scholarly journals Nicolaus von Redewitz – ein Diplomat und Informant des Deutschen Ordens am Hof von Sigismund von Luxemburg

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 109-137
Author(s):  
László Pósán

Nicolaus von Redewitz – the Teutonic Order’s diplomat and informant in the court of Sigismund of Luxembourg   At the end of 1422, Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor, allowed the Teutonic Order to have a permanent diplomatic representation in his court, in the person of Nicolaus von Redewitz. This was related to the fact that from the beginning of the 1420s, the Ottoman Empire posed an increasingly serious threat to the southern borders of Hungary again, and Sigismund wanted to win over the Order for the fight against the Turks. Arriving in the court of the king, von Redewitz kept the Grand Master of the order informed of Sigismund’s political plans, decisions, negotiations, military actions against the Turks, and all-important events. A recurring theme in his letters was the king’s urge that the Order take on the defence of the southern borders of the Hungarian Kingdom. In return, he first offered the Grand Master the Burzenland in Southern Transylvania, from where Andrew II, King of Hungary, expelled the Order in 1225, then the Banate of Severin by the lower Danube. Following long negotiations, at the end of July 1429, a few Teutonic Knights arrived in Hungary. These knights did not undertake the armed protection of the southern borders, only its organisation. Sigismund entrusted the management of twenty-one fortresses and military watch-posts to the Knights, who envisioned the reinforcement of the defence with the involvement of mercenaries. However, the Hungarian Treasury was unable to provide the expenses for this plan. When, at the end of the summer of 1432, the Turks launched an attack at the lower Danube, they managed to occupy three fortresses under the control of the Order. Recognising that the Order’s idea of the protection of the borders is impossible to finance, at the end of 1434, Sigismund agreed to the gradual return of the Teutonic Knights who had arrived in Hungary in 1429 to Prussia.

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAGNAR K. KINZELBACH

The secretarybird, the only species of the family Sagittariidae (Falconiformes), inhabits all of sub-Saharan Africa except the rain forests. Secretarybird, its vernacular name in many languages, may be derived from the Arabic “saqr at-tair”, “falcon of the hunt”, which found its way into French during the crusades. From the same period are two drawings of a “bistarda deserti” in a codex by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250). The original sketch obviously, together with other information on birds, came from the court of Sultan al-Kâmil (1180–1238) in Cairo. Careful examination led to an interpretation as Sagittarius serpentarius. Two archaeological sources and one nineteenth century observation strengthened the idea of a former occurrence of the secretarybird in the Egyptian Nile valley. André Thevet (1502–1590), a French cleric and reliable research traveller, described and depicted in 1558 a strange bird, named “Pa” in Persian language, from what he called Madagascar. The woodcut is identified as Sagittarius serpentarius. The text reveals East Africa as the real home of this bird, associated there among others with elephants. From there raises a connection to the tales of the fabulous roc, which feeds its offspring with elephants, ending up in the vernacular name of the extinct Madagascar ostrich as elephantbird.


Author(s):  
Henrik Wilberg

Émile Benveniste was a French linguist of Sephardic descent, born in 1902 in Aleppo in what was then the Ottoman Empire. A specialist in comparative Indo-European grammar and, in the interwar years, a student of Ferdinand de Saussure’s follower Antoine Meillet at the École pratique des hautes Études in Paris, he held the chair of linguistics at the Collège de France from 1937 to 1970.1 Having published widely since 1935, Benveniste came to prominence outside the field of linguistics in 1956, when he contributed a famous article on the function of language in Freud to the first issue of Jacques Lacan’s early journal, La psychanalyse.2 From 1960 onwards, at the height of structuralism’s influence, he founded and co-edited another journal, L’homme, alongside the anthropologist Claude LÉvi-Strauss and the geographer Pierre Gourou.


Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov

‘What do we really speak of when we speak of the modern ethno-national mindset and where shall we search for its roots?’ This is the central question of a book arguing that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching, and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements, and, after the empire’s demise, national monarchies. The book discusses the themes of public space/sphere, the Tanzimat reforms, millet, modernity, nationalism, governmentality, and the modern state, among others. It offers a new, thirteen-point model of modern belonging based on the concept of ruler visibility.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ethan White

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian deified his male lover, Antinous, after the latter drowned in the Nile. Antinous’ worship was revived in the late twentieth century, primarily by gay men and other queer-identified individuals, with Antinous himself being recast as “the Gay God.”


Author(s):  
Taner Akçam

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.


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