Crime and punishment early modern russia | European history after 1450 cambridge.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cambridge.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Was Repin’s masterpiece inspired by a fictitious Cossack letter? The main intrigue is whether the correspondence in question was ever written.
In the 1670s, the Ottoman Empire clashed with the Tsardom of Russia. Two hundred years later, renowned realist painter Ilya Repin heard a story about Cossacks composing a humiliating letter to Mehmed IV, the Sultan of the hostile Ottoman Empire. Ptuj Ormož Regional Museum, Slovenia
The story inspired Repin to create one of his greatest masterpieces. While many believe not least due to Repin’s artistic endeavor that the letter was a genuine historical document, historians express their reservations.
Westminster history professor’s new book examines Russian royal weddings
Share on:
A new book by
Dr. Russell E. Martin, professor of history at Westminster College, explores how royal weddings in early modern Russia were choreographed to broadcast powerful images of monarchy and dynasty.
The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russia’s Rulers, 1495-1745 shows how the vast, ornate affairs of royal weddings reflected and shaped court politics during a time of dramatic cultural and dynastic change.
Using an array of archival sources, Martin shows how the rites of passage in these ceremonies functioned as dazzling displays of monarchical power unlike any other ritual at the Muscovite court. And as dynasties came and went and the political culture evolved, wedding rituals become important symbolic expressions of dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Martin also relates how Peter the Great remade wedding rituals to symbolize and empower his effor