Considering a wide array of sources, this book reveals the tenacity with which Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213) of the Crown of Aragon forged a tighter Mediterranean regional network and augmented their regional success.
At the beginning of the eleventh century, Catalonia was a patchwork of counties, viscounties, and lordships that bordered Islamic al-Andalus to the south. Over the next two centuries, the region underwent a dramatic transformation. The counts of Barcelona secured title to the neighboring kingdom of Aragon through marriage and this newly constituted Crown of Aragon, after numerous failed attempts, finally conquered the Islamic states positioned along its southern frontier in the mid-twelfth century. Successful conquest, however, necessitated considerable organizational challenges that threatened to destabilize, politically and economically, this triumphant regime. The Aragonese monarchy's efforts to overcome these adversities, consolidate its authority, and capitalize on its military victories would impose lasting changes on its governmental framework and exert considerable influence over future expansionist projects. In Victory's Shadow, Thomas W. Barton offers a sweeping new account of the capture and long-term integration of Muslim-ruled territories by an ascendant Christian regime and a detailed analysis of the influence of this process on the governmental, economic, and broader societal development of both Catalonia and the greater Crown of Aragon. Based on over a decade of extensive archival research, Victory's Shadow deftly reconstructs and evaluates the decisions, outcomes, and costs involved in this experience of territorial integration and considers its implications for ongoing debates regarding the dynamics of expansionism across the diverse boundary zones of medieval Europe.
In Contested Treasure, Thomas Barton examines how the Jews in the Crown of Aragon in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries negotiated the overlapping jurisdictions and power relations of local lords and the crown. The thirteenth century was a formative period for the growth of royal bureaucracy and the development of the crown’s legal claims regarding the Jews. While many Jews were under direct royal authority, significant numbers of Jews also lived under nonroyal and seigniorial jurisdiction. Barton argues that royal authority over the Jews (as well as Muslims) was far more modest and contingent on local factors than is usually recognized. Diverse case studies reveal that the monarchy’s Jewish policy emerged slowly, faced considerable resistance, and witnessed limited application within numerous localities under nonroyal control, thus allowing for more highly differentiated local modes of Jewish administration and coexistence. Contested Treasure refines and complicates our portrait of interfaith relations and the limits of royal authority in medieval Spain, and it presents a new approach to the study of ethnoreligious relations and administrative history in medieval European society.
This analysis of royal marriage cases across seven centuries explains how and how far popes controlled royal entry into and exits from their marriages. In the period between c.860 and 1600, the personal lives of kings became the business of the papacy. d'Avray explores the rationale for papal involvement in royal marriages and uses them to analyse the structure of church-state relations. The marital problems of the Carolingian Lothar II, of English kings - John, Henry III, and Henry VIII - and other monarchs, especially Spanish and French, up to Henri IV of France and La Reine Margot, have their place in this exploration of how canon law came to constrain pragmatic political manoeuvring within a system increasingly rationalised from the mid-thirteenth century on. Using documents presented in the author's Dissolving Royal Marriages, the argument brings out hidden connections between legal formality, annulments, and dispensations, at the highest social level.
Based on narrative, iconographical, and liturgical sources, this is the first systematic study to trace the story of the ritual of royal self-coronations from Ancient Persia to the present. Exposing as myth the idea that Napoleon's act of self-coronation in 1804 was the first extraordinary event to break the secular tradition of kings being crowned by bishops, Jaume Aurell vividly demonstrates that self-coronations were not as transgressive or unconventional as has been imagined. Drawing on numerous examples of royal self-coronations, with a particular focus on European Kings of the Middle Ages, including Frederic II of Germany (1229), Alphonse XI of Castile (1328), Peter IV of Aragon (1332) and Charles III of Navarra (1390), Aurell draws on history, anthropology, ritual studies, liturgy and art history to explore royal self-coronations as privileged sites at which the frontiers and limits between the temporal and spiritual, politics and religion, tradition and innovation are encountered.
"The sixteen papers collected in this volume explore points of contact across the Latin, Greek and Islamic worlds between c. 1000 and c. 1250. They arise from a conference organized by the British Archaeological Association in Palermo in 2012, and reflect its interest in patterns of cultural exchange across the Mediterranean, ranging from the importation of artefacts - textiles, ceramics, ivories and metalwork for the most part - to a specific desire to recruit eastern artists or emulate eastern Mediterranean buildings. The individual essays cover a wide range of topics and media: from the ways in which the Cappella Palatina in Palermo fostered contacts between Muslim artists and Christian models, the importance of dress and textiles in the wider world of Mediterranean design, and the possible use of Muslim-trained sculptors in the emergent architectural sculpture of late-11th-century northern Spain, to the significance of western saints in the development of Bethlehem as a pilgrimage centre and of eastern painters and techniques in the proliferation of panel painting in Catalonia around 1200. There are studies of buildings and the ideological purpose behind them at Canosa (Apulia), Feldebro (Hungary) and Charroux (Aquitaine), comparative studies of the domed churches of western France, significant reappraisals of the porphyry tombs in Palermo cathedral, the pictorial programme adopted in the Baptistery at Parma, and of the chapter-house paintings at Sigena, and wide-ranging papers on the migration of images of exotic creatures across the Mediterranean and on that most elusive and apparently Mediteranean of objects - the Oliphant. The volume concludes with a study of the emergence of a supra-regional style of architectural sculpture in the western Mediterranean and evident in Barcelona, Tarragona and Provence. It is a third volume, based on the British Archaeological Association's 2014 Conference in Barcelona, will explore Romanesque Patrons and Processes."
An era rich in artistic creations and political transformations, the Mongol period across Eurasia brought forth a new historical consciousness visible in the artistic legacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Historicity of the present, cultivation of the secular within received cosmologies, human agency in history, and naturalism in the representation of social and organic environments all appear with consistency across diverse venues. Common themes, styles, motifs, and pigments circulated to an unprecedented extent during this era creating an equally unprecedented field of artistic exchange. Exploring art’s relationship to the unique commercial and political circumstances of Mongol Eurasia, Sudden Appearances rethinks many art historical puzzles including the mystery of the Siyah Kalem paintings, the female cup-bearer in the Royal Drinking Scene at Alchi, and the Mongol figures who appear in a Sienese mural. Drawing on primary sources both visual and literary as well as scholarship that has only recently achieved critical mass in the areas of Mongolian studies and Eurasian histories, Roxann Prazniak orchestrates an inquiry into a critical passage in world history, a prelude to the spin-off to modernity. Sudden Appearances highlights the visual and emotional prompts that motivated innovative repurposing of existing cultural perspectives and their adjustment to expanding geographic and social worlds. While early twentieth-century scholarship searched for a catholic universalism in shared European and Chinese art motifs, this inquiry looks to the relationships among societies of central, western, and eastern Asia during the Mongol era as a core site of social and political discourse that defined a globalizing era in Eurasian artistic exchange. The materiality of artistic creativity, primarily access to pigments, techniques, and textiles, provides a path through the interconnected commercial and intellectual byways of the long thirteenth century. Tabriz of the Ilkhanate with its proximity to the Mediterranean and al-Hind seas and relations to the Yuan imperial center establishes the geographic and organizational hub for this study of eight interconnected cities nested in their regional domains. Avoiding the use of modern geographic markers such as China, Europe, Middle East, India, Sudden Appearances shifts analysis away from the limits of nation-state claims toward a borderless world of creative commerce.
Much has been written about the Knights Templar; their code of conduct, their way of life, the battles and political machinations that took place, the trials which ended their order, and the 9 men who founded their order, and the one who commanded them at the end, Jacque de Molay. While some work has been done to identify the men and women who served as Templars in individual kingdoms and countries, this is the first comprehensive work to merge all of them together and to review the commanderies where they served. Volume 2 of this series identifies the commanders, seneschals, treasurers, drapers, turcopoliers, and more in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, Rhodes, Malta, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Outremer, Turkey, Greece, Armenia, Syria, Egypt, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands and the commanderies and fortresses that they built. Tour the castles and fortresses that they commanded and learn how each area played a part in the Crusades.
From majestic Celtic crosses to elaborate knotwork designs, visual symbols of Irish identity at its most medieval abound in contemporary culture. Consdering both scholarly and popular perspectives this book offers a commentary on the blending of pasts and presents that finds permanent visualization in these contemporary signs.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of tumultuous change in medieval Europe; they witnessed the Black Death, the Great Papal Schism, heightened fears of the apocalypse, and the elimination of Spain's non-Christian population. Few figures were as widely and as intimately involved in late medieval Europe's struggles as Saint Vincent Ferrer. Perhaps the foremost preacher of his day, Ferrer spent the final two decades of his life traversing Europe, preparing the world for its imminent destruction. Saint Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419), His World and Life reassesses the controversial preacher's motives, methods, and impact, tracing Ferrer's journey from obscure logician to angel of the apocalypse, as he came to be known. At the same time, the book offers new insights into the depth and breadth of late medieval apocalyptic anticipation, and into the processes that ultimately led to the expulsions of Spain's Jews and Muslims.