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An Empire of Memory - The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,372
Discovery Miles 13 720
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An Empire of Memory - The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Paperback)
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Total price: R1,382
Discovery Miles: 13 820
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Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants
of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it
an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped
contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth,
tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with
each retelling, almost always including the Christian East.
Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been
strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on
the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period
because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the
ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and
intellectual developments of the intervening years. Paradoxically,
Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The
legend became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they
had held God's favour under Charlemagne and held out hope that they
could one day reclaim their special place in sacred history.
Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of
a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation for the
last battle between good and evil, promised just this to the
Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious violence
were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could remind men
of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to take up arms,
march to the East, and reclaim their place as defenders of the
faith during the First Crusade. An Empire of Memory uses the legend
of Charlemagne, an often-overlooked current in early medieval
thought, to look at how the contours of the relationship between
East and West moved across centuries, particularly in the period
leading up to the First Crusade.
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