At the gate of Christendom

"Modern life in increasingly heterogeneous societies has directed attention to patterns of cultural interactions. While scholars have often used the binary framework of persecution and tolerance to understand such interaction, this book argues that both exclusion and integration simultaneously characterised medieval non-Christian status. It compares the place of Jews, Muslims and nomad Cumans between 1000 and 1300 in Hungary, a kingdom on the frontier of Christendom." "A complex picture of non-Christian status emerges from the analysis of economic, social, legal, and religious positions and roles. Existence on the frontier with the nomadic world led to the formulation of a frontier ideology, and to anxiety about Hungary's detachment from Christendom. The author uses a variety of written and material evidence, including Latin charters and laws, rabbinical responses, accounts by Muslim travellers, and archaeological finds, and draws upon analogies with other areas of medieval Christendom. The study also succeeds in integrating central European history into the study of the medieval world, while challenging how the concepts of frontier societies, persecution and tolerance, ethnicity, and 'the other' are currently used in medieval studies."--Jacket.