scholarly journals Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
A Minor

AbstractThe recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

Illuminated Manuscripts in Late Thirteenth-century Konya

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-81
Author(s):  
Cailah Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Visual Properties

This chapter initially focuses on two manuscripts – a small Qur’an and a monumental Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Both were produced in 1278, soon after Rum was formally incorporated into the Ilkhanid empire. After discussing their visual properties in depth, the author uses the manuscripts’ production information to analyse the nature of production and patronage in late medieval Konya. This chapter introduces many key themes that are developed throughout the rest of the book, including the role of the Mevlevis in artistic production, the itinerancy of artists, and cosmopolitan nature of Rum’s towns. Based on the examination of these manuscripts, the chapter contends that several currently unidentified or misidentified manuscripts were also produced in Konya. Through an illuminated copy of Ibn Bibi’s Seljuk chronicle produced around 1282, the chapter also considers the part that Ilkhanid officials played in manuscript patronage in Rum.

Rivals for Ministry? Ordinations of Secular and Regular Clergy in Southern England c. 1300–1500

1989 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
Virginia Davis
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Southern England ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
Pastoral Role ◽  
Late Medieval Literature ◽  
Changing Patterns

At the beginning of the fourteenth century ecclesiastical recruitment AA was flourishing in England. Hundreds of men turned up to be ordained at the four Ember seasons each year at which major ordinations were permitted to be held. The majority of these men were secular clergy; only a small proportion were members of religious orders. Of the scores of people in the diocese of Winchester who came at the stipulated time to be ordained to the major orders at this date only about one fifth were members of religious orders and of those, only a handful were mendicants. However, by the end of the century, after the ravages of the Black Death, although the total numbers of men being ordained had declined dramatically a greater percentage of these were regular rather than secular clergy. A similar pattern can be seen all over Southern England. It was a trend which persisted throughout much of the fifteenth century. This paper will investigate the changing patterns of secular and regular ordinations to the priesthood in southern England in the period between 1300 and 1500. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries extensive anti-mendicant feeling was expressed both in late medieval literature and in rivalry between the secular clergy and the friars over the pastoral role of the latter. Was this, in fact, a reflection of a reality which meant that, compared to the position in the early fourteenth century, far more ordained friars were on the streets and in the parishes?

scholarly journals The Encounter Between Forest Lithuanians and Steppe Tatars in the Time of Mindaugas

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Darius Baronas
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Baltic Countries ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
Contemporary Christian ◽  
Main Target ◽  
The Baltic

This article investigates the first contacts between the Lithuanians and the Tatars in Mindaugas’ time (ca. 1240-1263). In this period the role of the Tatars seems to be underestimated in historical literature. A study of the situation in the aftermath of the Tatar invasions into Rus’ in 1238-1240 reveals that Lithuanian warlords exploited the chaos there by intensifying their plundering assaults. Such Lithuanian behaviour shows that they did not try to clash with the Tatars, instead, like the Germans or the Swedes, the Lithuanians also sought to strengthen their political influence in Rus. The study also reveals that the Tatars were aware of the Lithuanians, whose lands were not the main target of their aggression. A radical change in the relations between the Lithuanians and the Tatars is obvious in connection with King Mindaugas’ policy (from 1253) characterised by the idea of a crusade against the Tatars, popular in contemporary Christian Europe. The nearness of the Tatar world to the Baltic countries shows that the contacts established in the thirteenth century would yield fruit only in the fourteenth century.

Astrology and the Sibyls: John of Legnano's De adventu Christi and the Natural Theology of the Later Middle Ages

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Ackerman Smoller
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Virgin Birth ◽  
Positive Light

ArgumentMedieval authors adopted a range of postures when writing about the role of reason in matters of faith. At one extreme, the phrase “natural theology” (theologia naturalis) was used, largely pejoratively, to connote something clearly inferior to revealed theology. At the other end, there was also a long tradition of what one might term “the impulse to natural theology,” manifested perhaps most notably in the embrace of Nature by certain twelfth-century authors associated with the school of Chartres. Only in the fifteenth century does one find authors using natural reason to investigate religious truths who also employ the term “natural theology,” now in a positive light, for their activities. Among such thinkers, astrology and eschatology frequently played an important role. In that respect, the writings of fourteenth-century Bolognese jurist John of Legnano offer an important example of the place of astrological, prophetic, and apocalyptic material in late medieval natural theology. In his 1375 treatise De adventu Christi, Legnano demonstrated that ancient poets, pagan seers such as the Sibyls, and non-Christian astrologers had all predicted, like Old Testament prophets, the virgin birth of Christ. For Legnano, not simply was Creation part of God's revelation, but, equally importantly, the very categories of reason and revelation blur in a way that points toward the works of Renaissance humanists and lays a foundation for a model of natural vaticination that showed reason's capability to reach fundamental religious truths.

The Discovery of an Early Bearing-Dial

1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl V. Sølver
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
North Western

It has hitherto been generally presumed that the division of the horizon into thirty-two points was a development of the late medieval period. Such a division, it has been said, was impossible in the pre-compass era. ‘It is questionable whether even so many as sixteen directions could have been picked out and followed at sea so long as Sun and star, however intimately known, were the only guides’, one eminent authority has declared; ‘Even the sailors in the north-western waters had only four names until a comparatively late date.’ Chaucer's reference in his Treatise on the Astrolabe to the thirty-two ‘partiez’ of the ‘orisonte’ has for long been quoted as the earliest evidence on the subject. The Konungs Skuggsjà, a thirteenth-century Norwegian work, however, refers to the Sun revolving through eight œttir; and the fourteenthcentury Icelandic Rímbegla talks of sixteen points or directions. An important discovery by the distinguished Danish archaeologist, Dr. C. L. Vebæk, in the summer of 1951, brings a new light to the whole problem and makes the earlier held view scarcely tenable. Vebæk was then working on the site of the Benedictine nunnery (mentioned by Îvar Bárdarson in the mid-fourteenth century) which stands on the site of a still older Norse homestead on the Siglufjörd, in southern Greenland. Buried in a heap of rubbish under the floor in one of the living-rooms, together with a number of broken tools of wood and iron (some of them with the owner's name inscribed on them in runes) was a remarkable fragment of carved oak which evidently once formed part of a bearingdial. This was a damaged oaken disk which, according to the archaeologists, dates back to about the year 1200.

scholarly journals Furnishing Piety: Beds in High Medieval Jewish Domestic Devotion

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Economic Importance ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Southern Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Complicated Nature

In recent years, pre-modern beds have generated extensive scholarly interest. Their social, religious, and economic importance has been rightfully highlighted in the study of domestic piety. Yet, concern has primarily focused on beds in late medieval English homes. This essay uses Hebrew texts from thirteenth-century Southern Germany, primarily Sefer Hasidim, to further this analysis of the role of the bed in shaping medieval domestic devotion. Jewish notions about the social, moral, and sexual significance of the bed reflect those identified in late medieval Christian culture. These ideas inspired numerous rituals practiced in Jewish homes. Yet, the bed and the remnants of sex assumed to be found in it also frustrated Jewish attempts to perform domestic devotion. These findings highlight the complicated nature of the home and how medieval people had to navigate both its opportunities and challenges in order to foster a rich culture of domestic devotion.

scholarly journals Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kathryn Webb
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Woman ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Many ◽  
Canonical Texts

This thesis examines responses to Christ’s gendered flesh that are located not in canonical literary texts or traditional saints’ lives, but in the sermons, visions and confessions of devout and orthodox men and women, whose orthodoxy, upon closer examination, is nevertheless decidedly unorthodox. In it, using a series of test cases, I argue that closer scrutiny of these non-canonical texts thus offers a more nuanced understanding of late-medieval notions of interplay between gender, sexuality and the divine than has been considered within previous scholarship. Beginning with the thirteenth-century Liber Specialis of Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), I demonstrate that, although remaining within the bounds of orthodox scripture and exegesis, the Saxon author nevertheless presents her readers with a Christ whose identity as saviour is predicated on his elevation of the female and the fleshly, and whose symbiotic, fluid relationship with Mechthild implicates her as co-redeemer through a divine, glorious, joyful, and uniquely feminine fecundity. I follow this with a detailed close analysis of the early fourteenth-century transcript of a young woman’s heresy trial in southern France, in which she confesses to equating Christ’s body with the ‘filth’ of the afterbirth, a concept so awful to her that she had been unable to believe in God or the transubstantiation. As I argue, however, Auda Fabri, experiences a species of revelation not unlike other orthodox female mystics, but, lacking their communities of discourse, must remain in a state of abjection from which capitulation to androcentric authority alone can save her. My third case-study is a sermon by the fourteenth-century English priest, John Mirk, in which Christ condemns an unconfessed merchant to Hell through the clotted blood from his feminised side-wound, which he casts at the dying man. I argue that, in attempting to uphold orthodox belief and practices, Mirk reveals a profound anxiety regarding late-medieval beliefs regarding the body and feminised flesh of Christ, whose appearance Mirk eventually demonises. Finally, to initiate my set of conclusions, I focus briefly on a largely unknown thirteenth-century Hebrew text, in which a Jewish woman in Sicily seems to give birth to a messianic figure from her body, which drips honey and oil. The woman’s ecstasy, resonant of the experiences of Christian women mystics like Mechthild, suggests some sort of commonality between the Sicilian Jewish and Christian female communities in pre-plague Europe. Ultimately, then, this thesis argues for – and contributes to – the need for far wider recognition of the importance of non-canonical and more generically varied source material and its closer scrutiny to gain better understanding of the deeply gendered complexities attached to the many labile beliefs concerning Christ’s flesh and blood during the Middle Ages.

Envisioning an Order

The Lay Saint ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 242-282
Author(s):  
Mary Harvey Doyno
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Gender And Power ◽  
Religious Ideals ◽  
The Church

This chapter offers a new explanation for why and how the contemporary lay civic saint seemingly disappeared over the fourteenth century. Instead of seeing mendicant spirituality as inherently oriented toward “mystical and paramystical phenomena,” and thus as pushing lay sanctity in that direction, it argues that the stress placed on medieval gender and power norms by women's participation in the lay penitential movement as well as the cults they earned for their efforts ultimately led to the end of the contemporary lay civic saint. From the second half of the thirteenth century, hagiographers—who were increasingly mendicant friars—responded to the female lay penitents garnering saintly reputations by advocating for an ideal lay life in which visions trumped a commitment to civic issues and charitable works. This new conception of an ideal lay life was not simply an indication of the spiritual point of view of the mendicant hagiographers, but rather a means the church had adopted to solve the longstanding problem of the female lay penitent. At the heart of this chapter's argument then is the contention that gender played a crucial role in the development of new lay religious ideals in the late medieval Italian communes.

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