TABOR - Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Romanian Orthodox Church
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Mission and challenges of alterity at the Christianitas frontiers: The Crusade and its meanings in Central-Eastern Europe
The crusade and its multiple meanings continue to provide some of the topics of interest to authors interested in church history and medieval studies. If the confessional dimension envisaged by the medieval intellectual elite - trained in the ecclesiastical cultural paradigm in legitimizing this series of impulses of the new church-society relationship, dynamized by the enthusiasm that followed the Great Fright - recommends this form of collective solidarity - involving the mobilization of a large number of clergy, nobles, peasants and artisans inspired by the ideal of fighting in the service of the Christian faith - as a phenomenon with social and economic implications, as a medieval phenomenon par excellence, in the sense of the Universalist vision theorized by St. Augustine, the dynamics of these movements, and especially the evolutions they have made at the borders of the Christian world, suggest the superficial character of the rhetoric regarding the stagnation and immobility of medieval society, as well as the evolution of this phenomenon from its function of instrumentum Ecclesiae to that of instrumentum nationis. At the end of the Middle Ages, the Crusade is embedded into the identity heritage of medieval and pre-modern national actors and becomes a catalyst of regional political and spiritual competition.
 

FLORIAN DUMITRU SOPORAN