An examination of how church leaders partnered with lay rulers to integrate lands conquered from the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the ninth through the fourteenth centuriesIn Constructing Christendom, Thomas W. Barton examines how church leaders partnered with lay rulers to integrate lands conquered from the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. In tracing the intricate developmental histories of a clust...

As Western Christendom expanded dramatically along its frontiers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Church leaders debated how to organize and administer newly captured diocesan lands. These questions were especially pressing in the Iberian Peninsula, where conquests ushered in piecemeal, multidimensional processes of consolidation and integration in which lay and religious authorities sought to establish ecclesiastical institutions to govern territories containing Christian and non-Ch...

As Western Christendom expanded dramatically along its frontiers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Church leaders debated how to organize and administer newly captured diocesan lands. These questions were especially pressing in the Iberian Peninsula, where conquests ushered in piecemeal, multidimensional processes of consolidation and integration in which lay and religious authorities sought to establish ecclesiastical institutions to govern territories containing Christian and non-Ch...

In Contested Treasure, Thomas Barton examines how the Jews in the Crown of Aragon in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries negotiated the overlapping jurisdictions and power relations of local lords and the crown. The thirteenth century was a formative period for the growth of royal bureaucracy and the development of the crown’s legal claims regarding the Jews. While many Jews were under direct royal authority, significant numbers of Jews also lived under nonroyal and seigniori...

At the beginning of the eleventh century, Catalonia was a patchwork of counties, viscounties, and lordships that bordered Islamic al-Andalus to the south. Over the next two centuries, the region underwent a dramatic transformation. The counts of Barcelona secured title to the neighboring kingdom of Aragon through marriage and this newly constituted Crown of Aragon, after numerous failed attempts, finally conquered the Islamic states positioned along its southern frontier i...

One thousand years ago, a civilization existed in Spain that was famed throughout Europe. To the horror of the Christian rulers to the north, Jews, Christians, and Moors lived together in harmony — and in doing so they created one of the most extraordinary societies the West has ever known.In the span a few hundred years, however, Spain would transform itself from a pluralistic, multicultural society to the least tolerant nation in Europe. By the end of the fifteenth century, the S...

This book was originally composed as a lecture to some Jewish working-men at the East end of London. The subject was, to the author, naturally an interesting one no less from a national than from a family point of view. The position of the Jews in Spain and Portugal during a great part of the middle ages forms an exceptionally bright spot in their dark and chequered history, and developed some striking intellectual and moral features in an age when a great part of what now constitutes Civi...

The dramatic one-thousand-year history of Jews in Spain comes to life in Exiles in Sepharad. Jeffrey Gorsky vividly relates this colorful period of Jewish history, from the era when Jewish culture was at its height in Muslim Spain to the horrors of the Inquisition and the Expulsion.Twenty percent of Jews today are descended from Sephardic Jews, who created significant works in religion, literature, science, and philosophy. They flourished under both Muslim and Christian ru...

The organization of several thousand Irish American men into a military outfit, which then attempted to invade Canada from within the United States, is a significant historical event that remains largely unexplored from an Irish and Irish American perspective. This study offers a fuller exploration of the details behind the Fenian invasion, asking why Irish immigrants were motivated to shape American international policy and examining the ways in which the Fenians defined identity as a tra...

A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion 1400-1668 provides an accessible survey of how the Portuguese became so influential during this period and how Portuguese settlements were founded in areas as far flung as Asia, Africa and South America.Malyn Newitt examines how the ideas and institutions of a late medieval society were deployed to aid expansion into Africa and the Atlantic islands, as well as how, through rivalry with Castile, this grew into a worldwide commercia...

This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author’s own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for N...

This book analyzes the reasons for the emergence and extinction of the Croatian name in four Slovene border regions. The author uses comparative methods and a broad spectrum of sources. In the early Modern Age, the Croatian name established itself in these areas as a temporary phenomenon, replacing the original Slovene name, which at that time had a «pre-national» content and was also used by a considerable portion of today’s Croats. Extending the use of the Croatian name to the Slovene bo...