War and Collective Identities in the Middle Ages: East, West, and Beyond (War and Conflict in Premodern Societies)

This book uses sociological perspectives to bring together work on war and identity in the Middle Ages relating to a range of peoples and geographical settings from Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia. Focusing on the interrelation between ideological practices and group formation, it examines the role of warfare in the emergence and decline of particular social structures, and changing patterns of collective identification. It contributes to the debate on the longue durée development of the phenomena of ethnicity and nationhood by drawing attention to the impact of war on the evolution of various types of polity and visions of community in the Middle Ages. Its use of non-European as well as European exemplars provides a wealth of fruitful comparative material, shedding new light on the relationship between medieval warfare and high-level identities. Contents 5 Notes on Contributors 7 Chapter 1. War and Peoplehood in the Middle Ages: An Introduction 9 Chapter 2. War and Peoplehood through Time: A Sociological Longue Durée Perspective 23 Chapter 3. Making War Ethnic: Arab–Persian Identities and Conflict on the Euphrates Frontier 41 Chapter 4. Captive Identities: Inscribing Armenianness from Sebēos to Ayrivanec’i 73 Chapter 5. War and Identity in Early Medieval Bulgaria 95 Chapter 6. Collective Identifications in Byzantine Civil Wars 107 Chapter 7. Warfare and Peoplehood: The Vikings and the English 125 Chapter 8. Medieval European Civil Wars: Local and Proto- national Identities of Toulousains, Parisians, and Prague Czechs 137 Chapter 9. The Crusades and French Political Identity in the Thirteenth- Century Mediterranean 161 Chapter 10. The Song– Jurchen Conflict in Chinese Intellectual History 177 Chapter 11. Faithful to a Vanishing Past: Narrating Warfare and Peoplehood in Yuan China 199 Chapter 12. War and Collective Identifications in Medieval Societies: Drawing Comparisons 211 Selected Bibliography 233 Index 239