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Ranging from medieval times to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992, this volume concentrates on the internal development of the Muslim community in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its relations with various suzerains. This updated edition features new bibliographic material, including a new section on resources covering Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia available through the Internet.
This original study of pre-modern Middle East history, provides fascinating new information about the conflict relations between the two great Muslim empires, the Ottomans and the Mamluks, and military confrontations between Eastern medieval armies.
In this book, the author examines sijills, the official documents of the Ottoman Islamic courts, to understand how sharia law, society and the early-modern economy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Cairo related to the practice of custom in determining rulings. In the sixteenth century, a new legal and cultural orthodoxy fostered the development of an early-modern Islam that broke new ground, giving rise to a new concept of the citizen and his role. Contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, this work adopts the position that local custom began to diminish and decline as a source of authority. These issues resonate today, several centuries later, in the continuing discussions of individual rights in relation to Islamic law.
The various strategies as to how the Ottoman sultans and the ruling elite tried to inculcate their understanding of authority and legitimacy into the Ottoman population are the focus of the articles in this collected volume.
Although empires have played a decisive role in political thinking and the orientation of political goals at all times, the focus of research has so far mostly been on spatial and ideological aspects. This volume, on the other hand, offers a multi-disciplinary collection of studies that deal with the instrumentalization and ongoing impacts of perspectives on empire and their place in time. Coming from archaeology, history, art history, literary studies, and social sciences, the individual case studies discuss perceptions of imperial histories and imagined futures of empires, both in imperial and in post-imperial contexts. The transcending historical significance of the imperial ideas and ideals shows the deep and long-lasting effects of empire in landscapes, mindscapes, and social structures. The diachronic cut through all epochs from antiquity to modern times is complemented by a broad global view to deepen the temporal understanding of imperial imaginaries as well as their political implications.
The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 marked the end of a thousand years of the Christian Roman Empire. Thereafter, world civilisation began a process of radical change. The West came to identify itself as Europe; the Russians were set on the path of autocracy; the Ottomans were transformed into a world power while the Greeks were left exiles in their own land. The loss of Constantinople created a void. How that void was to be filled is the subject of this book. Michael Angold examines the context of late Byzantine civilisation and the cultural negotiation which allowed the city of Constantinople to survive for so long in the face of Ottoman power. He shows how the devastating impact of its fall lay at the centre of a series of interlocking historical patterns which marked this time of decisive change for the late medieval world. This concise and original study will be essential reading for students and scholars of Byzantine and late medieval history, as well as anyone with an interest in this significant turning point in world history.
An accessible and stirring representation of what it means to be "the crusaded," The Race for Paradise captures for the first time the rich variety of the Islamic experience of the Crusades during the Middle Ages.
Leading military historians illuminate the major developments in European warfare during a period of momentous technological, political and military change. The chapters provide a comprehensive overview of warfare across Europe, presenting new findings and ideas that shed light on the art of war, military revolutions, state development and European expansion.
Drawing on surviving documents from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State provides a revisionist approach to the study of the formative years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging the predominant view that a desire to spread Islam accounted for Ottoman success during the fourteenth-century advance into Southeastern Europe, Lowry argues that the primary motivation was a desire for booty and slaves. The early Ottomans were a plundering confederacy, open to anyone (Muslim or Christian) who could meaningfully contribute to this goal. It was this lack of a strict religious orthodoxy, and a willingness to preserve local customs and practices, that allowed the Ottomans to gain and maintain support. Later accounts were written to buttress what had become the self-image of the dynasty following its incorporation of the heartland of the Islamic world in the sixteenth century.