Sigismund, First Captain... Emperor's Champion..The Eternal Crusader! The Great Crusade is ending. The Emperor has returned to Terra while Horus remains among the stars to complete the unification of humanity. As the Imperial armies fight the final battles of the age, Remembrancer Solomon Voss seeks the answer to one question: why does Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists and greatest champion of the Legions, believe that war will not end? Granted a rare audience with the master of the Templars, the answer takes Voss on a revelatory journey to a time before Sigismund became a Space Marine, through his first battles and oaths, to the bitterest duels between Legions
To readers familiar with Lars Gustafsson's work, the playful philosophizing of Sigsmund will come as no surprise, as he leisurely pulls together seeming fragments into a narrative of 1970s Berlin that at once looks back to Homer, Dante, and the Faust legend and ahead to space warfare and intergalactic travel, childhood memories of Sweden, Marxist-Leninism, sports competition, art, epistemology, daydreams--nothing is excluded from the purview of Gustafsson's lighthearted humanism. And behind it all broods the restless spirit of the author's alter ego, the warring king, Sigismund III of Poland (d. 1632).
The first major study of the early Reformation and the Polish monarchy for over a century, this volume asks why Crown and church in the reign of King Sigismund I (1506-1548) did not persecute Lutherans. It offers a new narrative of Luther's dramatic impact on this monarchy - which saw violent urban Reformations and the creation of Christendom's first Lutheran principality by 1525 - placing these events in their comparative European context. King Sigismund's realm appears to offer a major example of sixteenth-century religious toleration: the king tacitly allowed his Hanseatic ports to enact local Reformations, enjoyed excellent relations with his Lutheran vassal duke in Prussia, allied with pro-Luther princes across Europe, and declined to enforce his own heresy edicts. Polish church courts allowed dozens of suspected Lutherans to walk free. Examining these episodes in turn, this study does not treat toleration purely as the product of political calculation or pragmatism. Instead, through close analysis of language, it reconstructs the underlying cultural beliefs about religion and church (ecclesiology) held by the king, bishops, courtiers, literati, and clergy - asking what, at heart, did these elites understood 'Lutheranism' and 'catholicism' to be? It argues that the ruling elites of the Polish monarchy did not persecute Lutheranism because they did not perceive it as a dangerous Other - but as a variant form of catholic Christianity within an already variegated late medieval church, where social unity was much more important than doctrinal differences between Christians. Building on John Bossy and borrowing from J.G.A. Pocock, it proposes a broader hypothesis on the Reformation as a shift in the languages and concept of orthodoxy.
Terra comes under attack from an enemy within as the Imperial Fists and Rogal Dorn prepare for the coming of Horus. Recalled from the Great Crusade after Ullanor, Rogal Dorn and the VII Legion were appointed as the Emperor’s praetorians, but only after the Warmaster Horus' treachery was revealed did the full extent of that sacred duty become apparent. Now, the Solar System comes under attack for the first time since the war began, and many of the seemingly impregnable defences wrought by Dorn and his Imperial Fists Legion prove inadequate. With all eyes fixed firmly upon this new threat beyond the gates of Terra, who in turn will protect Dorn from the enemy within?
A short story collection on the Horus Heresy From the battlefields of Phall and Isstvan, to the haunted shadows of Terra itself – the Horus Heresy rages on across the galaxy in this collection of short stories and novellas.
This short fiction by Belgian scholar Oscar Mandel follows the life of Sigismund, the lost prince of Poland. Beginning as a play in 1988, improved in 2002, Sigismund finally comes to prose, where it plays freely with Polish history to bring alive a fanciful tale rooted in philosophy.
Book 4 in the Global best selling The Horus Heresy: Siege of Terra series. The Traitor Host of Horus Lupercal tightens its iron grip on the Palace of Terra, and one by one the walls and bastions begin to crumple and collapse. Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, redoubles his efforts to keep the relentless enemy at bay, but his forces are vastly outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned. Dorn simply cannot defend everything. Any chance of survival now requires sacrifice, but what battles dare he lose so that others can be won? Is there one tactical stroke, one crucial combat, that could turn the tide forever and win the war outright?
