Author: Adam Knobler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004324909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
This book examines the relationship between medieval European mythologies of the non-Western world and the initial Portuguese and Spanish voyages of expansion and exploration to Africa, Asia and the Americas. From encounters with the Mongols and successor states, to the European contacts with Ethiopia, India and the Americas, as well as the concomitant Jewish notion of the Ten Lost Tribes, the volume views the Western search for distant, crusading allies through the lens of stories such as the apostolate of Saint Thomas and the stories surrounding the supposed priest-king Prester John. In doing so, Knobler weaves a broad history of early modern Iberian imperial expansion within the context of a history of cosmologies and mythologies.
Author: Verena Krebs
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030649342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Europe appears to have been intimately connected to a local political agenda of building monumental ecclesiastical architecture in the North-East African highlands, and asserted the Ethiopian rulers’ claim of universal kingship and rightful descent from the biblical king Solomon. Shedding new light on the self-identity of a late medieval African dynasty at the height of its power, this book challenges conventional narratives of African-European encounters on the eve of the so-called ‘Age of Exploration'.
Author: Dorothée Goetze
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110672006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 838
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Book Description
New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions. The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.
Author: Ahmed M. A. Sheir
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the emergence of the legend in the mid-twelfth century. Second, the work presents a historical discussion of the legend and its association with actual occurrences in the Far East and the Levant, analysing the legend history under the crusading crisis and the imperial papal schism in Europe. Meanwhile, the work considers the vague Prester John Letter addressed to Manuel I Komnenus, Byzantine Emperor, and its elaborate conception of a mythical eastern kingdom, revealing imaginative parallels on the wondrous East and legendary Eastern Christian kings in Arabic Muslim and Christian accounts of the Muslim geographer and cartographer al-Idrisi, the Coptic Abu al-Makarim and the Syriac Ibn al-'Ibri (Bar Hebraeus), among others. Moreover, the book examines how the legend impacted war and peace processes between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders during the Fifth Crusade against Egypt (1217-1221), revealing how it was mingled with Arabic and Eastern Christian prophecies at the time. The study concludes by investigating the perception of Prester John by the papal and European envoys to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, revealing how the legend was instrumentalised (and even weaponised) to establish a Latin-Mongol crusade through a parallel exploration of relevant Latin, Arabic and Syriac sources.
Author: Malyn Newitt
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789147344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
A critical reassessment of world-shaping Portuguese voyages of discovery that places these quests in historical context. The lasting impact of historic Portuguese voyages of discovery is unquestionable. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals all make clear these voyages’ long-term global significance. Navigations reexamines these Portuguese quests by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. Malyn Newitt also narrates these voyages of discovery in the framework of Portuguese politics, describing the role of the Portuguese ruling dynasty—including its female members—in the flowering of the Portuguese Renaissance, the creation of the Renaissance state with its distinctive ideology, and in the cultural changes that took place within a wider European context.
Author: Mary Lindemann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644533383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.
Author: Adam Simmons
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000656098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The Crusades had a wide variety of impacts on societies throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. One such notable impact was its role in the development of knowledge between cultures. This book argues that the Nubian kingdom of Dotawo and the Latin Christians became increasingly more connected between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries than has been acknowledged. Subsequently, when Solomonic Ethiopian-Latin Christian diplomatic relations began in 1402, they were building on the prior connections of Nubia, either wittingly or unwittingly: Ethiopia became the ‘Ethiopia’ that the Latin Christians had previously been aiming to develop relations with. The histories of Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusades were directly and indirectly entwined between the twelfth century and 1402. By placing Nubia and Ethiopia within the wider context of the Crusades, new perspectives can be made regarding the international activity of Nubia and Ethiopia between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and the regional role reversal of Dotawo and Solomonic Ethiopia from the early fourteenth century. Prior to the fourteenth century, Nubia had been the dominant Christian power in the region before Solomonic Ethiopia began to replace it, including by adopting elements of discourse which had previously been attributed to Nubia, such as its ruler being the recognised protector of the Christians of north-east Africa. This process should not be viewed in isolation of the wider regional geo-political context. Nubia, Ethiopia, and the Crusading World, 1095-1402 will appeal to all those interested in the history of the Crusades, Nubia, and Ethiopia, particularly concerning inter-regional physical and intellectual connectivity.
Author: Geraldine Heng
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603295194
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
Author: Mike Horswell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000849007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book Description
Engaging the Crusades is a series of concise volumes (up to 50,000 words) which offer initial windows into the ways in which the crusades have been used in the last two centuries, demonstrating that the memory of the crusades is an important and emerging subject. Together these studies suggest that the memory of the crusades, in the modern period, is a productive, exciting, and much needed area of investigation. Despite their ‘intrinsic internationalism’, the crusades have long been conscripted for nationalist ends. The last decade has seen an upsurge in usage of the crusades to justify and inspire violence played out within and across national contexts. This volume furthers study of nationalist uses of the crusades and crusading by broadening the focus of study beyond north-western Europe and by showcasing different approaches to illustrate how the memory of the crusades has been employed within and between nations. This takes the form of tightly focused case studies and broader overviews covering the ambivalent role of foreign crusaders in Portuguese commemorations of the battle of Lisbon in 1947, Russian holy war rhetoric and theology, Zionist perceptions of the crusader castle of ‘Athlit, the role of individuals as ‘cultural brokers’ of crusader heritage amidst European imperial competition, and how crusading as a part of European medievalism was received and reflected in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book will be of interest to scholars and students considering national identity, medievalism, and religious violence and to those with specific interest in the contexts of each chapter.
Author: Alfred J. Andrea
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1647921937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
"A trailblazer in the field of premodern global history, Andrea here guides readers through the medieval expansion of the 'first Europe' from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. Ranging from Ireland to Ethiopia, from the Mongol Empire to the so-called New World, Expanding Horizons demolishes any lingering sense that European societies remained isolated from the wider world before the modern age. Complete with maps, excerpts from primary source documents, and suggestions for further reading, this book will be an ideal resource for anyone planning to build a course around themes of global travel, exploration, and colonialism." —Brett E. Whalen, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
