Regicide

Le régicide de Bamberg au début du XIIIe siècle a longtemps été expliqué par les théories du complot et d’une vengeance. Cet article propose, cependant, une relecture des sources contemporaines par une approche constructiviste permettant de reconstituer les différentes perceptions des auteurs. Il en ressort qu’une double lecture peut être faite de la représentation contemporaine de l’assassinat de Philippe de Souabe. Premièrement, malgré les récits divergents, tous leurs auteurs s’accordent à reconnaitre que le crime, au-delà de l’affront personnel, participe étroitement d’un conflit d’honneur. Deuxièmement, les partisans
comme les opposants de Philippe ont condamné unanimement l’assassinat. La raison en est simple : aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, dans le Saint-Empire, le régicide ne faisait pas partie de la pratique politique, parce qu’il n’était pas une composante légitime de la culture politique.

    The regicide of Bamberg in the early thirteenth century has long been explained by conspiracy and revenge theories. This article, however, proposes a re-reading of contemporary sources through a constructivist approach that allows the reconstruction of the different authors perceptions. It was found that the contemporary representation of Philip of Swabia’s murder can be read in two ways. Firstly, despite the divergent accounts, all the authors agree that the crime, beyond the personal affront, is closely related to a conflict of honour. Secondly, both supporters and opponents of Philip unanimously condemned the murder. The reason for
this is simple : during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the Holy Roman Empire, regicide was not part of political practice, because it was not a legitimate component of political culture.

Comparative Analysis of John Locke's Second Trestise of Government and Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince and Discourses of the Livy.
Author: Angel Versetti

"A wise ruler should nip any rebellion in the bud, claims Machiavelli’s Prince. Yet people have a right to rebel even against the shadow of tyranny, according to Locke’s Second Treatise. These two notions might suggest eternal confrontation between the oppressive ruler and rebellious citizenry, paranoid and suspicious of each other’s schemes. This is where the moderating approach from Machiavelli’s Discourses comes in: rebellion is a nuisance, but since the ruler needs the power of people to assist him in his quest for glory, let them rant and mob a bit.""

Kings of Disaster is a comparative, ethnographic study of the political systems of the the Bari, Lulubo, Lokoya, Pari and Lotuho, peoples who inhabit the East Bank of the Nile in Equatoria, South Sudan. The political systems are structured by the principle of consensual antagonism, the king operating as the unifying antagonist of the combined segments that constitute his people. Regicide as it is practiced by these peoples is a direct consequence of the king’s role as its political antagonist.
Kingship ritual is an unmistakeable makeover of the scapegoat mechanism, the model of consensual antagonism as René Girard first formulated it: he king’s installation is framed as the capture of an unwilling victim while his natural death is dramatized as a double transfiguration, as demon and as god. 
The book has four parts.  Part One presents the theoretical framework and the historical context of the kingdoms.  The dozen or so kingdoms where information was collected vary in size – between a thousand and a hundred thousand subjects per king. They practice a dual system of governance; on one side are the king/rainmaker and his clan, clients and other followers, on the other side the monyomiji, the age-grade of middle-aged men who rule as a corporate group for a fixed period varying from 10 and 24 years.The book is about the dynamic relationship between the kings and their peoples, the latter being normally represented by their monyomiji. The two core responsibilities of the monyomiji are warfare and the management of the relationship with the king. They ensure that the king provides the community with a timely and well-dosed supply of rain. They keep him happy by meeting his demands since royal anger is bad for the rain.  When the rains fail, the monyomiji carry out investigations and take measures against any group or person suspected of intentionally or accidentally stopping the rain. If drought persists, the blame will be put on the king. The monyomiji will confront him, if necessary use force in obtaining a confession regarding the cause of the disaster. During a king's career, periods during which he is worshipped like a god alternate with episodes of vicious confrontation when he is demonized, tortured, or even killed when a stand-off with the monyomiji escalates beyond repair.
Part Two, ‘Dualism’, analyzes the nature of relations between territorial and age- and generation based groups using Evans-Pritchard’s model of complementary, segmentary opposition. When disputes between these groups cannot be resolved by negotiations, the conflict parties have a stick fight. The winner is put in the right. A more or less fragile balance of power defines intergroup relations.   
Part Three, ‘Centralism’, deals with the relationship between king and people. Both king and monyomiji are jealous of their power and keenly intent on making the power balance tilt in their favour. As a rule, the balance will swing back and forth, one year the king is calling the shots, the next it is the monyomiji. 
In situations of war, when the confrontation between different kingdoms overrides internal divisions, king and monyomiji make common cause. When kings have the full support of the warrior class they obtain a de facto control over the legitimate use of force - the Weberian criterion that distinguishes states from pre-state social formations. A state-like configuration emerges that has characteristics in common with historic states: regimes of king and monyomiji who try to stay in power by preventing the junior generation from taking over. This has resulted in outright repression of the juniors when they resist the new regime, or in an exodus of juniors  as happened in Imatari in the middle of the nineteenth century and in Lafon in the beginning of the twentieth century.
From an evolutionary perspective these regimes can be considered cases of attempted endogenous state formation. They refute the widely held consensus that the first states could only have been the result of conquest.  The evidence also refutes the time-honoured anthropological consensus that there is a deep divide between the power dynamic animating stateless, segmentary, societies and the one that makes centralized, hierarchical, systems tick. The closing of ranks between the king and monyomiji, evoked in the previous paragraph, is a perfect example of complementary opposition: the more inclusive social segments that compose the political body of the kingdom merge when confronted with a political entity of the same order of inclusion.
When a war is over, there are two possible scenarios of the aftermath. In case of a victory of  the kingdom. (the merger of king and monyomiji), either another enemy will be picked to strenthen the emerging state configuration, or, depending on the phase  in the cycle of generational succession and the restlessness of the junior generation, king and monyomiji  may prioritize internal stability by consolidating their grip on the upcoming generation.
If a war ended in defeat, the coalition of king and monyomiji was likely to fall apart, offering chances to the new generation, leaving the king weakened and vulnerable. Local oral traditions tell about monyomiji abnegating their king altogether to the point of abolishing the institution of kingship (Chapter 15). These traditions are evidence of a back and forth between horizontal segmentary antagonism and vertical king-people antagonism.  By their proneness to rivalry in the royal family, coupled with the antagonism between territorial segments and successive generations,  these early kingships striving for statehood, remained  very fragile. This fragility may be the reason that examples of similar configurations are rare in the ethnographic literature. 
Part Four zooms in on the king as scapegoat. In his role as his people’s unifying adversary, the king is the ultimate target of blame when the community is stricken by disaster. The case-studies show that the killing of the king is not an impulsive, collective act. The tension builds up slowly and is political. Alternative wrongdoers are identified and all sorts of remedies are tried  before the collective anger converges on the king. In line with the logic of segmentary antagonism the killing community justifies the murder as an act of revenge. Kings of Disaster presents and analyzes more than twenty cases, some of them contemporary to the field work, in which kings or queens lost their lives in confrontations with their united subjects. These cases are undisputable evidence that the practice of regicide on which Frazer had built his majestic The Golden Bough really existed. The practice was disputed by later anthropologists who pointed at the ambiguity of the ethnographic evidence and argued that early observers had been misled by their colonial perceptions. 
The king is not only a scapegoat in what is fundamentally a political game. His career as king is ritualized as a deferred victimhood. From the day of his installation (staged as a capture, a deliberate contamination with his people’s diseases, or a condemnation), he is his people’s hostage. If he has not been a victim of a confrontation over drought before, his blessings are expected to be released at the time of his natural death. The king’s death is ritualized as a process in which the divine and the demonic powers inhabiting him are separated so that only the beneficial ones are retained for the community. The ‘effective divinity of the king’ is made to coincide  with a process of dying in successive stages and extending over at least one cultivation cycle counting from the king’s last breath, through the bloating and decomposition of his corpse, to the final exhumation  and placement of the skull or bones in a shrine.
For the Bari, Lulubo, Lokoya and Lotuho digestion is the model for the purification of the blessings; so they plug the orifices of the king’s body so that disorderly forces do not escape. For the Pari – and their well-documented Shilluk relatives to the north - the focus of control is on the king’s breathing which must be stopped before it stops by itself. This strongly suggests that the much-debated Shilluk practice of having the king suffocated when he is on the brink of death belongs in the same category of practices as the plugging of the orifices of his more southerly colleagues. The suffocation ensures the orderly release of the king’s blessings; it is not a vestige of regicide, nor a piece of colonial imagination.
Kings of Disaster demonstrates that Girard’s theory of social cohesion not only offers an explanatory context to the institution of kingship, but also to the political systems of the Nilotic Sudan as a whole. The dynamic of complementary segmentary opposition which is so prominent in these societies, is just another instance of consensual antagonism or, in the terminology used in the book, of the ‘enemy scenario of the scapegoat mechanism’.

This is the final version of my Bachelor thesis in egpytology, wherein I tried to reconstruct the scheme of one of the major festivals from Ancient Egypt based on the reliefs of the temple of Soleb. Instead of mystifying the ritual by implementing dubious theories of ritual regicide I tried to focus on what this festival might tell us about the social, politicals, economic and religious relations in Ancient Egypt.

In questa tesi vengono analizzati in maniera comparata due eventi occorsi in due paesi differenti: il regicidio avvenuto a Monza la sera del 29 luglio 1900 ed il regicidio di Lisbona del 1 febbraio 1908.
La struttura di questo testo segue l’esempio delle Vite Parallele di Plutarco, quantunque esse rappresentino più l’opera di un biografo che di uno storico: dapprima la “vita” del re italiano Umberto I, in un secondo momento la “vita” del re portoghese D. Carlos I, infine la synkrisis, il confronto ed il giudizio finale.
Sebbene siano numerosi i testi passati e presenti che esaminano e giudicano il regicidio del proprio paese, nessuno prima d’ora ha mai compiuto un’analisi comparata di un fatto di tale portata nella storia italiana e portoghese come la morte del proprio re. Umberto I e D. Carlos I effettuano il loro ultimo viaggio in una carrozza scoperta nel bel mezzo di una folla, festante in Italia, più fredda in Portogallo, senza però un’adeguata sicurezza personale.
Per redigere questa tesi sono stati consultati tanto i principali giornali italiani e portoghesi coevi al regicidio ed alcuni decreti pubblicati nella Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia e nel Diário do Governo, quanto le più significative testimonianze dei politici e degli esponenti di rilievo dell’opinione pubblica di ambedue i paesi. La ricerca inoltre illustra ed esamina la reazione dell’opinione pubblica portoghese al regicidio italiano ed il giudizio dell’opinione pubblica italiana nei confronti del regicidio portoghese.
Questa analisi comprende, esamina e confronta la situazione politica che ha portato al regicidio in Italia ed in Portogallo. Sia nel primo come nel secondo paese vengono promulgate delle leggi repressive ed il ruolo di prestigio del parlamento viene messo in discussione. La libertà di stampa è in pericolo. All’azione dall’alto del governo, le opposizioni minacciano una altrettanto violenta reazione dal basso, giustificando tale eventualità perché intenzionate a difendere la propria libertà.
Entrambi i sovrani hanno un ruolo preponderante nella crisi istituzionale e politica che avviene nei momenti precedenti al regicidio.  Ambedue scendono nell’arena della battaglia politica parlamentare e rinunciano al proprio carattere sacro, derivato proprio dal fatto di mantenere un atteggiamento distante da ogni forza politica.
Come per le premesse, anche le conseguenze del regicidio in entrambi i paesi vengono approfondite e confrontate. In Italia viene inaugurata una politica di “rigenerazione”, in Portogallo di “pacificazione”. Si tenta di trovare un accordo tra i partiti moderati al fine di comprendere come si sia giunti politicamente alla morte del proprio re. La monarchia ha comunque i giorni contati in Portogallo. Il 1 febbraio 1908 infatti è strettamente collegato con il 5 d’ottobre 1910, data che segna l’avvento della repubblica portoghese, mentre il 29 luglio 1900, data che comunque segna l’epilogo della “crisi di fine secolo”, in nessun modo può essere collegato con la nascita della repubblica in Italia.
Il regicidio sia in Italia come in Portogallo rappresenta un’eccezione nella storia nazionale, ma per entrambi costituisce la “fine di un mondo”.

Padişahı Devirmek, 1859 ve 1867 yıllarında İstanbul’da açığa çıkarılan iki isyan hazırlığı üzerinden iktidarın devrilmesi girişimlerinin Osmanlı siyasi hayatı ve zihniyet evrenindeki izdüşümlerini ele alıyor. Bu kapsamlı araştırmasında Burak Onaran, 17. yüzyıldan itibaren imparatorlukta yaşanan hal’ girişimlerinin seyrini, bu eylemleri düzenleyenleri ve taleplerini tarihsel bir bütünlük içine yerleştiriyor. Yeniçeri Ocağı’nın kaldırılmasından (1826) sonraki dönemde, Kuleli Muahedesi ve Meslek Cemiyeti mensuplarının kalkıştığı padişahı devirmeye yönelik ilk iki girişimi ayrıntılı şekilde inceliyor. Sanıkların ifadeleri ve diplomatik yazışmalar gibi ilk kez kullanılan belgelerden de hareketle, hem olayları kendi tarihsel bağlamı içerisinde yeniden anlatıyor hem de “tarihsel anlatı”nın zaaf ve imkânlarını tartışmaya
açıyor.

“Kuleli ve Meslek muahedeleri hakkında daha önceki çalışmaların hemen hepsi elebaşlarına odaklanmıştı. Bu çalışmada ise birer altbölüm, adlî takibata dâhil edilmiş herkesin biyografilerinin, toplumsal çevrelerinin ve aile profillerinin inşasına hasredilmiştir (…) Kitabın öncelikli amacı, bu iki siyasi muahedenin tarihini yeniden yazmak; yapılarını ve stratejilerini mercek altına almak, mensuplarının siyasi taleplerine, motivasyonlarına ve sosyal profillerine ışık tutmaktır (…) Çalışmanın bu bağlamda temel meselesi, Tanzimat’ın ilk otuz yıllık döneminde, siyasi iktidarın yapısının, özellikle tebaanın ve padişahın konumunun giderek nasıl değiştiğini anlamaktır.”

One of the consequences of the reformations was, around 1560/70, the transformation of older medieval as well as humanist practices and theories of regicide, tyrannicide and conspiracy. What had been still rooted in the medieval coniuratio as congiure (Machiavelli, Discorsi III, 6) or inspired by ancient authors (the young Morus on Lukian´s De Tyrannicida) was to become an interpretative politico-theological scheme, highly polarized, that was ordering perceptions and actions of and within the early modern international state system. Shakespeare´s own period was marked by the diffusion of the Calvinist and catholic monarchomach theories as well as by the spiritualization of the Crimen laesae majestatis (Cod. Just. IX, 8, 5) with tacitist lawyers so important for England as Alberico Gentili: The political contexts since at least the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570) right up to the Gunpowder plot was marked by the intersection of such theories with the well-known practice of ´plotting´ and European wide networking; the Catholics (exiled, recusant or not) between Rom, Madrid, Reims, Douai, Rouen; the protestants between England, the Netherlands, the Palatinate. The question of this contribution is not to search once again for direct influences on Shakespeare´s plays and to understand them simply as replicas of reality – to see Hamlet as a comment on the succession crisis; to ask for literal influence of the Basilikon doron on Measure for measure. It is rather the argument that the political practice and communication had witnessed itself, indeed, a profound change after the middle of the century, a liquefying of what were before more stable dynastic systems of rule, that a continuous change of perspectives and of reflexivity – the good king would switch to tyrant, who was once protector of one owns religion became its cruel persecutor – was trained not only and first on stage but was a crucial problem in real politics in a new way. This epistemic change which started to exercise its pressure on the relevant actors´ perception was due mostly to changes in the forms of communication, political analysis and planning. For the historian, it thus seems that the prismatic interrogations about tyranny, usurpers, sovereignty, regicide in Shakespeare´s plays such as Julius Caesar and Richard III are to be conceived as projections of that already existing liquefied political perception into a more personalized investigation of and on characters.

This paper investigates a specific set of early-1650s polemical reactions to the regicide of King Charles I Stuart (1649). The political language which conveyed them is here defined as “patriarchalist absolutism.” By focusing on the work of Claudius Salmasius (1649) and Robert Filmer (1652) as well as on John Milton’s ideas in relation to both thinkers, the following points will be addressed: why was the patriarchalist paradigm employed at this historical juncture to defend monarchy and oppose the Commonwealth? What languages, images, and rhetorical strategies did Salmasius and Filmer use? What did they identify the theoretical pillars and practical implications of the new regime with? In answering such questions, this piece will attempt two things. First, it will unveil the major clusters of debate that informed the disputes between Salmasius, Milton and Filmer, so as to show that in seventeenth-century theoretical parlance a key portion of political conflict centered on the issue of the representation of fatherland and fatherhood. Second, it will claim that patriarchalist attacks on the Commonwealth served to delineate a scathing critique of republican government and ideals more generally. In brief, a close textual analysis will enable us to establish in what ways at the time considered the flexible discourses of patriarchalism and republicanism were interpreted as antithetical casts of thought about politics, religion, ethics and civility. Besides unfolding in detail the significant elements of this often taken-for-granted opposition, the article suggests that the importance of patriarchalism consists in its showing the reality of correspondences between apparently disconnected fields of activity.

Regicidio y parricidio son temas profundamente ligados en la cultura. El caso del hijo que asesina a su padre para tomar el poder es constante a través de la historia. El Medio Oriente Antiguo nos proporciona algunos ejemplos, como las muertes
de Ramsés III y de Senaquerib, de los cuales excepcionalmente hemos conservado algunas fuentes documentales y que plantean una serie de problemas historiográficos.

Freud hypothesizes that civilization originates with the murder of the primal father. Derrida argues that this murder finds its repetition in the execution of Louis XVI, and, drawing on Freudian considerations of the problem of violence, derives an account of democracy as impelled by this death.

A seal of Ikhtiyār al-Dīn al-Ḥasan ibn Ghafras, a member of a noble Byzantine family serving at the court of sultan Qilijǧ Arslān, is witness of a brief moment of historical opportunities in the history of the Rūm-Saljūqs. Al-Ḥasan assumed the title of al-sulṭān, indicating that he claimed the sultanate for himself, presumably after the death of Qilij Arslān in 588/1192. No literary source corroborates his usurpation. While the sources on the political turmoil at the end of Qilij Arslān's reign are few and contradictory, an anonymous chronicle, Tārīkh-i Āl-i Saljūq, opens a possible window onto al-Ḥasan's ascension to the sultanate. Based on this narrative his only legitimation would have been the 'law of the Turks' on regicide, namely that he who kills the ruler, becomes ruler himself. According to the Tārīkh-i Āl-i Saljūq he poisoned Qilij Arslān.

This article is concerned with the writings on resistance by Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, the leaders of the Rational Dissenters who supported the American and French Revolutions, from the late 1760s to 1791. The article discusses the differences between Rational Dissent and mainstream (Court) Whig resistance theory, as regards history in particular: the Dissenters viewed the Glorious Revolution as a lost opportunity rather than a full triumph, and claimed the heritage of the Puritan opposition to Charles I, some of them justifying the regicide. Price’s and Priestley’s views on resistance are assessed against the benchmark of John Locke’s conception of the breach of trust. While both thinkers presented themselves as followers of Locke, they departed from his thought by their emphasis on the constantly active role of the people. Each in their own way, they also argued that early, possibly peaceful, resistance was preferable to violent resistance as a last resort against a tyranny. In the end, Price and Priestley articulated each an original theory derived from Locke; their views were very close and their main difference concerned the treatment of history, Price’s caution contrasting with Priestley’s justification of tyrannicide.

On the basis of a coin-document a new ruler of the Marwanid emirate, Sharwin ibn Muhammad, can be identified and thus added to the list of rulers given by C. E. Bosworth, New Islamic Dynasties. The circumstances of his accession to the throne shed some new light on the application and spread of regicide as a principle for legitimizing sovereign power of ruler, brought forward in an article by U. Haarmann in 1990.

Through Jacques Derrida’s extended discussion in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has become “an exemplary text for thinking together about the current state of the world” (Royle). This article concerns Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost as texts central to writing the “literary history of the International.” Whereas Derrida and Marx placed Hamlet at the center of their influential international visions, this article argues that the role of republicanism in forging international solidarity from the seventeenth-century onwards suggests that any literary history of the International ought also to include that key republican touchstone, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Against current critical consensus, however, it also argues that Paradise Lost’s republican internationalism developed through Milton’s own reading of Hamlet, and that Shakespeare himself may have been Milton’s “old mole.”

Some historians of violence and sociologists have posited a decrease in violence over time, beginning in the middle ages and continuing down to the present day. Such a thesis sits uneasily with the picture of post-Clontarf Ireland that emerges from the secondary literature, and levels of violence in Ireland have been compared unfavourably with those in Britain by some historians. This paper analyses the difficulties with the quantitative approach adopted by these historians and sociologists, but accepts that such an approach should not be dismissed off-hand.

Cast of characters in speaking truth to power: key role of women?
Tricoteuses -- relishing the repression of truth?
Fake news -- "let them eat cake"?
Show trials, mock trials and regicides in a period of farce?
Passion for truth as highlighted by a play
Ambiguities regarding the justice of a trial
Kangaroo court -- for the trial of an Australian?
Paradox of folk heroism?
Secretive security services constraining Assange?
Appropriate symbolic alternative to crucifixion for Assange?

Henri IV est sans nul doute le roi le plus populaire dans le cœur des Français. À l’heure de la commémoration du 400ème anniversaire de son assassinat, il convenait de revenir sur un destin exceptionnel. Cet ouvrage collectif a l’ambition d’apporter un éclairage neuf sur une période qui a contribué à façonner notre modernité, au-delà des anecdotes plus ou moins légendaires circulant sur le « bon roi Henri ».
À partir de la narration des trente derniers jours de la vie du monarque, cet ouvrage se propose, dans une synthèse accessible à tous, de donner au lecteur les clés du règne d’Henri IV.
Historiens, experts, journalistes, les plus grands spécialistes ont écrit ces textes initialement parus dans les quotidiens La République des Pyrénées et L’Éclair. Sous une forme revue et augmentée, ils sont aujourd’hui réunis pour constituer un ouvrage de référence particulièrement original

L’intent de regicidi protagonitzat per Joan de Canyamars en la figura de Ferran II, el 7 de desembre de 1492 a la Ciutat de Barcelona, forma part d’uns dels episodis més poc documentats del Principat a inicis de la Història moderna. No per això menys rellevant, ni de caràcter secundari, i molt menys anecdòtic. La visible mancança de fonts referents ja és un clar indicador d’una intencionalitat professa per amagar, excloure o extreure els fets de la memòria. Un intent declarat per fer caure en l’oblit uns esdeveniments, que, allunyats de qualsevol «ànimo diabòlich» responien a un malestar comú, un descontentament col·lectiu de base remença que s’havia vist desplaçat, humiliat i encara, si s’escau, més servil, després de les rebel·lions pageses (1462-72; 1483-85) i la Sentència Arbitral de Guadalupe (1486).

El tirano castigado de Juan Bautista Diamante es una obra teatral que teatraliza un momento clave en la historia otomana, el asesinato del sultán Osmán II por sus súbditos. Partiendo de la fuente primaria que inspiró al dramaturgo, este estudio discute los temas de regicidio y tiranicidio en esta pieza a través del análisis de sus personajes principales.

El tirano castigado by Juan Bautista Diamante is a theatrical play that stages a key moment in Ottoman history, the assassination of sultan Osman II by his subjects. Taking the primary source that inspired the playwright as a basis, this study discusses the themes of regicide and tyrannicide in this play through the analysis of its principal characters.

tiranicidio, El tirano castigado, obras turquescas, Juan Bautista Diamante, teatro áureo español

tyrannicide, El tirano castigado, Turk plays, Juan Bautista Diamante, Spanish Golden Age theatre

When did the divergence between South Asia and Western Europe occur? Interpersonal has not received sufficient attention in the debate. In this study, we use a new measure, regicide, which approximates how interpersonal violence developed over centuries. We find that South Asia entered a path of higher interpersonal violence at a relatively early point in time. In a second step, we explore potential correlates of violence in five regions of South Asia. Invasions from Central and West Asia had external effects which increased interpersonal violence, while human capital and urbanization where related to lower violence levels.

On May 20, 1622, the Sultan’s elite troops, the janissaries, executed the young Sultan Osman II who took refuge with them, fearing for his life in the face of a military revolt that had started two days ago. These kuls (slaves/servants) not only violated their oath of fealty to the Sultan and disgraced him with swears, insults and sexual harassments. They also committed the first act of regicide in Ottoman history and then disfigured his sacred corpse despite the fact that he trusted his life with them. Soon after, the empire plunged into chaos with a mentally deranged Sultan on the throne and an intrigue-ridden court while the capital was left at the mercy of the kapıkulu troops that wreaked havoc in its streets and meydans.

The murder of an Ottoman Sultan by the very soldiers who wowed to serve and protect him created far-reaching consequences. While disorder reigned in Istanbul, a powerful reaction came from the provinces, from Abaza Mehmed Paşa, the Governor of Erzurum in Anatolia. In the name of avenging the disgraceful murder of Osman II, Abaza not only sought to create a coalition of governors in Anatolia against the kapıkulu soldiers controlling politics in Istanbul, but also started a janissary hunt in the provinces.

The presentation will demonstrate how both Abaza Mehmed Paşa and the regicide janissaries used the rhetoric of blood vengeance in order to justify their actions in a long-standing political rivalry between the ümera (Ottoman grandees), the Sultan’s kapıkulus (tenured soldiers of the central army, including but not only the janissaries) and the sekban soldiers (irregular troops in the provinces seeking permanent employment). For Abaza Mehmed, avenging the Sultan’s blood and slaughtering the janissaries wherever he could find them were means to legitimize his interest-driven rebellion, finding allies at court and marshalling the support of other governors with sekban troops. Interestingly, the right of an outsider sekban leader to take the Sultan’s vengeance and slaughter the most elite corps of the empire, the Sultan’s very bodyguards, went unchallenged by Ottoman historiography that otherwise depicted Abaza in a negative light. Nor did the latter pay any price for his janissary hunt. Due to the absence of an institutionalized legal mechanism to avenge the blood of the Sultan and punish such a powerful political actor as the janissaries, Abaza’s feud was considered legitimate by the Ottoman grandees and Sultan Murad IV who would not only pardon him later, but also appoint him to important governor-generalships.

The rhetoric of vengeance and blood was not the exclusive domain of Abaza. There was a shared culture of blood vengeance that dictated actions within the boundaries of a moral community and decided whether resorting to violence was acceptable or not. This culture was so much ingrained in Ottoman popular mentality that it scandalized the Ottoman populace who attacked the otherwise untouchable janissaries both in the capital and the provinces. Moreover, it forced the janissaries to play by Abaza’s rules and employ a similar vocabulary of vengeance and blood in order to exonerate their corps from the most nefarious crime of regicide. The janissaries may have murdered the Sultan and several other Ottoman grandees; they did this, however, in order to avenge, with acts of ritualized violence, the blood of their unjustly executed peers.

English summary: This book focuses on the study of two conspiracies (Kuleli Meslek in 1859 and in 1867), born in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, and revealed at the time that the conspirators were preparing to dethrone the sultan (first attempts at dethroning since the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826, whom were previously the principal threat to the sultans). This book analyzes the new type of revolts and rebels who tried to "undo" the Ottoman sultan. The book attempts to rewrite the history of these two conspiracies to examine their structure, operations and strategies while at the same time, illuminating the motivations, political demands and social profiles of the conspirators. The work raises the question about the specifics of these two attempts in the context of social and political transformations of the 1850s and 1860s, and thus contributes to a better understanding of changes in the Ottoman political space.
Ce livre a pour objet l'étude de deux conjurations (Kuleli en 1859 et Meslek en 1867), fomentées dans le capitale de l'Empire ottoman, Istanbul, et révélées au moment où les conjurés s'apprêtaient à passer à l'action en vue de détrôner le sultan - premières tentatives de détrônement depuis la suppression en 1826 des janissaires, qui étaient auparavant les principaux «défaiseurs» de sultans.
Cet ouvrage analyse ce nouveau type de révoltes et de révoltés qui ont envisagé de «défaire» le sultan ottoman. Il s'attache à réécrire l'histoire de ces deux conjurations, à examiner leur structure, leur fonctionnement et leurs stratégies, tout en éclairant les motivations, les revendications politiques et les profils sociaux des conjurés. Il s'interroge sur les spécifités de ces deux tentatives dans le contexte des transformations sociales et politiques des années 1850 et 1860, et contribue ainsi à une mailleure compréhension des changements de l'espace politique ottoman à cette époque.

Quelle était la place des «sujets» et du sultan dans la structure du pouvoir politique durant les premières décennies des Tanzimat, alors que les mentalités et les «techniques» de gouvernement de l'administration centrale étaient en train d'être reformulées et que l'opinion publique devenait un acteur politique de plus en plus influent? Telle est la question fondamentale qui est abordée tout au long de ce livre.

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This deeply researched history of royalty and monarchical government in France and England over the course of a crucial century is vital reading for all historians of politics, political thought, religion, or culture ,1587 to 1688. Sacral kingship was revived in this period. The book connects the rise of intense and divisive religious belief to the rise of political violence and regicide.

O Ramo Dourado de J. G. Frazer, com seus treze volumes, é uma obra monumental que marca o período, digamos, heróico da Antropologia. Tomando como base a lenda romana do santuário de Nemi, Frazer procura explicar o processo de sucessão do sacerdote como sendo um sacrifício ritual e, para tanto, desenvolve uma teoria da magia e da religião, inexistente na emergente etnologia do último quartel do século XIX.

Entendemos que este trabalho é uma etapa preliminar de reavaliação a ser retomada criticamente pelos especialistas das sociedades negro-africanas. Para lançar a nossa própria reflexão, nos perguntaríamos: se o rei ou sacerdote é identificado com a própria natureza e exerce um controle sobre ela, se ele é considerado um “deus”, por que matá-lo, ou, parodiando um texto clássico, Pourquoi le tuer?

The first English translation of Juan de Mariana's 1605 essay on money, "De moneta." This is the introduction to an earlier edition published by the Universidad Francisco Marroquín. For the full translation of Mariana's text, see the appendix of _Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha: Religion, Feminism, Slavery, Politics, and Economics in the First Modern Novel_ (Lexington Books, 2021).

Available at Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Liberty-Don-Quijote-Mancha/dp/1793601186