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
|
|
