The Quest for Eastern Christians

The Quest for Eastern Christians PDF Author: Francis M. Rogers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816658617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Quest for Eastern Christians was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Most writers have considered that the great European explorations during the Age of Discovery were motivated primarily by a thirst for knowledge of other lands, desire for international trade, or missionary zeal. Professor Rogers demonstrates that there was another significant reason why Europeans traveled to the East during the lade medieval and Renaissance period. This was the dream of a Christian Indies, which in turn led to a quest for the Christians of the Farther East. The author specifically seeks to establish a direct relation between the knowledge of Indian and Ethiopian Christians which was available in Jerusalem from early Christian times onward and which returning pilgrims disseminated in the West, and the presence of the Portuguese in South India and the Ethiopian highlands in the early sixteenth century. Throughout his presentation of the evidence for the chain of events which links Palestinian knowledge with Portuguese action, Professor Rogers places emphasis on the early printed books and tracts which circulated both accurate information and rumor. Specimen pages from some of these books are reproduced as illustrations, and there is a double-page chart showing the genealogy of the nations and the sects of the Christians. There is a list of the early printed books which the author has used in his study as well as a bibliography.

The Realm of Prester John

The Realm of Prester John PDF Author: Robert Silverberg
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821441221
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
In this modern account of the genesis of a great medieval myth, celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg’s explores the mysterious origins of Prester John, the astonishing Christian potentate of the East. Prester John was a legendary figure who cast a powerful spell over Latin Christendom for almost five centuries. Rumors of the warrior-king-prelate’s fabulous realms first reached Europe in the eleventh century and quickly assumed an exalted status alongside such fabled wonders as El Dorado, The Fountain of Youth, and the Holy Grail. The defeat of a Moslem Turkish tribe by a Buddhist Chinese warlord seems to have been the unlikely historical nugget around which the Prester John myth grew, but contributions to this strange saga have also been traced all around the globe to the Apostle Thomas' apocryphal preaching in India, to the actual existence of small colonies of Nestorian schismatics in central Asia, and even to Genghis Khan.

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: 1317045467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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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.

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 Mineral and the Visual

The Mineral and the Visual PDF Author: Brigitte Buettner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271093692
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.

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.

Peoples of the Apocalypse

Peoples of the Apocalypse PDF Author: Wolfram Brandes
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110472635
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion’s approach as well as shared concepts.

The Shaping of Africa

The Shaping of Africa PDF Author: Francesc Relaño
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351761390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2002. When did Africa emerge as a continent in the European mind? This book aims to trace the origins of the idea of Africa and its evolution in Renaissance thought. Particular attention is given to the relationship between the process of acquiring knowledge through travel and exploration, and its representation within a discourse which also includes previously acquired cosmographical elements. Among the themes investigated are: How did the image of Africa evolve from the conception of a symbolic space to a Euclidean representation? How did the Renaissance rediscovery of Antiquity interact with the Portuguese discoveries along the African coast? And once Africa was circumnavigated, how was the inner landmass depicted in the absence of first-hand knowledge? Also, overall, in this whole process what was the interplay of myth and reality?

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion PDF Author: Dorothy Figueira
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472592360
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Through a unique combination of theoretical scope and material, and historical, breadth The Hermeneutics of Suspicion poses an original investigation into our understanding of alterity in Indian literature and history, and significantly contributes to an emerging discourse on East-West literary relations. Hans Georg Gadamer's notion of hermeneutical consciousness seeks to open up a cultural context through which to engage the other. It stands in opposition to the hermeneutics of suspicion advocated by recent popular theories, such as colonial discourse analysis, multiculturalism, postcolonial theory, the critique of globalism, etc. In his late work, Paul Ricoeur charts a middle path between the hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutical consciousness that addresses the ontological and ethical categories of otherness. His approach reflects concerns voiced elsewhere, particularly in the historiography of Michel de Certeau and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. This volume follows the path proposed by Ricoeur and, alongside Certeau and Levinas, provides an examination of varying representations of the Indian Other in classical Greek and Sanskrit sources, the writings of Church Fathers, apocryphal literature, the Romance tradition, Portuguese and Italian travel narratives and Jesuit mission letters. In the various texts examined, the problems of translation are highlighted together with the sense that understanding can be found somewhere between the different approaches of hermeneutical consciousness and critical consciousness. This book not only looks at the European reception of the Indian other, but also looks at the ancient Indian view of its others and the cross-pollination of Indian concepts of otherness with the West.

Medieval Ethnographies

Medieval Ethnographies PDF Author: Joan-Pau Rubies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351918613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous waves of conquest and devastation) was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. From a a global perspective what is most distinctive of Europe is the genre's long-term impact rather than its mere empirical potential, or its ethnocentrism (all of which can also be found in China and in Islamic cultures). Hence what needs emphasizing is the multiplication of original writings over time, their increased circulation, and their authoritative status as a 'scientific' discourse. The empirical bent was more characteristic of travel accounts than of theological disputations - in fact, the less elaborate the theological discourse, the stronger the ethnographic impulse (although many travel writers were clerics). This anthology of classic articles in the history of medieval ethnographies illustrates this theme with reference to the contexts and genres of travel writing, the transformation of enduring myths (ranging from oriental marvels to the virtuous ascetics of India or Prester John), the practical expression of particular encounters from the Mongols to the Atlantic, and the various attempts to explain cultural differences, either through the concept of barbarism, or through geography and climate.

The Marian Icons of the Painter Frē Ṣeyon

The Marian Icons of the Painter Frē Ṣeyon PDF Author: Marilyn Eiseman Heldman
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447035408
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description