Die Slawen im Mittelalter zwischen Idee und Wirklichkeit

Europe is home to around 250 million speakers of Slavic languages, making it over a third Slavic. What does this mean for the understanding of European culture and history? Does the Slavic-speaking population of Europe possess a distinct Slavic consciousness, a specific Slavic culture, and history? Based on this question, Eduard Mühle tells the story of the Slavs in the Middle Ages in a completely new way. Drawing on extensive source studies, he presents a dual perspective. On one hand, he describes the real historical structures—from the early Slavic population groups and their first forms of rule in the 7th to 9th centuries, through the Slavic-speaking kingdoms and nations of the 10th to 12th centuries, to the late medieval societies of the 13th to early 15th centuries. On the other hand, he examines the foreign and self-images through which the Slavs have been repeatedly constructed or invented as a cultural entity since the 6th century, and shows how these images were politically instrumentalized in various contexts and for different purposes even in the Middle Ages.