This Majestic example of Spanish architechture, incorporating both the Moorish and Medieval Catholic traditions is situated in the picturesque province of Castile-Leon, Northwest of Madrid. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the old city of Segovia is spectacularly situated atop a long, narrow promontory. It contains a wealth of monuments, including a cathedral, a magnificent ancient Roman aqueduct, and the beautiful fairy-tale spires of the Alcázar, or castle-palace, that towers over the countryside below.Alcazar castle in Segovia, Spain, was first mentioned in records dating back to 1122 as a hill-fort set atop a rocky outcrop between the rivers Bergsma and Clamores. By 1155 this hill-fort became known as “Alcazar”, which in Arabic meant royal residence. It is a stone fortification,...
The rules of Heraldry prohibit placing a color on a color, a metal upon a metal or, a fur upon a fur. There is one well known exception to the rule about metals and this is on the well known arms for the kingdom of Jerusalem, where the gold cross and crosses are placed on a silver field. On the basis of these three materials, Color, Metal and fur all coats of arms are created. The items placed on the field are called charges. The original shields were very simple with few charges as there were very few knights and nobleman that had arms. However as Coats of Arms became more widespread the need to differentiate arms led to the...
It was only natural that if French should be the lingua franca of the worldly gentleman, just as Latin was of the churchman and the scholar, Heraldry would also speak that language. There was a movement in England around 1400 to substitute English words for old French terms in Heraldry, Silver instead of Argent, Gold instead of Or and so on, but this movement died out and the French terms are used to this day. This is not surprising, Norman French was used in the English Law Courts for pleading until 1735, so it’s use to the present day in Heraldry is understandable.Now to the terms used in Heraldry. A shield, which is the main and essential part of the...
Located in Ghent, Belgium, the present castle was built in 1180 by count Philip of Alsace and was modeled after the crusaders castles the count encountered while he participated in the second crusade. Before its construction, there stood a wooden castle on the same location, built in the ninth century. Work was begun on the current Gravensteen building in 1180, on the site of an earlier castle. The building was modeled on the crusader castles in the Holy Land, and the massive fortifications still ooze power. The fortress was left empty and semi-derelict for some time, and during the industrial revolution some of its vast halls were used as loom-filled factories for the local cloth industry. It has now been restored...
Old French is the language of heraldry and many of the phrases used in the descriptions of the coats of arms are of Anglo-French derivation, the primary reason for this is that the French language was the first of the native tongues of Europe to arrive at anything resembling an equality with Latin. Since the time of the Roman Empire, Latin was the language of officialdom and had gradually become the everyday speech of people in Britain, France, Spain, and other western European countries.When the Roman Empire crashed, the rule of Rome was overthrown in many countries and Latin was replaced with the local dialect. In some countries such as France and Spain Latin lived on, albeit in a changed...
