title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: After marriage, it did not take long for her husband to stray as Eugénie found sex with him "disgusting". It is doubtful that she allowed further approaches by her husband once she had given him an heir. He subsequently resumed his "petites distractions" with other women.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: Eugénie faithfully performed the duties of an empress, entertaining guests and accompanying the emperor to balls, opera, and theater. After her marriage, her ladies-in-waiting consisted of six (later 12) "dames du palais", most of whom were chosen from among the acquaintances to the empress before her marriage, headed by the "Grand-Maitresse" Anne Debelle, Princesse d'Essling, and the "dame d'honneur", Pauline de Bassano.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: She traveled to Egypt to open the Suez Canal and officially represented her husband whenever he traveled outside France. In 1860, she visited Algiers with Napoleon. She strongly advocated equality for women; she pressured the Ministry of National Education to give the first baccalaureate diploma to a woman and tried unsuccessfully to induce the Académie française to elect the writer George Sand as its first female member.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: Her husband often consulted her on important questions. She acted as regent during his absences in 1859, 1865 and 1870, as he often accompanied his soldiers on the battlefield to motivate them during the wars. In the 1860s, she often attended meetings of the Council of Ministers, even leading the meetings for a brief space of time in 1866 when her husband was away from Paris. A Catholic and a conservative, her influence countered any liberal tendencies in the emperor's policies. Her strong preference was for hereditary monarchy and she made repeated displays of support for members of European royalty who were in crisis, like supporting a restoration of the Bourbons in Spain or trying to help the deposed monarchs of Parma and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. According to Nancy Nichols Barker, "her ideas on the principles of government were ill formed and included a jumble of Bonapartism and Legitimism, whose incompatibility she seemed not to even recognize."


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: She was a staunch defender of papal temporal powers in Italy and of ultramontanism. Because of this she ardently tried to dissuade her husband from recognizing the new Kingdom of Italy, which was formed after Sardinia's 1861 annexation of the Bourbon-ruled Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and all of the pope's territory outside Rome. She also supported keeping a French garrison in Rome to protect the papacy's continued hold on the city. Her opposition to Italian unification earned her the enmity of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, who stated that "the emperor is weakening visibly and the empress is our enemy and works with the priests. If I had her in my hands I would teach her well what women are good for and with what she should meddle." She also clashed with the French foreign minister Édouard Thouvenel over the question of the French garrison in Rome. Much to Eugénie's chagrin, Thouvenel negotiated an agreement to wind down the French military presence in exchange for a guarantee of papal sovereignty from the new Italian kingdom. The Duke of Persigny blamed her influence when Thouvenel was dismissed by the Emperor, declaring to Louis-Napoléon that "You allow yourself to be ruled by your wife just as I do. But I only compromise my future...whereas you sacrifice your own interests and those of your son and the country at large."


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: She was blamed for the fiasco of the French intervention in Mexico and the eventual death of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. However, the assertion of her clericalism and influence on the side of conservatism is often countered by other authors.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: In 1868, Empress Eugénie visited the Dolmabahçe Palace in Constantinople, the home to Pertevniyal Sultan, mother of Abdülaziz, 32nd sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Pertevniyal became outraged by the forwardness of Eugénie taking the arm of one of her sons while he gave a tour of the palace garden, and she slapped the empress on the stomach as a reminder that they were not in France. According to another account, Pertevniyal perceived the presence of a foreign woman within her quarters of the seraglio as an insult. She reportedly slapped Eugénie across the face, almost resulting in an international incident.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: The Empress was "perhaps the last Royal personage to have a direct and immediate influence on fashion". She set the standard for contemporary fashion at a time when the luxury industries of Paris were flourishing. Gowns, colors, and hairstyles ""à l'impératrice"" were avidly copied from the Empress throughout Europe and America. She was famous for her large crinolines and for rotating her outfits throughout the day, with a different dress for the morning, afternoon, evening, and night. The British satirical magazine "Punch" christened her variously as the "Queen of Fashion", "Imperatrice de la Mode", "Countess of Crinoline", and "Goddess of the Bustles". She never wore the same gown twice, and in this way commissioned and acquired an enormous wardrobe, which she disposed of in annual sales to benefit charity. Her favored couturier, Charles Frederick Worth, provided hundreds of gowns to her over the years and was appointed the official dressmaker to the court in 1869. In the late 1860s, she caused a shift in fashion by turning against the crinoline and adopting Worth's "new" slimmer silhouettes with the skirt gathered in the back over a bustle.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: Eugénie's influence on contemporary taste extended into the decorative arts. She was a great admirer of Queen Marie Antoinette and decorated her interiors in revivals of the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles. A general vogue arose for 18th century French design, becoming known as ""Style Louis XVI Impératrice"". According to Nancy Nichols Barker, her admiration for Marie Antoinette "was nearly an obsession. She collected her portraits and trinkets, lived in her suite at Saint-Cloud, had constructed a small model of the Petit Trianon in the park, and frequently engaged Hübner in lugubrious conversation about the fate of the martyred queen."


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: In 1863, the Empress established a museum of Asian art called the "musée Chinois" (Chinese Museum) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. She carefully curated the displays of her museum, constituting diplomatic gifts given to her by an embassy from Siam in 1860, as well as loot taken from the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing by French troops during the Second Opium War. General Charles Cousin-Montauban had sent crates of this loot to Eugénie as a gift, with the first shipment arriving in February 1861. The collection numbers some 800 objects, with 300 coming from the sack of the Summer Palace.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: In 1854, Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie bought several acres of dunes in Biarritz and gave the engineer Dagueret the task of establishing a summer home surrounded by gardens, woods, meadows, a pond and outbuildings. Napoleon III chose the location near Spain so his wife would not get homesick for her native country. The house was called the Villa Eugénie, today the Hôtel du Palais. The presence of the imperial couple attracted other European royalty like the British monarchs Queen Victoria and the Spanish king Alfonso XIII and made Biarritz well-known.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: The Empress held anti-Prussian views and disliked its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for what she perceived as his "meddling" in Spanish affairs. She believed that France's status as a great power was under threat, and that a victory against Prussia would secure her son's future rule. Maxime du Camp claimed that, after the Prussian victory over Austria in 1866, the Empress would often state that "Catholic France could not support the neighborhood of a great Protestant power." In 1870, when the diplomatic crisis which would lead to the Franco-Prussian War erupted over Prussia's Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne, Eugénie was key in pushing her husband toward supporting what she called "my war" ("C'est ma guerre"). In one instance she pointed to the couple's son in front of her husband and declared "this child will never reign unless we repair the misfortunes of Sadowa". Adolphe Thiers included her, the foreign secretary the Duc de Gramont, Émile Ollivier, and the military in the pro-war camp behind the Emperor, who was himself indecisive.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Eugénie remained in Paris as Regent while Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial travelled to join the troops at the German front. When the news of several French defeats reached Paris on 7 August, it was greeted with disbelief and dismay. Prime Minister Émile Ollivier and the chief of staff of the army, Marshal Le Bœuf, both resigned, and Eugenie took it upon herself to name a new government. She chose General Cousin-Montauban, better known as the count of Palikao, 74 years old, as her new prime minister. The count of Palikao named Maréchal Francois Achille Bazaine, the commander of the French forces in Lorraine, as the new overall military commander. Napoleon III proposed returning to Paris, realizing that he was doing no good for the army. The empress responded by telegraph: "Don't think of coming back unless you want to unleash a terrible revolution. They will say you quit the army to flee the danger." The emperor agreed to remain with the army but sent his son back to the capital. With the empress directing the country and Bazaine commanding the army, the emperor no longer had any real role to play. At the front, the emperor told Marshal Le Bœuf, "we've both been dismissed."


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: The army was ultimately defeated, and Napoleon III gave himself up to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan. The news of the capitulation reached Paris on 3 September. When it was given to the empress that the emperor and the army were prisoners, she reacted by shouting at the Emperor's personal aide, "No! An emperor does not capitulate! He is dead!...They are trying to hide it from me. Why didn't he kill himself! Doesn't he know he has dishonored himself?!". Later, when hostile crowds formed near the Tuileries Palace, and the staff began to flee, the empress slipped out with one of her entourage and sought sanctuary with her American dentist, Thomas W. Evans, who took her to Deauville. From there, on 7 September, she took the yacht of a British official to England. In the meantime, on 4 September, a group of republican deputies proclaimed the return of the Republic, and the creation of a Government of National Defense.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: From 5 September 1870 until 19 March 1871, Napoleon III and his entourage including Joseph Bonaparte's grandson Louis Joseph Benton, were held in comfortable captivity in a castle at Wilhelmshöhe, near Kassel. Eugénie traveled incognito to Germany to visit Napoleon.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: When the Second Empire was overthrown after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the empress and her husband took permanent refuge in England and settled at Camden Place in Chislehurst, Kent. Her husband, Napoleon III, died in 1873, and her son died in 1879 while fighting in the Zulu War in South Africa, with Eugénie visiting his death site on the first anniversary. Before her son's death and after she was widowed, she attempted to join together Bonapartists and Legitimists in political alliance against the French Third Republic by making overtures to the Count of Chambord (the Legitimist claimant to the throne of France) and proposing that he adopt her son. The idea was rejected by the Count of Chambord. In 1885, she moved to Farnborough, Hampshire, and to the Villa Cyrnos (named after the ancient Greek for Corsica), which was built for her at Cape Martin, between Menton and Nice, where she lived in retirement, abstaining from politics. Her house in Farnborough is now an independent Catholic girls' school, Farnborough Hill.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: After the deaths of her husband and son, as her health started to deteriorate, she spent some time at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight; her physician recommended she visit Bournemouth which was, in Victorian times, famed as a health spa resort. During an afternoon visit in 1881, she called on the queen of Sweden, at her residence 'Crag Head'.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: Her deposed family's friendly association with the United Kingdom was commemorated in 1887 when she became the godmother of Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (1887–1969), daughter of Princess Beatrice, who later became queen consort of Alfonso XIII of Spain. She was also close to Empress Consort Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, who last visited her, along with Emperor Nicholas II, in 1909.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: On the outbreak of World War I, she donated her steam yacht "Thistle" to the British Navy. She funded a military hospital at Farnborough Hill as well as made large donations to French hospitals, for which she was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 1919.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: The former empress died in July 1920, aged 94, during a visit to her relative the 17th duke of Alba, at the Liria Palace in Madrid in her native Spain, and she is interred in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, with her husband and her son. The British King George V attended her requiem.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: After World War I, Eugenie lived long enough to see the collapse of other European monarchies, such as those of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. She left her possessions to various relatives: her Spanish estates went to the grandsons of her sister Paca; the house in Farnborough with all collections to the heir of her son, Prince Victor Bonaparte; Villa Cyrnos to his sister Princess Laetitia of Aosta. Liquid assets were divided into three parts and given to the above relatives except for the sum of 100,000 francs bequeathed to the Committee for Rebuilding the Cathedral of Reims.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: The empress has been commemorated in space; the asteroid 45 Eugenia was named after her, and its moon Petit-Prince after the prince imperial.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: She had an extensive and unique jewelry collection, most of which later was owned by the Brazilian socialite Aimée de Heeren. De Heeren collected jewelry and was fond of the empress as both were considered to be the "Queens of Biarritz"; both spent summers on the Côte Basque. Impressed by the elegance, style and design of the jewelry of the neo-classical era, in 1858, she had a boutique in the Royal Palace under the name Royale Collections.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: She was honoured by John Gould who gave the white-headed fruit dove the scientific name "Ptilinopus eugeniae".


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: George W. M. Reynolds's penny dreadful "The Empress Eugenie's Boudoir" tells of the goings-on in the French court during the days of the Second Empire and features the titular empress as one of its lead characters.


title: Eugénie de Montijo

text: Named for the empress, the Eugénie hat is a style of women's chapeau worn dramatically tilted and drooped over one eye; its brim is folded up sharply at both sides in the style of a riding topper, often with one long ostrich plume streaming behind it. The hat was popularized by film star Greta Garbo and enjoyed a vogue in the early 1930s, becoming "hysterically popular". More representative of the empress' actual apparel, however, was the late 19th-century fashion of the "Eugénie paletot", a women's greatcoat with bell sleeves and a single button enclosure at the neck.


title: East London

text: East London refers to the part of London, England, east of the ancient City of London and north of the River Thames. It consists of areas in the historic counties of Essex and Middlesex.


title: East London

text: The East End of London is the historic core of east London, traditionally consisting of areas close to the City of London on the western, Middlesex side of the River Lea (in the former Tower Division), although the term "East End" is often used more loosely. Neither east London nor the East End of London have precise, formal definitions. The Eastern (E) Postal District is a different subset of East London; and there is also an "East" sub-region used by the Greater London Authority for planning policy reporting purposes.


title: East London

text: The below boroughs cover areas of Greater London to the north of the Thames and east of the City of London:


title: East London

text: The E (Eastern) postcode area was introduced in 1857 to facilitate the distribution of mail. The postcode area is a sub-set of East London, with notable exclusions:


title: East London

text: The 2011 iteration of the London Plan included an altered ‘East’ region, to be used for planning, engagement, resource allocation and progress reporting purposes. As well as seven boroughs north of the river, the ‘East’ sub-region also includes three boroughs to the south of it: Greenwich, Bexley and Lewisham. These boroughs are seldom called 'east London' as they are south of the river and are poorly connected to the north.


title: East London

text: East London is located in the lower Thames valley. The major rivers of East London are the Thames that forms the southern boundary; the Lea which forms the boundary of Tower Hamlets/Hackney with Newham/Waltham Forest; the Roding which approximately forms the boundary of Newham with Barking and Dagenham/Redbridge; and the Beam which forms the boundary of Barking and Dagenham with Havering. The marshes along the Thames which once stretched from Wapping to Rainham are almost completely gone. East London is generally the lowest elevated of London's four cardinal points because of the wide Thames that runs here; the only hills here are in northern areas distant from the river in the boroughs of Havering, Redbridge and Waltham Forest.


title: East London

text: The East End, the old core of modern East London, began with the medieval growth of London beyond the city walls, along the Roman roads leading from Bishopsgate and Aldgate, and also along the river.


title: East London

text: Growth was much slower in the east, and the modest extensions there were separated from the much larger suburbs in the west by the marshy open area of Moorfields adjacent to the wall on the north side, which discouraged development in that direction. Urbanisation accelerated in the 16th century and the area that would later become known as the East End began to take shape.


title: East London

text: The first known written record of the East End as a distinct entity, as opposed to its component parts, comes from John Strype's 1720 'Survey of London', where he describes London as consisting of four parts: the City of London, Westminster, Southwark, and That Part beyond the Tower.


title: East London

text: The relevance of Strype's reference to the Tower was more than geographical. The East End was the urbanised part of an area called the Tower Division, which had owed military service to the Tower of London since time immemorial. Later, as London grew further, the fully urbanised Tower Division became a byword for wider East London, before East London grew further still, east of the Lea and into Essex.


title: East London

text: The westernmost component of the Tower Division was the ancient parish of Shoreditch, which would become fully urbanised as part of the East End/East London. Shoreditch's boundary with the parish of St Luke's (which, like its predecessor St Giles-without-Cripplegate served the Finsbury area) ran through the Moorfields countryside. These boundaries remained consistent after urbanisation and so might be said to delineate east and north London. The boundary line, with very slight modifications, has also become the boundary between the modern London Boroughs of Hackney and Islington.


title: East London

text: Moorfields remained largely open until 1812, and the longstanding presence of that open space separating the emerging East End from the western urban expansion of London must have helped shape the varying economic character of the two parts and perceptions of their distinct identity (see map below).


title: East London

text: Until about 1700, London did not extend far beyond the walled boundaries of the City of London. However, the population in the parishes to the east of the City was rising and this led to a need to break up the large ancient parish of Stepney into smaller units to provide adequate religious and civil administration. It was the industries associated with the River Thames, such as shipbuilding and the docks, that encouraged growth in the east, and by 1650, Shadwell was a developed maritime settlement. The docks in Tower Hamlets started to reach capacity in the early 19th century, and in 1855 the Royal Victoria Dock was opened in Newham. By 1882, Walter Besant and others, were able to describe East London as a city in its own right, on account of its large size and social disengagement from the rest of London.


title: East London

text: These industries declined in the later part of the 20th century (and earlier), but East London is now an area of regeneration. In the London Docklands, this has reached an advanced stage, but in the sections of East London that are within the Thames Gateway it is continuing, such as the redevelopment in Stratford associated with the 2012 Summer Olympics.


title: East London

text: Areas further east developed in the Victorian and Edwardian eras after the expansion of the railways in the 19th century. Development of suburban houses for private sale was later matched by the provision of large-scale social housing at Becontree in the 1920s and Harold Hill after the Second World War. However, the urban footprint was constrained in 1878 by the protection of Epping Forest and later the implementation of the Metropolitan Green Belt. The density of development increased during the interwar period, and new industries developed, such as Ford at Dagenham. In Tower Hamlets, the population peaked in 1891 and growth was restricted to the outer boroughs. By 1971, the population had peaked in every borough and the population was declining throughout the entire area. By the time of the 2011 UK Census, this had reversed and every borough had undergone some growth in population.


title: East London

text: The etymology of London is uncertain, but is known to be an ancient name. The concept of East London as a distinct area is a relatively recent innovation. John Strype's map of 1720 describes London as consisting of four parts: The City of London, Westminster, Southwark and "That Part Beyond the Tower". From the late 19th century the term East End of London was used to describe areas immediately adjacent to the City in the Tower division of Middlesex. Charles Booth in 1889 defined East London as the County of London between the City and the River Lea. In 1902 he now considered this area to be the "true East End", and his attention had been drawn eastward over the Lea into the Borough of West Ham, which was then outside London, and geographically in Essex, but under the authority of neither; in 1857 Charles Dickens termed it "London-over-the-Border". Walter Besant described East London as an area north of the Thames and east of the City that stretched as far as Chingford and Epping Forest, which was similar to the definition used by Robert Sinclair in 1950 that stretched east to include Barking and Dagenham. This broadly matched the Metropolitan Police District east of the city and north of the Thames at that time, and now corresponds to the boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Hackney, Havering, Newham, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest in Greater London.


title: East London

text: The area adjacent to the City of London is known as the East End of London. It does not have clearly defined boundaries, but is usually taken to be north of the River Thames, east of the City and west of the River Lea.


title: East London

text: The City and West London are connected to South London by more than thirty bridges, but East London is only connected by Tower Bridge at its innermost edge. The reasons for this include the widening of the River Thames as it gets further east, and also the need, until relatively recently, to avoid impediments to the river traffic of the strategic London Docklands.


title: East London

text: Until the end of the 20th century the East was connected to the South by just one railway line, the East London Line. The Jubilee Line Extension opened in 1999, was supplemented by extensions to the Docklands Light Railway and the Elizabeth line. A cable car service opened in 2012.


title: East London

text: There are road tunnels at Rotherhithe and Blackwall, with the Woolwich Ferry further east. There are also foot tunnels to Greenwich and Woolwich.


title: East London

text: The majority of the rail network in East London was built within fifty years from 1839. The first through the area was the Eastern Counties Railway from Mile End to Romford, extended to Shoreditch in 1840. The London and Blackwall Railway built a line from Minories to Blackwall the same year and the Northern and Eastern Railway connected Lea Bridge and Tottenham with the Eastern Counties at Stratford. The Eastern Counties and Thames Junction Railway started passenger service on their line from Stratford to Canning Town, Custom House and North Woolwich in 1847. This made Stratford a significant railway junction and location of railway works. The East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway connected Kingsland with Bow and Poplar in 1850 and was renamed North London Railway in 1853.


title: East London

text: In 1854 the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway connected Forest Gate on the Eastern Counties with Barking and Rainham. The East London Railway was opened in 1869. The Great Eastern Railway connected Lea Bridge with Walthamstow in 1870, and in 1872 built a connection from the Eastern Counties line at Bethnal Green to Hackney Downs. This was connected to the Walthamstow line in 1873 and extended to Chingford. The London and Blackwall built an extension to Millwall and North Greenwich on the Isle of Dogs in 1872 and the Eastern Counties and Thames Junction Railway was extended to Beckton in 1873, and Gallions in 1880. The London, Tilbury and Southend Railway connected Barking with Dagenham, Hornchurch and Upminster in 1885, and Romford with Upminster in 1893. The final piece of original railway works was the construction of the Great Eastern loop line to connect Woodford with Ilford via Fairlop in 1903.


title: East London

text: London Docklands was defined in the 1980s as the area of redevelopment under the control of the London Docklands Development Corporation. The Thames Gateway extends into East London with two areas of activity: the Lower Lea Valley around the Olympic site and London Riverside adjacent to the Thames.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game remotely from a cloud. It contrasts with traditional means of gaming, wherein a game runs locally on a user's video game console, personal computer, or mobile device.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Cloud gaming platforms operate in a similar manner to remote desktops and video on demand services; games are stored and executed remotely on a provider's dedicated hardware, and streamed as video to a player's device via client software. The client software handles the player's inputs, which are sent back to the server and executed in-game. Some cloud gaming services are based on access to a virtualized Windows environment, allowing users to download and install games and software as they normally would on a local computer.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Cloud gaming can be advantageous as it eliminates the need to purchase expensive computer hardware or install games directly onto a local game system. Cloud gaming can be made available on a wide range of computing devices, including mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, digital media players, or proprietary thin client-like devices. Some services may offer additional features to take advantage of this model, including the ability for a viewer to join a player's session and temporarily take control of the game.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Due to their dependency on high-quality streaming video, cloud gaming services typically require reliable, high-speed internet connections with low latency. Even with high-speed connections available, traffic congestion and other issues affecting network latency can affect the performance of cloud gaming, and the ability to use a service regularly may also be limited by data caps enforced by some internet service providers.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Further, the costs of cloud gaming shift from traditional distribution through retail outlets and digital storefronts to the data servers that run the cloud gaming services. Novel cost structures are required to cover these operating costs compared to traditional distribution.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Cloud gaming requires significant infrastructure for the services to work as intended, including data centers and server farms for running the games, and high-bandwidth internet connections with low latency for delivering the streams to users. The network infrastructure required to make cloud gaming feasible was, for many years, not available in most geographic areas, or unavailable to consumer markets.


title: Cloud gaming

text: A major factor in the quality of a cloud gaming service is latency, as the amount of delay between the user's inputs and when they take effect can affect gameplay — especially in fast-paced games dependent on precise inputs (such as first-person shooters and fighting games). Attempts to reduce latency include the use of caching as the cached data can be "stored locally ... and can be retrieved when required."


title: Cloud gaming

text: The provider's dedicated hardware can be upgraded over time in order to support higher resolutions and frame rates for the rendering and streams. The Quality of Experience (QoE) that measures the user's general level of satisfaction also needs to be brought into consideration during the development phase of cloud gaming.


title: Cloud gaming

text: The first demonstrated approach of cloud gaming technology was by startup G-cluster (short for Game Cluster), which introduced its product at the 2000 E3, and released around 2003. In their initial model around 2005, G-cluster provided PC games that ran on their servers, using video-on-demand service providers, set-top box manufacturers, and middleware software providers to help provide their service to network operators, and then offered the games through portals to end users. By 2010, due to changes in the market, G-cluster changed their model to work through a large server manufacturer to provide their games to the network operators and directly to users. This refocusing was necessitated by the increased available of free-to-play games available for personal computers, drawing them away from G-cluster's service, so G-cluster opted to focus on Internet Protocol television (IPTV) users instead, which had a potential target of about three million users in 2010. French telco SFR launched G-cluster gaming service in 2010 for its end users and Orange followed suit in 2012 offering the gaming service for its customers. Both services have been commercially operational ever since offering cloud gaming for their customers on TV and mobile.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Video game developer Crytek began the research on a cloud gaming system in 2005 for "Crysis", but according to their CEO Cevat Yerli, they halted development in 2007 to wait until the infrastructure and cable Internet providers were able to complete the task and the cost of bandwidth to decline.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Entrepreneur Steve Perlman revealed OnLive at the March 2009 Game Developers Conference. Perlman stated that with improvements in data and video compression as well as capabilities of smartphones, the potential for cloud gaming was now timely. OnLive was officially launched in June 2010, alongside sale of its OnLive microconsole. While OnLive had acquired some support from large publishers like Ubisoft, 2K Games and THQ, they found it difficult to get other publishers onboard as they were wary of the subscription price model.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Simultaneous to OnLive, another startup Gaikai was announced by David Perry in 2010. Gaikai opted to approach streaming of game demos rather than full games, making the service a form of online advertising for games. Gaikai gained far more publisher support, including Electronic Arts which OnLive had been trying to bring back to their service. Gaikai was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in July 2012 for , and by October 2012, was offering PlayStation games. Ultimately, the technology behind Gaikai was used as the foundation for PlayStation Now, first introduced in 2014.


title: Cloud gaming

text: OnLive was never profitable, and after a possible acquisition by HP Inc. fell through, OnLive’s assets were acquired by a newly formed entity named “OL2,” which was capitalized by Gary Lauder of Lauder Partners in 2012 at , a fraction of OnLive’s valuation from 2010. A mass layoff (2/3 of staff) was conducted to reduce operating costs. Under Lauder Partners, the new OL2 attempted to pivot its business model to allow streaming of games already owned by the user, but this failed to be profitable. OnLive and OL2's intellectual property was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in April 2015, but then closed it down about a month later. As stated by "The Verge", the acquisition of both Gaikai and OnLive's intellectual property gave Sony access to a range of patents covering cloud gaming.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Nvidia first announced its cloud gaming service, Nvidia Grid (later rebranded as GeForce Now), as a combination of hardware using its graphics processing units and software in May 2012, initially intending to partner with Gaikai for games on the service. Ubitus GameCloud was also introduced alongside Nvidia's Grid. GameCloud was designed as white-label service based on Nvidia's Grid that other providers could use to offer game streaming to their customers.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Grid was formally introduced as part of its Nvidia Shield Android TV device during the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show. Grid/GeForce Now launched with services provided by several cloud gaming partners including Agawi, Cloudunion, Cyber Cloud, G-cluster, Playcast, and Ubitus. The Grid service was first launched in North America in November 2014 where a limited number of games were made available, and then later expanded to computers in 2017, including support for importing a user's Steam and Epic Games Store library to run on the remote instance. This importing model was criticized by publishers including Activision Blizzard and Bethesda Softworks, as purchases were only intended for personal computers and not through cloud gaming. The publishers forced NVidia to pull these games from their service.


title: Cloud gaming

text: In 2014, Dragon Quest X was brought to Nintendo 3DS in Japan using Ubitus for the streaming technology.


title: Cloud gaming

text: In 2017, the French startup Blade launched a service known as Shadow, where users are able to rent a remote Windows 10 instance on a datacenter, with allocated access to an Intel Xeon processor and Nvidia Quadro graphics. The service is geographically-limited based on proximity to one of its datacenters; it initially launched in France, but began expanding into the United States in 2019.


title: Cloud gaming

text: In May 2018, Electronic Arts acquired cloud gaming assets and talent from GameFly for an undisclosed amount. EA subsequently announced "Project Atlas", a project to explore the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Frostbite engine technology to create a "unified" platform to "remotely process and stream blockbuster, multiplayer HD games with the lowest possible latency, and also to unlock even more possibilities for dynamic social and cross-platform play." That month, Google and Microsoft also announced cloud gaming initiatives, with Google beginning to pilot "Project Stream" (including a closed beta featuring "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" running via a client in the Google Chrome web browser, and Microsoft announced the upcoming Project xCloud, leveraging Microsoft Azure technology.


title: Cloud gaming

text: At the Game Developers Conference in 2019, Google officially announced its cloud gaming service Stadia, which officially launched on November 19 of that year. In May, Sony announced a partnership with Microsoft to co-develop cloud solutions between divisions, including gaming.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Apple Inc., which makes the iOS platform for iPhones and iPads, had looked to block cloud gaming apps on its service in mid-2020. They argued that cloud gaming services allowed developers to add games onto the iOS system that bypassed the normal checks they perform on any app before it is added to the App Store, and thus violated their terms of service. However, in September 2020, Apple altered its rules that allowed cloud gaming apps to work on iOS, with restrictions that each game must be offered as an individual download on the iOS store which the user must use before playing, though catalog apps as part of the service can list and link to these games. Both GeForce Now and Stadia announced plans in November 2020 to release iOS versions of their streaming services as progressive web applications that would be run through a Chrome or Safari browser on iOS devices, as allowed for by Apple, to support cloud gaming. Microsoft has also announced plans to use a similar approach to bring the xCloud game streaming technology to iOS via the browser sometime in early 2021.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Amazon introduced its own cloud gaming service Luna in September 2020. Games on the service will be offered via a channel-style subscription service, with Amazon's own games and those from Ubisoft available at the service's launch.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Asus and Intel announced ongoing hardware supply, research & development and software optimization alongside Boosteroid cloud gaming platform in November 2020.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Nintendo currently has games on the Nintendo Switch system that primarily run on cloud gaming because their systems are not powerful enough to run them otherwise (or to avoid porting costs), such as "Control", "Hitman 3", "Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy", and the "Kingdom Hearts" franchise.


title: Cloud gaming

text: A proposed method to improve game streaming's scalability is adaptive graphics processing unit (GPU) resource scheduling. Most cloud gaming providers are using dedicated GPUs to each person playing a game. This leads to the best performance but can waste resources. With better GPU resource scheduling algorithms, if the game does not fully utilize that GPU it can be used to help run someone else’s game simultaneously. In the past, “GPU virtualization was not used due to the inferior performance of the resource scheduling algorithm”. However new resource management algorithms have been developed that can allow up to 90% of the GPUs original power to be utilized even while being split among many users.


title: Cloud gaming

text: Algorithms could be used to help predict a player's next inputs, which could overcome the impact of latency in cloud gaming applications. Stadia's head of engineering Majd Bakar foresaw the future possibility of using such a concept to "[reduce] latency to the point where it's basically nonexistent", referring to this concept as "negative latency".


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria (, , , ) is an autonomous community in northern Spain with Santander as its capital city. It is called a "comunidad histórica", a historic community, in its current Statute of Autonomy. It is bordered on the east by the Basque autonomous community (province of Biscay), on the south by Castile and León (provinces of León, Palencia and Burgos), on the west by the Principality of Asturias, and on the north by the Cantabrian Sea (Bay of Biscay).


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria belongs to "Green Spain", the name given to the strip of land between the Bay of Biscay and the Cantabrian Mountains, so called because of its particularly lush vegetation, due to the wet and moderate oceanic climate. The climate is strongly influenced by Atlantic Ocean winds trapped by the mountains; the average annual precipitation is about .


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria has archaeological sites from the Upper Paleolithic period, although the first signs of human occupation date from the Lower Paleolithic. The most significant site for cave paintings is that in the cave of Altamira, dating from about 37,000 BC and declared, along with nine other Cantabrian caves, as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. Historically, the territory sits in the Ancient Period Cantabria, but from the Late Middle Ages to the early 19th century, the name Cantabria usually refers to the territory of the Basques, especially the lordship of Biscay.


title: Cantabria

text: The modern Province of Cantabria was constituted on 28 July 1778 at Puente San Miguel, Reocín. The yearly Day of the Institutions holiday on 28 July celebrates this. The Organic Law of the Autonomy Statute of Cantabria, approved on 30 December 1981, gave the region its own institutions of self-government.


title: Cantabria

text: Numerous authors, including Isidore of Seville, Julio Caro Baroja, Aureliano Fernández Guerra and Adolf Schulten, have explored the etymology of the name "Cantabria", yet its origins remain uncertain. The Online Etymology Dictionary states the root "cant-" is said to come from the Celtic for "rock" or "rocky", while "-abr" was a common suffix used in Celtic regions. Thus, "Cantabrian" could mean "people who live in the rocks" or "highlanders", a reference to the steep and mountainous territory of Cantabria.


title: Cantabria

text: The name "Cantabria" could also be related to the Celtic root "kant" or "cant" meaning edge or rim thus "coastal district," or "corner-land", "land on the edge" thus having the same probable derivation as the name of the English county of "Kent" and Canterbury, one of its major cities.


title: Cantabria

text: During the Spanish liberal regimes of the 19th century, the term came to be increasingly associated to the province of Santander. However, during the late medieval and Modern Period literature, "Cantabria" and "Cantabrians" refer to the Basque Country, especially the lordship of Biscay, and the Basques.


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria is a mountainous and coastal region, with important natural resources. It has two distinct areas which are well differentiated morphologically:


title: Cantabria

text: Towards the south are higher mountains, the tops of which form the watershed between the drainage basins of the Rivers Ebro, Duero and the rivers that flow into the Bay of Biscay. These peaks generally exceed from the Pass of San Glorio in the west to the Pass of Los Tornos in the eastern part: Peña Labra, Castro Valnera and the mountain passes of Sejos, El Escudo and La Sía. The great limestone masses of Picos de Europa also stand out in the southwest of the region: most of their summits exceed , and their topography is shaped by the former presence of glaciers.


title: Cantabria

text: Due to the gulf stream, Cantabria, as well as the rest of "Green Spain", has a much more temperate climate than might be expected for its latitude, which is comparable to that of Oregon. The region has a humid oceanic climate, with warm summers and mild winters. Annual precipitation is around 1,200 mm at the coasts and higher in the mountains. The mean temperature is about . Snow is frequent in the higher zones of Cantabria between the months of October and March. Some zones of Picos de Europa, over 2,500 metres high, have an alpine climate with snow persisting year round. The driest months are July and August. The mountainous relief of Cantabria has a dominant effect on local microclimate in Cantabria. It is the main cause of the peculiar meteorologic situations like the so-called "suradas" (Ábrego wind), due to the foehn effect: the southerly wind coming down from the mountains blows strongly and dry, increasing the temperature closer to the coast. This causes a decrease in air humidity and rainfall. These conditions are more frequent in autumn and winter, and the temperatures are commonly higher than . Fires are often helped by this type of wind: one example is the fire that destroyed part of the city of Santander in the winter of 1941. In these specific cases in the southern part of the mountain range the dry adiabatic gradient produces different conditions to the rest of the region: the wind there is fresher and more humid, and there is more rain.


title: Cantabria

text: The rivers of Cantabria are short and rapid, descending steeply because the sea is so close to their source in the Cantabrian Mountains. They flow perpendicular to the coastline, except for the Ebro. They also generally flow year round due to constant rainfall. Nevertheless, the rate of flow is modest (20 m³/s annual average) compared to the other rivers of the Iberian peninsula. The rapidness of their waters, caused by their steep descents, gives them great erosive power, creating the narrow V-shaped valleys characteristic of Green Spain. The environmental condition of the rivers is generally good, although increasing human activity due to rising population in the valleys continues to pose a challenge.


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria is the only autonomous community whose rivers flow into every one of the seas which surround the Iberian Peninsula: The Cantabrian Sea, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.


title: Cantabria

text: The variation in the altitude of the region, which in a short distance ranges from sea level to 2,600 meters in the mountains, leads to a great deal of diversity in vegetation and a large number of biomes.


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria has vegetation typical of the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula. It is characterized by forests of leafy deciduous trees such as oak and European beech. Nevertheless, human intervention dating back to ancient times has favored the creation of pastures, allowing the existence of large areas of grassland and prairies suitable for grazing cattle. These grasslands are mingled with plantations of eucalyptus and native oak. The southern part of Cantabria, including the "comarca" of Campoo the fringes of the Castilian plateau, is characterized by the transition to drier vegetation. Another diversifying factor which contributes to local variation within the region is the Mediterranean ecotone, giving rise to species unique to the region, such as the holm oak and arbutus trees, which are found in poor limestone soils with little moisture.


title: Cantabria

text: During the last two decades of the 20th century, and due mainly to European agricultural policies (CAP), many farmers substituted forestry for livestock farming, so as to avoid unemployment and poverty. This provoked a surge of eucalyptus – – plantations (and to a less extent of pines) which often hid the illegal destruction of native forests, just as the spread of livestock farming had done in the past by the endemic conversion of forest into prairie. These acts have been laxly controlled by the local councils or the central governments, in a process that clearly follows the saying: ""Pan para hoy, hambre para mañana"" (which translates as 'Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow'; i.e., "short-term gain, long-term pain").


title: Cantabria

text: The plantation of pines has given way in the last decades to that of eucalyptus because this non-indigenous species has no natural attacker within the European ecosystem (while pines are highly vulnerable to the pine processionary).


title: Cantabria

text: Both in relative and absolute terms the use of woods for forestry has increased in Cantabria, and is now almost 70% of all woods in the region.


title: Cantabria

text: Along with these characteristics it would also be necessary to mention peculiarities of the "comarca" of Liébana, which has a microclimate very similar to the Mediterranean, allowing to grow cork oaks, vines and olives, and which is still very well conserved from human activity.


title: Cantabria

text: The most important of these is the Picos de Europa National Park, which affects Castile and León and Asturias in addition to Cantabria, the three autonomous communities sharing its management.


title: Cantabria

text: Furthermore, nine Sites of Community Importance (LIC) have been declared: Western Mountain, Eastern Mountain, Western Rias and Oyambre Dunes, Dunes of Liencres and Estuary of the Pas, El Puntal Dunes and Estuary of the Miera, Ria de Ajo, Marshes of Noja-Santoña, Escudo de Cabuérniga Range and several caves with important bat colonies.


title: Cantabria

text: According to the 2009 census, the region has a population of 591,886 which constitutes 1.29% of the population of Spain, with the population density numbering 106.8 people per kilometer. The average life expectancy for male inhabitants is 75 years; for female inhabitants, it is 83 years. Eight years later in 2017 the population has fallen to 581,477 according to INE.


title: Cantabria

text: In relative contrast to other regions of Spain, Cantabria has not experienced much immigration. In 2007, only 4.7% of the population were immigrants. The predominant countries of origin for immigrants to Cantabria are Colombia, Romania, Ecuador, Peru, Moldova, and Morocco.


title: Cantabria

text: The majority of the population resides in the coastal area, particularly in two cities: Santander, with 183,000 people, and Torrelavega, the second largest urban and industrial centre in Cantabria, having a population of around 60,000. These two cities form a conurbation known as the Santander-Torrelavega metropolitan area. Castro Urdiales has an official population of 28,542, making it the fourth largest in the region because of its proximity to the Bilbao metropolitan area, there are a large number of people not registered in Castro Urdiales, and the true count may be double the official figure.


title: Cantabria

text: The first written reference to the name Cantabria emerges around 195 BC, in which the historian Cato the Elder speaks in his book "Origines" about the source of the Ebro River in the country of the Cantabri:


title: Cantabria

text: There are about 150 references to Cantabria or the Cantabri in surviving Greek and Latin texts. The Cantabri were used as mercenaries in various conflicts, both within the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere. It is certain that they participated the Second Punic War, from references by Silius Italicus and Horace. When C. Hostilius Mancinus was besieging Numantia, he withdrew upon learning that Cantabri and Vaccaei were present among his auxiliaries. The Cantabrian Wars began in They were defeated by Agrippa with great slaughter in , but they revolted again under Tiberius and were never entirely subdued.


title: Cantabria

text: In older geographers, the term Cantabria referred to an expansive country bounded by the Cantabrian Sea (the Bay of Biscay), the western side of the Sella valley in Asturias, the hillfort of Peña Amaya in Burgos, and along the Aguera River almost as far as Castro Urdiales. It thus included areas of Asturias, Santander, Biscay, and Guipuzcoa. Following the Roman conquest of Spain, however, it was restricted to the area of Santander and eastern Asturias, forming a part of Hispania Tarraconensis ("Tarragonan Spain"). The principal tribes of the area were the Pleutauri, the Varduli, the Autrigones, the Tuisi, and the Conisci or Concaui, who were known for feeding on their horses' blood. The area was well settled, with the largest city being Juliobriga, and the local mountains exploited for lead mines.


title: Cantabria

text: Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Cantabria regained its independence from the rule of the Visigoths. In 574, King Liuvigild attacked Cantabria and managed to capture the south of the country, including the city of Amaya, where he established a Visigothic province called the Duchy of Cantabria (see picture), which would serve as a limes or frontier zone to contain the Cantabri as well as their neighbors the Vascones. To the north of this cordon, however, the Cantabri continued to live independently until the Arab invasion. In 714, a mixed Arab/Berber army of Muslim Moors invaded the upper valleys of the Ebro and succeeded in capturing Amaya, the Cantabrian capital, forcing the Cantabrians back to their traditional frontiers, where they joined forces with the Kingdom of Asturias.


title: Cantabria

text: In the first chronicles of the Reconquista, Cantabria still appears to be acknowledged as a region. In the "Albendense Chronicle", when speaking of Alfonso I, it says, "This was the son of Peter, the duke of Cantabria".


title: Cantabria

text: During the 9th century, on mentioning the monastery of Saint Zacharias, Eulogius pinpoints it in "Seburim" (maybe Zubiri) on the river Arga, "waters all of Cantabria", in a letter sent to the bishop of Pamplona Williesind, suggesting a region stretching out far into the east. From this period on, source documents barely reference Cantabria by name, with "Asturias" featuring in names of the "comarcas" called "Asturias de Santillana", "Asturias de Trasmiera" and "Asturias de Laredo".


title: Cantabria

text: From a central core formed by the "Hermandad de las Cuatro Villas" ("Brotherhood of the Four Cities") (Santander, Laredo, Castro Urdiales and San Vicente de la Barquera), the "Hermandad de las Marismas" ("Brotherhood of the Marshes") was created, thereby uniting all the important seaports to the East of Asturias. During the period of the Reconquista, the Four Cities actively participated in the re-settling of Andalusia, dispatching men and ships. The coastal port cities of Cádiz and El Puerto de Santa María were settled by families from the Cantabrian Sea ports. Ships from the Four Cities took part in the taking of Seville, destroying the ship bridge linking Triana and Sevilla, a victory that is represented by the Carrack and the Torre del Oro of Sevilla in the coat of arms of Santander, Coat of arms of Cantabria and Avilés (Asturias).


title: Cantabria

text: In the 16th century, the name "La Montaña" ("The Mountain") was widespread in popular usage and in literature, as a designation of the Ancient Cantabria, as opposed to Castile, which referred solely to the Central Plateau. This distinction has survived into modern times.


title: Cantabria

text: With the rise of the Catholic Monarchs, the Brethren of the Marshes disappeared, leaving the Coregiment of the Four Villas, which included the whole area of influence of the old Brethren of the Four Villas (almost all of Cantabria). During the "ancien régime", the greatest jurisdictional lordships of Cantabria were mainly under the control of three of the Grandee families of Spain: that of Mendoza (Dukes of Infantado, Marquises of Santillana), of Manrique de Lara (Marquises of Aguilar de Campoo, Counts of Castañeda), and to a lesser extent that of Velasco (Dukes of Frías, Constables of Castile).


title: Cantabria

text: From the 16th century on, there was renewed interest in studying Cantabria and the Cantabri, particularly concerning the precise location of the territory that this people had occupied. It was not until the 18th century that the debate about the location and size of Ancient Cantabria was settled in a series of works which described the history of the history of the region such as "La Cantabria" by the Augustinian father and historian Enrique Flórez de Setién. Concurrent with the resurgence of this interest in the Cantabrians and the clarification of the aforementioned polemic, many institutions, organizations and jurisdictions in the mountainous territory received the name of "Cantabrian" or "of Cantabria".


title: Cantabria

text: In 1727, the first attempt to unify what would later become the Province of Cantabria occurred. Despite this, the high level of autonomy that the small entities of the fractured estate of Cantabria enjoyed, combined with a lack of resources, continued to be the main reason for Cantabria's weakness, aggravated by the progressive advance of the Bourbonic centralism and its administrative efficiency. The latter continually emphasised the impossibility of the smaller territories facing a multitude of problems on their own: from communications to the exercise of justice, from putting aside adequate reserves for hard times to the indiscriminate levees for soldiers, and above all the progression of fiscal impositions. All of this led to an acceleration of contact between villas, valleys and jurisdictions, which tended to focus on the Assemblies of the Provinces of the Nine Valleys, led by the deputies elected by the traditional entities of self-government.


title: Cantabria

text: There were two events that triggered the culmination of the integration process in this second attempt:


title: Cantabria

text: In this General Assembly a framework was established and formal steps began to be taken, leading to administrative and legal unity in 1778. This all culminated in the success of the Assembly held in the Assembly House of "Puente San Miguel" on July 28, 1778, where the Province of Cantabria was constituted. It was achieved by passing the common ordinances which had been developed to that end, and which had been discussed and approved previously in councils of all the villas, valleys and subscribed jurisdictions. They were, in addition to the Nine Valleys: Rivadedeva, Peñamellera, the Province of Liébana, Peñarrubia, Lamasón, Rionansa, the Villa of San Vicente de la Barquera, Coto de Estrada, Valdáliga, the Villa of Santillana del Mar, Lugar de Viérnoles, the Villa of Cartes and environs, the Valley of Buelna, the Valley of Cieza, the Valley of Iguña with the Villas of San Vicente and Los Llares, the Villa of Pujayo, the Villa of Pie de Concha y Bárcena, the Valley of Anievas, and the Valley of Toranzo.


title: Cantabria

text: Having learned lessons from the failed attempt of 1727, the first objective of the new entity was to obtain approval from King Charles III for the union of all the Cantabrian jurisdictions into one province. The royal ratification was granted on 22 November 1779.


title: Cantabria

text: The 28 jurisdictions that initially comprised the Province of Cantabria were clear in their intention that all the other jurisdictions that formed the "Party and Baton of the Four Villas of the Coast" should be included in the new province. To this end they set out the steps needed for this to happen as soon as those jurisdictions should request it. They would have to abide by the ordinances, having the same rights and duties as the founders, all on an equal footing. Thus, the following joined in quick succession: the Abbey of Santillana, the Valleys of Tudanca, Polaciones, Herrerías, Castañeda, the Villa of Torrelavega and environs, Val de San Vicente, Valle de Carriedo, Tresviso, and the Pasiegan Villas of La Vega, San Roque and San Pedro, as well as the city of Santander with its abbey.


title: Cantabria

text: Competition between the townships of Laredo and Santander led to the latter, having initially allowed the name of Cantabria for the province created at the beginning of the 19th century, later retracting its consent and demanding that it bear the name of Santander, so there would be no doubt as to which was the capital. When in 1821 the Provincial Council presented before the constitutional Courts its definitive plan for the provincial borders and legal entities, it proposed the name of Province of Cantabria, to which the Township of Santander replied that ""this province must retain the name of Santander"". However, many newspapers still showed in their headings the name of Cantabria, or Cantabrian.


title: Cantabria

text: During the War of Independence (1808–1814), Bishop Rafael Tomás Menéndez de Luarca, a strong defender of absolutism, promoted himself as the "Regent of Cantabria" and established the "Cantabrian Armaments" in Santander, a section of the army whose purpose was to travel to all the mountain passes from the Central Plateau to detain any French troop.


title: Cantabria

text: Although defeated, he managed later to regroup in Liébana under the command of General Juan Díaz Porlier, calling his forces the "Cantabrian Division", in which there were various regiments and battalions, such as the "Hussars of Cantabria" (cavalry) or the "Shooters of Cantabria" (infantry). During the Carlist wars they formed a unit called the "Cantabrian Brigade".


title: Cantabria

text: The use of terms with ancestral resonance through the 18th and 19th centuries continued during the 20th century, taking on a political tone that was distinctly regionalist, until 1936. In fact, the "Republican Federal Party" produced an autonomy statute for a Cantabrian-Castilian Federal State that year, which would include present-day Cantabria and any neighbouring areas from Castile and Asturias willing to join it. It could not be passed because of the Civil War. Following the war and the subsequent marginalization of such efforts under the Francoists regime, the use of the name of Cantabria decreased, to the point that for official purposes it was relegated to sports associations, the only arena in which Cantabria was noted as a region.


title: Cantabria

text: In 1963, the president of the Provincial Council, Pedro Escalante y Huidobro, proposed reapplying the name of Cantabria to the Province of Santander, as suggested in an academic report written by the historian Tomás Maza Solano. Although further steps were taken and many of the townships were in favour of the move, the petition did not succeed, mostly due to the opposition of Santander City Council. On 30 December 1981, a process that had been started in April 1979 by the Council of Cabezón de la Sal, under the presidency of Ambrosio Calzada Hernández, culminated in the granting of self-rule to Cantabria, outlined in Article 143 of the Spanish Constitution.


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria based its claim to autonomy on the constitutional precept that made provision for self-government for ""provinces with a historic regional character"".


title: Cantabria

text: A Mixed Assembly formed out of provincial deputies and national members of parliament began the task of drawing up an Autonomy Statute on 10 September 1979. Following the approval of the General Courts on 15 December 1981, the King of Spain signed the corresponding Organic Law of Autonomy Statute for Cantabria on December 30 of the same year. Thus, the province of Santander broke its link to Castile, and left the former region of Castile and León to which it had belonged up to that time, together with the provinces of Ávila, Burgos, León, Logroño, Palencia, Salamanca, Segovia, Soria, Valladolid and Zamora.


title: Cantabria

text: On 20 February 1982, the first Regional Assembly (now Parliament) was formed, with provisional status. From this time, the former province of Santander has been known as Cantabria and has thereby regained its historic name. The first home-rule elections were held in May 1983. The 4th Legislature (1995–1999) brought into effect the first great reform of the Autonomy Statute of Cantabria, approved by all the parliamentary groups.


title: Cantabria

text: The Autonomy Statute of Cantabria of 30 December 1981, established that Cantabria has in its institutions the desire to respect fundamental rights and public freedom, at the same time as consolidating and stimulating regional development through democratic channels. This document gathers all competences of the Autonomous Community that were transferred from the Government of Spain. As in other Autonomous Communities, some competences were not transferred, for example, Justice. The Statute also defines the symbols that should represent the region: The flag, the coat of arms and the anthem of Cantabria.


title: Cantabria

text: The Parliament of Cantabria is the principal self-government institution of the Autonomous Community, being the representative body of the Cantabrians. Presently it is constituted by thirty-nine deputies elected by universal, equal, free, direct and secret suffrage. The primary functions of the Parliament are: to exercise the legislative power, to approve the budgets of the Autonomous Community, to motivate and control the actions of the government, and to develop the rest of the competences that the Spanish Constitution, the Autonomy Statute and the rest of the legal order bestow on it. The President of the Autonomous Community holds the highest representation of the Community and ordinary representation of the Country in Cantabria, and presides over the Government, coordinating its activities.


title: Cantabria

text: The Government of Cantabria is the body in charge of directing the political activities and exercising the executive and regulatory powers according to the Constitution, the Statute and the laws. The Government is made up of the President, the Vicepresident (in which the President can delegate his executive functions and representations) and the Councillors, who are appointed and ceased by the President.


title: Cantabria

text: After several legislatures presided by the Partido Popular or by Juan Hormaechea's UPCA, the Regional Government of Cantabria was directed by a coalition of the Regionalist Party of Cantabria and Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) from year 2003 until 2011. The President was Miguel Ángel Revilla of Partido Regionalista de Cantabria (PRC), and the Vice President was Dolores Gorostiaga of the PSOE. As a result of the absolute majority of the Partido Popular in the regional elections of 2011, the president from 2011 to 2015 was Ignacio Diego Palacios, and the Vice President was also the healthcare Councillor, Maria José Sáenz de Buruaga. After the 2015 regional elections, Miguel Ángel Revilla of Partido Regionalista de Cantabria (PRC) was invested president for a third tenure with the support of PSOE.


title: Cantabria

text: The autonomous community of Cantabria is structured in "municipios" (municipalities) and "comarcas" (regions).


title: Cantabria

text: There are 102 municipalities in Cantabria generally comprising several townships, and from these, several districts. A number of municipalities bear the name of one of their townships (be it its capital or not), but not all them do. Each municipality is governed by its own city or municipal council, and two of them, Tresviso and Pesquera, do it by "concejo abierto" ("open council"), having fewer than 250 inhabitants.


title: Cantabria

text: The Mancomunidad Campoo-Cabuérniga is not a municipality, but a communal property, singular for its size and characteristics, of shared management between the municipalities of Hermandad de Campoo de Suso, Cabuérniga, Los Tojos and Ruente. This mountain estate is used as a grazing ground for Tudanca cattle and also for horses in less amount, in its "brañas" or grass prairies, and even nowadays transhumant cattle farming traditions survive in this region.


title: Cantabria

text: The Cantabrian legislation divides the autonomous community in administrative regions called "comarcas", but traditionally, other subdivisions of the territory have been used.


title: Cantabria

text: "Law 8/1999 of "Comarcas" of the Autonomous Community of Cantabria" of 28 April 1999 establishes that the comarca is a necessary entity, integral in the territorial organization of the region. This law opens the development of the "comarcalization" in Cantabria promoting the creation of "comarcal" entities, which have barely begun to appear. The law establishes that the creation of comarcas will not become mandatory for the whole territory until at least the 70% of it had not been "comarcalized" by its own will. It also adds that Santander will not ruled by comarcalization and should establish its own metropolitan area instead.


title: Cantabria

text: "Comarcas" in Cantabria have not reached administrative nature and barely have definite borders. Only Liébana for its geographic position in Picos de Europa, Trasmiera and Campoo, in the Ebro basin are established are clearly defined "comarcas" in the region. Nevertheless, functional differences in the territory can be distinguished, dividing it in the following areas: Santander Bay, of industrial and urban nature; Besaya, also industrial; Saja-Nansa, eminently rural; Western Coast, which has urban character; Eastern Coast, vacational; the traditionally renowned Trasmiera; rural Pas-Miera; Asón-Agüera, also mainly rural; the very well defined Liébana, and Campoo-Los Valles, rural and industrial by regions.


title: Cantabria

text: Until the 13th century, Cantabria was organized in valleys, as was typical in all of northern Spain. From then on, it was substituted by the organization in cities, towns or historic "comarcas" that grouped several valleys.


title: Cantabria

text: The economy of Cantabria has a primary sector, now in decline, employing 5.8% of the active population in the industries of cattle farming, traditional dairy farming, and meat production; agriculture, especially corn, potatoes, vegetables, and roughage; maritime fishing; and the mining of zinc and quarries.


title: Cantabria

text: The secondary sector which employs 30.3% of the active population is the sector with the most productivity in recent years due to construction; that of ironworking (Reinosa being the most important city), food service (milk, meat, vegetables and seafood), chemistry (Solvay, Sniace), paper production (Sinace, Papelera del Besaya), textile fabrication (Textil Santanderina in Cabezón de la Sal), pharmacy (Moehs in Requejada), industrial groups and transport, etc. The service sector employs 63.8% of the active population and is increasing, given that large concentrations of the population live in the urban centers and the importance that tourism has acquired in the recent years. As of July 2014, the unemployment rate in Cantabria is 19.3%, compared to 24.47% in Spain; while as of April 2010 its purchasing power parity was €25,326, compared to €26,100 in Spain and €25,100 in the EU25. In 2007, Cantabria's growth of real GDP was 4.1%, compared to a 3.9% average for Spain. The Gross domestic product (GDP) of the region was 13.8 billion € in 2018. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 25,500 € or 84% of the EU27 average in the same year.


title: Cantabria

text: The most significant consequence of the strong relief of the Cantabrian territory is the existence of topographic barriers that condition decisively the courses of the linking infrastructures, as much in the north–south orientation in the accesses to the Castilian Mesa, as in the east–west in the communication between valleys. Moreover, the cost of their construction and maintenance is much higher than average.


title: Cantabria

text: In Cantabria, there are two daily regional newspapers in addition to the national ones: "El Diario Montañés" and "Alerta", as well as many weekly, fortnightly and monthly publications. The main national radio stations have transmitter stations in places like Santander, Torrelavega, Castro-Urdiales, or Reinosa. There are also numerous local and regional stations. For the moment, there is no Cantabrian autonomic television with public financing, although some local channels exist (including Canal 8 DM, TeleBahía, Telecabarga, Localia TV Cantabria, etc.). In recent years, the Internet has allowed new informative proposals to emerge in the shape of digital diaries or blogs, which contribute to enrich the mediatic panorama of the region.


title: Cantabria

text: Spanish is the official language of Cantabria. The eastern part of Cantabria contributed to the origins of Medieval Spanish in a significant way. In western areas, there are remnants of the Cantabrian language, also called ""montañés"", and it is also somewhat preserved in parts of the Pas and Soba valleys in its eastern zone. Cantabrian can be viewed as a dialect of the wider Astur-Leonese language continuum, and is mutually intelligible with varieties in neighbouring Asturias.


title: Cantabria

text: Regarding the fairs, understood as big markets of products periodically celebrated, it is remarkable the "Livestock Fair of Torrelavega" taking place in the National Livestock Market "Jesús Collado Soto", the third biggest of Spain, that groups the buy and sell of all kinds of cattle in the region itself and the adjacent ones, being the bovine the main product. All over the region cattle and typical products fairs are celebrated weekly, monthly, or annually to gather the neighbours of the land. There are many different festivities in Cantabria, some of them limited just to small villages, but there are also festivals that attract tourism from all over the country. The most important are the following:


title: Cantabria

text: The following festivals are also remarkable in modern Cantabrian culture: Santander International Festival (Arts festival), Santander Summer Festival (Music festival), Sotocine (Film festival)


title: Cantabria

text: The north of the Spanish state is a rich area for mythology. From Galicia to the Basque Country, passing by Asturias and Cantabria, there are rites, stories and imaginary or impossible beings (or maybe not so).


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabrian lore turns its forests and mountains into magical places where the myths, beliefs and legends have been present as an essential part of the Cantabrian culture, either because they have been living in the popular heritage through the oral tradition transmitted from father to son, or because they have been recovered by scholars (Manuel Llano and others) who have worried about preserving the cultural heritage.


title: Cantabria

text: Its mythology and superstitions present a great Celtic influence that has diluted with the pass of time, being romanized or Christianized in many cases.


title: Cantabria

text: There is a heavy presence of fabulous beings of giant proportions and Cyclopean features (the "ojáncanos"), fantastic animals ("culebres", "caballucos del diablu" (lit. horses of the devil, damselflies), "ramidrejus", etc.), færies ("anjanas", "ijanas" of Aras), duendes ("nuberos, ventolines, trentis, trasgus, trastolillos, musgosu, tentiruju"), anthropomorphic characters (the "sirenuca" (little mermaid), the fish-man, the cuegle, the wife-bear of Andara, the "guajona"), etc.


title: Cantabria

text: The traditional sport of Cantabria is the game of "bolos" (skittles) in its four forms: "bolo palma", "pasabolo tablón", "pasabolo losa" and "bolo pasiego". The first one is the most widespread, exceeding regional nature and reaching the eastern zone of Asturias and also being the most complex in its game rules. The existence of "boleras" or skittle rings is important in every Cantabrian township, often being near the church or the village pub. Since the late 1980s, skittle play has consolidated with the reinforcement of skittle schools, revamped by different town councils and Cantabrian institutions, various competitions, and media coverage.


title: Cantabria

text: The remo (rowing) is a very traditional sport in the coastal towns. The origins of rowing in Cantabria go back many centuries, when several "traineras" (traditional fishing longboats) competed for the selling of the caught fish, which was reserved for the first ship to arrive to the fish market. At the end of the 19th century, work became sport and people started to celebrate regattas between Cantabrian townships. The sport clubs of Cantabria, especially the Astillero, Castro Urdiales, and the Pedreña belong to the most prize-winning teams of the history of this sport, and nowadays they are having one of the best moments after a decades-long period of trophy drought.


title: Cantabria

text: The Pasiegan jump is another of the outstanding rural sports of the region and a clear example of how the use of a work skill that disappears with the pass of time, gives rise to games and competition. Similar to other forms, like the Canarian shepherd jump, in the beginning this technique was used in the Pasiegan valleys to cross the stone walls, the fences, the creeks or the ravines that bordered the fields and obstructed the pass in the abrupt geography of the highland areas of Cantabria.


title: Cantabria

text: Referring to mass sports, Cantabria is present in national and international competitions through teams such as the "Racing de Santander", the "RS Gimnástica de Torrelavega" and the Cantabria autonomous football team in football or the "Independiente RC" in rugby union. The "Club Balonmano Cantabria" that won Leagues and King's Cups as well as IHF Super Globe, EHF Champions League, EHF Cup Winners' Cup and EHF Cup in handball or the Cantabria Lobos that played in the ACB in basketball represented the highest level of the Cantabrian sport in the recent past.


title: Cantabria

text: Cantabria has been the birthplace of exceptional and notable individuals in fields such as literature, arts, sciences, etc. Many of them have played a decisive role, not only in the history and events of the region, but also on the national and international levels. These include:


title: Grayscale

text: In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a grayscale image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an "amount" of light; that is, it carries only intensity information. Grayscale images, a kind of black-and-white or gray monochrome, are composed exclusively of shades of gray. The contrast ranges from black at the weakest intensity to white at the strongest.


title: Grayscale

text: Grayscale images are distinct from one-bit bi-tonal black-and-white images, which, in the context of computer imaging, are images with only two colors: black and white (also called "bilevel" or "binary images"). Grayscale images have many shades of gray in between.


title: Grayscale

text: Grayscale images can be the result of measuring the intensity of light at each pixel according to a particular weighted combination of frequencies (or wavelengths), and in such cases they are monochromatic proper when only a single frequency (in practice, a narrow band of frequencies) is captured. The frequencies can in principle be from anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, etc.).


title: Grayscale

text: A colorimetric (or more specifically photometric) grayscale image is an image that has a defined grayscale colorspace, which maps the stored numeric sample values to the achromatic channel of a standard colorspace, which itself is based on measured properties of human vision.


title: Grayscale

text: If the original color image has no defined colorspace, or if the grayscale image is not intended to have the same human-perceived achromatic intensity as the color image, then there is no unique mapping from such a color image to a grayscale image.


title: Grayscale

text: The intensity of a pixel is expressed within a given range between a minimum and a maximum, inclusive. This range is represented in an abstract way as a range from 0 (or 0%) (total absence, black) and 1 (or 100%) (total presence, white), with any fractional values in between. This notation is used in academic papers, but this does not define what "black" or "white" is in terms of colorimetry. Sometimes the scale is reversed, as in printing where the numeric intensity denotes how much ink is employed in halftoning, with 0% representing the paper white (no ink) and 100% being a solid black (full ink).


title: Grayscale

text: In computing, although the grayscale can be computed through rational numbers, image pixels are usually quantized to store them as unsigned integers, to reduce the required storage and computation. Some early grayscale monitors can only display up to sixteen different shades, which would be stored in binary form using 4 bits. But today grayscale images intended for visual display are commonly stored with 8 bits per sampled pixel. This pixel depth allows 256 different intensities (i.e., shades of gray) to be recorded, and also simplifies computation as each pixel sample can be accessed individually as one full byte. However, if these intensities were spaced equally in proportion to the amount of physical light they represent at that pixel (called a linear encoding or scale), the differences between adjacent dark shades could be quite noticeable as banding artifacts, while many of the lighter shades would be "wasted" by encoding a lot of perceptually-indistinguishable increments. Therefore, the shades are instead typically spread out evenly on a gamma-compressed nonlinear scale, which better approximates uniform perceptual increments for both dark and light shades, usually making these 256 shades enough to avoid noticeable increments.


title: Grayscale

text: Technical uses (e.g. in medical imaging or remote sensing applications) often require more levels, to make full use of the sensor accuracy (typically 10 or 12 bits per sample) and to reduce rounding errors in computations. Sixteen bits per sample (65,536 levels) is often a convenient choice for such uses, as computers manage 16-bit words efficiently. The TIFF and PNG (among other) image file formats support 16-bit grayscale natively, although browsers and many imaging programs tend to ignore the low order 8 bits of each pixel. Internally for computation and working storage, image processing software typically uses integer or floating-point numbers of size 16 or 32 bits.


title: Grayscale

text: Conversion of an arbitrary color image to grayscale is not unique in general; different weighting of the color channels effectively represent the effect of shooting black-and-white film with different-colored photographic filters on the cameras.


title: Grayscale

text: A common strategy is to use the principles of photometry or, more broadly, colorimetry to calculate the grayscale values (in the target grayscale colorspace) so as to have the same luminance (technically relative luminance) as the original color image (according to its colorspace). In addition to the same (relative) luminance, this method also ensures that both images will have the same absolute luminance when displayed, as can be measured by instruments in its SI units of candelas per square meter, in any given area of the image, given equal whitepoints. Luminance itself is defined using a standard model of human vision, so preserving the luminance in the grayscale image also preserves other perceptual lightness measures, such as (as in the 1976 CIE "L"ab color space) which is determined by the linear luminance itself (as in the CIE 1931 "XYZ" color space) which we will refer to here as to avoid any ambiguity.


title: Grayscale

text: To convert a color from a colorspace based on a typical gamma-compressed (nonlinear) RGB color model to a grayscale representation of its luminance, the gamma compression function must first be removed via gamma expansion (linearization) to transform the image to a linear RGB colorspace, so that the appropriate weighted sum can be applied to the linear color components (formula_1) to calculate the linear luminance , which can then be gamma-compressed back again if the grayscale result is also to be encoded and stored in a typical nonlinear colorspace.


title: Grayscale

text: where represents any of the three gamma-compressed sRGB primaries (, , and , each in range [0,1]) and is the corresponding linear-intensity value (, , and , also in range [0,1]). Then, linear luminance is calculated as a weighted sum of the three linear-intensity values. The sRGB color space is defined in terms of the CIE 1931 linear luminance , which is given by


title: Grayscale

text: These three particular coefficients represent the intensity (luminance) perception of typical trichromat humans to light of the precise Rec. 709 additive primary colors (chromaticities) that are used in the definition of sRGB. Human vision is most sensitive to green, so this has the greatest coefficient value (0.7152), and least sensitive to blue, so this has the smallest coefficient (0.0722). To encode grayscale intensity in linear RGB, each of the three color components can be set to equal the calculated linear luminance formula_4 (replacing formula_1 by the values formula_6 to get this linear grayscale), which then typically needs to be gamma compressed to get back to a conventional non-linear representation. For sRGB, each of its three primaries is then set to the same gamma-compressed given by the inverse of the gamma expansion above as


title: Grayscale

text: Because the three sRGB components are then equal, indicating that it is actually a gray image (not color), it is only necessary to store these values once, and we call this the resulting grayscale image. This is how it will normally be stored in sRGB-compatible image formats that support a single-channel grayscale representation, such as JPEG or PNG. Web browsers and other software that recognizes sRGB images should produce the same rendering for such a grayscale image as it would for a "color" sRGB image having the same values in all three color channels.


title: Grayscale

text: For images in color spaces such as Y'UV and its relatives, which are used in standard color TV and video systems such as PAL, SECAM, and NTSC, a nonlinear luma component is calculated directly from gamma-compressed primary intensities as a weighted sum, which, although not a perfect representation of the colorimetric luminance, can be calculated more quickly without the gamma expansion and compression used in photometric/colorimetric calculations. In the Y'UV and Y'IQ models used by PAL and NTSC, the rec601 luma component is computed as


title: Grayscale

text: where we use the prime to distinguish these nonlinear values from the sRGB nonlinear values (discussed above) which use a somewhat different gamma compression formula, and from the linear RGB components. The ITU-R BT.709 standard used for HDTV developed by the ATSC uses different color coefficients, computing the luma component as


title: Grayscale

text: Although these are numerically the same coefficients used in sRGB above, the effect is different because here they are being applied directly to gamma-compressed values rather than to the linearized values. The ITU-R BT.2100 standard for HDR television uses yet different coefficients, computing the luma component as


title: Grayscale

text: Normally these colorspaces are transformed back to nonlinear R'G'B' before rendering for viewing. To the extent that enough precision remains, they can then be rendered accurately.


title: Grayscale

text: But if the luma component Y' itself is instead used directly as a grayscale representation of the color image, luminance is not preserved: two colors can have the same luma but different CIE linear luminance (and thus different nonlinear as defined above) and therefore appear darker or lighter to a typical human than the original color. Similarly, two colors having the same luminance (and thus the same ) will in general have different luma by either of the luma definitions above.


title: Grayscale

text: Color images are often built of several stacked color channels, each of them representing value levels of the given channel. For example, RGB images are composed of three independent channels for red, green and blue primary color components; CMYK images have four channels for cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink plates, etc.


title: Grayscale

text: Here is an example of color channel splitting of a full RGB color image. The column at left shows the isolated color channels in natural colors, while at right there are their grayscale equivalences:


title: Grayscale

text: The reverse is also possible: to build a full-color image from their separate grayscale channels. By mangling channels, using offsets, rotating and other manipulations, artistic effects can be achieved instead of accurately reproducing the original image.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: It was founded on 23 August 1921 as the Kingdom of Iraq, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War. Although a League of Nations mandate was awarded to the United Kingdom in 1920, the 1920 Iraqi revolt resulted in the scrapping of the original mandate plan in favour of a formally sovereign Iraqi kingdom, but one that was under effective British administration. The plan was formally established by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: The role of the United Kingdom in the formal administration of the Kingdom of Iraq was ended in 1932, following the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty (1930). Now officially a fully independent kingdom, officially named as the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, it underwent a period of turbulence under its Hashemite rulers throughout its entire existence. Establishment of Sunni religious domination in Iraq was followed by Assyrian, Yazidi and Shi'a unrests, which were all brutally suppressed. In 1936, the first military coup took place in the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, as Bakr Sidqi succeeded in replacing the acting Prime Minister with his associate. Multiple coups followed in a period of political instability, peaking in 1941.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: During the Second World War, the Iraqi government of the Prince-Regent, Prince 'Abd al-Ilah, was overthrown in 1941 by the Golden Square officers, headed by Rashid Ali. The short-lived pro-Nazi government of Iraq was defeated in May 1941 by the Allied forces in the Anglo-Iraqi War. Iraq was later used as a base for Allied attacks on the Vichy-French-held Mandate of Syria and support for the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. At the same time, the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani led a rebellion against the central government in Baghdad. After the failure of the uprising, Barzani and his followers fled to the Soviet Union.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: In 1945, during the final stages of World War II, Iraq joined the United Nations and became a founding member of the Arab League. In 1948, massive violent protests, known as the Al-Wathbah uprising, broke out across Baghdad as a popular demand against the government treaty with the British, and with support from the communists. More protests continued in the spring, but were interrupted in May, when martial law was imposed after Iraq entered the 1948 Arab–Israeli War along with other members of the Arab League.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: In February 1958, King Hussein of Jordan and Prince `Abd al-Ilāh proposed a union of Hāshimite monarchies to counter the recently formed Egyptian–Syrian union. The resulting Arab Federation, formed on 14 February 1958, was short-lived and ended the same year with a military coup led by Abd al-Karim Qasim deposing the monarchy.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: The territory of Iraq was under Ottoman dominance until the end of the First World War, becoming an occupied territory under the British military from 1918. In order to transform the region to civil rule, Mandatory Mesopotamia was proposed as a League of Nations Class A mandate under Article 22 and entrusted to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, when the former territories of that Ottoman Empire were divided in August 1920 by the Treaty of Sèvres. However, the 1920 Iraqi revolt resulted in the scrapping of the original mandate plan. Instead, the Kingdom of Iraq was recognised as a sovereign country under King Faisal I of Iraq. Not withstanding the formal sovereignty of the Iraqi king, a treaty of alliance was concluded between the Kingdom of Iraq and the United Kingdom in 1922 called the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty. It provided the United Kingdom with a role in the administration and governance of Iraq. King Faisal had previously been proclaimed King of Syria by a Syrian National Congress in Damascus in March 1920 but was ejected by the French in July of the same year. The British RAF retained certain military control. In this manner, Iraq remained under "de facto" British administration until 1932.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: Under King Faisal of Iraq, the civil government of postwar Iraq was led by the High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and his deputy, Colonel Arnold Wilson. British reprisals after the murder of a British officer in Najaf failed to restore order. British administration had yet to be established in the mountains of north Iraq. The most striking problem facing the British was the growing anger of the nationalists in the Iraqi kingdom.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: With the signing in Baghdad of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty on 30 June 1930 and the settling of the Mosul Question, Iraqi politics took on a new dynamic. The treaty came into force on 3 October 1932, when the Kingdom of Iraq officially became fully independent as the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq. The emerging class of Sunni and Shia landowning tribal sheikhs vied for positions of power with wealthy and prestigious urban-based Sunni families and with Ottoman-trained army officers and bureaucrats. Because Iraq's newly established political institutions were the creation of a foreign power, and because the concept of democratic government had no precedent in Iraqi history, the politicians in Baghdad lacked legitimacy and never developed deeply rooted constituencies. Thus, despite a constitution and an elected assembly, Iraqi politics was more a shifting alliance of important personalities and cliques than a democracy in the Western sense. The absence of broadly based political institutions inhibited the early nationalist movement's ability to make deep inroads into Iraq's diverse social structure.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: The new Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was signed in June 1930. It provided for a "close alliance," for "full and frank consultations between the two countries in all matters of foreign policy," and for mutual assistance in case of war. Iraq granted the British the use of air bases near Basra and at Al Habbaniyah and the right to move troops across the country. The treaty, of twenty-five years' duration, was to come into force upon Iraq's admission to the League of Nations. This occurred on October 3, 1932.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: In 1932, the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was granted full independence under King Faisal I. However, the British retained military bases in the country. Iraq was granted official independence on 3 October 1932 in accordance with an agreement signed by the United Kingdom in June 1930, whereby the United Kingdom would end its effective mandate on the condition that the Iraqi government would allow British advisers to take part in government affairs, allow British military bases to remain, and a requirement that Iraq assist the United Kingdom in wartime. Strong political tensions existed between Iraq and the United Kingdom even upon gaining independence. After gaining independence in 1932, the Iraqi government immediately declared that Kuwait was rightfully a territory of Iraq. Kuwait had loosely been under the authority of the Ottoman "vilâyet" of Basra for centuries until the British had formally severed it from the Ottoman influence after the First World War. It was on this basis the Iraqi government stated that Kuwait was a British imperialist invention.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: After Faisal died in September 1933, King Ghazi reigned as a figurehead from 1933 to 1939, when he was killed in a motor accident. Pressure from Arab nationalists and Iraqi nationalists demanded that the British leave Iraq, but their demands were ignored by the United Kingdom.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: Upon achieving official independence in October 1932, political tensions arose over the continued British presence in the new Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, with Iraq's government and politicians split between those considered pro-British politicians, such as Nuri as-Said, who did not oppose a continued British presence, and anti-British politicians, such as Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, who demanded that remaining British influence in the country be removed.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: Various ethnic and religious factions tried to gain political accomplishments during this period, often resulting in violent revolts and a brutal suppression by the Iraqi military, led by Bakr Sidqi. In 1933, thousands of Assyrians were killed in Simele massacre, in 1935–1936 a series of Shi'a uprisings were brutally suppressed in mid-Euphrates region of Iraq, and in parallel an anti-conscription Kurdish uprising in the north and a Yazidi revolt in Jabal Sinjar were crushed in 1935. Throughout the period political instability led to an exchange of numerous governments. Bakr Sidqi himself ascended to power in 1936, following a successful coup d'état against prime minister Yasin al-Hashimi but was later assassinated in 1937 during a visit to Mosul, followed by the death of King Ghazi in a car crash in 1939 suspected to have been planned by the British, causing a regency under Prince 'Abd al-Ilah over the 4 year old king Faisal II of Iraq lasting until 1953.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: From 1917 to 1946, five coups by the Iraqi Army occurred, led by the chief officers of the army against the government to pressure the government to concede to army demands.


title: Kingdom of Iraq

text: The 1941 Iraqi coup d'état overthrew the pro-British Prime minister Taha al-Hashimi and placed Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister of a pro-Nazi government called "the National defense government", the Regent 'Abd al-Ilah fled the royal palace after learning of this and with British support went to Habbaniyah then to Basra, he would spend the rest of the following months in Jordan and the Mandate of Palestine, His fleeing caused a constitutional crisis upon the new government. Rashid Ali did not abolish the monarchy, but installed ٍSharif Sharaf bin Rajeh as a more compliant Regent instead, and attempted to restrict the rights of the British under the treaty from 1930. Rashid Ali's attempted to secure control over Iraq asking assistance of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.