This book uses sociological perspectives to bring together work on war and identity in the Middle Ages relating to a range of peoples and geographical settings from Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Asia. Focusing on the interrelation between ideological practices and group formation, it examines the role of warfare in the emergence and decline of particular social structures, and changing patterns of collective identification. It contributes to the debate on the longue durée development of the phenomena of ethnicity and nationhood by drawing attention to the impact of war on the evolution of various types of polity and visions of community in the Middle Ages. Its use of non-European as well as European exemplars provides a wealth of fruitful comparative material, shedding new light on the relationship between medieval warfare and high-level identities.

Yannis Stouraitis is senior lecturer in Byzantine history at the University of Edinburgh and author of Krieg und Frieden in politischer und ideologischer Wahrnehmung in Byzanz (7.-11. Jahrhundert) (2009).

Chapter 1: "War and Peoplehood in the Middle Ages: An Introduction," by Yannis Stouraitis
Chapter 2: "War and Peoplehood through Time: A Sociological Longue Durée Perspective," by Siniša Malešević
Chapter 3: "Making War Ethnic: Identity and Conflict on the Arabian-Mesopotamian Frontier," by Peter Webb
Chapter 4: "Captive Identities: Inscribing Armenianness from Sebēos to Ayrivanec‘i," by Sergio La Porta
Chapter 5: "War and Identity in Early Medieval Bulgaria," by Panos Sophoulis
Chapter 6: "Collective Identifications in Byzantine Civil Wars," by Yannis Stouraitis
Chapter 7: "Warfare and Peoplehood: The Vikings and the English," by Clare Downham
Chapter 8: "Medieval European Civil Wars, Local and Proto-National Identities of Toulousains, Czechs in Prague, and Parisians," by Philippe Buc
Chapter 9: "The Crusades and French Political Identity in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean," by Gregory E. M. Lippiatt
Chapter 10: "The Song-Jurchen Conflict in Chinese Intellectual History," by Shao-yun Yang
Chapter 11: "Faithful to a Vanishing Past: Narrating Warfare and Peoplehood in Yuan China," by Francesca Fiaschetti
Chapter 12: "War and Collective Identifications in Medieval Societies: Drawing Comparisons," by Yannis Stouraitis
Selected Bibliography