Frontiers in Question : Eurasian Borderlands, 700-1700

by Power, Daniel J.; Standen, Naomi

• ISBN13: 9780312216382
• ISBN10: 0312216386
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The nine essays in this book seek to answer the questions of what made a "frontier" between the ancient and modern eras, how people imagined their frontiers, and why historians have sometimes had very different ideas of what these frontiers were like. The collection spreads across much of Europe and Asia, familiar frontiers in Western Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea, and includes examples from China, Mesopotamia, and Lithuania. Ranging from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries, the essays challenge us to rethink our modern notions of frontiers as neat lines intended to divide one state from another because frontiers in the past were often far more complex.

Author Biography

Daniel Power is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield.

Naomi Standen is Assistant Professor of Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Table of Contents

List of maps and figures	vii	(1)
Preface	viii	(3)
Abbreviations	xi	(2)
Glossary	xiii	(9)
Notes on contributors	xxii
1 Introduction	1	(31)
A. Frontiers: Terms, Concepts, and the Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe	1	(12)
Daniel Power
B. Nine Case Studies of Premodern Frontiers	13	(19)
Naomi Standen
2 The Creation of a Medieval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, Eighth to Eleventh Centuries	32	(23)
Eduardo Manzano Moreno
3 (Re)Constructing the Frontiers of Tenth-Century North China	55	(25)
Naomi Standen
4 The Byzantine Frontier at the Lower Danube in the Late Tenth and Eleventh Centuries	80	(25)
Paul Stephenson
5 French and Norman Frontiers in the Central Middle Ages	105	(23)
Daniel Power
6 Northern Syria between the Mongols and Mamluks: Political Boundary, Military Frontier, and Ethnic Affinities	128	(25)
Reuven Amitai-Preiss
7 The English State and its Frontiers in the British Isles, 1300-1600	153	(29)
Steven G. Ellis
8 The Lithuano-Prussian Forest Frontier, c. 1422-1600	182	(27)
S. C. Rowell
9 Crusaders as Frontiersmen: The Case of the Order of St John in the Mediterranean	209	(19)
Ann Williams
10 The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths	228	(23)
Colin Heywood
Select Bibliography	251	(21)
Index	272