Thesiss

In the early fifteenth century, a great debate took place at the Council of Constance (1414-1418) over the morality, legality and propriety of crusades against non-Christians. This debate was not merely theoretical or abstract for it was the intellectual theater in a multi-theat…

This thesis is a longue-duree intellectual history that takes as its subject a form of historico-legal argument, which, for the sake of analytical convenience, will be termed the 'succession claim'. Employing the serial contextualist method pioneered by David Armitage, the disse…