The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades PDF Download

Author: Ahmed M. A. Sheir
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the emergence of the legend in the mid-twelfth century. Second, the work presents a historical discussion of the legend and its association with actual occurrences in the Far East and the Levant, analysing the legend history under the crusading crisis and the imperial papal schism in Europe. Meanwhile, the work considers the vague Prester John Letter addressed to Manuel I Komnenus, Byzantine Emperor, and its elaborate conception of a mythical eastern kingdom, revealing imaginative parallels on the wondrous East and legendary Eastern Christian kings in Arabic Muslim and Christian accounts of the Muslim geographer and cartographer al-Idrisi, the Coptic Abu al-Makarim and the Syriac Ibn al-'Ibri (Bar Hebraeus), among others. Moreover, the book examines how the legend impacted war and peace processes between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders during the Fifth Crusade against Egypt (1217-1221), revealing how it was mingled with Arabic and Eastern Christian prophecies at the time. The study concludes by investigating the perception of Prester John by the papal and European envoys to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, revealing how the legend was instrumentalised (and even weaponised) to establish a Latin-Mongol crusade through a parallel exploration of relevant Latin, Arabic and Syriac sources.

Author: Ahmed Sheir
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783656869450
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject History - World History - Early and Ancient History, University of Gottingen (History Department), course: History of the Crusades and the relation between the East and West, language: English, comment: I would like to thank a lot Prof. Aly al- Sayed, Damnhour University, Egypt. and Prof. Dr. Frank Rexroth, Gottingen University, Germany, for their help, patience, encouragement throughout all the stage of researching and writing this work. I could not have been written this work without their advices, instructions, comments and extensive help., abstract: The Crusade movement is one of the most important occurrences of medieval history. It took place throughout two centuries in the Levant and affected both Muslims and Crusaders and in turn changed the way in which West and East related to one another. To understand the history of the Crusades, it is important to study not only the military aspects but also the socio-economic and political relationships. When the Crusaders took control of the Holy Land and many Islamic cities in the Levant, they transferred their feudal European system there. They established four main fiefdoms or lordships, Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch and Tripoli. In addition, there were another twelve secondary fiefdoms, of which Tibn n was one. This work is divided into five chapters. An introduction to outline the importance and objectives of the study, and also discusses its primary and second sources as well as the previous studies in this field. The second chapter is a study of the society of Tibn n, the architecture of the castle of Tibn n and its importance for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It illustrates the nature of the relations between the Crusader and Muslim inhabitants in Tibn n and the economic and agricultural importance of lands of Tibn n in the age of the Crusades. The third chapter deals with the issues of Crusader rule in Tibn n, from its origins and evolution to the political role of

Author: Michael S. Fulton
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004376925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
Artillery in the Era of the Crusades provides a detailed examination of the use of mechanical artillery in the Levant through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Rather than focus on a selection of sensational anecdotes, Michael S. Fulton explores the full scope of the available literary and archaeological evidence, reinterpreting the development of trebuchet technology and the ways in which it was used during this period. Among the arguments put forward, Fulton challenges the popular perception that the invention of the counterweight trebuchet was responsible for the dramatic transformation in the design of fortifications around the start of the thirteenth century. See inside the book.

Author: Denys Pringle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521460101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
A descriptive gazetteer of all the secular buildings known to have existed within the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Author: Julian Binder
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656139989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2012 in the subject History Europe - Other Countries - Middle Ages, Early Modern Age, University College Cork, language: English, abstract: The First Crusade from 1096 to 1099 A.D. was a military expedition initiated by Pope Urban II. with the goal to reconquer the Holy Sepulchre and Jerusalem, the holy city, for Christianity. Despite enormous threats, dangers and logistic problems, the Christian army finally succeeded. The aim of this paper is to analyse and to critically discuss the strengths which enabled the crusaders to succeed in the troublesome recapture of Jerusalem, and the weaknesses of this expedition, which nearly led to the failure of the holy mission...

Author: Maxi Hinze
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638612465
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam, course: Religious Diversity in Multicultural Britain, language: English, abstract: In 1187, Saladin and his troops defeated the Christians (under King Guy of Lusignan) at the Battle of Hattin and by the end of the year Saladin had taken Acre and Jerusalem. In particular the news of the Fall of Jerusalem aroused immense feelings among Christians in Europe and had still greater reverberations than the Conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The Papacy reacted immediately to the Fall of Jerusalem by making it a duty for the clergy to preach a new crusade and thus influenced the public opinion significantly. Consequently, no king could evade the duty of going on a crusade in order to recapture the Holy Land from Saladin. Nevertheless, the King of France (Phillip II) and the King of England Henry II (who was succeeded by his son Richard I in 1189) did not show much enthusiasm to go on a crusade at first, as they both feared a foreign invasion during their absence. In contrast to them, the German Emperor, Frederick of Hohenstaufen (also known as Barbarossa), responded to the call for help immediately. He took the cross at Mainz Cathedral at the end of March in 1188 and was the first of the three monarchs to set out for the Holy Land. As public pressure grew, Richard I and Phillip II were urged to renounce their own quarrels and it was finally agreed that they both go on the Third Crusade. After final arrangements were made on the continent, the two kings departed from Vezelay on July 4th 1190 in order to retake the Holy Land from Saladin. After military successes (Fall of Acre and the Battle of Arsuf), Richard I established his headquarters in Jaffa where he believed to be in a good strategic position to launch an attack on Jerusalem. But when Richard I realized that his position in England was threatened by his absence, he offered negotiations to Saladin in order to be able to withdraw soon. On September 2nd 1192, Saladin and Richard I signed the Treaty of Jerusalem and Richard I finally returned to England in 1194. Richard I s decision to go on the Third Crusade led to profound changes within society and affected the English people in various ways.

Author: R. Stephen Humphreys
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873952637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Upon the death of Saladin in 1193, his vast empire, stretching from the Yemen to the upper reaches of the Tigris, fell into the hands of his Ayyubid kinsmen. These latter parceled his domains into a number of autonomous principalities, though some common identity was maintained by linking these petty states into a loose confederation, in which each local prince owed allegiance to the senior member of the Ayyubid house. Such an arrangement was, of course, highly unstable, and at first glance Ayyubid history appears to be no more than a succession of unedifying squabbles among countless rival princelings, until at last the family's hegemony was extinguished by two events: 1) a coup d'état staged by the palace guard in Egypt in 1250, and 2) the Mongol occupation of Syria, brief but destructive, in 1260. But appearances to the contrary, the obscure quarrels of Saladin's heirs embodied a political revolution of highest importance in Syro-Egyptian history. The seven decades of Ayyubid rule mark the slow and sometimes violent emergence of a new administrative relationship between Egypt and Syria, one in which Syria was subjected to close centralized control from Cairo for the unprecedented period of 250 years. These years saw also the gradual decay of a form of government--the family confederation--which had been the most characteristic political structure of Western Iran and the Fertile Crescent for three centuries, and its replacement by a unitary autocracy. Finally, it was under the Ayyubids that the army ceased to be an arm of the state and became, in effect, the state itself. When these internal developments are seen in the broader context of world history as it affected Syria during the first half of the thirteenth century--Italian commercial expansion, the Crusades of Frederick II and St. Louis, the Mongol expansion--then the great intrinsic interest of Ayyubid history becomes apparent. Professor Humphreys has developed these themes through close examination of the political fortunes of the Ayyubid princes of Damascus. For Damascus, though seldom the capital of the Ayyubid confederation, was, nevertheless, its hinge. The struggle for regional autonomy vs. centralization, for Syrian independence vs. Egyptian domination, was fought out at Damascus, and the city was compelled to stand no less than eleven sieges during the sixty-seven years of Ayyubid rule. Almost every political process of real significance either originated with the rulers of Damascus or was closely reflected in their policy and behavior. The book is cast in the form of a narrative, describing a structure of politics which was in no way fixed and static, but dynamic and constantly evolving. Indeed, the book does not so much concern the doings of a group of rather obscure princes as it does the values and attitudes which underlay and shaped their behavior. The point of the narrative is precisely to show what these values were, how they were expressed in real life, and how they changed into quite new values in the course of time.

Author: Benjamin Z. Kedar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040247113
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Steven Runciman characterized intellectual life in the Frankish Levant as 'disappointing'; Joshua Prawer claimed that the Franks refused to open up to the East's intellectual achievements. The present collection, the second by Benjamin Kedar in the Variorum series, presents facts that require a modification of these still largely prevailing views. The earliest laws of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were influenced by Byzantine legislation; medical routine in the Jerusalem Hospital, unparalleled in Europe, had counterparts in Oriental hospitals; worshippers of different creeds repeatedly converged; multi-directional conversion recurred time after time. Several articles deal with groups that did abstain from intercultural contacts: Muslim villagers, Frankish clerics and hermits. One article dwells on the asymmetry of Frankish and Muslim mutual perceptions. The volume concludes with studies of specific locations: one argues that Acre was considerably larger than hitherto assumed, another compares its Venetian and Genoese quarters and attempts to locate the remains of a main street, a third reconstructs the history of Caymont.

Author: Helen Nicholson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429514735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Published in 1997, this is a translation of the Intnerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, 'The Itenerary of the Pilgrims and the deeds of King Richard,’ based on the edition produced in 1864 by William Stubbs as volume 1 of his chronicles and memorials of the reign of King Richard I. This Chronicle is the most comprehensive and complete account of the Third Crusade, covering virtually all the events of the crusade in roughly chronological order, and adding priceless details such as descriptions of King Richard the Lionhearts personel appearance, shipping, French fashions and discussion of the international conventions of war. It is of great interest to medieval historians in general, not only historians of the crusade. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and exhaustive notes which explain the manuscript tradition and the sources of the text and which compare this chronicle with the works of other contemporary writers on the crusade, Christian and Muslim. The translation has been produced specifically for university students taking courses on the Crusades, but it will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Third Crusade and the history of the Middle Ages.

Author: Denys Pringle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521390378
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
This is the second of a series of four volumes that are intended to present a complete corpus of all the church buildings, of both the western and the oriental rites, rebuilt or simply in use in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem between the capture of Jerusalem for the First Crusade in 1099 and the loss of Acre in 1291. This volume completes the general topographical coverage begun in volume I, and will be followed by a third volume dealing specifically with the major cities of Jerusalem, Acre and Tyre (which are excluded from the preceding volumes). The project, of which this series represents the final, definitive publication, has been sponsored by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. On completion the corpus will contain a topographical listing of all the 400 or more church buildings of the Kingdom that are attested by documentary or surviving archaeological evidence, and individual descriptions and discussion of them in terms of their identification, building history and architecture. Some of the buildings have been published before, but many others are published here for the first time.