Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section I NEW CONTEXTS FOR CLASSICAL PAGAN CULTURE
- Section II NEW CONTEXTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN PAST
- Old Martyrs, New Martyrs and the Coming of Islam: writing hagiography after the conquests
- Slavonic Kontakaria and Their Byzantine Counterparts: adapting a liturgical tradition
- Old Traditions and New Models: travelling monks in the late Byzantine hagiography from the Balkans
- The Authority of the Church Fathers in Sixteenth-Century Polish Sermons: Jakub Wujek, Grzegorz of żarnowiec and their postils
- Section III INTELLECTUAL INTERMEDIARIES BETWEEN CULTURES
- Section IV INTERCULTURAL CONTACTS AND DOMESTIC AGENDAS
Old Martyrs, New Martyrs and the Coming of Islam: writing hagiography after the conquests
from Section II - NEW CONTEXTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN PAST
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section I NEW CONTEXTS FOR CLASSICAL PAGAN CULTURE
- Section II NEW CONTEXTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN PAST
- Old Martyrs, New Martyrs and the Coming of Islam: writing hagiography after the conquests
- Slavonic Kontakaria and Their Byzantine Counterparts: adapting a liturgical tradition
- Old Traditions and New Models: travelling monks in the late Byzantine hagiography from the Balkans
- The Authority of the Church Fathers in Sixteenth-Century Polish Sermons: Jakub Wujek, Grzegorz of żarnowiec and their postils
- Section III INTELLECTUAL INTERMEDIARIES BETWEEN CULTURES
- Section IV INTERCULTURAL CONTACTS AND DOMESTIC AGENDAS
Summary
Introduction
Around the year 775, a monk known as Joshua the Stylite completed a four-part history of the world in Syriac. The text, surviving in a unique manuscript, is known to scholars today as the Chronicle of Zuqnīn. The fourth and final section of the Chronicle details the social and economic hardships facing Christians in the Jazīra (northern Mesopotamia) in the aftermath of the 'Abbasid revolution (ca. 750–775). It was a time of extreme suffering, when rapacious officials of the new regime taxed, intimidated, and beat the Christian population into submission. Through Joshua's rich descriptions of everyday life, we can witness the kinds of indignities that greased the way for large-scale conversions to Islam in the years to come.
Two-thirds of the way through Part IV, Joshua describes the punishments inflicted on individuals who disobeyed the ‘Abbasids’. Officials would strike them with rods and planks, crushing their heads, hands, and flanks. At other times, they would rip away their arms and breasts, forcing them to march naked into the snow. Joshua also mentions a device called the ‘walnut’, which Muslim officials would place over the eyes of their victims, causing them to nearly pop out of their sockets.
Joshua's litany of tortures calls to mind the theatrical punishments inflicted on the martyrs of early Christian times. His allusion was far from accidental.
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- Cultures in MotionStudies in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, pp. 89 - 112Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2014