SAFAVIDS BEFORE EMPIRE: TWO 15TH-CENTURY ARMENIAN PERSPECTIVES

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Intermediate Step ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Sedentary Population ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sufi Order

AbstractArmenian sources from the 15th century provide distinctive viewpoints on the history of the Safaviyyih Sufi order before the foundation of the Safavid Empire. The history of T‘ovma of Metsop‘ suggests an earlier intermediate step in the militarization of the order, which scholars have typically viewed as an unprecedented development beginning after 1447, and ascribes to the Safavi shaykh the idea of taxing non-Muslims to encourage conversion to Islam. A second Armenian text, a previously unknown colophon, describes Haydar's attack on Shirvan in 1488 and the suffering of the Muslim and Christian sedentary population, as well as an episode of interreligious mockery. It is probably the earliest extant source to identify the Qizilbash by their distinctive red hats. Together, these sources suggest ways in which the Safaviyyih order's development was conditioned by the multireligious environment. They are examples of the value of non-Muslim sources even for late medieval Islamic history.

The History of Islam in Mauritania

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Pettigrew
Keyword(s):  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Senegal River ◽  
External Threats ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

The study of the long-term history of what has been known since 1960 as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania is possible largely because of inhabitants’ early embrace of Islam in the 8th century. While research on the early pre-Islamic history of the region is limited by the availability of sources to primarily the archaeological, the arrival of Islam through trade networks crossing the Sahara from North Africa meant that Arab merchants and explorers supplied and produced knowledge about the region’s inhabitants, polities, and natural resources that was then written down in Arabic by Muslim chroniclers and historians. Early Muslims were largely Khajirite and Ibadi but the 11th-century Almoravid reformist and educational movement ensured that the region’s Muslims would predominantly follow Sunni Islam as defined by the Maliki school of law and ʿAshari theology. By the time the Almohad empire succeeded the Almoravid in the 12th century, important centers of Islamic scholarship were emerging in major trading towns in the Sahara and along the Senegal River. The expansion of Sufi thought and practice, the arrival of the Arabic-speaking Banu Hassan, and the subsequent development of political entities known as emirates occurred in ensuing centuries and played a part in the genesis of a social structure that valorized the Arabic language, the study of Islam, and claims of descent from the Prophet Muhammad. The arrival of European merchants in the 15th century and the subsequent colonization of the region by the French led to rapid changes in the economic and cultural bases of political authority and social hierarchy, with colonial policy largely valorizing Sufi leaders as political interlocutors and community representatives. Independence from France in 1960 meant the establishment of an Islamic Republic whose laws are based on a mixed legal system of Maliki Islamic and French civil law. The basis of presidential rule is not religious in nature, though presidents have increasingly used a discourse of religion to legitimize their rule in the face of internal political opposition and external threats from extremist groups such as al-Qaʿeda.

Stabreimende Wortpaare in Deutsche Versnovellistik des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts

2021 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-97
Author(s):  
John M. Jeep
Keyword(s):  
Word Pair ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
History Of

Abstract The recently published compendium of 175 German verse tales from the 13th–15th century (Deutsche Versnovellistik des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts) includes never-before-published material in critical edition, so that a survey of the alliterating word-pairs within this arguably hard to define genre seems desirable. Some 380 pairs are collected and analysed within the context of each tale, with special attention paid to earlier transmission of the pairs or their innovative nature, respectively. Following a methodology that has been employed to cover all of Old and Early Middle High German and much of classical High German, the history of this durable rhetorical device is extended well into the late medieval era. Further surveys will help to fill in remaining gaps in coverage of the history of the alliterating word-pair in German.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Chatzopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Inertial Forces ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Polarity Item ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Diachronic Development

This study is an investigation of the expression of negation in the history of Greek, through quantitative data from representative texts from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, Late Medieval Greek), and qualitative data from Homeric Greek until Standard Modern. The contrast between two complementary negators, NEG1 and NEG2, is explained in terms of sensitivity of NEG2 μη‎ to nonveridicality: NEG2 is a polarity item in all stages of the Greek language, an item licensed by nonveridicality. The asymmetry in the diachronic development of the Greek negator system (the replacement of NEG1 and the preservation of NEG2) is explained with reference to the particulars of the uses of NEG2, specifically the inertial forces drawn by the nonnegative uses of NEG2, which being nonnegative did not experience the renewal pressures predicted by the Jespersen’s Cycle. These are its complementizer uses: (i) as a question particle, and (ii) in introducing verbs of fear complements. A viewpoint for Jespersen’s Cycle is proposed that abstracts away from the morphosyntactic and phonological particulars of the phenomenon and explicitly places its regularities in the semantics, accommodating not only for Greek, but for numerous other languages that deviate in different ways from the traditional description of Jespersen’s Cycle. The developments observed in the history of the Greek negator system agree with current generative theories of syntactic change, regarding the notions of up-the-tree movement.

At the Edge of Reformation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Linehan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

Rebels, Believers, Survivors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Powers ◽  
First Time ◽  
Modern Myth

This book of essays covers a wide range of topics in the history of Albania and Kosovo. Many of the essays illuminate connections between the Albanian lands and external powers and interests, whether political, military, diplomatic or religious. Such topics include the Habsburg invasion of Kosovo in 1689, the manoeuvrings of Britain and France towards the Albanian lands during the Napoleonic Wars, the British interest in those lands in the late nineteenth century, and the Balkan War of 1912. On the religious side, essays examine ‘crypto-Christianity’ in Kosovo during the Ottoman period, the stories of conversion to Islam revealed by Inquisition records, the first theological treatise written in Albanian (1685), and the work of the ‘Apostolic Delegate’ who reformed the Catholic Church in early twentieth-century Albania. Some essays bring to life ordinary individuals hitherto unknown to history: women hauled before the Inquisition, for example, or the author of the first Albanian autobiography. The longest essay, on Ali Pasha, tells for the first time the full story of the role he played in the international politics of the Napoleonic Wars. Some of these studies have been printed before (several in hard-to-find publications, and one only in Albanian), but the greater part of this book appears here for the first time. This is not only a contribution to Albanian and Balkan history it also engages with many broader issues, including religious conversion, methods of enslavement within the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of modern myth-making about national identity.

scholarly journals RADIOCARBON DATES FROM THE MONASTERY ON KOM H IN OLD DONGOLA (SUDAN) AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF MEDIEVAL NUBIAN POTTERY

Radiocarbon ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Dorota Dzierzbicka ◽  
Katarzyna Danys
Keyword(s):  
Historical Research ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACT The paper presents and discusses a series of radiocarbon (14C) dates from a medieval Nubian monastery found on Kom H of Old Dongola, the capital of the kingdom of Makuria located in modern-day Sudan. The monastery was founded in the 6th–7th century AD and although it probably ceased to function in the 14th century, the site remained occupied until the beginning of the 15th century. The investigated courtyard of the monastery was in use from the 11th to the 14th century, as indicated by the ceramics and 14C analysis results presented here. The dates under consideration are the first published series of 14C dates from this site, which is of crucial importance for historical research on medieval Nubian Christianity and monasticism. They permit to begin building an absolute chronological framework for research on the archaeological finds from the site and region. A group of finds in particular need of such a framework are ceramics, and the implications of the 14C dates for pottery assemblages found in the dated contexts are discussed. The conclusions summarize the significance of the datings for the history of the site.

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