CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Vasiljevic, Bojana |
|---|---|
| Title | "Fear of the Turks": Monastic Discourse on the Ottoman Threat in 14th- and 15th-century Serbian Territories |
| Summary | The thesis analyzes late medieval Serbian texts, primarily produced by the members of monastic communities, regarding the fear of the Ottoman presence in the Serbian lands. These popular historical sources have traditionally been used to demonstrate the many hardships the Serbian population had to endure during the beginning of the era of Ottoman domination in the Balkans. In that way, late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century writings of Serbian monks were conceptualized as important arguments in support of the nineteenth-century historiographical construct of “five centuries of Turkish yoke” in Serbia. The thesis analyzes these texts through the theoretical and methodological paradigm of the history of emotions as outlined by Barbara H. Rosenwein. Specifically, it conceptualizes the monastic sources as products of an emotional community and focuses on the discursive analysis of emotives—speech acts capable of social/emotional transformation through their very utterance. The thesis demonstrates that the “fear of the Turks” was an aspect of the broader apocalyptic discourse shared by the learned Byzantine theologians of the era. Moreover, the Athonite monks, primarily the members of the Byzantine Orthodox community, were also concerned with the recent schism between the Serbian Church and the patriarchate of Constantinople and the widely shared belief of the impending end of the world. The main cause behind the storied “fear of the Turks” thus does not lie in the Ottoman actions in the Balkans alone, but in the monks’ appropriation of a Byzantine apocalyptic narrative in order to promote the unity and the interests of the Orthodox Commonwealth. |
| Supervisor | Krstić, Tijana |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/vasiljevic_bojana.pdf |
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