The Fifth Crusade and its Aftermath: Crusading in the Southeast of the Holy Roman Empire in the First Decades of the Thirteenth Century

Crusades ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 91-113
Author(s):  
Miha Kosi
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire

Birdsong and the Edges of the Empire

Stolen Song ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The South ◽  
Roman De La Rose ◽  
Roman De La Violette

This chapter studies Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la violette (ca. 1230). Just like Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose, the Violette emphasizes the border to the east of Capetian France (the border with the Empire) rather than the border to the south (with Occitania). This suggests a greater interest on the part of thirteenth-century francophone writers in the Battle of Bouvines than in the Albigensian Crusade. In the Violette, however, the Holy Roman Empire has not been conquered by the “soft power” of francophone artistic traditions. Instead, it is marked as a dangerous space—a valence conveyed in part through the territory's association with hunting birds, especially the eagle, in recognition of the most commonly deployed imperial symbol. The chapter then documents a critical blind spot in Violette criticism: the saturation of imperial symbolism and geography within the romance. It then turns to the text's quotation of troubadour song, which is also placed within an avian typology. If the Empire is characterized mainly by hunting birds, Occitan song is, by contrast, associated with songbirds. Unlike in Jean Renart's Rose, where many grands chants foregrounded birdsong thematically, here this association between human song and birdsong is unique to the Occitan insertions within the romance.

Keeping Up with the French

Stolen Song ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 81-114
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Roman De La Rose ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Jean Renart's Roman de la rose (early thirteenth century). It specifically assesses the way in which francophone lyric and other French artistic objects—the symbolic significance of which has previously been dismissed by critics—are circulated with a peculiar frenzy by the elite of the Holy Roman Empire in Rose. Renart implies that instead of taking an interest in the artistic traditions more native to the Empire—such as Minnesang (the German analog of troubadour and trouvère song)—the cultural elite of the Empire are infatuated with French cultural products. The chapter then looks at the processes through which Occitan song is assimilated into the broader francophone lyric landscape, one of which is linguistic Gallicization. This process has resulted in this text, as elsewhere in the French reception of the troubadours, in occasional moments of nonsensicality, and the chapter documents the various ways in which this nonsensicality is accounted for within the narrative. Finally, it considers the ramifications of this staging of French culture (including Gallicized Occitan) within the narrative.

scholarly journals Images of Cities on the Nomismata of the Principality of Epiros from the First Half of the Thirteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 301-309
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Denisov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Architectural Elements ◽  
The City

This paper has analysed the images of Arta and Thessalonike on eight types of billon nomismata minted in the Principality of Epirus in 1224–1248. These images were represented separately or included into the portraits of local rulers from the Doukai family: Theodore I (1215–1230), Manuel (1230–1237), John (1237–1244), and Michael II (1237–1267). There are two types of representation of the city on the coins. The first image followed the Byzantine iconographic tradition of the eleventh and twelfth century and appeared on the coins from 1224–1244. It comprises the scene showing the heavenly patron of the community (St. Demetrios) or archangel Michael giving a Doukas the model of Thessalonike. This scene underlined the religious legitimation of the ruler’s power over the local community and implied schematic presentation of the city as a model. To the second type occurring on the nomismata from 1237–1248 features the images of urban architectural elements (gates, walls, and towers) incorporated into the ruler’s portraits or shown separately on the reverse. These images also underlined the ruler’s relation with the local community; they are typical of more detailed execution of drawing of fortifications (blocks, embrasures, and flags). The second type images appeared on the coins under the influence from iconographic samples from the Holy Roman empire caused by the political alliance between the Doukai and Friedrich II Hohenstaufen (1212–1250). Using the representation of their power as the patrons of urban communities, the Doukai gained support for their policy from the local inhabitants and used it as a support for their power and struggle for the Byzantine heritage.

Jews, Regalian Rights, And The Constitution In Medieval France

AJS Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Chester Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The West ◽  
Medieval France ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Territorial Division

It is fashionable to imagine a great dichotomy between the feudal monarchies in the West and the brittle, particularistic entity of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. To Voltaire's mean-spirited gibe that the latter was neither holy, Roman, nor an Empire might be added that it was also not really German, since millions of Netherlanders, Italians, and Slavs, as well as Provencals and Savoyards, lived within its territorial limits. France and England, the stereotype goes, had achieved a precocious unity, at least in the thirteenth century. Nothing could be clearer, one might conclude, than the contrast between the great kingdoms of the West and the so-called Empire. The fashionable cliche even affects our understanding of Jewish life in the Middle Ages. Fritz Backhaus put the commonplace this way: “The territorial division (Zersplitterung) of Germany prevented a comprehensive expulsion [of the Jews] as could be carried out in England, France, and Spain.” This neat dichotomy is inadequate. At best it makes sense in a comparison between England and Germany. Only in England, a few exceptions aside, were the claims of a paramount lord, the king, to the control and exploitation of the Jews more or less uncontested by other secular authorities or by ecclesiastics in the role of secular lords.

Lordship and Administration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Interconnected Networks ◽  
Territorial States

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Bounds of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
To Come

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

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