Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes

Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes PDF Author: Charles Fraser Beckingham
Publisher: Variorum Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This study makes an important contribution to the study of the Prester John legend and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working in the field of medieval history and literature. The principal sources relating to Prester John are reprinted here for the first time in more than a century, together with a number of key modern articles on this topic. In addition, an international group of scholars has contributed six new studies which examine the legend in the context of Mongol history, Russian literature, the medieval Jewish accounts of the Ten Lost Tribes, the crusading movement, and the Portuguese voyages of exploration.

Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes

Prester John, the Mongols, and the Ten Lost Tribes PDF Author: Charles Fraser Beckingham
Publisher: Variorum Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study makes an important contribution to the study of the Prester John legend and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working in the field of medieval history and literature. The principal sources relating to Prester John are reprinted here for the first time in more than a century, together with a number of key modern articles on this topic. In addition, an international group of scholars has contributed six new studies which examine the legend in the context of Mongol history, Russian literature, the medieval Jewish accounts of the Ten Lost Tribes, the crusading movement, and the Portuguese voyages of exploration.

The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555

The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555 PDF Author: Matteo Salvadore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317045459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile, back home the Ethiopian nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore's narrative takes the reader on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian-Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits at the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians.

Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration

Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration PDF 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.

The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades

The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades PDF 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.

The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel

The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel PDF Author: Andrew Tobolowsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009089137
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel is the first study to treat the history of claims to an Israelite identity as an ongoing historical phenomenon from biblical times to the present. By treating the Hebrew Bible's accounts of Israel as one of many efforts to construct an Israelite history, rather than source material for later legends, Andrew Tobolowsky brings a long-term comparative approach to biblical and nonbiblical “Israelite” histories. In the process, he sheds new light on how the structure of the twelve tribes tradition enables the creation of so many different visions of Israel, and generates new questions: How can we explain the enduring power of the myth of the twelve tribes of Israel? How does “becoming Israel” work, why has it proven so popular, and how did it change over time? Finally, what can the changing shape of Israel itself reveal about those who claimed it?

Empire of Magic

Empire of Magic PDF Author: Geraldine Heng
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150067X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses of race, class, and colonialism, this provocative book revises our understanding of the beginnings of the nine hundred-year-old cultural genre we call romance, as well as the King Arthur legend. Geraldine Heng argues that romance arose in the twelfth century as a cultural response to the trauma and horror of taboo acts—in particular the cannibalism committed by crusaders on the bodies of Muslim enemies in Syria during the First Crusade. From such encounters with the East, Heng suggests, sprang the fantastical episodes featuring King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle The History of the Kings of England, a work where history and fantasy collide and merge, each into the other, inventing crucial new examples and models for romances to come. After locating the rise of romance and Arthurian legend in the contact zones of East and West, Heng demonstrates the adaptability of romance and its key role in the genesis of an English national identity. Discussing Jews, women, children, and sexuality in works like the romance of Richard Lionheart, stories of the saintly Constance, Arthurian chivralic literature, the legend of Prester John, and travel narratives, Heng shows how fantasy enabled audiences to work through issues of communal identity, race, color, class and alternative sexualities in socially sanctioned and safe modes of cultural discussion in which pleasure, not anxiety, was paramount. Romance also engaged with the threat of modernity in the late medieval period, as economic, social, and technological transformations occurred and awareness grew of a vastly enlarged world beyond Europe, one encompassing India, China, and Africa. Finally, Heng posits, romance locates England and Europe within an empire of magic and knowledge that surveys the world and makes it intelligible—usable—for the future. Empire of Magic is expansive in scope, spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and detailed in coverage, examining various types of romance—historical, national, popular, chivalric, family, and travel romances, among others—to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways. Boldly controversial, theoretically sophisticated, and historically rooted, Empire of Magic is a dramatic restaging of the role romance played in the culture of a period and world in ways that suggest how cultural fantasy still functions for us today.

Prisoners of Prester John

Prisoners of Prester John PDF Author: Cates Baldridge
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786490195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
During the 16th century, Portugal endeavored to locate the mythical kingdom of Prester John--a Christian nation rumored to be somewhere in the Orient, amidst the pagans and Muslims. This study chronicles Portugal's final attempt, a six-year odyssey in Ethiopia that resulted in a tragicomic collision with a proud but isolated Christian kingdom. After summarizing the Prester John myth and the many efforts it spawned, the work focuses on the Ethiopian mission's chronicler, Father Francisco Alvares, who fell in love with the country and its people, became a friend of its king, hid the Abyssinians' heresies from his superiors, and set in motion events that saved Ethiopia from imminent destruction. Unique in the annals of Europeans' initial contacts with African peoples, the Portuguese mission is a portrait of hopeful preconceptions buffeted and eventually transformed by encounters with a fascinating, utterly unexpected reality.

The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality

The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality PDF Author: Denise Aigle
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004280642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
In The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality, Denise Aigle presents the Mongol empire as a moment of contact between political ideologies, religions, cultures and languages, and, in terms of reciprocal representations, between the Far East, the Muslim East, and the Latin West. The first part is devoted to “The memoria of the Mongols in historical and literary sources” in which she examines how the Mongol rulers were perceived by the peoples with whom they were in contact. In “Shamanism and Islam” she studies the perception of shamanism by Muslim authors and their attempts to integrate Genghis Khan and his successors into an Islamic framework. The last sections deal with geopolitical questions involving the Ilkhans, the Mamluks, and the Latin West. Genghis Khan’s successors claimed the protection of “Eternal Heaven” to justify their conquests even after their Islamization.

Denmark and the Crusades

Denmark and the Crusades PDF Author: Janus Møller Jensen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004155791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This ground-breaking study of the role of crusading in late-medieval and early modern Denmark argues that crusading had a tremendous impact on political and religious life in Scandinavia all through the Middle Ages, which continued long after the Reformation ostensibly should have put an end to its viability within Protestant Denmark.

Emperor of the World

Emperor of the World PDF Author: Anne A. Latowsky
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Emperor of the World, traces the curious history of the story of the alliances forged by Charlemagne while visiting Jerusalem and Constantinople, revealing how the memory of the Frankish Emperor was manipulated to shape the institutions of kingship and empire in the High Middle Ages. The legend incorporates apocalyptic themes such as the succession of world monarchies at the End of Days and the prophecy of the Last Roman Emperor. Charlemagne's apocryphal journey to the East increasingly resembled the eschatological final journey of the Last Emperor, who was expected to end his reign in Jerusalem after reuniting the Roman Empire prior to the Last Judgment. Latowsky finds that the writers who incorporated this legend did so to support, or in certain cases to criticize, the imperial pretentions of the regimes under which they wrote. Latowsky removes Charlemagne's encounters with the East from their long-presumed Crusading context and shows how a story that began as a rhetorical commonplace of imperial praise evolved over the centuries as an expression of Christian Roman universalism.