The 'rise of the west' is the most familiar and most elusive topic in global history. Everyone agrees it happened. No one can say how, when, where or why, without provoking dissent. Yet the world we inhabit is, by universal acknowledgement, the outcome.
In recent years, controversy has focussed on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the 'early modern period', when Western expansion became a conspicuous phenomenon in a world of colliding empires and unprecedented long-range cultural exchange. But, like most such apparently new departures in history, Western European activity in the 'expanding world' of early modernity is best understood against a background of long, sometimes faltering preparation in the Middle Ages.
Therefore, following the success of the series An Expanding World, a series of key papers on the period, published by Routledge and edited by A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Ashgate has commissioned an attempt to collect cutting-edge research on the medieval background and events of European expansion. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and James Muldoon have gathered classic and key contributions from learned journals and other arcane publications to give readers a conspectus of knowledge, analysis and reflection on the history of the frontiers, mental horizons, internal expansion and means of growth of Latin Christendom from the eleventh to the early sixteenth centuries.
Edited
By James Muldoon
January 11, 2019
Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled the warlike Celts, and beyond whom lay the north seas and the awesome Atlantic Ocean, formidable ...
By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, James Muldoon
December 22, 2008
Around the year 1000 Rodulfus Glaber described France as being in the throes of a building boom. He may have been the first writer to perceive the early medieval period as a Dark Age that was ending to be replaced by a better world. In the articles gathered here distinguished medieval historians ...
By Joan-Pau Rubies
December 16, 2009
From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous waves of conquest and devastation) was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. From a a global ...
By Jace Stuckey
October 01, 2014
By the turn of the millennium, the East Mediterranean region had become a place of foreigners to Latin Christians living in Western Europe. Nevertheless, in the eleventh century numerous Latin Christian pilgrims streamed toward the East and Jerusalem in anticipation of the end times. The ...
Edited
By Nora Berend
January 14, 2013
This volume brings together a set of key studies on the history of medieval Central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland), along with others specially commissioned for the book or translated, and a new introduction. This region was both an area of immigration, and one of polities in expansion. Such ...
Edited
By Jonathan Shepard
December 21, 2007
This volume aims to clarify the context for the expansion of Western Europe by focusing on what had been the greatest power in early medieval Europe, the Byzantine empire, and on the continuing strengths and expansion of the Orthodox world. Byzantine 'orthodoxy' offered a format for faith, hope and...
By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, James Muldoon
December 22, 2008
The aim of this first volume in the series "The Expansion of Latin Europe" is to sketch the outlines of medieval expansion, illustrating some of the major topics that historians have examined in the course of demonstrating the links between medieval and modern experiences. The articles reprinted ...
Edited
By Alan V. Murray
October 01, 2014
By the mid-twelfth century the lands on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, from Finland to the frontiers of Poland, were Catholic Europe’s final frontier: a vast, undeveloped expanse of lowlands, forest and waters, inhabited by peoples belonging to the Finnic and Baltic language groups. In the ...
Edited
By James Muldoon
December 09, 2010
As the articles reprinted in this volume demonstrate, medieval men and women were curious about the world around them. They wanted to hear about distant lands and the various peoples who inhabited them. Travellers' tales, factual such as that of Marco Polo, and fictional, such as Chaucer's famous ...
Edited
By James D. Ryan
October 23, 2013
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries religious zeal nourished by the mendicants’ sense of purpose motivated Dominican and Franciscan friars to venture far beyond Europe’s cultural frontiers to spread their Christian faith into the farthest reaches of Asia. Their incredible journeys were ...
By Eleanor A. Congdon
August 16, 2013
While Latin expansion stalled in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages, Islam lost ground to Christendom in the west - in the Spanish Levant, the islands of the Western Mediterranean, and even on the Maghribi coast, where conquerors and colonists from the northern shore of the sea ...
By Jose-Juan Lopez-Portillo
October 18, 2013
As seen from the perspective of 1492, the medieval expansion of Latin Europe was nowhere as dramatic or enduring as in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic. Its Christian kingdoms continued their advance against Al-Andalus up to 1492, whereas territorial expansion elsewhere against the Muslim ...