Download or read book Prester John The Legend and its Sources written by Keagan Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legend of Prester John has received much scholarly attention over the last hundred years, but never before have the sources been collected and coherently presented to readers. This book now brings together a fully-representative set of texts setting out the many and various sources from which we get our knowledge of the legend. These texts, spanning a time period from the Crusades to the Enlightenment, are presented in their original languages and in English translation (for many it is the first time they have been available in English). The story of the mysterious oriental leader Prester John, ruler of a land teeming with marvels who may come to the aid of Christians in the Levant, held an intense grip on the medieval mind from the first references in twelfth-century Crusader literature and into the early-modern period. But Prester John was a man of shifting identity, being at different times and for different reasons associated with Chingis Khan and the Mongols, with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, with China, Tibet, South Africa and West Africa. In order to orient the reader, each of these iterations is explained in the comprehensive introduction, and in the introductions to texts and sections. The introduction also raises a thorny question not often considered: whether or not medieval audiences believed in the reality of Prester John and the Prester John Letter. The book is completed with three valuable appendices: a list of all known references to Prester John in medieval and early modern sources, a thorough description of the manuscript traditions of the all-important Prester John Letter, and a brief description of Prester John in the history of cartography.
Download or read book Prester John The Legend and Its Sources written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom written by Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold synthesis fills in many of the missing links between the histories of Europe and medieval China.
Download or read book The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian European Relations 1402 1555 written by Matteo Salvadore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades written by Ahmed M. A. Sheir and published by Trivent Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Prester John the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes written by Charles Fraser Beckingham and published by Variorum Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Realm of Prester John written by Robert Silverberg and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-04 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality written by Denise Aigle and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Prester John written by Vsevolod Slessarev and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prester John, The Letter and the Legend was first published in 1959. 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.The legend of Prester John, a Christian monarch of a vast empire in Asia or Africa, runs through medieval literature in various languages and forms, from the late twelfth century onward. This volume presents a study, a translation and a facsimile reproduction of a fifteenth-century French version of a letter of Prester John, as king of India, to his friends, the emperor of Rome and the king of France. The original of the document, printed in Paris in about 1500, is in the James Ford Bell Collection of the University of Minnesota library. The study investigates the intricate problems of the original language, the possible authorship, and the place of composition. An important aspect of the study concerns the relationship of the Prester John legend to the legends of a shrine of the apostle St. Thomas in India.
Download or read book The Assassins written by Bernard Lewis and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a master historian, the definitive account of history's first terrorists An offshoot of the Ismaili Shi'ite sect of Islam, the Assassins were the first group to make systematic use of murder as a political weapon. Established in Iran and Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they aimed to overthrow the existing Sunni order in Islam and replace it with their own. They terrorized their foes with a series of dramatic murders of Islamic leaders, as well as of some of the Crusaders, who brought their name and fame back to Europe. Professor Lewis traces the history of this radical group, studying its teachings and its influence on Muslim thought. Particularly insightful in light of the rise of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. and in Israel, this account of the Assassins -- whose name is now synonymous with politically motivated murderers -- places recent events in historical perspective and sheds new light on the fanatic mind.
Download or read book Myths of the Dog Man written by David Gordon White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-05-07 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An impressive and important cross-cultural study that has vast implications for history, religion, anthropology, folklore, and other fields. . . . Remarkably wide-ranging and extremely well-documented, it covers (among much else) the following: medieval Christian legends such as the 14th-century Ethiopian Gadla Hawaryat (Contendings of the Apostles) that had their roots in Parthian Gnosticism and Manichaeism; dog-stars (especially Sirius), dog-days, and canine psychopomps in the ancient and Hellenistic world; the cynocephalic hordes of the ancient geographers; the legend of Prester John; Visvamitra and the Svapacas ("Dog-Cookers"); the Dog Rong ("warlike barbarians") during the Xia, Shang, and Zhou periods; the nochoy ghajar (Mongolian for "Dog Country") of the Khitans; the Panju myth of the Southern Man and Yao "barbarians" from chapter 116 of the History of the Latter Han and variants in a series of later texts; and the importance of dogs in ancient Chinese burial rites. . . . Extremely well-researched and highly significant."—Victor H. Mair, Asian Folklore Studies
Download or read book The Two Cities written by Otto I (Bishop of Freising) and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Assembling the Tropics written by Hugh Cagle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.
Download or read book Medieval Ethiopian Kingship Craft and Diplomacy with Latin Europe written by Verena Krebs and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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'.
Download or read book Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration written by Adam Knobler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Adam Knobler demonstrates the intimate connection between medieval mythologies of the non-Western world, and early modern European imperial expansion to Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Download or read book Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Medieval World written by Christoph Mauntel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the medieval world, geographical knowledge was influenced by religious ideas and beliefs. Whereas this point is well analysed for the Latin-Christian world, the religious character of the Arabic-Islamic geographic tradition has not yet been scrutinised in detail. This volume addresses this desideratum and combines case studies from both traditions of geographic thinking. The contributions comprise in-depth analyses of individual geographical works as for example those of al-Idrisi or Lambert of Saint-Omer, different forms of presenting geographical knowledge such as TO-diagrams or globes as well as performative aspects of studying and meditating geographical knowledge. Focussing on texts as well as on maps, the contributions open up a comparative perspective on how religious knowledge influenced the way the world and its geography were perceived and described int the medieval world.
Download or read book The World of the Crusades 2 volumes written by Andrew Holt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-05 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike traditional references that recount political and military history, this encyclopedia includes entries on a wide range of aspects related to daily life during the medieval crusades. The medieval crusades were fundamental in shaping world history and provide background for the conflict that exists between the West and the Muslim world today. This two-volume set presents fundamental information about the medieval crusades as a movement and its ideological impact on both the crusaders and the peoples of the East. It takes a broad look at numerous topics related to crusading, with the goal of helping readers to better understand what inspired the crusaders, the hardships associated with crusading, and how crusading has influenced the development of cultures both in the East and the West. The first of the two thematically arranged volumes considers topics such as the arts, economics and work, food and drink, family and gender, and fashion and appearance. The second volume considers topics such as housing and community, politics and warfare, recreation and social customs, religion and beliefs, and science and technology. Within each topical section are alphabetically arranged reference entries, complete with cross-references and suggestions for further reading. Selections from primary source documents, each accompanied by an introductory headnote, give readers first-hand accounts of the crusades.
