Download or read book Latin Expansion in the Medieval Western Mediterranean written by Eleanor A. Congdon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Latin expansion stalled in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages, Islam lost ground to Christendom in the west - in the Spanish Levant, the islands of the Western Mediterranean, and even on the Maghribi coast, where conquerors and colonists from the northern shore of the sea established footholds. Edited by Eleanor Congdon, with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and James Muldoon, this collection of classic studies illuminates the problems of how the expansion occurred and why it was slow and limited. The volume broaches fundamental questions of Mediterranean history formulated by Henri Pirenne and Fernand Braudel. The place of the late medieval Western Mediterranean in the history of the sea as a whole and of European overseas expansion generally emerges with new clarity, as the reader re-traces the process of formation of one of the world’s great frontiers between civilizations. Important work by Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol appears in translation for the first time, alongside pieces by such leading authorities as David Abulafia, Robert I. Burns, S.J., Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, and Hilmar C. Krueger.

Download or read book The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom The Asian Missions written by James D. Ryan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries religious zeal nourished by the mendicants’ sense of purpose motivated Dominican and Franciscan friars to venture far beyond Europe’s cultural frontiers to spread their Christian faith into the farthest reaches of Asia. Their incredible journeys were reminiscent of heroic missionary ventures in earlier eras and far more exotic than evangelization during the tenth through twelfth centuries, when the western church Christianized Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. This new mission effort was stimulated by a variety of factors and facilitated by the establishment of the Mongol Empire, and, as the fourteenth century dawned, missionaries entertained fervent but vain hopes of success within khanates in China, Central Asia, Persia and Kipchak. The reports these missionaries sent back to Europe have fascinated successive generations of historians who analyzed their travels and struggled to understand their motives and aspirations. The essays selected for this volume, drawn from a range of twentieth-century historians and contextualized in the introduction, provide a comprehensive overview of missionary efforts in Asia, and of the developments in the secular world that both made them possible and encouraged the missionaries’ hopes for success. Three of the studies have been translated from French specially for publication in this volume.

Download or read book A Companion to Mediterranean History written by Peregrine Horden and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Mediterranean History presents a wide-ranging overview of this vibrant field of historical research, drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss the development of the region from Neolithic times to the present. Provides a valuable introduction to current debates on Mediterranean history and helps define the field for a new generation Covers developments in the Mediterranean world from Neolithic times to the modern era Enables fruitful dialogue among a wide range of disciplines, including history, archaeology, art, literature, and anthropology

Download or read book The Medieval Frontiers of Latin Christendom written by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this first volume in the series "The Expansion of Latin Europe" is to sketch the outlines of medieval expansion, illustrating some of the major topics that historians have examined in the course of demonstrating the links between medieval and modern experiences. The articles reprinted here show that European expansion began not in 1492 following Columbus's voyages but earlier as European Christian society re-arose from the ruins of the Carolingian Empire. The two phases of expansion were linked but the second period did not simply replicate the medieval experience. Medieval expansion occurred as farmers, merchants, and missionaries reduced forests to farmland and pasture, created new towns, and converted the peoples encountered along the frontiers to Christianity. Later colonizers subsequently adapted the medieval experience to suit their new frontiers in the New World.

Download or read book Arabic Islamic Views of the Latin West written by Daniel G. König and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West provides an insight into how the Arabic-Islamic world perceived medieval Western Europe in an age that is usually associated with the rise and expansion of Islam, the Spanish Reconquista, and the Crusades. Previous scholarship has maintained that the Arabic-Islamic world regarded Western Europe as a cultural backwater at the periphery of civilization that clung to a superseded religion. It holds mental barriers imposed by Islam responsible for the Muslim world's arrogant and ignorant attitude towards its northern neighbours. This study refutes this view by focussing on the mechanisms of transmission and reception that characterized the flow of information between both cultural spheres. By explaining how Arabic-Islamic scholars acquired and processed data on medieval Western Europe, it traces the two-fold 'emergence' of Latin-Christian Europe — a sphere that increasingly encroached upon the Mediterranean and therefore became more and more important in Arabic-Islamic scholarly literature. Chapter One questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords 'ignorance', 'indifference', and 'arrogance'. Chapter Two lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter Three deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters Four to Eight analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on themes such as the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths, the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter Nine provides a concluding re-evaluation.

Download or read book The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages written by Nora Berend and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a set of key studies on the history of medieval Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland), along with others specially commissioned for the book or translated, and a new introduction. This region was both an area of immigration, and one of polities in expansion. Such expansion included the settlement and exploitation of previously empty lands as well as rulers' attempts to incorporate new territories under their rule, although these attempts did not always succeed. Often, German immigration has been prioritized in scholarship, and the medieval expansion of Central Europe has been equated with the expansion of Germans. Debates then focused on the positive or negative contribution of Germans to local life, and the consequences of their settlement. This perspective, however, distorts our understanding of medieval processes. On the one hand, Central Europe was not a passive recipient of immigrants. Local rulers and eventually nobles benefited from and encouraged immigration; they played an active role. On the other hand, German immigration was not a unified movement, and cannot be equated with a drang nach osten. Finally, not just Germans, but also various Romance-speaking and other immigrant groups settled in Central Europe. This volume, therefore, seeks to present a more complex picture of medieval expansion in Central Europe.

Download or read book The Eastern Mediterranean Frontier of Latin Christendom written by Jace Stuckey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the turn of the millennium, the East Mediterranean region had become a place of foreigners to Latin Christians living in Western Europe. Nevertheless, in the eleventh century numerous Latin Christian pilgrims streamed toward the East and Jerusalem in anticipation of the end times. The Apocalypse did not materialize as some had anticipated, but instead over the course of the next few centuries an expansion of Latin Christendom did. This expansion would transform the political, economic, and cultural landscape of both East and West and alter the course of Mediterranean history. This volume presents 22 critical studies on this crucial period (1000-1500) in the development of the Western expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean. These works deal with economy and trade, migration and colonization, crusade and conquest, military orders, as well as religious diversity and cross-cultural interaction. It includes a bibliography of important works published in Western languages together with an introduction by the editor.

Download or read book Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World written by Robert Sabatino Lopez and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Spain Portugal and the Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe written by Jose-Juan Lopez-Portillo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen from the perspective of 1492, the medieval expansion of Latin Europe was nowhere as dramatic or enduring as in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic. Its Christian kingdoms continued their advance against Al-Andalus up to 1492, whereas territorial expansion elsewhere against the Muslim world had either ceased or subsided by the late 13th century. Castile and Portugal also transformed the Atlantic Ocean from the inaccessible dead-end of Eurasia into the most promising avenue for European expansion for the first time in history. The articles collected in this volume explore the causes and the nature of this expansion, from a variety of historical traditions. They investigate the extent to which the ’transference’ of Mediterranean traditions aided this process; the characteristics of Iberian conflict that eventually led to the success of its Christian kingdoms; and the motives for launching, and techniques for running, the first European ’overseas empires’ in the unfolding Atlantic frontier. In the process they illuminate the new identities and cultural interactions that this expansion produced in its wake, while the new introduction sets them in the broader context.

Download or read book The North Eastern Frontiers of Medieval Europe written by Alan V. Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the mid-twelfth century the lands on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, from Finland to the frontiers of Poland, were Catholic Europe’s final frontier: a vast, undeveloped expanse of lowlands, forest and waters, inhabited by peoples belonging to the Finnic and Baltic language groups. In the course of the following three centuries, Finland, Estonia, Livonia and Prussia were incorporated into the Latin world through processes of conquest, Christianisation and settlement, and brought under the rule of Western monarchies and ecclesiastical institutions. Lithuania was left as the last pagan polity in Europe, yet able to accept Christianity on its own terms in 1386. The Western conquest of the Baltic lands advanced the frontier of Latin Christendom to that of the Russian Orthodox world, and had profound and long lasting effects on the institutions, society and culture of the region lasting into modern times. This volume presents 21 key studies (2 of them translated from German for the first time) on this crucial period in the development of North-Eastern Europe, dealing with crusade and conversion, the establishment of Western rule, settlement and society, and the development of towns, trade and the economy. It includes a classified bibliography of the main works published in Western languages since World War II together with an introduction by the editor.

Download or read book The North Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe written by James Muldoon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled the warlike Celts, and beyond whom lay the north seas and the awesome Atlantic Ocean, formidable obstacles to expansion westward. This volume looks first at the legacy of the Viking expansion which had briefly created a network stretching across the sea from Britain and Ireland to North America, and had demonstrated that the Atlantic could be crossed and land reached. The next sections deal with the English expansion in the western and northern British Isles. In the 12th century the Normans began the process of subjugating the Celts, thus inaugurating for the English an experience which was to prove crucial when colonizing the Americas in the 17th century. Medieval Ireland in particular served as a laboratory for the development of imperial institutions, attitudes, and ideologies that shaped the creation of the British Empire and served as a staging area for further expansion westward.

Download or read book Medieval Ethnographies written by Joan-Pau Rubies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Dynasties Intertwined written by Matt King and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dynasties Intertwined traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening around the Zirids and Normans, their relationship was never governed by an overarching ideology like jihad or crusade. Instead, both dynasties pursued policies that they thought would expand their power and wealth, either through collaboration or conflict. The relationship between the Zirids and Normans ultimately came to a violent end in the 1140s, when a devastating drought crippled Ifriqiya. The Normans seized this opportunity to conquer lands across the Ifriqiyan coast, bringing an end to the Zirid dynasty and forming the Norman kingdom of Africa, which persisted until the Almohad conquest of Mahdia in 1160. Previous scholarship on medieval North Africa during the reign of the Zirids has depicted the region as one of instability and political anarchy that rendered local lords powerless in the face of foreign conquest. Matt King shows that, to the contrary, the Zirids and other local lords in Ifriqiya were integral parts of the far-reaching political and economic networks across the Mediterranean. Despite the eventual collapse of the Zirid dynasty at the hands of the Normans, Dynasties Intertwined makes clear that its emirs were active and consequential Mediterranean players for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with political agency independent of their Christian neighbors across the Strait of Sicily.

Download or read book Why Europe written by Michael Mitterauer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity written by John H. Arnold and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity takes as its subject the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the Christian Church between 400 and 1500AD. It addresses topics ranging from early medieval monasticism to late medieval mysticism, from the material wealth of the Church to the spiritual exercises through which certain believers might attempt to improve their souls. Each chapter tells a story, but seeks also to ask how and why 'Christianity' took particular forms at particular moments in history, paying attention to both the spiritual and otherwordly aspects of religion, and the material and political contexts in which they were often embedded. This Handbook is a landmark academic collection that presents cutting-edge interpretive perspectives on medieval religion for a wide academic audience, drawing together thirty key scholars in the field from the United States, the UK, and Europe. Notably, the Handbook is arranged thematically, and focusses on an analytical, rather than narrative, approach, seeking to demonstrate the variety, change, and complexity of religion throughout this long period, and the numerous different ways in which modern scholarship can approach it. While providing a very wide-ranging view of the subject, it also offers an important agenda for further study in the field.

Download or read book Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond written by Francesco Stella and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.

Download or read book Texts from the Middle written by Thomas E Burman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texts from the Middle is a companion primary source reader to the textbook The Sea in the Middle. It can be used alone or in conjunction with the textbook, providing an original history of the Middle Ages that places the Mediterranean at the geographical center of the study of the period from 650 to 1650. Building on the textbook’s unique approach, these sources center on the Mediterranean and emphasize the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration. The supplementary reader mirrors the main text’s fifteen-chapter structure, providing six sources per chapter. The two texts pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.