Download or read book Empress of the East written by Leslie Peirce and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.
Download or read book Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland Lithuania written by Tomasz Grusiecki and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland–Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance. These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation. The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.
Download or read book Queens Consort Cultural Transfer and European Politics c 1500 1800 written by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics examines the roles that queens consort played in dynastic politics and cultural transfer between their natal and marital courts during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This collection of essays analyses the part that these queens played in European politics, showing how hard and soft power, high politics and cultural influences, cannot be strictly separated. It shows that the root of these consorts’ power lay in their dynastic networks and the extent to which they cultivated them. The consorts studied in this book come from territories such as Austria, Braunschweig, Hanover, Poland, Portugal, Prussia and Saxony and travel to, among other places, Britain, Naples, Russia, Spain and Sweden. The various chapters address different types of cultural manifestation, among them collecting, portraiture, panegyric poetry, libraries, theatre and festivals, learning, genealogical literature and architecture. The volume significantly shifts the direction of scholarship by moving beyond a focus on individual historical women to consider ‘queens consort’ as a category, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of early modern gender and political history.
Download or read book Monarchy Transformed written by Robert von Friedeburg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-17 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Until the 1960s, it was widely assumed that in Western Europe the 'New Monarchy' propelled kingdoms and principalities onto a modern nation-state trajectory. John I of Portugal (1358-1433), Charles VII (1403-1461) and Louis XI (1423-1483) of France, Henry VII and Henry VIII of England (1457-1509, 1509-1553), Isabella of Castile (1474-1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (1479-1516) were, by improving royal administration, by bringing more continuity to communication with their estates and by introducing more regular taxation, all seen to have served that goal. In this view, princes were assigned to the role of developing and implementing the sinews of state as a sovereign entity characterized by the coherence of its territorial borders and its central administration and government. They shed medieval traditions of counsel and instead enforced relations of obedience toward the emerging 'state'."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book A Concise History of Poland written by Jerzy Lukowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-06 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated and expanded second edition covering Polish history from medieval times to the present day.
Download or read book Salus Vienna Tua written by Henry Elliot Malden and published by Soldiershop Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-04 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: splendid book this"Salus Vienna Tua", from the orginal work of British historian Henry Elliot Malden thet provides a detailed account of the intricate machinations between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Malden’s description of the siege itself is masterly and always a fresh reading. Very clearly are the detail of the negotiations among the Christian princes and charting the march of the various armies. He seems to know every inch of ground, every earthwork and fortification around the Imperial City, and he follows the action meticulously. Very enriched by several wonderful colour plates of Allies and Turkish soldiers and a lot of other images. The failure of the Turkish army to take Vienna in 1683 marks the beginning of the long decline of the Ottoman state but it was a close-run affair. Kara Mustafa's janissaries laid siege to the Austrian imperial capital while allied horsemen ravaged the surrounding countryside. Leopold III and his court had fled leaving the rescue of Vienna to Charles, Duke of Lorraine and John Sobieski of Poland. Another good issue, a fine story teller of our series witness to history !! This book is based on"Vienna 1683 The History And Consequences Of The Defeat Of The Turks Before Vienna, September 12, 1683 By John Sobieski, King Of Poland And Charles Leopold, Duke Of Lorraine"By Henry Elliot Malden London Regan Paul, Trexcii & Co, 1, Paternoster Square 1883. The colour plate of Turkish and Polish soldiers are originally artworks of Soldiershop ©. No effort has been made to modernize or standardize the spelling used in the original text.
Download or read book Royal Bastards written by Sara McDougall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stigmatization as 'bastards' of children born outside of wedlock is commonly thought to have emerged early in Medieval European history. Christian ideas about legitimate marriage, it is assumed, set the standard for legitimate birth. Children born to anything other than marriage had fewer rights or opportunities. They certainly could not become king or queen. As this volume demonstrates, however, well into the late twelfth century, ideas of what made a child a legitimate heir had little to do with the validity of his or her parents' union according to the dictates of Christian marriage law. Instead a child's prospects depended upon the social status, and above all the lineage, of both parents. To inherit a royal or noble title, being born to the right father mattered immensely, but also being born to the right kind of mother. Such parents could provide the most promising futures for their children, even if doubt was cast on the validity of the parents' marriage. Only in the late twelfth century did children born to illegal marriages begin to suffer the same disadvantages as the children born to parents of mixed social status. Even once this change took place we cannot point to 'the Church' as instigator. Instead, exclusion of illegitimate children from inheritance and succession was the work of individual litigants who made strategic use of Christian marriage law. This new history of illegitimacy rethinks many long-held notions of medieval social, political, and legal history.
Download or read book Strategic Imaginations written by Anke Gilleir and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaginations of female rule and the imaginative strategies of women rulers What is the gender of political power ? What happens to the history of sovereignty when we reconsider it from a gender perspective ? Political sovereignty has been a major theme in European thought from the very beginning of intellectual reflection on community. Philosophy and political theory, historiography, theology, and literature and the arts have, often in dialogue with one another, sought to represent or recalibrate notions of rule. Yet whatever covenant was imagined, sovereign rule has consistently been figured as a male prerogative While in-depth studies of historical women rulers have proliferated in the past decades, these have not systematically explored how all women rulers throughout the entirety of European culture have had to operate in a context that could not think power as female – except in grotesque terms. Strategic Imaginations demonstrates that this constitutive tension can only be brought out by studying women’s political rule in a comparative and longue durée manner. The book offers a collection of essays that brings together studies of female sovereignty from the Polish-Lithuanian to the British Commonwealth, and from the Middle Ages to the genesis of modern democracy. It addresses historical figures and takes stock of the rich yet unsettling imagination of female rule in philosophy, literature and art history. For all the variety of geographical, social, and historical contexts it engages, the book reveals surprising resonances between the strategies women rulers used and the images and practices they adopted in the context of an all-pervasive skepticism toward female rule.
Download or read book Blood Royal written by Robert Bartlett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging history of royal and imperial families and dynastic power, enriched by a body of surprising and memorable source material.
Download or read book The Origins of the Slavic Nations written by Serhii Plokhy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2006 book documents developments in the countries of eastern Europe, including the rise of authoritarian tendencies in Russia and Belarus, as well as the victory of the democratic 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine, and poses important questions about the origins of the East Slavic nations and the essential similarities or differences between their cultures. It traces the origins of the modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nations by focusing on pre-modern forms of group identity among the Eastern Slavs. It also challenges attempts to 'nationalize' the Rus' past on behalf of existing national projects, laying the groundwork for understanding of the pre-modern history of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The book covers the period from the Christianization of Kyivan Rus' in the tenth century to the reign of Peter I and his eighteenth-century successors, by which time the idea of nationalism had begun to influence the thinking of East Slavic elites.
Download or read book The Thirty Years War written by Peter H. Wilson and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 1038 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world. When defiant Bohemians tossed the Habsburg emperor’s envoys from the castle windows in Prague in 1618, the Holy Roman Empire struck back with a vengeance. Bohemia was ravaged by mercenary troops in the first battle of a conflagration that would engulf Europe from Spain to Sweden. The sweeping narrative encompasses dramatic events and unforgettable individuals—the sack of Magdeburg; the Dutch revolt; the Swedish militant king Gustavus Adolphus; the imperial generals, opportunistic Wallenstein and pious Tilly; and crafty diplomat Cardinal Richelieu. In a major reassessment, Wilson argues that religion was not the catalyst, but one element in a lethal stew of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict. By war’s end a recognizably modern Europe had been created, but at what price? The Thirty Years War condemned the Germans to two centuries of internal division and international impotence and became a benchmark of brutality for centuries. As late as the 1960s, Germans placed it ahead of both world wars and the Black Death as their country’s greatest disaster. An understanding of the Thirty Years War is essential to comprehending modern European history. Wilson’s masterful book will stand as the definitive account of this epic conflict. For a map of Central Europe in 1618, referenced on page XVI, please visit this book’s page on the Harvard University Press website.
Download or read book The Mandaean Book of John written by Charles G. Häberl and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic homelands by war and oppression. Today, they are a community in crisis, but they provide us with unparalleled access to a library of ancient Gnostic scriptures, as part of the living tradition that has sustained them across the centuries. Gnostic texts such as these have caught popular interest in recent times, as traditional assumptions about the original forms and cultural contexts of related religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been called into question. However, we can learn only so much from texts in isolation from their own contexts. Mandaean literature uniquely allows us not only to increase our knowledge about Gnosticism, and by extension all these other religions, but also to observe the relationship between Gnostic texts, rituals, beliefs, and living practices, both historically and in the present day.
Download or read book The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature Art and Architecture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the various strategies by which appropriate pasts were construed in scholarship, literature, art, and architecture in order to create “national”, regional, or local identities in late medieval and early modern Europe. Because authority was based on lineage, political and territorial claims were underpinned by historical arguments, either true or otherwise. Literature, scholarship, art, and architecture were pivotal media that were used to give evidence of the impressive old lineage of states, regions, or families. These claims were related not only to classical antiquity but also to other periods that were regarded as antiquities, such as the Middle Ages, especially the chivalric age. The authors of this volume analyse these intriguing early modern constructions of “antiquity” and investigate the ways in which they were applied in political, intellectual and artistic contexts in the period of 1400–1700. Contributors include: Barbara Arciszewska, Bianca De Divitiis, Karl Enenkel, Hubertus Günther, Thomas Haye, Harald Hendrix, Stephan Hoppe, Marc Laureys, Frédérique Lemerle, Coen Maas, Anne-Françoise Morel, Kristoffer Neville, Konrad Ottenheym, Yves Pauwels, Christian Peters, Christoph Pieper, David Rijser, Bernd Roling, Nuno Senos, Paul Smith, Pieter Vlaardingerbroek, and Matthew Walker.
Download or read book Universal Empire written by Peter Fibiger Bang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the aspiration to universal, imperial rule across Eurasian history from antiquity to the eighteenth century.
Download or read book The Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings written by Kathleen Dardes and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1998-10-29 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the proceedings of an international symposium organized by the Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first conference of its kind in twenty years, the symposium assembled an international group of conservators of painted panels, and gave them the opportunity to discuss their philosophies and share their work methods. Illustrated in color throughout, this volume presents thirty-one papers grouped into four topic areas: Wood Science and Technology, History of Panel-Manufacturing Techniques, History of the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings, and Current Approaches to the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings.
Download or read book Pickle the Spy written by Andrew Lang and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lithuanian Millenium written by Rūta Janonienė and published by VDA leidykla. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
