Institute for Medieval Studies

Session	1211
Title	Identity and Othering, V: Christian Defamations and Appropriations of Islam
Date/Time	Wednesday 15 July 2009: 14.15-15.45
Organiser	IMC Programming Committee
Moderator/Chair	Sini Kangas, History, Philosophy & Literary Studies Unit, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University
Paper 1211-a	Conversion, Collaboration, and Confrontation: Islam in the Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the 14th Century (Language: English) Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien Index Terms: Byzantine Studies; Ecclesiastical History; Islamic and Arabic Studies; Social History
Paper 1211-b	The Legend of Mohamed in the Medieval Christian Thought of Dante Alighieri (Language: English) Claudia Di Fonzo, Istituto di Studi Umanistici, Università di Firenze Index Terms: Islamic and Arabic Studies; Language and Literature - Comparative; Language and Literature - Italian; Language and Literature - Latin
Paper 1211-c	Acceptance and Rejection of Ottoman Power in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Hungary and its Orthodox Vassal States: The Hunyadi Crusaders and their Ottoman Counterparts (Language: English) Alexandru Simon, Centrul de Studii Transilvane, Academia Romane, Cluj-Napoca
Abstract	One of the principal means by which the Christian orthodoxies defined themselves was through their defamation of Islam. This session explores aspects of this central cultural issue, with approaches drawing on archival, literary, and visual sources. Paper -a: The Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains many valuable documents of the period 1315-1402, is one of the most important sources for the (church) history of this time of renewed Muslim expansion at Byzantium's cost. In this paper it will be analyzed how Islam is being described in those documents in regard to the terminology and the framework of traditional Byzantine polemics (Islam as a Christian heresy or a discrete religion?). Last aspect of survey will be the reaction of the Byzantine laymen but also of the lower and high clerics to the Islamic expansion - whether in form of confrontation, collaboration, or even conversion. Paper -b: In the paper will be showed the Christian medieval thinking about the Islam and the diffusion of the legend of Mohamed; it will be clear the way of thinking of the most famous poet of Italian literature of the medieval time (Dante Alighieri) and his views and regarding Muslim religion and the idea that it was an heretic version of the Christian religion. Paper -c: The paper attempts to explore how royal Hungarian ideology, politics and propaganda: moved from strongly rejecting Islamic Ottoman power to promoting the 'story' of the Ottoman blood-relatives of John Hunyadi and King Matthias Corvinus. The paper further investigates how this evolution affected the 'Ottoman stands' of the Orthodox vassal states of the Hungarian realm, a realm that nonetheless upheld and continued to claim the status of Christendom's bulwark throughtout this peculiar evolution.