Dynastic Crisis Research Articles

The Inception of the Seleukid Empire

AbstractThe paper looks at the fragmentary cuneiform evidence from the initial years of Seleukos’ rule at Babylon, to explain how Macedonian authority was imposed in Mesopotamia after Alexander the Great’s death. Beyond military might and sheer opportunism, the consolidation of Seleukos’ rule in Babylon was achieved through careful negotiations of privileges and guarantees with the local temple elites. This relationship of mutual recognition was reinforced through the composition and propagation of prophetic Babylonian accounts. These were meant to interpret a period of dynastic crisis as the cosmic unfolding of a divine plan, manifested through the decisive success of Seleukos.

Early european influences on peter the great: Patrick Gordon and Franz Lefort at the еnd of the 17th century

The author examines issues connected with the expansion of European influence on the Russian elite in the late 17th century with reference to Tsar Peter I. Describing the early stages of the foreign influence on Peter the Great, the author argues that Peter’s Europeanisation became noticeable a lot later than was previously thought (i. e., when he was turning into a young man and after the dynastic crisis of 1689). An analysis of concomitant events contradicts the stereotypes still present in popular books on the history of the period, according to which the young ruler’s outlook was formed under the influence of Franz Lefort and Patrick Gordon. They were favourites of V. V. Golitsyn, a leader of a long-lived group in opposition to Peter I. As a result of this (and also because of their status as foreign officers completely dependent on the state), they did not seek any closer contacts with the young tsar. It was only after the dynastic crisis ended well for Peter I in 1689 that there was a turning point in their relationship with the tsar. Due to these factors, the first signs of the Europeanisation of Peter’s everyday life became noticeable at around this time: this can be seen in changes to his clothing and in his behaviour.

‘No Picture more Charming’: The Family Portrait in Eighteenth-Century France

During the eighteenth century, so it is conventionally argued, the family portrait underwent a decisive transformation. Hitherto stiff and formal, such pictures took on a new informality and intimacy in response to the rise of a new set of domestic ideals. In the case of French family portraiture, this narrative has continued to be rehearsed in a largely uncritical way. What has not been adequately grasped to date is the way that such pictures functioned to legitimate the sitters and, more particularly, the male head of the family in the eyes of an external beholder. Although sometimes commissioned by a royal or noble family in response to a dynastic crisis, they most often functioned to consolidate the social ascent of wealthy commoners. The changes that the family portrait underwent during this period are bound up with the shift of political authority away from the absolute monarch towards the public sphere.

Myth, Marriage, and Dynastic Crisis in LaƷamon’s Brut

In contrast to Christopher Cannon, who argues that the Brut is more descriptive than narrative, or more spatial than temporal, examination of recurrent cycles of marriage and dynastic struggle suggests a linear progression for the Brut through history.

Basarab I at the Beginnings of Wallachia. An Attempt to Recompose the Moment of His Takeover of Power

The beginnings of the Wallachian mediaeval state remain an unwritten page in mediaeval history. The absence of relevant documents apt to set a chronology, to confirm the moment that the first voivode, Basarab I, came into power, prompted the Romanian researchers to formulate viewpoints which could only be partially accepted in the scientific world. Our contribution is to try and arrange the facts logically so as to unravel the complicated file of the Romanian state genesis. In approaching the moment, two aspects of the research must be considered. The first refers to identifying, as accurately as possible, the first Wallachian voivode, which is necessary to formulate general considerations on the period during which he might have assumed power in the sub-Carpathian territories. The other aspect has to do with the entire external political context, with the moment of maximum expansion of the Golden Horde Khanate, under Nogai’s command, when the area was probably ruled by an intercessor of the fierce Tatar prince. The respite following Nogai’s assassination marked the beginning of the unification process south of the Carpathians, which we do not exactly know whether it was initiated under voivode Basarab or it was just completed by him. The dynastic crisis of Hungary, along with the Transylvanian attempts to break away from its trusteeship, also favoured the process of territorial unification south of the Carpathians. Therefore, even though Wallachia and its leader Basarab I were first mentioned in a 1324 diploma, we may assume that the first Romanian mediaeval state was already formed at the beginning of the third decade of the 14th century.

Bastards: politics, family, and law in early modern France

Preface A Note on the Text Introduction: Illegitimacy and the Political History of the Family Part I: Stigmatizing the Bastard Chapter One: Bastardy in Sixteenth-Century French Legal Doctrine and Practice Chapter Two: Jurisprudential Reform of Illegitimacy in Seventeenth-Century France Chapter Three: Royal Bastardy & Dynastic Crisis Part II: Destigmatizing the Natural Child Chapter Four: State Expansion, Social Practice, and the Quandaries of Legal Unification Chapter Five: Redefining Social Interest: The Eighteenth-Century Foundling Crisis Chapter Six: Illegitimacy and Legal Change in the French Enlightenment Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

Weibliches Mäzenatentum zwischen dynastischer Bestimmung, politischem Kalkül und höfischer Memoria

Some recent trends in the research on womens’ roles in medieval dynastic nuptial practice have focused on the cultural displacement of noblewomen through marriage, and their status as »bartered brides« in foreign courts. This essay examines the role of the foreign noblewoman as mediatrix, highlighting the cultural advantages that these women — by reason of their gender and their relocation into a foreign court — could bring to bear in their new homeland. One such advantage discussed here is the notion of »double competency« in linguistic and cultural matters: the first being the result of their prenuptial socialisation, while the second is acquired in the new dynastic homeland. I suggest that art and especially literature provided the relocated noblewoman with opportunities to mediate between the old and the new cultures. At the same time, the process of mediation made it possible for her to exert a modicum of political or social influence, or to express a didactic comment. Queen Eufemia of Norway (d. 1312), the daughter of prince Wizlaw II of Rugen, gives an instructive example of this process. As the celebrated patron of the first Old Swedish epics, the cycle of the so called Eufemiavisor (verse adaptations of three continental epics of different language, genre and matiere), Eufemia not only transferred a new genre from her Low German courtly homeland to the North, but also tried to use literary production to smooth over a dynastic and nuptial crisis that had broken out between her husband, King Hakon V. of Norway, and her favoured son-in-law, a powerful nobleman from Sweden.

The Illusion of Disloyalty: Rumours, Distrust, and Antagonism, and the Charges Brought Against the Viceroy of New Spain in the Autumn of 1808

Following his overthrow on 15 September 1808 José de Iturrigaray, Viceroy of New Spain, was sent to the Peninsula on charges of disloyalty to the king. When his indictment was reviewed by the Council of the Indies, it was found to have been constructed by the authorities in New Spain in a faulty manner. This article analyses the process through which the indictment was constructed, asking what determined the way in which the charges of treason were effectively brought against Iturrigaray and why the charges for treason got mixed up with the examination of his administration. In so doing, it helps illuminate the proceedings and attitudes of those members of the peninsular elite who backed the coup and took over government after Iturrigaray's arrest and who have remained out of the spotlight of the period's historiography. At the same time, it looks at the political culture of New Spain in the wake of the Spanish dynastic and political crisis of 1808, highlighting the changing character of publicity and public opinion.

A Poet of Our Own: The Struggle for Os Lusíadas in the Afterlife of Camões

Few works in the cultural history of early modern Europe have been so steadily regarded as canonical summits of national literary traditions as Luis de Camoes's Os Lusiadas (1572). Many have considered Camoes's epic about Vasco da Gama's voyage to India to be the nation's greatest literary achievement and the poem has come to represent Portugal better than any other cultural product of the past. The poet himself has become an icon, the unmatched singer of the glorious history of the Portuguese nation and its overseas empire. This quintessentially Portuguese canonicity, however, has not always been so evident.Immediately after his death in 1580, Camoes was repeatedly resurrected to fight in battles very different from those initially involved in the writing and publication of his poem in 1572. In this essay, I explore the struggle over the meaning and ownership of Os Lusiadas in relation to two different contexts of imperial competition in early modern Europe: Philip of Spain's annexation of Portugal in 1580 and Britain's international policies regarding both kingdoms in the mid-seventeenth-century, during the Interregnum and the beginning of the Restoration. The attempts to appropriate Camoes's epic for different political designs become apparent when we approach English and Spanish translations produced at those particular moments. These translations of Os Lusiadas participated in the fierce fight that took place to possess a text that Spanish and English intellectual elites clearly perceived as a desirable cultural and political asset. As we will see, at the Habsburg expansionist peak of 1580, several Spanish translators transformed the Portuguese Camoes into the singer of Philip's global imperial rule from a newly unified peninsula. More than seventy years later, and against a very different international landscape, an English translator would explicitly seize Os Lusiadas from its former Portuguese and Spanish proprietors to transform the poem into a tradable commodity for the enrichment of a nascent British empire, thus participating in the rebalancing of cultural and political power that took place in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.I will focus on the specific ways that the competing Spanish and English translators reworked and determined the distribution and reception of Camoes's epic through the production of historically concrete effects of meaning. I will thus examine how those translations were presented, and how the material production, the social spaces of circulation, and the early judgments about them worked to facilitate different appropriations of Os Lusiadas. Translation can be understood as a practice that allows production, redistribution, and new consumptions of the literary capital accumulated by previous works. In the moments of intense political conflict and cultural contest in Europe that I study here, translation becomes a specifically imperial cultural practice participating in that competition for cultural hegemony and political supremacy. My analysis will seek to provide the grounds for a geopolitics of imperial cultural struggle around Os Lusiadas in early modern Europe.11.In 1578 King Sebastian of Portugal died in the North African battle of Alcazarquibir leaving no direct heir to the kingdom's throne. The dynastic crisis that followed the disaster gave way to an intense legal, diplomatic, theological, and military dispute among the royal candidates who aspired to wear the Portuguese crown. Philip of Spain's final victory over his rivals prompted the union of the two peninsular kingdoms and their overseas territories, which gave birth to a global empire of unprecedented dimensions.2After having been crowned in the Courts of Tomar, Philip of Spain arrived at Lisbon in June 1581 to be acclaimed as the new king of Portugal. As soon as he stepped on the streets of the Portuguese metropolis, he eagerly asked for the great Portuguese genius, Luis de Camoes, who had died in the same city one year earlier. …

The Causes of the Thirty Years War 1618-48

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) was the most destructive conflict in Europe before the twentieth-century world wars. There are several explanations of what caused the war, but these rarely discuss the merits of alternative interpretations, nor do they make their own underlying assumptions explicit. Anglophone scholarship generally fits the war into a wider struggle against Spanish Habsburg hegemony, whereas older German writing saw it as a conflict beginning in the Holy Roman Empire but fusing with wars elsewhere. Others place greater emphasis on structural causes, interpreting the war as the culmination of a ‘General Crisis of the seventeenth century’ attributed to social, economic or environmental factors. More recently, there has been a return to the view that it was a religious war, or that it was a ‘state-building war’ related to the transition from medieval to modern political organisation. This article reviews these approaches and investigates how they work as historical explanations, before suggesting an alternative. It identifies the difficulty in defining the war as a chief obstacle to explaining its causes. While related to other European conflicts, the Thirty Years War was primarily a struggle over the political and religious order within the Empire. It was neither inevitable, nor the result of irreconcilable religious antagonism. Rather, it stemmed from a coincidence of tension within the Empire with a political and dynastic crisis within the Habsburg monarchy that undermined confidence in the emperor's ability to resolve long-standing constitutional problems.

The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe

<i>The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389</i>. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe

Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond (review)

Reviewed by: Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond Maram Epstein (bio) David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, editors. Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. x, 620 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0–674–01781–1. It is unlikely that many people, other than reviewers, will read this massive collection of sixteen essays and introduction cover to cover. Several chapters do shed a diachronic perspective on how the late Ming legacy of trauma, memory, and nostalgia informed the imaginations of late Qing and postmodern writers, but most essays have a more limited reach in addressing specific late Ming or late Qing literary phenomena. However, this criticism in no way lessens my enthusiasm for the individual chapters, most of which make important contributions to late imperial fiction studies. Furthermore, it is refreshing that the editors have attempted to project a long, long view of Chinese literary development and have rejected the artificial divide that so frequently and even more unfortunately separates fiction written after 1900 from what came before. Rather than try to treat the volume as a whole, I will organize my review according to certain themes that emerge. Chief among these are the aesthetics of writing about traumatic loss and pain, and a genealogical uncovering of how women writers appropriated the traditional male roles of witness to and authors of history. How do writers take the somatic and irrational sensations of loss and turn them into the stuff of history, a mode of writing that in the modern period is associated with realism and the metanarrative of the nation? David Der-wei Wang's brilliant concluding essay, "Second Haunting," anchors and frames the themes of the anthology by focusing on the rootless ghost (gui 鬼), "that which returns" (gui 歸), as a metaphor for the psychic processes of nostalgia. Despite the attempts of May Fourth and socialist ideologies alike to drive away ghosts as politically incorrect expressions of superstition, ghosts have returned with a vengeance in the literature of the last two decades. These modern and postmodern revenants share with their imperial ancestors yearnings for a sense of stability and for a home and past that no longer exist. As Wang suggests, postmodern ghosts have further taken on the overlay of resistance to the modern, including the rejection of the politics and aesthetics of the modern nation and its physically invigorated citizens as well as the rejection of the ideological premises of realism and rationalism. Wang's essay neatly echoes themes raised by Judith Zeitlin in "The Return of the Palace Lady: The Historical Ghost Story and Dynastic Fall." As she argues, the present's backward gaze and desire for the past is masculine, while the yearned-for past is feminine (p. 156). She suggests that this might explain the prevalence of female ghosts who haunt stories about fallen dynasties. [End Page 579] One of the surprises of this bulky anthology is that the two lengthy chapters by Wai-yee Li and Judith Zeitlin cover much of the same material: the evolving literary treatment of late Ming beauties and what this says about changing views on the fall of the Ming, especially during the late years of the Qing. The editors would have done well to streamline the bibliographic information in both articles to avoid repetition. Wai-yee Li's "Women as Emblems of Dynastic Fall in Qing Literature" discusses the representations of late Ming women and the changing views on the relationship between the individual and larger historical processes. As the fall of the Ming became more historically and emotionally distant from Qing writers, they focused their efforts on manipulating the aesthetic and universal themes associated with these women's lives. The strength of this chapter is the close readings of the Chen Yuanyuan 陳圓圓 and Lin Siniang 林四娘 stories. Chen Yuanyuan was a famed late Ming courtesan who became involved with Wu Sangui 吳三桂 (1612–1678), the military commander who joined forces with the Manchus after one of Li Zicheng's rebel leaders captured Yuanyuan. Li traces the use of the Chen Yuanyuan/Wu Sangui story through...

The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389

The Development of Flateyjarbók: Iceland and the Norwegian Dynastic Crisis of 1389

Dynastic crisis and cultural innovation: from the late Ming to the late Qing and beyond

This volume addresses cultural and literary transformation in the late Ming (1550-1644) and late Qing (1851-1911) eras. Although conventionally associated with a devastating sociopolitical crisis, each of these periods was also a time when Chinese culture was rejuvenated. Focusing on the twin themes of crisis and innovation, the seventeen chapters in this book aim to illuminate the late Ming and late Qing as eras of literary-cultural innovation during periods of imperial disintegration; to analyze linkages between the two periods and the radical heritage they bequeathed to the modern imagination; and to rethink the premodernity of the late Ming and late Qing in the context of the end of the age of modernism. The chapters touch on a remarkably wide spectrum of works, some never before discussed in English, such as poetry, drama, full-length novels, short stories, tanci narratives, newspaper articles, miscellanies, sketches, familiar essays, and public and private historical accounts. More important, they intersect on issues ranging from testimony about dynastic decline to the negotiation of authorial subjectivity, from the introduction of cultural technology to the renewal of literary convention.

David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, editors.Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond.:Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 249.)

David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, editors.<i>Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond</i>.:<i>Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond</i>. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 249.)

DAVID DER-WEI WANG and SHANG WEI, editors. Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 249.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 620. $60.00

David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, editors. Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 249.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 620. $60.00 Get access David Der-wei Wang and David Der-wei Wang, editors. Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation from the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 249.)Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 620. $60.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 111, Issue 3, June 2006, Page 939, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.3.939-a Published: 01 June 2006

Poder y finanzas en Castilla en el tránsito a la modernidad (un apunte historiográfico)

The period between 1500 and 1525 is a pivotal period in Spanish history, encompassing the dynastic crisis after Queen Isabel´s death and the revolt of Comuneros. In this article we propose a rethinking of the historiographical construction of this period as well as the influence of this tradition on new lines of research. In order to achieve this objective, we will analyse the historiography of these years from two perspectives: first, we will focus broadly on the political development of the monarchy, and secondly, we will address the historiography relating to the tax system and the financial world. We will not attempt to give a full summary of all titles published, but we will offer an overview of the current state of research.

Good luck and Allah bless

A looming dynastic crisis, on top of unprecedented social, political and economic problems, presents King Fahd's successor with some serious challenges

Consensus Politics: The Dynastic Crisis of the 1490s Reconsidered

The political conflict of the 1490s at the Muscovite court has generated numerous interpretations; inherent in each is a particular understanding of Kremlin politics. Despite the high stature and meticulous research of the scholars who have addressed the problem, their attempts to ascertain what the crisis consisted of, and who gained and lost what from it, have not been convincing. The interpretation that follows derives from my conviction that the fundamental issue in most such crises in the Muscovite period was the creation of a power and status hierarchy among leading boyar families based on succession in the ruling dynasty and in particular on the marriage of the dynastic heir.1 I will begin by offering a survey of dominant trends in the literature on this topic, preceded by a summary of the events of the crisis and the political context in which they took place. The question of dynastic succession determined the course of the crisis. When Ivan III's eldest son and designated heir, Prince Ivan Ivanovich, died in March 1490,2 the grand prince had a choice between two candidates, both eligible by the Daniilovichi's ambiguous succession principles. He might have followed a strict interpretation of primogeniture, the succession principle established by Muscovy's midfifteenth-century dynastic war; thereby he would have chosen the sixand-a-half-year-old Prince Dmitrii, son of the deceased Prince Ivan Ivanovich and of his wife Elena Stepanovna of Moldavia. Prince Dmitrii's succession might have been considered inappropriate,