Weekly History Quiz No.310

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire on May 29, 1453, when Sultan Mehmed II conquered the city after a 53-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire.

Read more about the Peasants' Revolt and its consequences here.

Often overshadowed by the Monterey International Pop Festival which was held a couple of weeks after it, Barbecue 67 is regarded as the first rock festival, held in Spalding, Lincolnshire, UK on 29th May 1967. The line-up included Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Move, Pink Floyd and Eric Clapton. The Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival was held 10 – 11 June 1967 in California and regarded as the opener for the ‘Summer of Love’. The Monterey International Pop Festival was held 16 – 18 June 1967, also in California. Woodstock, in up-state New York, was not held until 15 – 18 August 1969.

Using literary technique of multiple focalisation, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no direct action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. Woolf explores loss, subjectivity, the nature of art, and the problem of perception in the novel.

Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing extremist who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords. Rabin was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres for his part in brokering the peace deal. The Accords greatly divided Israeli society, with some seeing Rabin as a hero for advancing the cause of peace and some seeing him as a traitor for giving away land they viewed as rightfully belonging to Israel.

An early influential artist in Cubism, Metzinger also wrote extensively on the theory of the art movement.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), was established in 1949 by Stalin to coordinate socialist economies under Soviet leadership. The Warsaw Pact was military; the European Coal and Steel Community was Western European.

A villa rustica was a Roman grand house in the countryside that housed the owner and their family as well as accommodation for the workers of the estate and spaces for storage and farm animals. The name for these houses distinguished them from the villas located in or on the outskirts of Roman cities. Remains of villa rustica buildings have been discovered in Germany, Serbia, Portugal, Britain, Switzerland and of course, Italy.

A key revolutionary, Trotsky was de facto second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic.  He was a critic of Joseph Stalin, who outmaneuvered him, expelling him from the Politburo in 1926 and deporting him in 1929. In 1940 he was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.

Imperator was originally an honorific granted to victorious generals and later became synonymous with emperors. Consuls were elected magistrates with shared authority, dictators were temporary emergency rulers, and praetors primarily handled judicial duties.