Am Montag, dem 03. März 2020, findet ab 17.15 Uhr im Elise-Richter-Saal im Hauptgebäude der Universität Wien das 244. Institutsseminar des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung statt. Es spricht Lorenzo Pubblici (Director of the Center for Studies on Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, Florence) zum Thema:

The Mongols and Europe: Building common economic and political spaces in medieval Eurasi

The Fourth Crusade and the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire shot down the Bosphorus “barrier” and opened new perspectives for the Western merchants that populated the Byzantine territory.

In the same years, the Mongols penetrated Eastern Europe and subjugated an impressive number of States, giving birth to the largest empire ever existed. After decades of warfare, the Mongols realized that it was necessary to initiate the reconstruction. The Mongol empire was soon divided into four khanates. The Westernmost of them, the Golden Horde, bordered with the declining States created by the Latins in the East.

The Mongol conquest favored the interconnections into Eurasia and the Italian Sea Republics – Genoa and Venice – were the most prepared to pick the chance. The two Italian cities invested considerable efforts to penetrate the Mongol Empire and frequent those markets, whose potentialities in terms of profit were immense. In other words, the Mongol conquest opened new horizons to the Europeans (traders, missionaries, adventurers, etc.) and favored unprecedented intercontinental connections, at least in the decades commonly called Mongol Peace. But was the so-called Mongol Peace (Pax Mongolica) historical reality or is it more of a (successful) historiographical category?

In this talk, I will try to illustrate the most recent acquisitions of historical research and to
explain the point of view of Western sources with particular attention to the Venetian ones.

Die Veranstaltung ist wie alle Institutsseminare öffentlich, Gäste sind herzlich willkommen. Die Einladung im PDF-Format finden Sie hier.