The Briennes

The Briennes
Author: Guy Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2018-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108186955

The Briennes were a highly important aristocratic family who hailed from the Champagne region of north-eastern France, but whose reach and impact extended across Europe and into the Crusader States in the Middle East. It is a highly dramatic and wide-ranging story of medieval mobility, not only up and down the social ladder, but in geographical terms as well. Although the Briennes were one of the great dynasties of the central Middle Ages, this book represents the first comprehensive history of the family. Taking the form of parallel biographies and arranged broadly chronologically, it explores not only their rise, glory and fall, but also how they helped to shape the very nature of the emerging European state system. This book will appeal to students and scholars of medieval France, the Mediterranean world, the Crusades and the central Middle Ages.

The Briennes

The Briennes
Author: Guy Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-08-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107196906

The first comprehensive study of the Brienne dynasty, a fascinating example of the international aristocracy in the central Middle Ages.

John of Brienne

John of Brienne
Author: Guy Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107513200

John of Brienne's progress, from mid-ranking knightly status to king of Jerusalem and, later, Latin emperor of Constantinople, traces one of the most remarkable careers in the entire medieval period. But how and why did he achieve such heights? This biographical study of aristocratic social and geographical mobility in the 'Age of the Crusades' reassesses John's fascinating life, and explores how families and dynasticism, politics, intrigue, religion and war all contributed to John's unprecedented career. John was a major figure in the history of the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, and yet very much a product of the workings of the society of his day. This book reveals how John's life, and its multifarious connections to France, Italy, the German empire and the papacy, can illuminate the broad panorama of the early thirteenth-century world, and the zenith of the crusading movement.

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading
Author: Megan Cassidy-Welch
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2016-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134861443

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading examines the diverse contexts in which crusading was memorialised and commemorated in the medieval world and beyond. The collection not only shows how the crusades were commemorated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also considers the longer-term remembrance of the crusades into the modern era. This collection is divided into three sections, the first of which deals with the textual, material and visual sources used to remember. Each contributor introduces a particular body of source material and presents case studies using those sources in their own research. The second section contains four chapters examining specific communities active in commemorating the crusades, including religious communities, family groups and royal courts. Finally, the third section examines the cultural memory of crusading in the Byzantine, Iberian and Baltic regions beyond the early years, as well as the trajectory of crusading memory in the Muslim Middle East. This book draws together and extends the current debates in the history of the crusades and the history of memory and in so doing offers a fresh synthesis of material in both fields. It will be essential reading for students of the crusades and memory.

Archives

Archives
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2023-11-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192884417

Chapter 23 is published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and is free to read or download from Oxford Academic. Archives have never been more complex, expansive, or ubiquitous. Gargantuan in scale and conception yet never sufficient or complete, the archive is on the one hand a space for empowerment and expression and on the other an instrument of constraint and repression. The way in which the archive is structured, made available, and developed plays a central role in how societies define their values and ethics. Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction is a wide-ranging and innovative volume which highlights the vibrancy and urgency of the field by bringing together contributors from many different disciplines and backgrounds, including archivists, historians, literary scholars, digital researchers, and creative practitioners. The archive of the twenty-first century is a fluid and multi-vocal space that challenges at every point the hegemonic and positivistic assumptions which shaped traditional ideas of the archive. The massive growth of digital archives further complicates the picture. Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction is designed to help the reader draw threads through the rapidly changing and shifting multiverse of archives. The interdisciplinary and international contributors use a wide range of examples, from the Middle Ages to the Windrush scandal, to unsettle preconceptions, encourage debate, and draw out issues generated by the perpetual motion of the archive.

A World of Paper

A World of Paper
Author: John C. Rule
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 653
Release: 2014-06-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0773592156

Historians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state's foundation and the reign of France's Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV's reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy's department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad. They explore the collection and centralization of information during Torcy's tenure through the creation of a modern state archive, discreet intelligence gathering, and the surveillance and management of the French mails. They also study the postal carriers, couriers, household officers of the royal court, genealogists hired for research, and an informal "brain trust" of experts, and advisors who carried vital information in and out of the department every day. A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, A World of Paper demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.

Geoffroy of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne

Geoffroy of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne
Author: Theodore Evergates
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501773518

Geoffroy of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne by Theodore Evergates traces the remarkable life of Geoffroy of Villehardouin (c. 1148–c. 1217) from his earliest years in Champagne through his last years in Greece after the crusade. The fourth son of a knight, Geoffroy became marshal of Champagne, principal negotiator in organizing the Fourth Crusade, chief of staff of the expedition to and conquest of Constantinople, garrison commander of Constantinople and, in his late fifties, field commander defending the Latin settlement in the Byzantine empire against invading Bulgarian armies and revolting Greek cities. Known for his diplomatic skills and rectitude, he served as the chief military advisor to Count Thibaut III of Champagne and later to Emperor Henry of Constantinople. Geoffroy is remarkable as well for dictating the earliest war memoir in medieval Europe, which is also the earliest prose narrative in Old French. Addressed to a home audience in Champagne, he described what he did, what he saw, and what he heard during his eight years on crusade and especially during the fraught period after the conquest of Constantinople. His memoir, The Book of the Conquest of Constantinople, furnishes a commander's retrospective account of the main events and inner workings of the crusade—the innumerable meetings and speeches, the conduct (not always commendable) of the barons, and the persistent discontent within the army—as well as a celebration of his own deeds as a diplomat and a military commander.

The Military Orders Volume V

The Military Orders Volume V
Author: Peter #N/A
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351542494

Scholarly interest and popular interest in the military orders show no sign of abating. Their history stretches from the early twelfth century to the present. They were among the richest and most powerful religious corporations in pre-Reformation Europe, and they founded their own states on Rhodes and Malta and also on the Baltic coast. Historians of the Church, of art and architecture, of agriculture and banking, of medicine and warfare and of European expansion can all benefit from investigating the orders and their archives. The conferences on their history that have been organized in London every four years have attracted scholars from all over the world. The present volume records the proceedings of the Fifth Conference in 2009 (held in Cardiff as the London venue was in the process of refurbishment), and, like the earlier volumes in the series, will prove essential for anyone interested in the current state of research into these powerful institutions. The thirty-eight papers published here represent a selection of those delivered at the conference. Three papers deal with the recent archaeological investigations at the Hospitaller castle at al-Marqab (Syria); others examine aspects of the history of the military orders in the Latin East and the Mediterranean lands, in Spain and Portugal, in the British Isles and in northern and eastern Europe. The final two papers address the question of present-day perceptions of the Templars as moulded by the sort of popular literature that most of the other contributors would normally keep at arm's length.