polska: Lipka Tatars

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The Lipka Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group and minority in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of the 14th century. The first Tatar settlers tried to preserve their Pagan tradition and sought asylum amongst the Baltic pagans. Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars—this time, Islamized Turkic populations, were invited into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great. These Tatars first settled in Lithuania proper around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas, later spreading to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. These areas comprise parts of present-day Belar…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 88

Pagan Virtue, 1400–1700. This chapter turns to the second aspect of the Problem of Paganism: virtue. The dominant view among scholastic theologians in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was that pagans could be genuinely virtuous, although their virtues were not of the sort which could merit salvation. In the period after 1400, mainstream Catholic theologians in the scholastic tradition tended to take the same broad view as their predecessors, but reformulating it to take account of new opponents. By contrast, and surprisingly, writers more influenced by humanism were often more sceptical about pagan virtue, although they presented their doubts in sophisticated literary forms. Fro…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 88

Pagan Knowledge, 1400–1700. This chapter turns to the first of the three aspects of the Problem of Paganism — knowledge, virtue, and salvation — which is examined here for the period 1400–1700. It begins by looking at discussions, mainly about ancient Greek and Latin pagans and their writings, in and out of the universities, before going on to see how the Problem was complicated and given special relevance, but not fundamentally changed, by contacts, from 1492 onwards, with large groups of contemporary pagans, in America and then in China. Within roughly four decades from 1492, Europeans came into contact with — and all too rapidly made themselves the rulers of — a vast number of previously…

Evidence: 39 • authority: 72

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a sovereign state in northeastern Europe that existed from the 13th century, succeeding the Kingdom of Lithuania, to the late 18th century, when the territory was suppressed during the 1795 partitions of Poland–Lithuania. The state was founded by Lithuanians, who were at the time a polytheistic nation of several united Baltic tribes from Aukštaitija. By 1440 the grand duchy had become the largest European state, controlling an area from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The grand duchy expanded to include large portions of the former Kievan Rus' and other neighbouring states, including what is now Lithuania, Belarus, most of Ukraine…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

A continuous presence of Islam in Poland began in the 14th century. From this time it was primarily associated with the Lipka Tatars, many of whom settled in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth while continuing their traditions and religious beliefs. The first significant non-Tatar groups of Muslims arrived in Poland in the 1970s, though they are a very small minority. Today, less than 0.02% of the population in Poland is Muslim. The majority of Muslims in Poland are Sunni.

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Tatars (, TAH-tərz) are a group of Turkic speaking peoples found across Eastern Europe and Northern Asia who bear the name "Tatar". Initially, the ethnonym Tatar possibly referred to the Tatar confederation. That confederation was eventually incorporated into the Mongol Empire when Genghis Khan unified the various steppe tribes. Historically, the term Tatar (or Tartar) was applied by western cartographers to anyone from the vast Northern and Central Asian landmass then known as Tartary, a term that was falsely conflated with the Mongol Empire. More recently, the term has come to refer more narrowly to related ethnic groups who call themselves Tatars. By far the largest group amongst the…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Volga Tatars, also known as Volga-Ural Tatars or simply Tatars (Tatar: татарлар, romanized: tatarlar; Russian: татары, romanized: tatary) are a Turkic ethnic group native to the Volga-Ural region of western Russia, and contains multiple subgroups. Tatars are the second-largest ethnic group in Russia after ethnic Russians. They are primarily found in Tatarstan, where they make up 53.6% of the population. Their native language is Tatar, and are primarily followers of Sunni Islam. "Tatar" as an ethnonym has a very long and complicated history, and in the past was often used as an umbrella term for different Turkic and Mongolic tribes. Nowadays it mostly refers exclusively to Volga Tatars (…