-PDF Download- Medieval Frontier Societies EBOOK

Medieval Frontier Societies

Author: Robert Bartlett

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13:

This is the first study of the nature of frontiers and frontier society in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the frontiers between England and Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; between Castile and Grenada; and on the Elbe, the book examines the consequences for frontier societies of being located in areas of cross-cultural contact and confrontation. This comparative study by expert contributors throws new light on our thinking about frontiers, and fills a major gap in the history of medieval Europe.

Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices

Author: David Abulafia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1351918583

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In recent years, the 'medieval frontier' has been the subject of extensive research. But the term has been understood in many different ways: political boundaries; fuzzy lines across which trade, religions and ideas cross; attitudes to other peoples and their customs. This book draws attention to the differences between the medieval and modern understanding of frontiers, questioning the traditional use of the concepts of 'frontier' and 'frontier society'. It contributes to the understanding of physical boundaries as well as metaphorical and ideological frontiers, thus providing a background to present-day issues of political and cultural delimitation. In a major introduction, David Abulafia analyses these various ambiguous meanings of the term 'frontier', in political, cultural and religious settings. The articles that follow span Europe from the Baltic to Iberia, from the Canary Islands to central Europe, Byzantium and the Crusader states. The authors ask what was perceived as a frontier during the Middle Ages? What was not seen as a frontier, despite the usage in modern scholarship? The articles focus on a number of themes to elucidate these two main questions. One is medieval ideology. This includes the analysis of medieval formulations of what frontiers should be and how rulers had a duty to defend and/or extend the frontiers; how frontiers were defined (often in a different way in rhetorical-ideological formulations than in practice); and how in certain areas frontier ideologies were created. The other main topic is the emergence of frontiers, how medieval people created frontiers to delimit areas, how they understood and described frontiers. The third theme is that of encounters, and a questioning of medieval attitudes to such encounters. To what extent did medieval observers see a frontier between themselves and other groups, and how does real interaction compare with ideological or narrative formulations of such interaction?

At the Gate of Christendom

Author: Nora Berend

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-05-17

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0521651859

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Modern life in increasingly heterogeneous societies has directed attention to patterns of interaction, often using a framework of persecution and tolerance. This study of the economic, social, legal and religious position of three minorities (Jews, Muslims and pagan Turkic nomads) argues that different degrees of exclusion and integration characterized medieval non-Christian status in the medieval Christian kingdom of Hungary between 1000 and 1300. A complex explanation of non-Christian status emerges from the analysis of their economic, social, legal and religious positions and roles. Existence on the frontier with the nomadic world led to the formulation of a frontier ideology, and to anxiety about Hungary's detachment from Christendom, which affected policies towards non-Christians. The study also succeeds in integrating central European history with the study of the medieval world, while challenging such current concepts in medieval studies as frontier societies, persecution and tolerance, ethnicity and 'the other'.

England's Northern Frontier

Author: Jackson Armstrong

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1108472990

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Explains the history of England's northern borderlands in the fifteenth century within a broader social, political and European context.

The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier

Author: Alan V. Murray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 1351892606

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The conversion of the lands on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea by Germans, Danes and Swedes in the period from 1150 to 1400 represented the last great struggle between Christianity and paganism on the European continent, but for the indigenous peoples of Finland, Livonia, Prussia, Lithuania and Pomerania, it was also a period of wider cultural conflict and transformation. Along with the Christian faith came a new and foreign culture: the German and Scandinavian languages of the crusaders and the Latin of their priests, new names for places, superior military technology, and churches and fortifications built of stone. For newly baptized populations, the acceptance of Christianity encompassed major changes in the organization and practice of political, religious and social life, entailing the acceptance of government by alien elites, of new cultic practices, and of new obligations such as taxes, tithes and military service in the armies of the Christian rulers. At the same time, as the Western conquerors carried their campaigns beyond pagan territory into the principalities of north-western Russia, the Baltic Crusades also developed into a struggle between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This collection of sixteen essays by both established and younger scholars explores the theme of clash of cultures from a variety of perspectives, discussing the nature and ideology of crusading in the medieval Baltic region, the struggle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and the cultural confrontation that accompanied the process of conversion, in subjects as diverse as religious observation, political structures, the practice of warfare, art and music, and perceptions of the landscape.

War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages

Author: Anthony Goodman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1134895127

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The frontier or `marcher' societies flourished in the Middle Ages and their influence has lasted well into modern times. In this study of Anglo-Scottish relations and of border society, the contributors examine the infrastructure beneath societies which were permanently `organized for war'. They draw on Anglo-Scottish archival material to argue that the issues which feature in other frontier societies - acculturation and the creation of special institutions - appeared also on the Anglo-Scottish frontier. The book uses the celebrated Battle of Otterburn as a starting-point for a major reassessment of border society, challenging the view put forward in popular ballads that the borders were isolated and self-contained.

Frontiers for Peace in the Medieval North

Author: Ian Peter Grohse

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 9004343652

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In Frontiers for Peace in the Medieval North. The Norwegian-Scottish Frontier c. 1260-1470, Ian Peter Grohse offers an account of social and political relations in the frontier community of Orkney in the late Middle Ages.

Lords of the Central Marches

Author: Brock Holden

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-08-07

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0199548579

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the Middle Ages, the March between England and Wales was a contested, militarised frontier zone, a 'land of war'. This text examines how the English aristocracy of this borderland organised themselves and their followers in order to survive against the increasing power of their Welsh opponents.

The Sephardic Frontier

Author: Jonathan Ray

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-01-14

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0801461774

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their Christian neighbors was extensive. Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. By the end of the thirteenth century, royal intervention had begun to restrict the amount of contact between Jewish and Christian communities, signaling the end of the open society that had marked the frontier for most of the century.