The Expansion Of Orthodox Europe

Download or read book The Expansion of Orthodox Europe written by Jonathan Shepard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims to clarify the context for the expansion of Western Europe by focusing on what had been the greatest power in early medieval Europe, the Byzantine empire, and on the continuing strengths and expansion of the Orthodox world. Byzantine 'orthodoxy' offered a format for faith, hope and fear in various combinations, involving religious beliefs and an idealised world-order. Its multifaceted nature helps explain Byzantium's success - the resilience of the earthly empire and the appeal of its religious organisation and rites to other societies. The volume reprints a set of key studies, combining classic treatments of Byzantine and Slavic history with far-reaching explorations of the extent of those worlds. Part I focuses on the empire in its heyday: some studies illustrate the sense of manifest destiny bolstering the imperial order until - and even beyond - Constantinople's fall to the fourth crusaders in 1204. The spread of the Byzantines' cult enlarged their trading zone northwards across Rus, while Byzantine-based merchants were more active than is generally realised in the Eastern Mediterranean. Part II includes an overview of the 'fragmentation' following 1204. Studies show how Byzantine rites and ideals of rulership were adopted by Serb and Bulgarian dynasts. Particular attention is paid to Rus: although subjugated by the Mongols, Rus churchmen, monks and leading princes all drew on Byzantine religious texts and imagery. From the later fifteenth century Moscow's rulers began to be portrayed as new guardians of religious correctness, even as the World's End supposedly drew nigh. The Introduction contextualises the studies included here, highlighting the significance (and not just in terms of rivalry) of the Byzantine Orthodox world for developments in Western Europe.

Download or read book The Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century written by Christine Chaillot and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is common knowledge that the majority of the population of Eastern Europe belong to the Christian Orthodox tradition. But how many people have an adequate knowledge of the past or even of the present of these Orthodox churches? This book aims to present an introduction to this history written for a general audience, both Christian and non-Christian. After the 1917 revolution in Russia, communism spread to most of the countries of Eastern Europe. By 1953, at the time of Stalin's death, the division between Eastern and Western Europe seemed absolute. However, the advent of perestroika at the end of the 1980s brought about political changes that have enabled the Orthodox Church to develop once again in Eastern Europe. The foundation of the European Union in 1993 has had a broader significance for Orthodox communities, who can now participate in the future development of Europe. Some Orthodox Churches already have their representatives at the European Union in Brussels. These include the patriarchates of Constantinople, Russia and Romania, along with the Church of Greece and the Church of Cyprus. Today, Europe is becoming increasingly religiously diverse, even within Christianity itself. A growing number of Orthodox Christians have come to work and settle in Western Europe. An understanding of the history of the Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century will contribute, in a spirit of informed dialogue, to the shaping of a new united Europe that is still in the process of expansion. This book is translated from the French version (published 2009).

Download or read book The Expansion of Central Europe in the Middle Ages written by Nora Berend and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a set of key studies on the history of medieval Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland), along with others specially commissioned for the book or translated, and a new introduction. This region was both an area of immigration, and one of polities in expansion. Such expansion included the settlement and exploitation of previously empty lands as well as rulers' attempts to incorporate new territories under their rule, although these attempts did not always succeed. Often, German immigration has been prioritized in scholarship, and the medieval expansion of Central Europe has been equated with the expansion of Germans. Debates then focused on the positive or negative contribution of Germans to local life, and the consequences of their settlement. This perspective, however, distorts our understanding of medieval processes. On the one hand, Central Europe was not a passive recipient of immigrants. Local rulers and eventually nobles benefited from and encouraged immigration; they played an active role. On the other hand, German immigration was not a unified movement, and cannot be equated with a drang nach osten. Finally, not just Germans, but also various Romance-speaking and other immigrant groups settled in Central Europe. This volume, therefore, seeks to present a more complex picture of medieval expansion in Central Europe.

Download or read book The North-Eastern Frontiers of Medieval Europe written by Alan V. Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the mid-twelfth century the lands on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, from Finland to the frontiers of Poland, were Catholic Europe’s final frontier: a vast, undeveloped expanse of lowlands, forest and waters, inhabited by peoples belonging to the Finnic and Baltic language groups. In the course of the following three centuries, Finland, Estonia, Livonia and Prussia were incorporated into the Latin world through processes of conquest, Christianisation and settlement, and brought under the rule of Western monarchies and ecclesiastical institutions. Lithuania was left as the last pagan polity in Europe, yet able to accept Christianity on its own terms in 1386. The Western conquest of the Baltic lands advanced the frontier of Latin Christendom to that of the Russian Orthodox world, and had profound and long lasting effects on the institutions, society and culture of the region lasting into modern times. This volume presents 21 key studies (2 of them translated from German for the first time) on this crucial period in the development of North-Eastern Europe, dealing with crusade and conversion, the establishment of Western rule, settlement and society, and the development of towns, trade and the economy. It includes a classified bibliography of the main works published in Western languages since World War II together with an introduction by the editor.

Download or read book The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom: The Asian Missions written by James D. Ryan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries religious zeal nourished by the mendicants’ sense of purpose motivated Dominican and Franciscan friars to venture far beyond Europe’s cultural frontiers to spread their Christian faith into the farthest reaches of Asia. Their incredible journeys were reminiscent of heroic missionary ventures in earlier eras and far more exotic than evangelization during the tenth through twelfth centuries, when the western church Christianized Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. This new mission effort was stimulated by a variety of factors and facilitated by the establishment of the Mongol Empire, and, as the fourteenth century dawned, missionaries entertained fervent but vain hopes of success within khanates in China, Central Asia, Persia and Kipchak. The reports these missionaries sent back to Europe have fascinated successive generations of historians who analyzed their travels and struggled to understand their motives and aspirations. The essays selected for this volume, drawn from a range of twentieth-century historians and contextualized in the introduction, provide a comprehensive overview of missionary efforts in Asia, and of the developments in the secular world that both made them possible and encouraged the missionaries’ hopes for success. Three of the studies have been translated from French specially for publication in this volume.

Download or read book The North Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe written by James Muldoon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled the warlike Celts, and beyond whom lay the north seas and the awesome Atlantic Ocean, formidable obstacles to expansion westward. This volume looks first at the legacy of the Viking expansion which had briefly created a network stretching across the sea from Britain and Ireland to North America, and had demonstrated that the Atlantic could be crossed and land reached. The next sections deal with the English expansion in the western and northern British Isles. In the 12th century the Normans began the process of subjugating the Celts, thus inaugurating for the English an experience which was to prove crucial when colonizing the Americas in the 17th century. Medieval Ireland in particular served as a laboratory for the development of imperial institutions, attitudes, and ideologies that shaped the creation of the British Empire and served as a staging area for further expansion westward.

Download or read book Introduction à la littérature berbère. 1. La poésie written by Jonathan Sutton and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains selected papers presented at a conference on Orthodox Christianity and its contemporary European setting. The conference was held in England, at the University of Leeds, in June 2001 and drew together historians, theologians, philosophers, specialists in theological education and political scientists. Countries with an Orthodox Christian history were well represented, as well as Orthodoxy in the diaspora and other Christian confessions by representatives from Western Europe and the United States and Canada. The coherence of Orthodox Christianity and contemporary threats to its coherence formed one main strand for reflection, but discussion also broadened out to consider the nature of religious tradition as such. Part I of the collection brings together papers on such matters as identity, nationalism, globalization, human rights discourse, ecumenical dialogue and competing interpretations of what it means to be European. Part II focuses on Orthodox Christianity in Russia and Part III on the traditionally Orthodox countries of Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. The present collection is meant as a contribution to further reflection on Orthodox identity, and relationship between Christianity and culture in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.