scholarly journals English travelers in early modern Cyprus: Piety, commerce and anti-Ottoman sentiment

Sederi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 93-115
Author(s):  
José Ruiz Mas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Subsequent Risk ◽  
Travel Accounts

English travelers in Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus saw the island as the last obligatory stop on their maritime pilgrimage route to the Holy Land. After the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (1571) the island was visited almost exclusively by English merchants on the lookout for the construction of factories on Eastern Mediterranean shores. They were attracted by Cyprus’s famed fertility and by the abundance of much-valued products to trade with. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English traders were nevertheless issued with warnings by English travel accounts. These dealt with the danger of over-trusting the paradise-like prospects of the island and remaining there for good, with the subsequent risk of “turning Turk.” In order to discourage English travelers and residents from becoming renegades in Cyprus, travel accounts included abundant morbid information on the brutal repression applied by the Great Turk upon Cypriot cities in the Wars of Cyprus and upon other anti-Ottoman Christian insurrections.

scholarly journals The Dido Story in Accounts of Early Modern European Imperialism—An Anthology

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-150
Author(s):  
Andrew Newman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Travel Accounts

This anthology of excerpts from histories and travel accounts composed during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries features representations of indigenous oral traditions about the founding of European colonies in Sri Lanka, Melaka, Gujarat, Cambodia, Manila, Jakarta, Taiwan, New York, and the Cape of Good Hope. According to these accounts, the colonists first requested as much land as the hide of an ox could cover, and then cut that hide into strips and claimed all the land they could encircle. The “oxhide measure” is a widely-attested folkloric motif. The introduction, however, questions assumptions about the unreliability of oral traditions and looks to history instead of folklore for an explanation for the colonial parallels. It proposes that Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch colonists performed the “hide trick” in emulation of the classical story of the Phoenician Queen Dido’s founding of Carthage.

The Jews in the Land of Israel and the Spread of Sabbatheanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-179
Author(s):  
Adam Teller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Religious System ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
Two Systems ◽  
Land Of Israel

This chapter explains that alongside the pidyon shevuyim network, there existed another economic and religious system covering the entire Jewish world that was focused on the eastern Mediterranean. This was the philanthropic network dedicated to supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Though its goals were different, it overlapped with the pidyon shevuyim network: most communities collected money for both causes, sometimes even combining them into a single fund. The two systems thus acted in parallel, always in tension, and sometimes even in competition with each other. To understand this phenomenon and its broad significance for the Jewish world in both philanthropic and religious terms, the chapter looks at the issue of raising money for the Jews in the early modern Land of Israel. It also considers the spread of Sabbatheanism.

The Crusades in North Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt King
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Regional Control ◽  
Northwest Africa ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Christian Leaders

Although Jerusalem was the ultimate target of many of the largest crusading expeditions during the medieval period, North Africa nonetheless played a crucial role in this movement. Following the establishment of the Crusader states at the end of the 11th century, Latin Christians clashed with the Fatimids of Egypt for regional control of the Levant and Nile River delta. This conflict gave way in the 13th century to the “Egyptian strategy,” through which crusaders thought the most likely way to retake Jerusalem was by attacking the rich and fertile lands of the Nile. The crusades of King Louis IX, which were directed at Egypt and Tunis, were motivated in part by the idea that seizing these lands in North Africa would ultimately lead to the reconquest of the Holy Land. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, crusading fervor reached the shores of North Africa via the Reconquista. Beginning in the 13th century and extending through the early modern period, Christian leaders in Iberia viewed campaigns in northwest Africa as an extension of their earlier repulsion of Muslims from the peninsula. These crusades, which were theorized as dynastic enterprises that served to both spread Christianity and expand the borders of empires, persisted into the 16th century as the papacy marshaled the assistance of European Christian powers against the Ottomans. The response of Muslim dynasties in North Africa to these expeditions was never uniform, as some preferred diplomacy with the aggressing Franks and others conflict. However, there gradually developed in the Islamic world the idea that a persistent jihad against Mediterranean-wide Frankish aggression was an appropriate response. The memory of medieval crusades was a particularly potent one in France, where Louis IX’s expeditions were evoked during France’s conquest of Algeria in the 19th century.

Journeying to an Antique Christian Past

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-188
Author(s):  
Megan C. Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
Being There ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
Transformative Impact ◽  
The Impact

Pilgrimage treatises fulfilled many functions—as sacred histories, polemics, and aids to contemplation—but they were first and foremost modes of spiritual journeying designed to take devout Christians on a virtual visitation of the Holy Places. Through their vivid descriptions of the journey of the pilgrim to Jerusalem, early modern Catholic narratives purposefully concretized the Holy Land as the place where Christ lived and evoked the transformative impact for the pilgrim of being there. Just as importantly, these narratives embedded the Catholic tradition, in the form of Catholic altars, ornamentation, and rituals, in the very fabric of the Holy Places. These twin strategies, concretization and embedding, illuminate the impact of Reformation debate over the nature and locus of Christian authority upon members of the traditional Church. They show that many Catholics staked a claim to the legitimacy of the traditional Church in the place where Christ first plied his ministry.

The “Criminal Tribe” in India before the British

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Piliavsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Broad Consensus ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Travel Accounts

AbstractThis paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonialusesof the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

scholarly journals Catholicism Decentralized: Local Religion in the Early Modern Periphery

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Beat Kümin ◽  
Felicita Tramontana
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Organizational Factors ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Early Modern Catholicism ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Close Supervision ◽  
Central Switzerland ◽  
Strong Position

AbstractExpanding upon recent work on the heterogeneity of Catholicism and the challenges facing Tridentine reformers, this article examines local religion in two “extreme” settings: the village republic of Gersau in Central Switzerland and the missionary territory of the Custody of the Holy Land. Following conceptual remarks, the authors sketch the distinct secular contexts as well the phased evolution of localized networks for the administration of the cure of souls, the latter starting in the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, respectively. A consistently comparative approach reveals notable similarities—in terms of expanding spiritual provision and better record keeping—alongside substantial differences—especially between the clearly demarcated territorial parishes in the Alps and a more punctual system of sacrament centers in Palestine. At Gersau, where diocesan structures were weak, the church operated under the close supervision of a commune with extensive powers stretching to the rights of advowson and benefice administration. Around Jerusalem, the Franciscans—whose custos acted as the vicar apostolic—used material incentives to win over converts from other Christian denominations. Building on recent reassessments of the post-Tridentine Church, both examples thus underline the strong position of the laity in the confessional age and the need to acknowledge local sociopolitical as well as organizational factors in the formation of early modern Catholicism.

Interaction and boundary work: Western merchant colonies in the Levant and the Eastern Churches, 1650–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Cornel Zwierlein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Close Distance

European merchants in their factories (‘nations’) in the Eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman rule were not really colonizers; in early modern times, they were somehow privileged guests. However, they deserve an important part in a long-term history of types of ‘close distance’ and forms of segregational coexistence. Different from recent studies that stress a strong overall interaction, understanding, sharing, and exchange between Europeans and Ottoman subjects, it is proposed to distinguish three levels: (1) The daily commercial interaction of Western Europeans with their Ottoman counterparts; (2) the stronger involvement in some politico-religious struggles (the 1724 schism in the patriarchate of Antioch serves as example): also here, one has still to distinguish between real interest in the religious cause and other activities as credit lending; (3) the care for and maintenance by the Europeans of their own Western national culture abroad: these cultural activities served more to (eventually unconsciously) perform ‘boundary work’ and to close up the ‘nation’. These early modern forms of close distance and segregation were only isomorphic but not homologous with later highly conscious colonial and modern imperial forms of contact between ‘West’ and ‘East’ as in the nineteenth-century European settlements in Istanbul.

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