scholarly journals Saint Louis and the Jochids

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 662-674
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Uzelac ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Saint Louis ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Latin Empire ◽  
Louis Ix

Research objectives: To provide an analysis of the relations between the Jochids and the French monarch, Louis IX. Particular attention is dedicated to the channels used by the Tatars to obtain information about the political conditions in Western Europe. Research materials: Contemporary Western sources including the report of the Franciscan traveler, William of Rubruck, and German chronicles in which Berke’s embassy to the French king in 1260 has been recorded. Results and novelty of the study: The Tatar view of Medieval Europe is an insufficiently researched topic. In the decades that followed the Mongol invasion of Central Europe in 1241–1242, the accounts of Western travelers and chroniclers remain the sole material from which glimpses of the Jochid perspective of the Western world may be discerned. Nonetheless, fragmentary sources at our disposal reveal that the Jochids used Western travelers and envoys to learn more about the Christendom. In this way, the image of Louis IX as the leader of the Christian world was firmly entrenched among the Jochids by the early second half of the thirteenth century. It is attested by Berke’s mission sent to Paris in 1260, and also by testimony of William of Rubruck, recorded several years earlier. According to the Flemish Franciscan author, Batu’s son Sartak, who regarded Louis IX to be “the chief ruler among the Franks”, had heard about the French king from an earlier envoy from Constantinople, Baldwin of Hainaut. The report of Rubruck and other sources at our disposal indicate the importance of the rather neglected Jochid relations with the Latin empire of Constantinople as a channel through which the Tatars gathered valuable reports about the political conditions in the West.

Ritual Brotherhood in Western Medieval Europe

Traditio ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 357-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Gerald Of Wales ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
The Difference

Concentrating as he did on the office of adelphopoiesis preserved in Eastern Christian liturgical sources, John Boswell gave short shrift to the West. Although he believed that the ritual was known and practiced there, the only documentary trace of any similar ceremony he discussed was an account that Gerald of Wales included toward the end of the twelfth century in his Topographica Hibernica. Boswell did present a fifteenth-century French pact of brotherhood in translation in an appendix, but he did not consider its ceremonial significance in his text. Nor did he believe it pertinent to his topic, labeling it as he did, “an agreement of ‘brotherhood',” and terming it “[a] treaty of political union using fraternal language.” I shall discuss Gerald's account and this compact later, in the course of analyzing a variety of evidence regarding ritual brotherhood in Western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I shall attempt to show that ties of brotherhood contracted formally and ritually between two individuals were more common in the West than Boswell believed. I shall argue that bonds of ritual brotherhood similar to those solemnized in the office of adelphopoiesis existed in many parts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, in areas far removed from the regions of Italy subject to Byzantine influence, where euchologies containing the Eastern ceremony were preserved.’ In dealing with the Western evidence I shall be particularly concerned with its nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Eastern sources. For the East, the most abundant documentation is liturgical, and traces of such relationships in other sources are rare — although (as Claudia Rapp shows in this symposium) not as sparse as has sometimes been thought. For the West the situation is precisely the reverse.’ The Western cases of individuals linked by ritual fraternal ties that Du Cange presented far outnumber the Eastern instances he cited, and additional Western examples have come to light since his time. However, as regards the ceremonial by which the ties were forged in the West, there is no strictly liturgical evidence. Western liturgical books contain no special prayers and offices for making brothers. Narrative and documentary sources cast fitful light on the nature of the ceremony that accompanied the unions, but they do not suggest that any uniform ritual ever existed. Why this was so is a matter for speculation, but I believe that the absence of fraternal ceremonial from the liturgy is closely related to another distinctive aspect of the institution in the West: the lack of prohibitions, ecclesiastical and secular, against the bond. I shall consider this issue after examining the various motives that seem to have underlain the Western fraternal alliances, and also the outcomes of the unions. In the end I shall propose that whatever the differences in documentation, and despite the difference in the ritual practices, striking formal and functional likenesses existed between the Eastern and Western institutions of ritual brotherhood linking two participants: in the purposes they served, the means by which they were contracted, and the gap that often existed between ideal and reality. In a final section I shall discuss the problems associated with attempting to establish whether or not — or when and how often — Western (or Eastern) rituals of brotherhood formalized relationships that involved or were expected to involve sexual intercourse between the participants.

YURIY SHEVELOV ABOUT HIS UKRAINIAN CHOICE OF AND ABOUT THE ATTITUDE TO “STRANGERS” IN THE MEMOIRS “I, ME, AND MYSELF (AND AROUND)”.

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-185
Author(s):  
Nadiia Koloshuk
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Identification ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Reflections of the outstanding scholar-Slavicist Yuriy Shevelov about his paradoxical experience of ethnic- identification, on the background of this problem as a general human and fundamental one, have a lot of weight. The escape of a young Ukrainian scientist from occupied Kharkiv to the West was driven by conscious aspirations to self-fulfillment and freedom. The path from Ukraine to Europe, and later to America, saved him from war and physical destruction, which threatened not only him but also a significant part of his people. Thinking of this path as salvation, he soberly and quite tolerably showed the environment of the Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals. He was a close acquaintance with them in pre- war and occupied Kharkiv and Lviv, in the German DP camps for Ukrainian refugees, in the research centers of Western Europe, and later in the United States. Openness and sincerity, as well as the scale of experience and depiction, the depth and self-criticism of comprehension of his own experience, make the book of Yu. Shevelov particularly valuable in the Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century. Yu. Shevelov rightly considered the reason for a special hatred on the part of representatives of the “Russian world” (in particular, in the face of the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson and Ukrainian traitor Ivan Bilodid) their desire to destroy in his person a representative of an independent Ukrainian culture, a qualified researcher of its history and language, capable of advancing and advocating scientific ideas, those contradicted their Russification desires, which formed in the minds of the representatives of the scientific community of the western world non-penetrating barriers to the penetration of the voice of the stateless Ukrainian ethnic group. He called a complete defeat the result of his confrontation with the “Russian world” in the western scientific world. However, based on the fact that his labor is now in demand, and those who want to affirm the “Russian world” in the West and in Ukraine were already diminished, we can assert: his efforts have not gone in vain. Identification is that complex of ideas, which is made up in human heads, and here the truth goes up over the lie.

scholarly journals Państwo polsko-litewskie europejskim mocarstwem. Uwarunkowania ustrojowo-społeczne

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 144-161
Author(s):  
Jerzy Juchnowski ◽  
Agnieszka Pieróg
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Political System ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Peripheral Region ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Bargaining ◽  
Strong Position

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a European power:  The system and social factors Central and Eastern Europe is viewed by the West as a peripheral region which is the object of political bargaining among different powerful countries. However, the Poland of the Jagiellonian era deserves the name of a regional power. The Polish-Lithuanian Federation constituted the basis for the system which was republican and monarchical at the same time and which was unusual in Western Europe. From the 14th to the 16th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was working towards its strong position in the region. In relations with the Vatican, Poland maintained its extensive autonomy. It was the 17th century that brought the regress which resulted from the evolution of the political system in the direction of noblemen’s oligarchy.

scholarly journals Georgia Beyond “Radical Europeanness”: Undiscovered Directions of Foreign Policy

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
A. Т. Sikharulidze
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
Economic Cooperation ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Relations

Georgia’s turn to the West signifi cantly aff ected its geopolitical and foreign policies. The author shares the view expressed by Georgian scholars that the country’s continued commitment to the Western vector is a direct consequence of ideas expressed by political elites (constructivist theory) and their self-identifi cation as “European,” coupled with Western-style liberal democracy as a social order preference (liberal theory). Georgia’s political elites are driven by the concept of “Europeanness” and thus focus primarily on the state’s aspirations to be integrated into the “Western world,” which is pushing the state towards European and North-Atlantic integration. Georgian elites believe that institutional reunifi cation with “European family” under the NATO defence shield will not only deter Moscow but will fi nally put an end to Moscow’s attempts to bring the post-soviet state under its control. Moreover, due to the tensions between the generalized West and Russian Federation, the Kremlin’s aspirations to stop what it perceives as a geopolitical expansion of the West to the east, Georgia’s approach has become even more radical. The paper argues that the concept of “Europeanness” has been transformed into “radical Europeanness,” meaning that the political elites maintain economic cooperation with non-Western countries, but there is no proactive foreign policy beyond that, even with its most important strategic partners, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. In spite Tbilisi enjoys trade relations with these countries, the existing level of political and military cooperation between them conceals signifi cant bilateral challenges. Additionally, this approach is perfectly refl ected in Georgia’s relations with China, when the country’s political elites pushed for free trade, without attention to the political and geopolitical aspects of economic cooperation. Thus, Georgia – China relations are also the part of research interest in this paper, as the free trade regime between the two countries is subject to serious scrutiny after the Donald Trump administration made it clear that Washington would not welcome Chinese economic and geopolitical expansion in Georgia.

3. The Chosen People

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Beller
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Radical Transformation

In the century before antisemitism emerged as a powerful political movement in the early 1880s, European Jewry had been through a radical transformation. ‘The Chosen People’ looks at developments around that time to help explain the path antisemitism took. Modernization of the European economy, society, and political systems from the mid-17th century onwards added to radical changes in thought and attitudes towards Jews. They needed to be integrated into society, and how to do this became known as the ‘Jewish Question’. Attempts to solve the ‘Jewish Question’ were more successful in Western Europe than in Russia and Central Europe. But Jewish difference persisted, partially explaining the political force of antisemitism.

Theories of Language

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fellerer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Implications

This chapter identifies key notions about the nature and workings of language and their wider political implications in Europe from around 1789 to the first decades of the nineteenth century. There are at least three formations, aesthetic and philosophical, linguistic, and political. Even though treated under separate headings for ease of exposition, they are meant to meet in this introduction in response to more granular surveys. The political dimension in particular tends to be left to historians or to philologists who deal with that part of the continent where it first gained real prominence: East and East Central Europe. Thus, after the first two sections on aspects of philosophy and early linguistics, where the focus is on Germany with France and England, the third section on language and nation moves eastwards to the Slavonic-speaking lands, to finally return back, albeit very briefly, to the West. The main purpose of this survey to provide introduction and guidance.

Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2018, xxiii, 636 pp., 4 maps.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 381-382
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
The West ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The North ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Nomadic People ◽  
Military Structure

Even though this is not a new publication, Pohl’s study on the Avars deserves particular attention, now in its first English translation. While not identified on the cover page, Pohl’s book was superbly translated into English by Will Sayers, who is briefly mentioned in the preface. Pohl had published his book originally in German in 1988, and it appeared in its third edition in 2015. Only in the last few decades has our awareness and understanding of the Avars grown and changed, particularly because intensive archaeological evidence has vastly changed our concept of that Steppe people who lived in the Carpathian Basin long before the Magyars settled there. Consequently, Pohl has made great efforts to reflect on the new insights and rewrote the respective sections of this book. In short, although here we hold in our hands ‘only’ the English translation of the third edition, The Avars represents, after all, a new approach and a thorough update of the current research on that people that had significant influence on the Byzantines, the Germanic peoples to the west and southwest, and to the north and east. They were the first to introduce into Europe the stirrup, but they left practically no written sources. They were Nomadic people, and yet not simply barbarians, as later chroniclers liked to call them. Hence, Pohl’s study on this early medieval people sheds important light on the political and military structure of early medieval Europe in an area where the Byzantine sphere of interest ended and where the Carolingians endeavored to place their stakes.

The Creation of Sustainable Orientalism in Cinema

2021 ◽  
pp. 574-590
Author(s):  
Can Diker ◽  
Esma Koç
Keyword(s):  
Western World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
The West ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Relationship

The myth of modern culture's superiority to other cultures is instilled as a norm to the masses through the media. The myth of the cultural superiority of the West not only formed with the economic possibilities of the West but was also supported by the non-Western world by self-orientalism, thus becoming sustainable. While themes such as modernity, development, and technological superiority are watched within the scope of Hollywood films, several platforms have been created for non-US countries to watch alternative films. Although films known as European and World Cinema have the chance to show themselves at film festivals rather than film theatres, non-Western directors face a cultural challenge in these festivals due to the sociocultural structure of Western-based film festivals. In this study, by examining how non-Western directors are directed towards self-orientalism indirectly through festivals and funds, the relationship between the creation of sustainable orientalism in cinema and the political economy of the film industry will be revealed.

Shifting the Iron Curtain of Kantian Peace : NATO Expansion and the Modern Magyars

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Oas
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Western World ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The West ◽  
Member States ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Military Alliance ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Military Security ◽  
Market Capitalism

As the head of Latvia’s minute military, Colonel Raimanos Graube, notes, the ascension of the Latvian state into NATO is part of a much larger process than military security alone: “This means we are moving to our goal, which is to be a firm and permanent part of the West.” Though such a viewpoint is common among the populaces of ascending member states, it helps raise numerous questions as to several inherent contradictions in the reasoning behind NATO expansion. To begin with, why are numerous states that just over ten years ago regained their sovereign independence from the Soviet empire so suddenly willing to join a new, hegemonic-backed Western empire? Furthermore, what are the true reasons that underlie NATO members’ interest in expanding their military alliance into nation-states with military forces comprised of only 5,500 members (e.g., Latvia)? There is more at play in NATO expansion than simple geopolitical security as defined by the international relations (IR) field. Indeed, it will be argued that above and beyond security for central Europe, contemporary NATO expansion is a moment in the cycle of the U.S. rise to world power. Moreover, it will be illustrated that ascension of central and Eastern European states into NATO may represent the final surrender of the socialist modernity as global competitor to the West. In this historical battlefield between Eastern and Western modernities, the socialist modernity that dominated during much of the region’s twentieth-century history is now reviled by these civil societies and viewed as the antithesis of modernity. In the meantime, the Western lifestyle of mass consumption and suburbanism, as well as other dominant core processes from Western Europe in general, raised the flag of market capitalism and democratic institutions in these states and filled the power vacuum just as quickly as the Soviet red stars came down. In this way, NATO is becoming increasingly synonymous with a “zone of peace” wherein all members ascribe to democracy, free trade, and interdependent relations. By joining NATO, new member states are making a political effort to shed the yoke of the failed Soviet modernity and join the hegemonic-led “Western” world (i.e., become “part of Europe”).

The roots and manifestations of conflicts in Medieval Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (03) ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Sergey Rybakov
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Ethical Problems ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Mental Space ◽  
Religious Factors ◽  
Western European

The article examines the nature of conflicts in medieval Western Europe. It is noted that the roots of Western European conflicts go back to the time of the Great migration of peoples. Ethno-cultural and Church-religious factors that directly or indirectly influenced the course and nature of conflicts are considered. Projects of secular and ecclesiastical authorities aimed at ousting conflicts from the political and mental space of Western Europe are presented; legal, ethno-cultural, moral and ethical problems that did not allow achieving success in the practical implementation of these projects are identified.

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