Antemurale Christianitatis

This impressive work is the first attempt at a general history of the so-called antemurale christianitatis rhetoric in Central and Eastern Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. The antemurale christianitatis motif (often rendered into English as ‘Bulwark of Christendom’), was a staple feature in the literature, orations, historical works and diplomatic correspondence of the time, where royal and princely courts on the borders of Christendom presented themselves and the lands they ruled as ‘shields’ or ‘bulwarks’, whose gallant efforts protected the rest of Christendom from external military, religious and ideological threats. Paul Srodecki takes as his focus the use, deployment and diffusion of this rhetorical set-piece in the region of Central and Eastern Europe between roughly the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a primary focus on the Teutonic Order and the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary. The geographical and chronological scope of Srodecki’s book is impressive. After a wide-ranging theoretical and methodological introduction (including, among other things, a discussion of Aristotelian philosophy and modern scholarship on discursive analysis), Srodecki focuses on the early forms of the antemurale topos in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as used by the Teutonic Order and then the Piasts and Árpadians—the ruling dynasties of Poland and Hungary respectively. The author then surveys the various invocations of antemurale -related rhetoric made by the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Poland during their bitter conflict over the Baltic littoral during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, before a brief section on the role which humanism and its major figures, notably Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–64), played in helping to diffuse antemurale rhetoric throughout Christendom after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The next two chapters largely focus on Hungary and Poland, with smaller sections on Moldavia, Russia, and the Crimean Khanate. Particular attention here is paid to the efforts of Hungarian and Polish rulers to resist the Ottoman threat, and the various ends to which antemurale rhetoric could be used. It could function not just as a framework with which rulers could present their campaigns to resist the Turks to the Papacy and others, but it could also help legitimate their own rule and encourage their fellow Christian princes to aid them in their efforts against the Ottomans. The penultimate chapter takes the coverage of antemurale rhetoric into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with reference to the impact of printing and the confessional splits caused by the Reformation, and the final chapter into the modern period

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