IMC 2009: Sessions

Session 510: Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantine, and Islamic Spheres: Righteous Peoples and Errant Outsiders, IV

Tuesday 14 July 2009, 09.00-10.30

Sponsor:	Society for the Medieval Mediterranean
Organiser:	Jonathan Shepard, Independent Scholar, Oxford
Moderator/Chair:	Björn Weiler, Department of History & Welsh History, Aberystwyth University
Paper 510-a	The Battle of 'Ayn Jalut: An Islamic Myth (Language: English) Amalia Levanoni, Department of Middle Eastern History, University of Haifa Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Military History
Paper 510-b	Frankish Captives and Mamluk Society in a Post-Crusades Context (Language: English) Julien Loiseau, Centre de recherche sur les pays méditerranéens au Moyen Âge (CREPMA), Université de Montpellier III - Paul Valéry Index terms: Crusades, Islamic and Arabic Studies
Paper 510-c	After the Fourth Crusade: Michael Choniates, Orthodoxy, and the Defence of Local Interests (Language: English) C. Teresa M. Shawcross, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Politics and Diplomacy
Abstract	Our prime concern is with the ways in which the authorities within each sphere defined their orthodoxy in relationship to the beliefs, ideology, and practices of the other spheres, especially in overt antithesis to them. In other words, we shall be considering how far regimes could gain or maintain a reputation for religious orthodoxy and thus political legitimacy through stirring up or leading opposition to the beliefs of 'Latins', 'Greeks', 'Saracens', or other errant outsiders. The one could gain in self-definition and self-righteousness and a kind of self-sealant commonality through identifying and indicting the defects of the other, sometimes to the death.