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The genealogies of peoples and families developed in Europe during the modern period are prevalently studied by scholars from the perspective of the political history of ideas, with the aim of explaining the practical utility of genealogical works. These analyses do not foreground the aspect that is the focus of this paper: the fact that genealogical reconstructions are full of absurdities. They mix factual information, or information that may seem credible, with fabulous details, often false, sometimes ridiculous, in a word "incredible". This is all the more interesting since these texts were composed during the centuries in which scientific methods applied to historical research were developed. Using tools borrowed from cultural anthropology, this paper suggests an epistemological approach that takes into consideration the meaning and credibility of the genealogical materials in the still authoritative framework of the Historia Salutis, the unitary vision of human history as a fusion of the classical legacy and Biblical tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the hitherto unknown beginnings of the Ottoman-Russian imperial rivalry by focusing on the mid-16th-century encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy over the North Caucasus, where the ambitions of these two asymmetric powers--the Ottomans being an established "super power" and the Muscovites a rising power--became entangled for the first time. This first encounter, which was the harbinger of many future engagements not only in this region but also in the broader steppe frontier around the Black Sea, was more of a "cold war" rather than a military confrontation, as both the Ottomans and the Muscovites rather preferred to establish spheres of influence and eventually their hegemony over the North Caucasus through their vassals and clients. In addition to demonstrating the Tsardom of Muscovy's initial claims and policies over the North Caucasus, this study will shed light on the reasons of the Ottoman failure to transform their nominal claims over the region to a de facto hegemony similar to what they had established over Eastern European principalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a "third world" rose to prominence in international political discourse around 1960 and vanished around 1990. It designated a group of countries aligned with neither of the two other worlds. I argue in this article that the term needs to be situated in a larger history of the perception of global difference at least as old as the Enlightenment. The peculiar career of the concept of the "third world" is connected both to changes in the order of knowledge and, more specifically, to the history of economic thought, of which it is an effect. The paper thus focuses on the emergence of the term around 1960 and investigates the irrelevance of economics in late colonialism as opposed to the prominence of economic experts in the post-1945 world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While medieval diplomacy in general has lately attracted the attention of several German scholars, the more specific subject of political relations between Islamic and Christian powers is far less studied and has not yet received the same attention in Germany as it has elsewhere. One of this article's aims is therefore to open up the field of intercultural diplomacy for future research by surveying recent scholarship and approaches. More importantly, the paper focuses on five systematic questions: Did the quality of political relations between Christian and Islamic powers in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean undergo long-term shifts? Did religion play a significant role within this sphere, either as an obstacle or as a facilitator? Which particular traits distinguished interreligious diplomacy from intra religious political relations? To what extent were these particularities due to the specific conditions of the medieval Mediterranean? And did this historical region therefore make a distinct contribution to the history of diplomacy? Although religion undoubtedly presented an important normative framework for intercultural relations, functional pragmatism, the creation of intermediary institutions and the prominent role of certain societal groups must be seen as equally important features. The medieval Mediterranean thus presents itself as a source of innovative impulses for the field of premodern political relations, which deserves further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with Russian Orthodoxy in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian empire, a topic rarely addressed in scholarly literature that usually focuses on Lutheran Estonians and Latvians whereas their orthodox compatriots are neglected. However, the scope of this text is limited since it concentrates on the question if orthodoxy actually brought Estonians and Latvians closer to Russia. In other words, did Orthodoxy play the role ascribed to it in Russian nationalist discourse, namely did it “russify” the Baltic provinces? After a short discussion of the emergence of Orthodoxy as a religious factor in the region during the mass conversions of Estonians and Latvians in the 1840s, the article provides some basic information about the orthodox population of the Baltic Provinces. Then it goes on to introduce the Riga Theological Seminary established in 1850 as a school for the local orthodox clergy initially meant for Russians, but also for Estonians and Latvians. However, according to an anonymous brochure supposedly written by an orthodox Latvian in 1882, there were many conflicts on ethnic grounds among the orthodox elites in the Baltic provinces. This brochure namely defended the impact of Estonians and Latvians on the Riga Seminary against accusations of their Russian brothers in faith who blamed all problems of Orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces solely on the non-Russian clergy. Although we still do not know enough about the history of this institution, it is indicative of the self-awareness of the seminarists of local origin that the anonymous author uses one of the key-terms of the Russian “language of assimilation” (Austin Jersild), “sblizhenie” (“confluence”), in a quite unusual way since in his usage, priests of Russian origin in the Baltic borderland had to adapt oneself to local circumstances. Thus even people who supposedly were chosen by the Russian imperial elites as proponents of Russia’s mission in the non-Russian peripheries, already prior to Alexander’s III centralising reforms in the Baltic provinces decidedly protested against any attempts to simply impose Russian customs and traditions on the local environment. When in 1908 a congress of the Riga eparchy seriously debated the introduction of Lutheran patterns of choir singing in orthodox services in order to make the latter more attractive to the local population, it thus admitted quite pragmatically that the orthodox objective in the Baltic provinces should only be to save and to care for what had already been achieved. As the conclusion shows, however, still on the eve of the First World War in orthodox discourse a “natural” form of Russification of Estonians and Latvians remained the ultimate goal of the imperial orthodox idea. As this paper argues, this vision considerably underestimated the level of self-awareness reached by Estonians and Latvians already by the 1880s.

The events of the Slovak-Hungarian “Little War” are closely connected to the circumstances of Hungary’s re-annexation of Sub-Carpathia in March 1939, which took place under the motto of re-establishing a common Hungarian-Polish border. Corps belonging to the Carpathian section of the Hungarian army advanced into Sub-Carpathia and then proceeded to attack Slovak territories. Hungaryʼs official explanation for its occupation of Sub-Carpathia ran as follows: since Slovakia has become an independent state and thus Czechoslovakia no longer exists as a state, the Viennese arbitration is no longer valid. Hungary has won the right to exercise its claim to Sub-Carpathia. The military conflict between Slovakia and Hungary came to an end when Germany intervened and ordered the two parties to conduct bilateral negotiations with a view to reaching an agreement. At the negotiations on March 28, 1939, the parties agreed to end hostilities and to establish a neutral zone between the two armies. They also agreed that Hungarian troops might remain at their occupied positions. On March 28 the Slovak delegation announced claims on Hungarian territory by way of compensation, but the Hungarian government rejected these claims. Germany offered no support to the Slovaks on the border issue; indeed, on April 7 Slovak troops were even required to withdraw from various settlements on the Slovak side of the demarcation line. On April 3, 1939, the German Ambassador to Budapest, Otto von Erdmannsdorff, paid a visit to the Hungarian foreign minister, István Csáky; in the course of their discussions, the two men touched upon the issue of the border established with Slovakia. The Ambassador informed Csáky that the Slovak government had turned to Germany for support, but that it had been told that under the circumstances any attempt at the full restoration of the old border, which was Slovakia’s wish, would be futile. The German Ambassador then asked Csáky whether the Hungarian government would be willing to make certain territorial concessions. Csáky responded that this would be inconceivable — “where Hungarian soldiers have trodden, they will stay”. Hungary could keep the 60-kilometre long and 20-kilometre wide strip of land that it had taken from Slovakia. The Hungarian authorities attached the area of land Sub-Carpathia, of which it remained a part until 1944. In 1945 the newly re-established Czechoslovakia was obliged to surrender the railway line between Csap and Ungvár as well as the Ung line: the Czechoslovak-Soviet border — today’s frontier between Slovakia and Ukraine — was drawn ten to fifteen kilometres further west. During its engagements with the Slovak armed forces from March 23–28, 1939, the Hungarian army suffered 25 fatal and 56 non-fatal casualties; it captured 360 Slovak and 211 Czech/Moravian soldiers.

The goal of the study is to describe the attitude of Budapest to the election of the President of the Republic in Czechoslovakia in December 1935, electing the successor to Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic who had been in office long years. The election of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic in late 1935 was the first presidential election with active participation of the opposition and negativistic Hungarian minority legislators of the Czechoslovak National Assembly from both Hungarian minority parliamentary parties, the Land Christian-Socialist Party (OKSzP) and the Hungarian National Party (MNP) who had always cast empty votes in presidential elections until that time, to declare their negativistic attitude to the constitutional limits of the Czech Republic. In 1935, they even supported the presidential candidate Edvard Beneš, the Foreign Minister to whom the Hungarian minority political representation including the very Budapest had a very negative attitude as he had been one of the main architects of the Versailles rearrangement of Central Europe after World War I, refused by the Hungarians, as the Hungarian state had lost two thirds of its territory and about seven hundred and fifty thousand Hungarians landed in Czechoslovakia in position of national and non-state-constituting minority due to it. But in spite of that fact, the Hungarian minority legislators from OKSzP and MNP, with political support of Budapest, sided with Benešʼs candidacy; thus the Hungarian minority was the only one out of the two large negativistic national minorities of the Czechoslovak Republic of that time, besides the minority Germans whose representatives in the Czechoslovak Parliament, on behalf of the opposition and negativistic OKSzP and MNP parties took an activistic attitude, increasing the national-political and the foreign-political prestige of Edvard Benešʼs presidential mandate.