Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World

Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World PDF Author: David A. Wacks
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487505019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Reading crusader fiction against the backdrop of Mediterranean history, this book explains how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of crusade through the lens of Iberian geopolitics and social history. The crusades transformed Mediterranean history and inaugurated complex engagements between Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East in ways that endure to this day. Narratives of crusades powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interactions between Christian and Muslim states in the region. The crusade, a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, North African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. French and English authors wrote itineraries in the Holy Land, chronicles of the crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin Church in the East. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of crusade, both as participants and interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.

Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World

Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World PDF Author: David A. Wacks
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487505019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Reading crusader fiction against the backdrop of Mediterranean history, this book explains how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of crusade through the lens of Iberian geopolitics and social history. The crusades transformed Mediterranean history and inaugurated complex engagements between Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East in ways that endure to this day. Narratives of crusades powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interactions between Christian and Muslim states in the region. The crusade, a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, North African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. French and English authors wrote itineraries in the Holy Land, chronicles of the crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin Church in the East. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of crusade, both as participants and interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.

The Mercenary Mediterranean

The Mercenary Mediterranean PDF Author: Hussein Fancy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022632964X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian kings of Aragon recruited thousands of foreign Muslim soldiers to serve in their armies and as members of their royal courts. Based on extensive research in Arabic, Latin and Romance sources, 'The Mercenary Mediterranean' explores this little-known and misunderstood history.

The Ornament of the World

The Ornament of the World PDF Author: Maria Rosa Menocal
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 0316092797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This classic bestseller — the inspiration for the PBS series — is an "illuminating and even inspiring" portrait of medieval Spain that explores the golden age when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance (Los Angeles Times). This enthralling history, widely hailed as a revelation of a "lost" golden age, brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain, where for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and where literature, science, and the arts flourished. "It is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously call 'Western' culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment...This book partly restores a world we have lost." —Christopher Hitchens, The Nation

Sacred Plunder

Sacred Plunder PDF Author: David M. Perry
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271066830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In Sacred Plunder, David Perry argues that plundered relics, and narratives about them, played a central role in shaping the memorial legacy of the Fourth Crusade and the development of Venice’s civic identity in the thirteenth century. After the Fourth Crusade ended in 1204, the disputes over the memory and meaning of the conquest began. Many crusaders faced accusations of impiety, sacrilege, violence, and theft. In their own defense, they produced hagiographical narratives about the movement of relics—a medieval genre called translatio—that restated their own versions of events and shaped the memory of the crusade. The recipients of relics commissioned these unique texts in order to exempt both the objects and the people involved with their theft from broader scrutiny or criticism. Perry further demonstrates how these narratives became a focal point for cultural transformation and an argument for the creation of the new Venetian empire as the city moved from an era of mercantile expansion to one of imperial conquest in the thirteenth century.

The Cutting Edge of the Poet’s Sword: Muslim Poetic Responses to the Crusades

The Cutting Edge of the Poet’s Sword: Muslim Poetic Responses to the Crusades PDF Author: Osman Latiff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004345221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
In this comprehensive analysis of Arabic poetry during the period of the crusades (sixth/twelfth-seventh/thirteenth centuries), Osman Latiff provides an insightful examination of the poets who inspired Muslims to unite in the jihād against the Franks. The Cutting Edge of the Poet’s Sword not only contributes to our understanding of literary history, it also illuminates a broad spectrum of religiosity and the role of political propaganda in the anti-Frankish Muslim struggle. Latiff shows how poets, often used by the ruling elite to promote their rule, emphasised the centrality of Islam’s holy sites to inspire the Muslim response to the occupation and later reconquest of Jerusalem, and expressed some surprising views of Frankish Christians.

The Book of the Knight Zifar

The Book of the Knight Zifar PDF Author: Charles L. Nelson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813194911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
The Book of the Knight Zifar (or Cifar), Spain's first novel of chivalry, is the tale of a virtuous but unfortunate knight who has fallen from grace and must seek redemption through suffering and good deeds. Because of a curse that repeatedly deprives him of that most important of knightly accoutrements—his horse—Zifar and his family must flee their native India and wander through distant lands seeking to regain their rank and fortune. A series of mishaps divides the family, and the novel follows their separate adventures—alternatively heroic, comic, and miraculous—until at length they are reunited and their honor restored. The anonymous author of Zifar based his early fourteenth-century novel on the medieval story of the life of St. Eustacius, but onto this trunk he grafted a surprising variety of narrative types: Oriental tales of romance and magic, biblical stories, moralizing fables popular since the Middle Ages, including several from Aesop, and instructions in the rules of proper knightly conduct. Humor in the form of puns, jokes, and old proverbs also runs through the novel. In particular, the foolish/wise Knave offers a comic contrast to the heroic Knight, whom he must continually rescue through the application of common sense. Zifar was to have an important influence on later Spanish literature, and perhaps on Cervantes' great tale of a knight and his squire, Don Quixote. All those with an interest in Spanish literature and medieval life will be grateful for Mr. Nelson's excellent translation, which brings to life this extraordinary early novel.

King Alfonso VIII of Castile

King Alfonso VIII of Castile PDF Author: Miguel Gómez
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823284158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era. Contributors: Martin Alvira Cabrer, Janna Bianchini, Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., Miguel Dolan Gómez, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Kyle C. Lincoln, Joseph O’Callaghan, Teofi lo F. Ruiz, Miriam Shadis, Damian J. Smith, James J. Todesca

Why Europe?

Why Europe? PDF Author: Michael Mitterauer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226532380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Why did capitalism and colonialism arise in Europe and not elsewhere? Why were parliamentarian and democratic forms of government founded there? What factors led to Europe’s unique position in shaping the world? Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Why Europe? tackles these classic questions with illuminating results. Michael Mitterauer traces the roots of Europe’s singularity to the medieval era, specifically to developments in agriculture. While most historians have located the beginning of Europe’s special path in the rise of state power in the modern era, Mitterauer establishes its origins in rye and oats. These new crops played a decisive role in remaking the European family, he contends, spurring the rise of individualism and softening the constraints of patriarchy. Mitterauer reaches these conclusions by comparing Europe with other cultures, especially China and the Islamic world, while surveying the most important characteristics of European society as they took shape from the decline of the Roman empire to the invention of the printing press. Along the way, Why Europe? offers up a dazzling series of novel hypotheses to explain the unique evolution of European culture.

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050–1614

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050–1614 PDF Author: Brian A. Catlos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139915754
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 649

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Book Description
Through crusades and expulsions, Muslim communities survived for over 500 years, thriving in medieval Europe. This comprehensive study explores how the presence of Islamic minorities transformed Europe in everything from architecture to cooking, literature to science, and served as a stimulus for Christian society to define itself. Combining a series of regional studies, Catlos compares the varied experiences of Muslims across Iberia, southern Italy, the Crusader Kingdoms and Hungary to examine those ideologies that informed their experiences, their place in society and their sense of themselves as Muslims. This is a pioneering new narrative of the history of medieval and early modern Europe from the perspective of Islamic minorities; one which is not, as we might first assume, driven by ideology, isolation and decline, but instead one in which successful communities persisted because they remained actively integrated within the larger Christian and Jewish societies in which they lived.

Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean

Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean PDF Author: Dr Ruthy Gertwagen
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409483126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
The cutting-edge papers in this collection reflect the wide areas to which John Pryor has made significant contributions in the course of his scholarly career. They are written by some of the world's most distinguished practitioners in the fields of Crusading history and the maritime history of the medieval Mediterranean. His colleagues, students and friends discuss questions including ship construction in the fourth and fifteenth centuries, navigation and harbourage in the eastern Mediterranean, trade in Fatimid Egypt and along the Iberian Peninsula, military and social issues arising among the crusaders during field campaigns, and wider aspects of medieval warfare. All those with an interest in any of these subjects, whether students or specialists, will need to consult this book.