History of The World
The Weltchronik tells the history of the world, starting even before the six-day creation by telling of Satan's rebellion in Heaven, and relating the Biblical stories of the Old Testament (oddly not the New), then continuing with Homer and other classical Greek and Roman material, and on down the list of Emperors through Charles the Great to Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor.
The style is anecdotal, with many fun tales inserted into what might otherwise be sober history. For example, the reign of Frederick II is interrupted to tell an entirely fictional story of a nobleman named Friedrich von Antfurt. This Friedrich subjects a duchess to what we today could only call sexual harassment, to the point where she thinks up a ruse to get rid of him. She promises to give him what he wants (the poet makes no bones about the fact that he only wants her body) provided he takes part in a joust wearing her chemise (underdress) instead of his armour. She is of course counting on him being killed. But he survives, and there has to be a reckoning.
Jans is recorded in a number of Viennese documents for the years 1271-1302. He is known to have been a member of one of the highest patrician families of the city.
Read more about this topic: Jans Der Enikel
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, the world, history of, history and/or world:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Softly sweet in Lydian measures
Soon he soothed his soul to pleasures.
‘War’, he sung, ‘is toil and trouble;
Honour but an empty bubble.
Never ending, still beginning,
Fighting still, and still destroying;
If the world be worth thy winning,
Think, O think it worth enjoying.
Lovely Thais sits beside thee,
Take the good the Gods provide thee.’”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.”
—Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten Of Burma Mountbatten (1900–1979)