Henry I of England plans for Matilda, the King was succeeded by his nephew, Stephen of Blois, resulting in a period of civil war known as the Anarchy. Henry was probably born in England in 1068, in either the summer or the last weeks of the year, possibly in the town of Selby in Yorkshire. His father was William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy who had invaded England in 1066 to become the King of England, establishing lands stretching into Wales. The invasion had created an Anglo-Norman elite, many with estates spread across both sides of the English Channel. These Anglo-Norman barons typically
The Boy Who Was in history, connected only by Nino's involvement. Chapter 3, "Poseidon and the Greeks", covers the building of the temple of Poseidon in Paestum. Chapter 4, "The Romans and the Volcano", tells of the destruction of Pompeii. Chapter 5, "The Last of the Goths", is a highly romanticized view of the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom in southern Italy which followed the western Roman empire and was in turn followed by the Lombards. Chapter 6, "The Normans and the Saracens", has Nino telling Robert Guiscard's army about a group of Norman soldiers sixty years earlier who repelled a Saracen pirate attack