Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition : Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts / Samuel England.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements and Note on Arabic Transliterations -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: Courtly Gifts, Imperial Rewards -- 1 'Baghdad is to Cities What the Master is to Mankind': The Rise of Vizier Culture -- 2 The Sovereign and the Foreign: Creating Saladin in Arabic Literature of the Counter-Crusade -- 3 Alfonso X: Poetry of Miracles and Domination -- 4 Saladino Rinato: Spanish and Italian Courtly Fictions of Crusade -- Conclusion: The Ministry of Culture -- Bibliography -- Index

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Shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts shaped imperial thought in the Middle AgesA probing inquiry into medieval court struggles, this book shows the relationship between intellectual conflict and the geopolitics of empire. It examines the Persian Buyids' takeover of the great Arab caliphate in Iraq, the counter-Crusade under Saladin, and the literature of sovereignty in Spain and Italy at the cusp of the Renaissance. The question of high culture-who best qualified as a poet, the function of race and religion in forming a courtier, what languages to use in which official ceremonies-drove much of medieval writing, and even policy itself. From the last moments of the Abbasid Empire, to the military campaign for Jerusalem, to the rise of Crusades literature in spoken Romance languages, authors and patrons took a competitive stance as a way to assert their place in a shifting imperial landscape.Key FeaturesCovers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric and Italian narrative works from 950-1350 CEProvides new critical context for historians' work to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era's Islamic and Christian empiresArgues that medieval thinkers' most pressing cultural challenge was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional warShows how the ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups' rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

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In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jun 2022)