From the world of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, numerous ethnic names (such as Goths, Huns, Lombards or Franks) have been handed down to us. Especially in the course of the early Middle Ages (5th-11th centuries), ethnic identity played an important role in the development of new political and religious communities and the legitimation of political power. However, ethnic attributions were not all firmly defined - even more obvious indications of different origins such as language, clothing or weapons were not reliable criteria for the assignment to a particular people. What can these names tell us about medieval peoples, their communities and the space they inhabited? What did they mean for the scholars who recorded them in Latin, Greek or Syriac texts, and for their audience?

The aim of MMP is to reconstruct the mental maps of medieval authors and thereby to elucidate how ethnic identifications helped readers to perceive the medieval social world, and thus, how attributions to peoples and perceptions of space were intertwined. This touches on questions of the creation and appropriation of territory, the construction of otherness, and the influence of religious ideas and terminology on conceptions of space and peoples, as well as the circumstances under which perceptions of peoples and space changed over the course of time.

Find out more about our project and the people behind it in this short movie, a contribution to the exhibition Reiternomaden in Europa