The Kurdish general Saladin, who gained control of Egypt in 1169, followed what by then constituted a tradition in Muslim military practice by including a slave corps in his army in addition to Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, and other free elements.
Although Political Philosophy was not part of the core curriculum in the universities, and although the writings surveyed above were generally not produced with the idea of contributing to a philosophical discipline, by the end of the middle ages the discipline of political philosophy (or political theology) had attained self-consciousness and a sense of constituting a tradition.
If anything, they constitute a tradition unto themselves.
They now constitute a tradition in their own right that spans several generations and even includes a few men.
Proponents of the new anti-gay laws in Russia claim to be upholding "traditional Russian values," yet there was a time when everyone, it seems, from tsars to tavern singers was at least sexually ambiguous, enough to constitute a tradition.
I suppose this constitutes a continuing tradition of diaspora, what Stalin called "rootless cosmopolitanism".
From that period until the middle of the 19th century, many European thinkers of a nationalist persuasion argued that stories told by ordinary people constituted a continuous tradition reaching back into the nation's past.
Its author, Paul Blanshard, a former diplomat and editor at The Nation, made the case that Catholicism was an ideology of conquest, and that its traditions constituted a form of "medieval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment".
It was a tradition that drew sustenance from the sense that there were books in the Bible which, although not written metrically, constituted a kind of poetry.
Word meaning constituted a prominent topic of inquiry in three classical traditions: speculative etymology, rhetoric, and lexicography (Meier-Oeser 2011; Geeraerts 2013).
