Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic world, c.700-c.1500

This comparative study explores three key cultural and political spheres - the Latin west, Byzantium and the Islamic world from Central Asia to the Atlantic - roughly from the emergence of Islam to the fall of Constantinople. These spheres drew on a shared pool of late antique Mediterranean culture, philosophy and science, and they had monotheism and historical antecedents in common. Yet where exactly political and spiritual power lay, and how it was exercised, differed. This book focuses on power dynamics and resource-allocation among ruling elites; the legitimisation of power and property with the aid of religion; and on rulers' interactions with local elites and societies. Offering the reader route-maps towards navigating each sphere and grasping the fundamentals of its political culture, this set of parallel studies offers a timely and much needed framework for comparing the societies surrounding the medieval Mediterranean.

Author: Catherine Holmes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/02/2023
Pages: 592
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.73lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781009011136

About the Author
Holmes, Catherine: - Catherine Holmes is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of books including Basil II and the Governance of Empire 976-1025 (2005) and co-editor of Literacy, Education and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond (2002) with J. Waring, Between Byzantines and Turks (2012) with J. Harris and The Global Middle Ages (2018) with N. Standen.Shepard, Jonathan: - Jonathan Shepard was Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of books including The Emergence of Rus (1996) with S. Franklin, editor of The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008) and co-editor of Byzantine Diplomacy (1992) with S. Franklin, Byzantium and the Viking World (2016) with F. Androshchuk and M. White, Imperial Spheres and the Adriatic (2018) with M. Ančic and T. Vedris, and Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland (2020) with J. Gruszczyński and M. Jankowiak.Van Steenbergen, Jo: - Jo Van Steenbergen is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent University. He is the author of Order out of Chaos (2006), Caliphate and Kingship in a Fifteenth-Century Literary History of Muslim Leadership and Pilgrimage (2017), A History of the Islamic World, 600-1800: Empires, Dynastic Formations, and Heterogeneities in Islamic West-Asia (2020), and editor of Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences (2020).

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