Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon


Book Description

This collection of eighteen essays focuses on various phases of warfare around the medieval Mediterranean. Topics of these essays range from crusading activity to the increasing use of mercenaries to the spread of gunpowder weaponry.




Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon


Book Description

This volume consists of the work of eighteen established and younger scholars and focuses on the Mediterranean as a military arena during the Middle Ages. The essays center on several pillars of Mediterranean warfare: the crusading movement including the Spanish reconquista, the development of gunpowder weaponry, the widespread use of mercenaries, and warfare as understood by the lawcodes and intellectuals of the period. A number of articles in this collection present new answers to old historiographical questions.




Crusading and Masculinities


Book Description

This volume presents the first substantial exploration of crusading and masculinity, focusing on the varied ways in which the symbiotic relationship between the two was made manifest in a range of medieval settings and sources, and to what ends. Ideas about masculinity formed an inherent part of the mindset of societies in which crusading happened, and of the conceptual framework informing both those who recorded the events and those who participated. Examination and interrogation of these ideas enables a better contextualised analysis of how those events were experienced, comprehended and portrayed. The collection is structured around five themes: sources and models; contrasting masculinities; emasculation and transgression; masculinity and religiosity and kingship and chivalry. By incorporating masculinity within their analysis of the crusades and of crusaders the contributors demonstrate how such approaches greatly enhance our understanding of crusading as an ideal, an institution and an experience. Individual essays consider western campaigns to the Middle East and Islamic responses; events and sources from the Iberian peninsula and Prussia are also interrogated and re-examined, thus enabling cross-cultural comparison of the meanings attached to medieval manhood. The collection also highlights the value of employing gender as a vital means of assessing relationships between different groups of men, whose values and standards of behaviour were socially and culturally constructed in distinct ways.




A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2003-2006


Book Description

This is the second update of A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, which appeared in 2002. It is meant to do two things: to present references to works on medieval military history and technology not included in the first two volumes; and to present references to all books and articles published on medieval military history and technology from 2003 to 2006. These references are divided into the same categories as in the first two volumes and cover a chronological period of the same length, from late antiquity to 1648, again in order to present a more complete picture of influences on and from the Middle Ages. It also continues to cover the same geographical area as the first and second volume, in essence Europe and the Middle East, or, again, influences on and from this area. The languages of these bibliographical references reflect this geography.




The Cambridge History of War: Volume 2, War and the Medieval World


Book Description

Volume II of The Cambridge History of War covers what in Europe is commonly called 'the Middle Ages'. It includes all of the well-known themes of European warfare, from the migrations of the Germanic peoples and the Vikings through the Reconquista, the Crusades and the age of chivalry, to the development of state-controlled gunpowder-wielding armies and the urban militias of the later middle ages; yet its scope is world-wide, ranging across Eurasia and the Americas to trace the interregional connections formed by the great Arab conquests and the expansion of Islam, the migrations of horse nomads such as the Avars and the Turks, the formation of the vast Mongol Empire, and the spread of new technologies – including gunpowder and the earliest firearms – by land and sea.




The Jewish Jesus


Book Description

There is a general understanding within religious and academic circles that the incarnate Christ of Christian belief lived and died a faithful Jew. This volume addresses Jesus in the context of Judaism. By emphasizing his Jewishness, the authors challenge today’s Jews to reclaim the Nazarene as a proto-rebel rabbi and invite Christians to discover or rediscover the Church’s Jewish heritage. The essays in this volume cover historical, literary, liturgical, philosophical, religious, theological, and contemporary issues related to the Jewish Jesus. Several of them were originally presented at a three-day symposium on “Jesus in the Context of Judaism and the Challenge to the Church,” hosted by the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in 2009. In the context of pluralism, in the temper of growing interreligious dialogue, and in the spirit of reconciliation, encountering Jesus as living history for Christians and Jews is both necessary and proper. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the New Testament and Early Church who are seeking new ways of understanding Jesus in his religious and cultural milieu, as well Jewish and Christian theologians and thinkers who are concerned with contemporary Jewish and Christian relationships.




Isabella of Castile


Book Description

A major biography of the queen who transformed Spain into a principal global power, and sponsored the voyage that would open the New World. In 1474, when Castile was the largest, strongest, and most populous kingdom in Hispania (present day Spain and Portugal), a twenty-three-year-old woman named Isabella ascended the throne. At a time when successful queens regnant were few and far between, Isabella faced not only the considerable challenge of being a young, female ruler in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but also of reforming a major European kingdom riddled with crime, debt, corruption, and religious factionism. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon united two kingdoms, a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Their pivotal reign was long and transformative, uniting Spain and setting the stage for its golden era of global dominance. Acclaimed historian Giles Tremlett chronicles the life of Isabella of Castile as she led her country out of the murky Middle Ages and harnessed the newest ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to turn her ill-disciplined, quarrelsome nation into a sharper, truly modern state with a powerful, clear-minded, and ambitious monarch at its center. With authority and insight he relates the story of this legendary, if controversial, first initiate in a small club of great European queens that includes Elizabeth I of England, Russia's Catherine the Great, and Britain's Queen Victoria.







Barbour's Bruce and Its Cultural Contexts


Book Description

Fresh approaches to one of the most important poems from medieval Scotland. John Barbour's Bruce, an account of the deeds of Robert I of Scotland (1306-29) and his companions during the so-called wars of independence between England and Scotland, is an important and complicated text. Composed c.1375 during the reign of Robert's grandson, Robert II, the first Stewart king of Scotland (1371-90), the poem represents the earliest surviving complete literary work of any length produced in "Inglis" in late medieval Scotland, andis usually regarded as the starting point for any worthwhile discussion of the language and literature of Early Scots. It has also been used as an essential "historical" source for the career and character of that iconic monarch Robert I. But its narrative defies easy categorisation, and has been variously interpreted as a romance, a verse history, an epic or a chivalric biography. This collection re-assesses the form and purpose of Barbour's great poem. It considers the poem from a variety of perspectives, re-examining the literary, historical, cultural and intellectual contexts in which it was produced, and offering important new insights. Steve Boardman is a Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh. Susan Foran, currently an independent scholar, researches chivalry, war and the idea of nation in late medieval historical writing. Contributors: Steve Boardman, Dauvit Broun, Michael Brown, Susan Foran, Chris Given-Wilson, Theo van Heijnsbergen, Rhiannon Purdie, Biörn Tjällén, Diana B. Tyson, Emily Wingfield.




The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000-1650


Book Description

The Age of Wars of Religion saw navies, armies, armed merchant companies, and mercenaries battle one another and local potentates in many lands and along numerous shores. Wars of religion were fought in and between all the major religions and civilizations, from Europe to China, in Africa, and in the isolated Americas, mixing motives of knightly idealism, mercenary greed, and competing claims of divine sanction. This unparalleled work traces the extraordinary upheavals of the period in military technology, competing theologies, and civilizational change that were brought about by, or impinged upon, military conflict. It offers nearly 2,000 discrete but cross-referenced entries on cultural, military, religious and political history, as well as geography, biography, and military literature. Close to 2,000 entries offer detailed information on the major events, places, battles, figures, technologies, and ideas one must know to begin to make sense of the past six centuries of global conflicts. Though especially ferocious and intense, the Wars of Reformation and Counter-Reformation fought by Europeans from the 15th through 17th centuries were hardly unique in world or military history. The Byzantine Empire, bastion of Christian Orthodoxy, staggered to the tortuous end of its long conflict with the Ottoman Empire, the Great Power of the Sunni Muslim world. The Ottomans, in turn, were still engaged in an equally ancient intra-Muslim war, between Sunnis and Shi'ites. In India, the Hindu Rajputs and Marathas, and also the Sikhs, organized armies around religious communities to throw off the Muslim Yoke (Mughul Empire), and also fought against Christian invaders from Europe. As for the isolated Americas, ideas of divine kingship sustained by powerful priesthoods and religious warfare also prevailed, as exemplified by the Inca and Aztec empires.