War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600 is a panoramic synthesis of the Iberian Peninsula including the kingdoms of Leon and Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarra, al-Andalus and Granada. It offers an extensive chronology, covering the entire medieval period and extending through to the sixteenth century, allowing for a very broad perspective of Iberian history which displays the fixed and variable aspects of war over time. The book is divided kingdom by kingdom to provide students and academics with a better understanding of the military interconnections across medieval and early modern Iberia. The continuities and transformations within Iberian military history are showcased in the majority of chapters through markers to different periods and phases, particularly between the Early and High Middle Ages, and the Late Middle Ages. With a global outlook, coverage of all the most representative military campaigns, sieges and battles between 700 and 1600, and a wide selection of maps and images, War in the Iberian Peninsula is ideal for students and academics of military and Iberian history.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the early modern military history of Portugal and its possessions in Africa, the Americas, and Asia from the perspective of the military revolution historiographical debate. The existence of a military revolution in the early modern period has been much debated in international historiography, and this volume fills a significant gap in its relation to the history of Portugal and its overseas empire. It examines different forms of military change in specifically Portuguese case studies but also adopts a global perspective through the analysis of different contexts and episodes in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Contributors explore whether there is evidence of what could be defined as aspects of a military revolution or whether other explanatory models are needed to account for different forms of military change. In this way, it offers the reader a variety of perspectives that contribute to the debate over the applicability of the military revolution concept to Portugal and its empire during the early modern period. Broken down into four thematic parts and broad in both chronological and geographical scope, the book deepens our understanding of the art of warfare in Portugal and its empire and demonstrates how the military revolution debate can be used to examine military change in a global perspective. This is an essential text for scholars and students of military history, military architecture, global history, Asian history, and the history of Iberian empires.

This is Volume Two of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.

Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions brings together leading scholars in medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, and Romantic studies. The assembled essays trace continuities and changes in the emotional register of war, as it has been mediated by the written record over six centuries. Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, genres of writing and contexts of publication and reception, Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854 analyses the emotional history of war in relation to both the changing nature of conflicts and the changing creative modes in which they have been arrayed and experienced. Each chapter explores how different forms of writing defines war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively. The volume is especially interested in how the written production of war as emotional experience occurs within a wider historical range of cultural and social practices. Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions will be of interest to students of the history of emotions, the history of pre-modern war and war literature.

What connects political violence in Classical Athens and state terrorism in the Roman republic to the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka and the modern destruction of monuments? Using 9/11 as a lens through which to examine past instances of terrorism, this book presents a wide global view of the use of terror and its impact throughout history. Contributors are: Jaime A. González-Ocaña, Aaron L. Beek, Francesco Mori, Gaius Stern, Timothy Smith, João Nisa, Ölbei Tamás, James Crossland, Paul J. Cook, Chris Millington, Vineeth Mathoor, Dmitry Shlapentokh, Kalinga Tudor Silva, Cserkits Michael, Katty Cristina Lima Sá, Tatiana Konrad, Daniel Leach, Paul J. Cook, Mark Briskey, Silke Zoller, Elizabeth L. Miller, and William V. Hudon.

The Crusader States and their Neighbours explores the military history of the Medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious, dynastic, and commercial interests collided and the causes of war could be numerous. Conflicts persisted for decades and were fought out between many groups including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and the crusaders themselves. Nicholas Morton recreates this world, exploring how each faction sought to advance its own interests by any means possible, adapting its warcraft to better respond to the threats posed by their rivals. Strategies and tactics employed by the pastoral societies of the Central Asian Steppe were pitted against the armies of the agricultural societies of Western Christendom, Byzantium, and the Islamic World, galvanising commanders to adapt their practices in response to their foes. Today, we are generally encouraged to think of this era as a time of religious conflict, and yet this vastly over-simplifies a complex region where violence could take place for many reasons and peoples of different faiths could easily find themselves fighting side-by-side.

Beginning in the twelfth century, taxation increasingly became an essential component of medieval society in most parts of Europe. The state-building process and relations between princes and their subject cities or between citizens and their rulers were deeply shaped by fiscal practices. Although medieval taxation has produced many publications over the past decades there remains no synthesis of this important subject. This volume provides a comprehensive overview on a European scale and suggests new paths of inquiry. It examines the fiscal systems and practices of medieval Europe, including essential themes such as medieval fiscal theory and the power to tax; royal and urban taxation; and Church taxation. It goes on to survey the entire European continent, as well as including comparative chapters on the non-European medieval world, exploring questions on how taxation developed and functioned; what kinds of problems authorities encountered assessing their fiscal power; and the circulation of fiscal cultures and practices across cities and kingdoms. The book also provides a glossary of the most important types of medieval taxes, giving an essential definition of key terms cited in the chapters. The Routledge Handbook of Public Taxation in Medieval Europe will appeal to a large audience, from seasoned scholars who need a comprehensive synthesis, to students and younger scholars in search of an overview of this critical subject.

Dynastic Change: Legitimacy and Gender in Medieval and Early Modern Monarchy examines the strategies for change and legitimacy in monarchies in the medieval and early modern eras. Taking a broadly comparative approach, Dynastic Change explores the mechanisms employed as well as theoretical and practical approaches to monarchical legitimisation. The book answers the question of how monarchical families reacted, adjusted or strategised when faced with dynastic crises of various kinds, such as a lack of a male heir or unfitness of a reigning monarch for rule, through the consideration of such themes as the role of royal women, the uses of the arts for representational and propaganda purposes and the impact of religion or popular will. Broad in both chronological and geographical scope, chapters discuss examples from the 9th to the 18th centuries across such places as Morocco, Byzantium, Portugal, Russia and Western Europe, showing readers how cultural, religious and political differences across countries and time periods affected dynastic relations. Bringing together gender, monarchy and dynasticism, the book highlights parallels across time and place, encouraging a new approach to monarchy studies. It is the perfect collection for students and researchers of medieval and early modern monarchy and gender.

Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within which the experience of Florence remains unique. By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbours, this collection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere towards Florence. New techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the connections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe. This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance.

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.