Where the Middle Ages Begin
If one compares the Russian Anthony text with the original Mercati Anonymus text, the longest and most detailed of the three extant contemporary Western descriptions of the shrines of Constantinople, one finds that the Latin text includes only twenty of the seventy-six religious shrines mentioned by the Russian enumeration.
This paper looks at the Mongol Empire’s impacts on Russia in terms of religion, art, language, government, and the ultimate rise of Moscow.
It is my contention that, in the general view of Icelanders, the Christian world was united, ’catholic’ in the original meaning of the word. Christianity in the East was thought to have similar roots to Christianity in Iceland and differences between the religions of Nordic and Eastern people were considered insignificant.
Despite their isolation and poverty, the Slavic plowmen succeeded in settling this unforgiving region, expanding their numbers, and, most importantly, creating the beginnings of a trading network along the many rivers of the region—the western Dvina, the Volkhov, the northern Dvina, and the Dniepr and its tributaries.
The standard method employed in characterization studies of amber, namely infrared spectrography, can discriminate roughly between Baltic amber and amber from other European sources…
Mann argues that a rare text of the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche comes from an early, fifteenth-century redaction that scholars could never locate—a redaction that is the prototype for all the redactions that have been studied heretofore. He maintains that unique parallels between this redaction and the Slovo o polka Igoreve support the hypothesis that the Igor Tale was an oral epic song in a tradition that actually continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when oral tales about the Kulikovo Battle (1380) were composed. He places the new parallels in the context of other evidence for oral composition in the Igor Tale.
This lecture will demonstrate that the court of Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) and other tsars was actually a focus point of exchange in technology, commodities and ideas with both the East and the West,
While looking for the origins of the state of Lithuania, it is the study of old maps that helps solve a number of riddles, so far weighing on the history of our nation. Historical data, traced in maps and their images, unrestricted by any political, religious or pseudo- scientific taboos, allow us to cast a broad view on the dim and distant past of our state.
The differences in the imposition of serfdom led to different economic and political effects for the peasantry in Europe. In Western Europe, wages rose, grain prices fell, and the consumption of meat, dairy products, and beer increased. More and more peasants moved into a widening “middle class” that could afford to buy manufactured goods.
This paper focused on marriage alliances in Eastern Europe and the issue of canon law and consanguinity.
On the basis of a 14th-century account by the Genoese Gabriele de’ Mussi, the Black Death is widely believed to have reached Europe from the Crimea as the result of a biological warfare attack.
The first move of Norwegians into the polar regions was to Finmark. Archaeologists cannot say for certain how early the Fins and the Norwegians came into cultural contact with each other.
Since at least the Iron Age, and perhaps much earlier, Caucasia has been a cohesive yet diverse zone of cross-cultural encounter and shared historical experience. Despite their linkage by a web of interconnections which was as dense as it was durable, the peoples inhabiting the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas have seldom exhibited a conscious regional identity in their oral, written, and visual monuments.
Bulgar-on-the Volga was the first documented trade center which channeled fur from Northern Europe to the rest of the world.
Before the advent of Christianity, the European population practiced various forms of paganism. Pagan beliefs were not centralized or codified; they exhibited specific regional characteristics that developed within relatively small territories (Afanas’ev). Slavic cities had differing pantheons comprised of deities whom the inhabitants considered to be most important.
Although both came from pagan and ethnically Slavic backgrounds, the leaders diverged in the branch of Christianity each chose, although, both conversions took place each region within a similar time frame.
Mentioning Poland in a publication dealing with Viking identities, diaspora and reception might be surprising.
A large Novgorod icon, dated in the mid-fifteenth or early sixteenth century, has been called a Last Judgment composition by scholarship.
The urge to find additional supplies of pelts and better-quality furs drove not only the Novgorodian traders and tribute collectors to cross the Urals during the Middle Ages, but later the Muscovites to colonize Siberia and even later the Russian Empire to explore and establish control over the Russian Far East and Alaska.
Novgorod played a significant role in the complex maritime networks that connected Russia with Northern and Western Europe during this period, the most important of which being the Hanseatic League, and developed into a thriving cosmopolitan society while most major Russian cities were still struggling to rebuild and adjust after the Mongol invasion.
On the one hand, stories (particularly fables) have been de- rived from already existing proverbs, from antiquity up to early modern times. On the other hand, a story in its summarised form can live on in a proverb or an idiom, even if the knowledge of this story has been forgotten for a long time.
Those who came from Scandinavia were called Rus and Varangians by peoples in Eastern Europe. French and Anglo-Saxon chroniclers sometimes divide the Vikings into ‘Danes’, ‘Swedes’ (Svear) and ‘Norsemen’ (Norwegians).
Museum Secrets is a wonderful show, which reminds me why I enjoy history so much. I am now very much looking forward to seeing the rest of this season’s episodes.
A useful contribution towards the understanding of the wearing practices of Byzantine and other medieval ear ornaments is supplied by archaeological evidence from the territory of medieval Rus.
What is this? What is this distressing and heavy catastrophe and abomination? Why has this dreadful thunderbolt fallen on us out of the farthest north?
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