Power Elites During Changes of Rulership and Religion: Transcultural Perspectives (c. 500–1600)

• Applicant: Dr. Eric Böhme
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543670315

Research discussion on the phenomena (i) changes in rulership, (ii) conquest processes, and (iii) elite groups has recently been particularly productive, both in Medieval Studies and in related disciplines. Building on that, the planned network will focus on a hitherto neglected subject that connects the discussion on these three topics. The areas of investigation will be socio-political systems that underwent significant crisis and upheaval situations due to changes of rulership resulting from processes of conquest. In the cases to be studied, immediate or medium-term shifts in the politically dominant religion mark a particularly disruptive factor in the transitioning processes. Yet, the shifts of constellation caused by the change of rulership and its aftermath on the macro level merely provide the framework for the actual centre of analysis: elite groups which held concrete political power within the old system, as well as their agency in the context of the change of rulership and religion, its initiation, course, and aftermath. With a consensual understanding of rulership, it will be analysed how these elites engaged in processes of communication, interaction, and negotiation with the new rulers and their subordinate elites immigrating into the conquered territory, and how these processes were influenced by the change in the politically dominant religion. To ensure comparability of the case studies under examination, the analysis will follow a specific grid of criteria and core questions, divided into three subcategories: (a) the initial situation before the change of rulership, (b) interaction processes during the change of rulership, and (c) further development of the situation after the change of rulership. As the central outcome of the interdisciplinary network project, all of its members will collaboratively produce a monograph that will test the methodological approach in a broad selection of 14 case studies and place the results of the individual analyses into comparative perspectives. The panorama of the case studies is to be understood in several ways: chronologically, they span the period from the Early Middle Ages to the beginning of the Early Modern period (500–1600); the geographical perspective encompasses examples from the Euromediterranean region as well as from Central America, North Africa, and Central, South, and East Asia. This transcultural and exemplary global perspective on the “medieval” millennium takes into account the fact that the phenomena to be studied were by no means limited to the Euromediterranean region but can be observed wherever societies underwent transitions due to changes of rulership and religion.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks