Latin Syria and the West, 1149–1187

1969 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Smail
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Historians of the crusades have given most of their attention to the major crusading expeditions, especially to the first, and to the surface history of the Latin states in Syria, especially to that of the kingdom of Jerusalem. They have shown less interest in those conditions in western Europe from which all crusading activity grew. It is true that the roots of the movement prior to the First Crusade were traced by Erdmann in a magisterial study which remains the most important contribution made to the subject during the present century. But the First Crusade was not the end of the matter. European sentiment about the crusades and the Latin states continued to develop during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond. Even in the twelfth century there was a body of opinion which was highly critical of crusading activity and this grew in the course of time; but the main weight of conventional opinion in the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth century came to accept the crusade, and the maintenance or recovery of Latin possession of the Holy Places, as a Christian responsibility.

A Hermit Goes to War: Peter and the Origins of the First Crusade

1985 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 79-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.O. Blake ◽  
C. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
The West ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Church

Just over a century ago Heinrich Hagenmeyer published his definitive book on Peter the Hermit. It has shaped most subsequent discussions of Peter’s career, and it must be said at once that no completely new material has come to light since then. There is, however, a problem of perpetual interest posed by the divergences among twelfth-century accounts of the origins of the First Crusade. Until the advent of modern historiography, it was accepted that the expedition was provoked by an appeal from the church of Jerusalem, brought to the west by Peter the Hermit, who had visited it as a pilgrim, had seen a vision of Christ and had been entrusted by the patriarch with a letter asking for help against the oppression of the Christians there. The crusade was on this view born in the atmosphere of pilgrimage, visions and popular preaching which continued to mark its course, and is so evident in, for example, the discovery of the Holy Lance and the visions and messages which accompanied it. Peter is in some sense the embodiment of these charismatic elements, and there is no controversy about his prominence in the history of the movement. He appears as a sensationally successful preacher, who recruited and led a large contingent which left in advance of the main armies, and was cut to pieces in Asia Minor. Thereafter, he appears in the chronicles in a variety of capacities: as a runaway, and an ambassador to the Moslems, as an adviser, as an associate with the popular element among the crusaders, and finally as a guide to the sacred sites at Jerusalem. It is, however, not with these wider aspects of his career that we wish to deal in this paper, but with his special role in the summoning of the expedition. The older view was that he was its first author. Every student of the early church is familiar with militant monks and hermits. It was once believed that Peter, their spiritual descendant, was the most supremely successful of all the ascetic warmongers.

Ideas and Reality: Some Attempts to Control and Defuse War in the Twelfth Century

1983 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Holdsworth
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Military ◽  
Working Out ◽  
The Church

The track to be explored in this paper was laid down when I realised how relatively unexamined the actual working out of Christian ideas about war within the medieval period is. Recent years have seen appear a notable book about the development of ideas on the Just War, and a great deal of work on the role of the military aristocracy and on its ideals, but upon the coming together of Christianity and actual events there seemed to me very little, at least in the period which interests me most. The one series of events which has attracted attention within what one can call loosely the twelfth century is, of course, the Crusades, but I decided to put them rather at the edge of my focus since they raised special questions, and to invite a scholar who has devoted much time to their elucidation to give a paper upon a crusading theme later in the conference. Yet when one turns for guidance for the history of western Europe there is only one book which stands out, La Guerre au Moyen Age by Philippe Contamine which appeared in the Nouvelle Clio series as recently as 1980, and it, as one would expect from its author’s earlier achievement, is strongest when it deals with the period of the Hundred Years War. Nonetheless it is a remarkable achievement, and one to which I am deeply indebted. But given the fact that the subject is still so unmapped, only two approaches seemed feasible to me, one where I would try to look at a series of specific wars and see what the Church did about them, or one where I would look at a source or group of sources, and see what it, or they, had to say about war and the Church.

Scissors and paste: Corpus Christi, Cambridge, MS 139 again

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 83-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ultra Violet ◽  
Present Form ◽  
The West ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Violet Light ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Unique Source

Amongst the manuscripts bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, by Matthew Parker in 1575 is one of the most important surviving collections of sources for the history of the north of England in the twelfth century. Manuscript 139, as it now is, contains, amongst other items, unique, or almost unique, copies of the so-called Historia Regum, which had been ascribed to Symeon of Durham before the end of the twelfth century, its continuation by John of Hexham, and the History of Richard of Hexham. It was a prime, and in part a unique, source of Twysden’s pioneering edition of 1652, and its value is in no way diminished today. This apart, the manuscript is of great interest as a manuscript, and the problems of its date, provenance and composition are still the subject of debate. The most recent and definitive account of the manuscript was given by Peter Hunter Blair in a fifty-five page article contributed to the volume of essays edited by Nora Chadwick under the title Celt and Saxon. His conclusions, which supersede all earlier views, were that the manuscript was compiled in the period c 1165–70 at the cistercian house of Sawley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the subsequent discovery of an erased Sawley ex libris, now visible only in ultra-violet light, and dated by Ker to the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, reinforced his view. Yet there still remain problems and uncertainties, and my purpose here is first to sketch in a little of the history of the manuscript in its present form, and secondly, by further examination of particular aspects of its to supplement and qualify Blair’s conclusions.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Material Conditions of Anglo-Saxon Life

1979 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Joel T. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The West ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

The author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People was the greatest historian writing in the West between the later Roman Empire and the twelfth century, when we come to William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, and William of Tyre. Bede's qualities as a historian are well known and widely appreciated, and they need no further exposition here. Instead, we propose to be perverse and to attempt to read Bede's text as though he had been a sociologist or an economic anthropologist: What can we learn from him about the “material conditions” of life in post-Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England, especially about life in the sixth and seventh centuries. This is surely a strange purpose for which to use the Ecclesiastical History. We do so both to show that Bede is so rich and so multifaceted that he is immensely valuable for many purposes besides those of greatest obvious interest to him, and because the sources for social and economic life in those years are so poor that everything available is legitimate grist for the mills of our analysis.Actually there are two reasons why Bede might have furnished us with the kind of information we are seeking. One is that among classical and early medieval historians there was a considerable tradition of describing the barbarian world, of paying particular attention to the institutions, mores, and customs of the Germanic people or whoever might be the subject of the tale.

Memorials of the Holy Places and Blessings from the East: Devotion to Jerusalem before the Crusades

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 90-109
Author(s):  
Colin Morris
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Almost All

Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre and the liturgy of the Resurrection appear to be the origin of everything.’ Carol Heitz was emphatic about the significance of the Jerusalem ideal in shaping the liturgy and architecture of the Carolingian period. The question of how far this interest in Jerusalem lies behind the origin of the crusades has for a long time been the subject of discussion among historians. Their productivity on the subject has inevitably been increased by the occurrence of the ninth centenary of the preaching of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095. It is agreed by almost all that there was a devotion to Jerusalem in Western Europe in the preceding centuries, but there are profoundly different views about its effect on the decision of Urban II to proclaim the crusade and on the response to his preaching. This paper does not attempt to add to this voluminous debate. It is concerned rather to explore the reasons for the reverence for the Holy Land, the forms which it took, and the changes which took place from the Carolingian period to the beginning of the crusade movement.

L’Estoire d’Eracles in Outremer

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Handyside
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
Old French ◽  
French Language ◽  
The West ◽  
First Crusade ◽  
History Of

William of Tyre’s Latin history of the first crusade, the Historia rebus in partibus transmarinis gestarum, was first written in the late twelfth century and then swiftly translated into Old French within a generation of the author’s death. The French-language translation, called L'Estoire d'Eracles, was copied and recopied multiple times in both the West and in the Levant over the course of the next hundred years. Several of the changes introduced by the translator for his western audience also changed the narrative’s perspective, serving as a powerful example of how French-language texts bridged the distance between communities located in the Levant and those in the Christian West.

A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activities

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

Twelfth-Century Italian Prices: Food and Clothing in Pisa and Venice

1983 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-403
Author(s):  
Louise Buenger Robbert
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American Philosophical Society ◽  
Cost Of Living ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Cost

Seventy-three years ago pioneer American medievalist Dana Carlton Munro (1911: 504) delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society entitled “The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century.” He threw down the gauntlet by concluding that in this paper an attempt has been made to set forth only a few of the facts, merely to indicate the nature and importance of the problem. Every one of the subjects here discussed is susceptible of elaboration, and needs to be worked out in detail for each country of Western Europe and each period in the twelfth century. The material is voluminous…. This field, as a whole, offers a good opportunity for many monographs, and such work is essential before we can understand the economic history of the century which was most important in the advance of western Europe.This article takes up this challenge with new material on the cost of living in Italy in the twelfth century.

scholarly journals On the Question of Medieval Artillery in the Muslim Regions of Contemporary Russia

Islamovedenie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Nabiev Rustam Fanisovich ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Northern Eurasia ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Relationship Of

The article deals with the problem of the spread of artillery weapons from the East to the West through the territory of the Eurasian steppes. Among the regions important for the devel-opment of firearms were countries with Islamic culture, which are currently part of the Russian Federation and the CIS. They were one of the most important links in the movement of new technologies from the East to Europe. Evidence of the development of artillery in the northern Muslim countries is not only written sources, but also finds of genuine medieval weapons. The author shows that the Muslim peoples of northern Eurasia have contributed to the world process of the development and spread of firearms. The article substantiates the view that in the territory of Russia powder technologies, the newest at that time, began to be used much earlier than in Western Europe. The author also identifies a number of areas of research into the history of powder technologies in the medieval Muslim world, such as sources of information, regions, landscapes, the main ways of spreading technologies, as well as terminology from the standpoint of cultural relationship of languages

The State

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
The State ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Modern Times

It is often said that the subject matter of political philosophy is the nature and justification of the state. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thinks that political science is “nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity.” John Rawls famously understands “the primary subject of justice [to be] the basic structure of society,” restricting his attentions to a society “conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies,” and assuming that “the boundaries of these schemes are given by the notion of a self-contained national community.” Contemporary political philosophers often follow suit, disagreeing about what states should do, and simply assuming that they are the proper agents of justice or reform. The history of philosophy and the development of political concepts seem to be central to understanding the state. The influence of Roman law and republican government, and the rediscovery of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are obvious important influences. The modern state emerged first in Western Europe in early modern times.

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