatched from Goa, capital of the now almost forgotten Portuguese empire in Asia, Manrique made his way across and around the Bay of Bengal, surviving shipwreck, tigers, and pirates, to reach the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma. Instead, it would receive certain parts of Europe, certain fragments that had been broken off from the whole – particularly English laws and customs – and would give those fragments a new home, in a new land, where they could develop and flourish in ways that would never have been possible in their native habitat. Nor can we have a sense of the future as a time we know will come, because we remember that other tomorrows also have come and gone. And all along Manrique’s way the author waits at every turn with another curiosity, another historical tidbit for the reader to relish. The details can be surprising and intriguing, and they may reveal unsuspected things about your ancestors.

The Caribbean islands were beguilingly beautiful, but they were full of exotic plants and trees that did not correspond to anything he knew or had read about. Portugal was a small country, but as the westernmost country of mainland Europe, with an extensive Atlantic coastline and the magnificent ports of Lisbon and Porto, it was perfectly situated to become an oceangoing power, and eventually the first global empire in the history of the world. The Land of the Great Image is a vivid, illuminating study written with the care and penetration that an artist as well as a historian must exercise to make the exotic past live and breathe for us. In fact, aside from his challenge to the pope’s authority, Henry had no complaints about the doctrines of the Catholic Church.But we are more concerned here with one of the indirect effects of the Crusades, which was to bring Europeans into contact with the riches of the lands along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, consequently opening up overland trade routes to Asia, from which many desirable goods, such as rugs, silks, gold brocade, perfumes, teas, precious stones, dye-woods, and unusual spices such as pepper, nutmeg, and cloves, could be imported.