scholarly journals Prisoners of War in Early Medieval Bulgaria (Preliminary Remarks)

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 73-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanko M. Hristov

The work is concentrated on the problem of war prisoners in the chronological period of the existance of the so-called First Bulgarian state. The analysis is based predominantly on various Byzantine and selected Latin and Bulgarian sources from the epoch. With some exceptions, mostly for 707/708, 754/755, 763/764 and 774, the notices are concentrated around the events of 811–815/816, 837/838; 894–896, 917–30s and for a moment or two from the period of 971–1018. In his preliminary remarks the author comes to the conclusion that in the Early Middle Ages prisoners of war (in the broadest medieval sense) were an integral part of the efforts to achieve the political objectives of the Bulgarian rulers. Response mechanisms against prisoners of war were highly dependent on the course of the conflict and their attitude towards their own warriors and subjects caught up in enemy hands. They included a wide range of solutions, which could be grouped into three main areas: the first one refers to killing (and/or mutilation) of war prisoners; the second main line was connected with preserving the lives of the captives; the third group of measures was due to the fact that an immediate effect is not always haunted.

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Predrag Komatina

The paper analyzes the information concerning the border between the Serbs and the Bulgarians in the 9th and the 10th centuries found in the work De administrando imperio by the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. It is made clear that there were no clearly established borderlines between the political entities in the Early Middle Ages, and that those political entities during that period functioned not on the basis of territorialy organized states, but of ethnic communities, whose authority rested upon the people, not the territory. The functioning of the early medieval Bulgarian Khanate is one of the best examples for that. Therefore, it is necessary that the information on the Serbian-Bulgarian border in the Porphyrogenitus? work be analyzed in a new and different light.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-263
Author(s):  
Ya. V. Volodarets-Urbanovіch

The pendant from Luka-Kavetchyna, dwelling 25 (fig. 2: 1; 3) is the earliest find from the Slavs sites da­ting to the second quarter — the end of the 5th century. The adornment was made of a shell of the genus Murex and is the «legacy» from the Cherniakhіv culture. In the area of that culture are known the pendants made of shells of this genus (type 2 by O. Hopkalo). The pendants from shells appear in use of the Slavs since the second half of the 6th century. Their varieties were used until the first half of the 8th century, although the assemblages and finds with them are few (table 1; fig. 1; 14). In the Slavic assemblages the shells of mollusks of the following species were occurred: Cypraea moneta, C. pantherina, C. tigris, C. arabica. The items from Murex shells are also known. The height of Cypraea moneta is a little more than 2 cm. Other species of shells are larger reaching the height ca. 7—8 cm. The assemblages of the Martinіvka circle include Khatski (fig. 4: A) and Khittsі ones. The grave from Mokhnach belongs to the same antiquities (fig. 2: 2; 5—7). The jewellery by Martynivka circle are dated back to the second half of the 6th century, and the hoards were hidden in the middle — the third quarter of the 7th century. The Pastyrsky circle hoards include the assemblages from Zaitsevo (fig. 4: B) and Kharіvka (fig. 8—10). The hoards by Pastyrsky circle were hidden in the first half of 8th century. The appearance of the pendants from shells is related to the general trend of the spread of Cypraea moneta in Eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages. They are known in the Caucasus, Crimea, the Seversky Donets basin (fig. 11). Cypraea moneta shells were used as pendants in necklaces as evidenced by finds from the Luchiste burial ground from Crimea. The use of other types of shells remains unclear. However, they were probably parts of necklaces or amulets.


Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9 (107)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Maya Petrova

The paper deals the construction of Aachen as a symbol of the power of Charlemagne (742/4 — 814). It discusses the poetic Carolingian texts, which played an important role in the formation of the medieval ideology of the unity of the City and the power of its creator. It is shown that the most striking example of the statement of such a worldview is the third book (v. 1—536) of the anonymous epic poem (not fully preserved), known in the early Middle Ages under the title “Charlemagne and Pope Leo” (Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa). It is noted that this text, containing a description of the construction of the Second Rome — Aachen, influenced the subsequent Carolingian poetic tradition, serving as a turning point in the development of narrative poetry during the reign of Charlemagne.


2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Newfield

Two independent molecular clock analyses (mcas) reveal that measles (mv) diverged from rinderpest (rpv) c. 1000 c.e. This evidence, when conjoined with written accounts of non-Justinianic plagues in 569–570 and 986–988 and zoo-archaeological discoveries regarding early medieval mass bovine mortalities, suggests that a now-extinct morbillivirus, ancestral to mv and rpv, broke out episodically in the early Middle Ages, causing large mortalities in both species. Tentative diagnoses of an mv–rpv ancestor help to untangle early medieval accounts of human–bovine disease and facilitate an assessment of the consequences of the 569–570 and 986–988 plagues.


2022 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-99
Author(s):  
N. P. Matveeva ◽  
E. A. Tretyakov ◽  
A. S. Zelenkov

We describe 15 burials at the Vodennikovo-1 group of mounds in the northern Kurgan Region, on the Middle Iset River, relevant to migration processes during the Early Middle Ages. On the basis of numerous parallels from contemporaneous sites in the Urals and Western Siberia, the cemetery is dated to the late 7th and 8th centuries. Most of single and collective burials are inhumations in rectangular pits with a northwestern orientation, with vessels, decorated by carved or pricked designs, placed near the heads. These features, typical of the Early Medieval Bakalskaya culture of the Tobol and Ishim basins, are also observed at the Pereyma and Ust-Suerskoye-1 cemeteries in the same area. However, there are innovations such as inlet burials, those in blocks of solid wood and plank coffi ns, western orientation of the deceased, and placing vessels next to the burial pits. These features attest to a different tradition, evidenced by cemeteries of the Potchevash culture in the Tobol and Ishim basins (Okunevo III, Likhacheva, and Vikulovskoye). Also, Potchevash and Bakalskaya vessels co-occur at Vodennikovo-1, and some of them (jugs with comb and grooved designs) are typologically syncretic. To date, this is the westernmost cemetery of the Potchevash culture, suggestive of a migration of part of the southern taiga population from the Ishim and Tobol area to the Urals.


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