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In medieval Passion cycles represented in Czech, Slovak (former Hungary), and Polish murals dating from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries one may observe a number of-gestures which appear in respective scenes starting from the Entry into Jerusalem and ending with the Entombment (laying in the sepulchre). The most significant gesture in the entry scene is the outstretched hand of Christ riding a donkey. It is the language of gesture used since antiquity, transmitted through Byzantine and Italian art (including Giotto’s Entry into Jerusalem in his Arena Chapel frescoes), and transferred into art north of the Alps.

In the fifteenth-century Liberty of Bruges, a rural castellany in the county of Flanders, a bounty system was established to promote the elimination of wolves. Prize money made the wolf not only an unwanted but also an actively tracked animal, a combination that resulted in its wholescale slaughter. Researchers who have previously examined these bounties believed that they were primarily part of a system of pest control. They did not realise, however, that the inhabitants who came forward to claim the bounty killed wolves not to clear the Liberty of Bruges of vermin but for entirely different reasons, which depended on the context in which encounters with wolves occurred. In this text, I use the records concerning the bounty system established by the Liberty of Bruges to understand the complex relationships between humans and wolves in this fifteenth-century castellany. I first introduce the long series of records; thereafter, I attempt to identify reasons for killing wolves in the Liberty of Bruges and the contexts in which such killings occurred.

Most polyphonic compositions of the fifteenth century have at least one voice which begins without rests. The exceptions usually use the rests to create a musical upbeat, potentially motivated by t...

This paper tests for speculative bubbles in the medieval English property market based on a unique hand-collected dataset from the feet of fines spanning the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We focus on asset types where there are sufficiently large numbers of transactions each year to make a long and reliable run of information, and we transform this into annual time-series of prices. We employ a regime switching model that allows for boom and crash episodes to characterise and test for bubble dynamics. The results are consistent with the presence of periodic, partially collapsing speculative bubbles in the market for agricultural land, but there is no such evidence in the context of messuages. Our findings demonstrate that the medieval English property market shares important features with its contemporary counterpart, for instance with the recent so-called ‘barn bubble’.

"Research on late-medieval religiosity in Central and Western Europe has shown that religious books were not only possessed, but also read, and sometimes even copied or disseminated by laymen. The need for a better definition of the relationship between the laity and the religious text leads to the formulation and intensive discussion of concepts such as devotional reading, culture of religious reading, or vernacular theology. Several examples of works that belonged to late-medieval Transylvanian laymen suggest the opportunity and, at the same time, the need to ask whether similar dynamics of pious behaviour can be discussed in their case. In order to provide a convincing answer, this study proposes an analysis of these books from at least three perspectives: theme, language, formal characteristics. The most interesting information is offered, however, by property notes, which suggest that the devotional potential of the book was not activated by reading, but rather by donation. By offering solutions to the everyday necessities of ecclesiastical institutions, these gifts were designed to ensure personal salvation as well. In order to support this hypothesis, I will also address another category of sources from which mentions regarding this kind of donations can be recovered, i.e. last wills. Keywords: religious books, devotional practices, pious donations, last wills, laity "

This study of the communication of the Livonian Branch of the Teutonic Order with the king of Denmark and the Grand Duke of Lithuania focuses on diplomatic cooperation between the Order’s Livonian and Prussian branches. Though the Grand Master largely represented the Livonian Master in communication with the Danish king during the first half of the fifteenth century, this took place because the Danish king preferred to communicate Livonian matters to the Grand Master. In the second half of the century, the king addressed the Livonian Master directly and the Grand Master lost his role as a mediator of communication between the king and the Livonian Master. The communication with the Grand Duke of Lithuania can be described as forming a triangle, where both the Grand Master and the Livonian Master were in frequent correspondence with the Grand Duke and would represent each other if needed. The second half of the fifteenth century saw a tendency toward excluding the Grand Master from communication between the Livonian Master and the Grand Duke, probably due to the diverging political goals of the Prussian and the Livonian branches of the Order. As a concluding generalization, one can say that cooperation between these two branches of the Teutonic Order in diplomatic correspondence was largely determined by the preferences of their partners in communication as well as by the compatibility of their respective political stances.

Nowadays, there are many applications of text mining over corpora from different languages. However, most of them are based on texts in prose, lacking applications that work with poetry texts. An example of an application of text mining in poetry is the usage of features derived from their individual words in order to capture the lexical, sublexical and interlexical meaning, and infer the General Affective Meaning (GAM) of the text. However, even though this proposal has been proved as useful for poetry in some languages, there is a lack of studies for both Spanish poetry and for highly-structured poetic compositions such as sonnets. This article presents a study over an annotated corpus of Spanish sonnets, in order to analyse if it is possible to build features from their individual words for predicting their GAM. The purpose of this is to model sonnets at an affective level. The article also analyses the relationship between the GAM of the sonnets and the content itself. For this, we consider the content from a psychological perspective, identifying with tags when a sonnet is related to a specific term. Then, we study how GAM changes according to each of those psychological terms. The corpus used contains 274 Spanish sonnets from authors of different centuries, from 15th to 19th. This corpus was annotated by different domain experts. The experts annotated the poems with affective and lexico-semantic features, as well as with domain concepts that belong to psychology. Thanks to this, the corpus of sonnets can be used in different applications, such as poetry recommender systems, personality text mining studies of the authors, or the usage of poetry for therapeutic purposes., 24 pages, 3 figures, 17 tables

The completion of the construction of the foundation of socialism in the USSR means that the Leninist question of "who - whom" has been resolved against capitalism, in favor of socialism completely and irrevocably both in the city and in the countryside this is how the current stage of the 17th Party Conference determined. anniversary of October, reinforced this definition.

The positive impact of daylight on various forms of life is well understood. The daylight conditions a person experiences inside a building strongly depend on the character of the glazing. Contemporary windows maximize the transmission of visible daylight. In post-medieval times glassmakers were confronted with less pure materials. Driven by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation they were at the same time challenged by the demand for increased daylight. Luckily, technological evolutions allowed the production of thinner windows. It is currently an open question if glassmakers in the (Southern) Low Countries during the booming economic period from the fifteenth to seventeenth century made use of the interplay between material and fabrication properties to bring light into the darkness. Therefore, this paper links the impact of glass purity and production technique to light transmission for a well-diagnosed group of excavated glass window pieces from the castle of Middelburg-in-Flanders and a set of roundels, all dating back to between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and explores what factors have influenced this technological improvement. A non-destructive approach making use of UV–vis–NIR absorption spectroscopy unveiled that the more recent material is less pure compared to the older dated material but that light transmission was maximized due to the applied production technique.

The article aims to present the main features of the character of the Morlachs living in the Venetian Dalmatia during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries. The research approach focuses on Venetian sources, published and unpublished, therefore the portray of the Morlachs built up in this study is an external one. According to it the Morlachs appear as nomadic people who develop occasional or permanent activities in the Venetian hinterland of Dalmatia. Either they are presented by the sources as shepherds, soldiers, immigrants, merchants, criminals or in many other situations, the Morlachs became agents of coexistence in the permeable area of the Venetian-Ottoman border. This is why, one of the ideas promoted by this study is that the survival of the Morlach`s presence in Dalmatia was assured by the political instability.

The paper deals with the particular linguistic variety spoken by some servants in Stefano De Franchi’s comedies (1714‒1785). After briefly hinting at some fundamental aspects of his production (§1), we examine the text of his comedies (§2) and analyze the servants’ language. This variety presents numerous traits which do not belong to Genoese (§3), some others which will spread in the urban variety only between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (§4) and many others which had been expelled from it between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (§5). Finally (§6), the linguistic analysis of Gerusalemme Liberata’s Genoese translation (1755) will allow us to order chronologically the linguistic relics of §5.

Resumo: A colonialidade do poder, do saber e do ser se perpetuam no imaginário moderno através do avanço da mercantilização massiva sobre as plantas, a terra, a água, o conhecimento. Esse processo, que se inicia no século 15, com a constituição da América, avança desde então sobre os territórios e os conhecimentos dos povos que foram colonizados. Nesse sentido, analiso um acontecimento que ocorreu no ano de 2014, no Encontro da Região Sul de Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais, em Curitiba, Paraná, no qual se estabeleceu um embate cosmopolítico sobre um projeto de transformação dos saberes tradicionais em patentes. Essa proposta envolveu, por um lado, agentes do Estado, do mercado e da ciência, que almejavam convertê-los em fonte de lucro, e, por outro, os povos e comunidades tradicionais para quem esses conhecimentos são coletivos e circulam entre si, compondo seus modos de existência. Abstract: The coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being has been perpetuated in the modern imaginary through the advance of the massive mercantilism of everything. That process, which started in the fifteenth century with the discovery of America, has spread since then throughout territories and knowledge from the peoples who were colonized. In this regard, I analyze an event that occurred in 2014, at the Conference of the Southern Region for Traditional Peoples and Communities, in Curitiba/Paraná, in which a cosmopolitical conflict took place, regarding a project to transform traditional knowledge into patents. This initiative involved, on one side, the State, Market and Science, all aiming at transforming them into sources of profit, and on the other side, the traditional peoples and communities for whom this knowledge is collective and circulates freely among them, composing their modes of existence. Resumen: La colonialidad del poder, del saber y del ser se perpetúa en el imaginario moderno por medio del avance de la mercantilización masiva de todo. Este proceso, que se inició en el siglo XV con la constitución de América, avanza desde entonces sobre los territorios y sobre los conocimientos de los pueblos que fueron colonizados. En este sentido, analizo un hecho que tuvo lugar en 2014, en el Encuentro de la Región Sur de Pueblos y Comunidades Tradicionales, en Curitiba, Paraná, en el que se estableció un embate cosmopolítico sobre un proyecto de transformación de los saberes tradicionales en patentes. Esta propuesta involucró agentes del estado, mercado y ciencia, quienes anhelaban convertirlos en fuentes de lucro, en contraposición a los pueblos y comunidades tradicionales, quienes defendían que sus conocimientos son colectivos y circulan entre ellos, componiendo sus modos de existencia.

Migration and admixture history of populations have always been curious and an interesting theme. The West Coast of India harbours a rich diversity, bestowing various ethno-linguistic groups, with many of them having well-documented history of migrations. The Roman Catholic is one such distinct group, whose origin was much debated. While some historians and anthropologists relating them to ancient group of Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, others relating them for being members of the Jews Lost Tribes in the first Century migration to India. Historical records suggests that this community was later forcibly converted to Christianity by the Portuguese in Goa during the Sixteenth Century. Till date, no genetic study was done on this group to infer their origin and genetic affinity. Hence, we analysed 110 Roman Catholics from three different locations of West Coast of India including Goa, Kumta and Mangalore using both uniparental and autosomal markers to understand their genetic history. We found that the Roman Catholics have close affinity with the Indo-European linguistic groups, particularly Brahmins. Additionally, we detected genetic signal of Jews in the linkage disequilibrium-based admixture analysis, which was absent in other Indo-European populations, who are inhabited in the same geographical regions. Haplotype-based analysis suggests that the Roman Catholics consist of South Asian-specific ancestry and showed high drift. Ancestry-specific historical population size estimation points to a possible bottleneck around the time of Goan inquisition (fifteenth century). Analysis of the Roman Catholics data along with ancient DNA data of Neolithic and bronze age revealed that the Roman Catholics fits well in a basic model of ancient ancestral composition, typical of most of the Indo-European caste groups of India. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis suggests that most of the Roman Catholics have aboriginal Indian maternal genetic ancestry; while the Y chromosomal DNA analysis indicates high frequency of R1a lineage, which is predominant in groups with higher ancestral North Indian (ANI) component. Therefore, we conclude that the Roman Catholics of Goa, Kumta and Mangalore regions are the remnants of very early lineages of Brahmin community of India, having Indo-Europeans genetic affinity along with cryptic Jewish admixture, which needs to be explored further.

The existence of football has paved the way for this study to find the football registers types. This linguistic part explains about language and the usage. The researcher implemented the theories of register from Biber and Conrad (2009) and Biber and Finegan(1994). This investigation uses the interviews via whatsApp to gather the data from 5 participants. These people were the alumni from university located in Yogyakarta. After the information of interview is got, the researcher analyzed it. The results showed 16 types as follows. First finding is actions. Second result shows positions. Third finding reveals places. Fourth result is championships. Fifth finding is supporters types. Sixth result reveals clubs. Seventh finding shows tools. Eighth result has business in football. Nineth finding is referee types. Tenth result indicates impacts of fouls. Eleventh finding is special matches. Twelveth result shows times. Thirteenth finding reveals honorifics. Fourteenth result has name. Fifteenth finding is impacts of less achievements. Sixteenth result has formations.

The heritage of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of the most problematic residues of the Polish past. After World War II, Poland lost its so-called Eastern Borderlands, which meant a break with a specific state tradition, the most important link of which was the powerful Polish-Lithuanian state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The potential and significance of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remains an important topic of Polish identity discourse. One of the issues addressed in that context is the imperial character of that state. The importance of this issue goes beyond the space of historiographic debates. It also concerns the place and role of Poland in the world from both historical and contemporary perspective. A common element of various narratives around the national-state status is myth. Myth is a story told for the needs of a specific social group, but it also refers to some of the supra-class conditions that could be described as the ontology of national being. Thanks to this, it can be treated as one of the tools used to study not only self-perceptions of the community, but also the interactions that occur between these self-images and real determinants of the community’s status. According to the author of the article, postcolonial studies create a possibility of integrated research on Polish imperiality, since they combine a number of different competencies necessary to comprehensively cover this broad topic. The sphere of national mythology is combined from a postcolonial perspective with a vast sphere of social facts and real-life conditions.

This article studies the use of what was known as grana (carmine dye from cochineal insects) in Western Andalusia during the fifteenth century. Through the value of grana which was used to obtain the precious red pigment for dyeing wool and silk, we will reflect on the connection between the ecosystem where this natural resource was collected, the peasants, the governance of cities and towns, as well as the role of the market.

espanolLa nocion de tributo justo, convertida en concepto clave del pensamiento fiscal bajomedieval, hubo de marcar la orientacion de la politica hacendistica de los nacientes Estados monarquicos, como sugiere una iniciativa desarrollada por la realeza castellana en el transito de los siglos XIV al XV, basada en el proyecto de consecucion de nuevas rentas a traves de la busqueda de minas y tesoros. Para ello, se parte de tres documentos del Archivo General de Simancas, que, aunque carecen de fecha, cabria situar hipoteticamente durante el reinado de Enrique III de Castilla (1390-1406), los cuales son contextualizados en el marco de la politica fiscal de la monarquia castellana y de las lineas de accion politica del tercer Trastamara. El estudio permite sugerir el interes de Enrique III por impulsar nuevas fuentes de renta, mas alla del incremento de los tributos, como garantia de una actuacion acorde al ideal regio bajomedieval. EnglishThe notion of fair taxation, which became a key concept in late-medieval fiscal thought, marked the focus of taxation policies in the new monarchical states, as suggested by an initiative developed by the Castilian royalty from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries. This initiative was based on a project to acquire new revenue by searching for mines and treasures. To this end, three documents from the Archivo General de Simancas are used as a starting point and although they are not dated they can be hypothetically traced to the reign of Enrique III of Castile (1390-1406). These documents are contextualised within the framework of the Castilian monarchy’s fiscal policy and of the course of political action of the third Trastamara king. The study suggests Enrique III’s interest in boosting new sources of revenue, beyond increasing taxes, as a measure to guarantee his political leverage in line with the royal ideal of the late Middle Ages.

Sifting through business accounts and public records, this article demonstrates the involvement of Medici Bank in the military industry of the fifteenth century, shedding new light on the final yea...

In the article “Settlement on Lusignan Cyprus after the Latin Conquest: The Accounts of Cypriot and other Chronicles and the Wider Context” the narratives of various chronicles of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries on settlement in Cyprus in the years following the Latin conquest, from the end of the twelfth to the early thirteenth century, will be examined and compared. The details provided by the chronicles, where the information given derived from, the biases present in the various accounts, the extent to which they are accurate, especially in cases where they are corroborated or refuted by documentary evidence, will all be discussed. The chronicles that will be referred to are the thirteenth century continuation of William of Tyre, that provides the fullest account of the settlement of Latin Christians and others on Cyprus after the Latin conquest, the fifteenth century chronicle of Leontios Makhairas, the anonymous chronicle of ‘Amadi’ that is probably dateable to the early sixteenth century although for the section on thirteenth century Cypriot history it draws on earlier sources and the later sixteenth century chronicle of Florio Bustron. Furthermore, the Chorogra a and the Description of Stephen de Lusignan, two chronicles postdating the conquest of Cyprus by the Ottoman Turks in 1570, will also be referred to on the subject of settlement in thirteenth century Cyprus. By way of comparison, the final part of the paper examined the extent to which the evidence of settlement in other Mediterranean lands derives chiefly from chronicles or from documentary sources. In conclusion, it can be stated that the various accounts of settlement on Cyprus following its cession to King Guy of Jerusalem in 1192 show differences in terms of the value of the fiefs, the geographical regions from which the settlers came and the types of properties which were granted to them. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem resembles Cyprus in that the source material for early Latin settlement is narrative, not documentary. But this is not the case for the Venetian Crete and the Hospitaller Rhodes, where the source materials recording the arrival of the first Latin settlers are wholly documentary., Artykuł „Osadnictwo na Cyprze Lusignanów po podboju łacińskim: analiza kronik cypryjskich i innych w szerszym kontekście” stawia sobie za cel przebadanie i porównanie relacji z różnych kronik z XIII do XVI wieku, dotyczących osadnictwa na Cyprze po podboju łacińskim, czyli od końca XII do początku XIII wieku. Omówione zostaną również szczegółowe informacje zawarte w tych kronikach, zarówno pod kątem rozbieżności, które są wynikiem uprzedzeń i stronniczości, jak również pod względem wiarygodności, która zostanie zweryfikowana na podstawie dostępnych źródeł z epoki. Źródła narracyjne, o których mowa, to XIII-wieczna kontynuacja kroniki Wilhelma z Tyru, która dostarcza najpełniejszego opisu osadnictwa łacińskiego i innego na Cyprze po podboju łacińskim; XV-wieczna kronika Leontiosa Makhairasa; anonimowa kronika znana jako „Amadi”, którą można prawdopodobnie datować na początek XVI wieku, chociaż w części dotyczącej XIII-wiecznej historii Cypru czerpie z wcześniejszych źródeł; kronika Florio Bustrona z XVI wieku; dwie kroniki Stefana z Lusignan – „Chorografia” i „Opis Cypru”– obydwie datowane na okres po podboju Cypru przez Turków osmańskich w 1570 roku.W końcowej części artykułu zbadano, w jakim stopniu informacje o osadnictwie na innych terenach śródziemnomorskich pochodzą z kronik, a w jakim ze źródeł dokumentowych. Podsumowując, można stwierdzić, że różne relacje o osadnictwie na Cyprze po przekazaniu wyspy w 1192 roku Gwidonowi z Lusignan (Guy de Lusignan), królowi Jerozolimy, wykazują różnice pod względem wartości lenn, regionów geograficznych, z których przybyli osadnicy, oraz rodzajów posiadłości, które zostały im przyznane. Łacińskie królestwo Jerozolimy przypomina Cypr pod tym względem, że baza źródłowa dotycząca wczesnego osadnictwa łacińskiego oparta została na materiałach narracyjnych, a nie na dokumentach. Inaczej mają się sprawy w przypadku weneckiej Krety i Rodos pod władaniem Zakonu Szpitalników – tam informacje o przybyciu pierwszych osadników łacińskich zawarte są w całości w źródłach dokumentowych.

During the investigation of the Research Group Señoríos Medievales Segovianos in the Archive of the Diocese of Segovia an unusual document was digitized. It was a building license for Bishop Juan Arias Dávila to improve University facilities. This document was written in a different script: The Calligraphic Courtesan Script. related to traditional Courtesan script; this document was written in an especially clear writing style not connected with the usual cursive gothic styles in Castilla. This article tries to connect this clearness in the writing style with the presence of Juan Parix from Heidelberg in Segovia, who brought the first Spanish printing press to Segovia.

Estudio del Hostal y la Casa adscrita a Blanca de Trastámara, infanta de Navarra y, tras su matrimonio con Enrique de Castilla en 1440, princesa de Asturias. Figura escasamente atendida por la historiografía, para la elaboración de este trabajo se ha reunido una importante documentación de archivo, en su mayor parte inédita, que ha permitido conocer los espacios de servicio curiales que atendieron a la joven princesa desde su niñez y profundizar en las intrigas que en su entorno se desarrollaron en el marco más amplio de las complejas relaciones políticas que Castilla, Navarra y Aragón mantuvieron durante la primera mitad del siglo XV.

Petrarch’s letter de Ascensu Montis Ventosi has long served as the founding document of “renaissance humanism”. Since thebeginning of renaissance studies in the mid-nineteenth century, the letter has become almost a talisman for summoning the new, secular spirit of humanism that spontaneously arrived in Italy in the fourteenth century, took hold of the hearts and minds of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and led to cataclysmic cultural, religious, and political changes in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This reading, still common among non-specialists, especially in the English-speaking world, is overly simplistic and ignores Petrarch’s profound debt to classical and Christian tradition, obscuring the fundamentally religious character of the letter. This article examines how scholars came to assign the letter so much importance and offers an interpretation that stresses Petrarch’s continuity with tradition and his desire to revitalize rather than reinvent the traditions of Christian scholarship and contemplation.

This article examines codicological evidence for the presence of an illustrated Persian cosmography (‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt) (British Library Add 23564) at the fifteenth-century Bahmani court (1347–1...

This paper examines MS D. 92 of the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras/Chennai, which contains the works of ‘Iyani, a late fifteenth century Shirazi poet and historian. ‘Iyani had migrated to the Deccan, and wrote in Persian in the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1528), receiving the patronage of both Sultan Mahmud Shah (r. 1482–924) and Habib al-Din Muhibballah, a descendant of the Sufi saint Shah Ni‘matallah Vali of Kirman. The paper investigates ‘Iyani’s works, which comprise qasidas, ghazals, ruba‘iyyat and two mathnavīs, the Jangnama-i Shahrukh and the Fathnama-i Mahmud Shahi. The latter, recording the defeat of a rebellion led by the Abyssinian commander in Gulbarga, Dastur Dinar, sheds new light on the political and factional environment in the final stages of Bahmani rule. ‘Iyani’s works represent a new source for the cultural, literary and political history of the fifteenth century Deccan. Postprint

The Portuguese engagement with the continent of Africa following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was framed, among numerous conditions, as a crusade (Portuguese: cruzada). However, crusading influences on Portuguese expansion are often sidelined in favour of economic motives. Unlike North and north-east Africa's connected histories with the Crusades (1095–1291) and the continual role of crusading in the following centuries, the fifteenth century offered a new arena. Kongo's adoption of Christianity in the late fifteenth century was the first time that an African power can be viewed as engaging in crusading ideology as a Latin Christian power. Significantly, Kongo was converted by Portuguese missionaries who were undertaking their own crusade. Yet, the crusading influence on Kongo's early development of its Christianity has hitherto been overlooked in Africanist scholarship. Similarly, the situation in Kongo remains a lacuna in Crusades scholarship too. This article calls for a closer discussion between the histories of Africa and the Crusades through the case of Kongo and comparative African examples, such as Benin and Ndongo, to highlight the need to better connect these histories.

The port of Leixões was built in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the Douro port in North Portugal. Despite the importance of the Douro port in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (during the age of discoveries) and later in the eighteenth century with the port wine trade, it had several restrictions – namely, geomorphic and hydrodynamic features. The first studies of the new port of Leixões date back to the fifteenth century, but it was in the eighteenth century that a strong effort was made to deliver a viable alternative to the Douro port. Due to the magnitude of the work, it was considered one of the biggest engineering works of the nineteenth century. A diversity of structures are addressed, from vertical rock/concrete quay walls to piled quays and dolphins, pointing out the problems and describing the solutions. This work aims to describe the construction of the second most important port of Portugal, whose docks were totally excavated on the mouth of the River Leça, and its developments in over 120 years, focusing on the main geotechnical problems met and their mitigation. In fact, harbour geotechnics could learn from this outstanding engineering experience, and the Leixões port may contribute to that knowledge.

The concept of justice came to be transformed in the medieval era in the Latin West, particularly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, due to ongoing shifts in the political and institutional fields. Monarchies became institutionalized due to the influence of debates proposed by the University of Bologna generating the construction of a legal culture systematizing the concepts and criteria for the exercise of justice without abandoning the relationship between these theories and the social context to which it was destined. Municipal representatives came to play an increasingly important role in events such as the rise of the Joanine Dynasty in Portugal (1383-5) and their aspirations and worldview would be sought out as one of the currencies of exchange for the granting of support, reflected in the legislation and in the legal collections developed by descendants of John I of Avis, such as the Alfonsine Ordinations. This constituted a space in which private rights overlapped with the Common Law emanating from the royal court and which crystallized a tendency towards Portuguese legal singularity promoting the hierarchization of the sources of law available in Latin. This work is developed from historical criticism applied to documentary content, Las Siete Partidas del muy noble Rey Don Alfonso el Sabio, Livro das Leis e Posturas, and the Ordenações Afonsinas.

Byzantine civilization did not know the printed book: it was a civilization of manuscripts and manuscript books (codices) made of papyrus, parchment, and paper. The ancient Greeks bequeathed to the Byzantines the word Logos (in multiple meanings – word, speech, mind, reason, supreme principle, the divine creative power, the word of God, the word as the bearer of life and light), as the greatest treasure. The Rhomaioi (Byzantines) polished the skill of use of words and the ability to persuade with words to their full glory. However, the use of words within Byzantine civilization flourished completely and reached its apogee in literature. An important feature of the Greek language in Byzantine times (the period from the fourth to the fifteenth century) is diglossia, i.e. the existence of two different varieties of a language used under different conditions within a community – a high, socially prestigious form, used for writing, and a low, simpler, everyday spoken form. For Christians, a sensitive issue was the attitude towards the ancient pagan heritage: they accepted what did not conflict with their dogmas, and rejected the rest. Today, there are about 55,000 Greek manuscripts in the world, of which about 40,000 are Byzantine. In order to be distributed to readers and preserved from decay, manuscript books were being transcribed in scriptoriums, in which not only monks but also secular people of various professions were working. Books were very expensive. There were public, imperial, patriarchal, monastic, and private libraries, with not large collections of manuscripts. As Byzantine civilization was approaching its decline, the migration of Greek manuscripts from Byzantium to the Latin world of Western Europe began. In that way, the great heritage of ancient civilization was preserved and transferred to European countries.

Locally made ceramics from Islamic sites in Ethiopia have been neglected in most archaeological studies, which tend to privilege imported Middle Eastern and Chinese/Southeast Asian ceramics. An assemblage of the local ceramics from the important trading site of Harlaa, in eastern Ethiopia (mid-sixth and fifteenth centuries AD), is the subject of this article. The study emphasizes the value of these ceramics as chronological markers, and for understanding regional and long-distance contacts, cultural innovations, processes of Islamization, and foodways.

EnglishAfter a brief excursus on the Italian «living saints» who acquired a reputation for sanctity between the second half of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a clarification of the historiographical concept of «living saints», the essay presents the hitherto unexplored case of the Dominican tertiary Maddalena Panatieri da Trino (1443-1503). While living in a small town in Monferrato, a rich land located in the Piedmont region, Maddalena was reported to the Marquis Guglielmo viii Paleologo for having prophesied his victory in a tournament held in France. Later venerated by the prince, who considered her a mother, the life of the blessed Magdalene was composed by Girolamo da Milano op following the example of the hagiographic legend of Blessed Osanna of Mantua, after the passage of Monferrato to the Gonzaga dukedom in the thirties of the sixteenth century. italianoDopo un breve excursus sulle «sante vive» italiane vissute tra il secondo Quattrocento e il Cinque­cento e una precisazione del concetto storiografico di «sante vive», il saggio presenta il caso fino ad ora non approfondito, della terziaria domenicana Maddalena Panatieri da Trino (1443-1503). Mentre viveva in un piccolo centro del Monferrato, ricca terra situata nella regione del Piemonte, Maddalena si segnalo al mar­chese Guglielmo viii Paleologo per aver profetizzato la sua vittoria in un torneo tenutosi in Francia. Venerata in seguito dal principe, che la considero una madre, la vita della beata venne composta da Girolamo da Mi­lano op sull’esempio della leggenda agiografica della beata Osanna da Mantova, dopo il passaggio del Mon­ferrato al ducato dei Gonzaga negli anni Trenta del Cinquecento.

This article examines the Bengal–China connections between the Ilyās Shāhī and Ming dynasties in the early fifteenth century across the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea. It traces how law played a central role in the cultural geography and diplomatic vocabulary between individuals and communities in foreign lands, with their shared understanding of two nodal points of law. Diplomatic missions explicate how customary, regional and transregional laws were entangled in inter-imperial etiquette. Then there were the religious orders of Islam that constituted an inner circle of imperial exchanges. Between the Ilyās Shāhī rule in Bengal and the Ming Empire in China, certain dimensions of Islamic law provided a common language for the circulation of people and ideas. Stretching between cities and across oceans the interpolity legal exchanges expose interesting aspects of the histories of China and Bengal.

espanolEste articulo se centra en el analisis de los mecanismos de creacion y reclamacion de areas de uso colectivo en la Edad Media, a traves del caso de los devasos de Ciudad Rodrigo. Se trata de un conjunto de espacios destinados preferentemente al pasto del ganado y a la recoleccion de lena, a los que tenian acceso los habitantes de la villa de Ciudad Rodrigo y los vecinos de las aldeas adyacentes (comarcanos). El uso combinado del registro arqueologico y de las fuentes escritas, aplicado a los siglos xi al xv, ha permitido observar los medios de reclamacion de los derechos comunales sobre esos espacios. Se plantea la hipotesis de que se utilizaran inicialmente estrategias de sacralizacion mediante enterramientos que vinculaban el territorio a los antepasados que mas tarde se construyeran para ese fin edificaciones con funciones religiosas, pequenas iglesias que no fueron parroquias. Esta utilizacion de lo sagrado coexistio con la progresiva identificacion de los devasos como propiedades concejiles como consecuencia de la afirmacion del poder del concejo de Ciudad Rodrigo. EnglishThis paper focuses on the analysis of the ways which areas of collective use were created and claimed in the Middle Ages, through the case of the devasos of Ciudad Rodrigo. They were lands used preferentially to the grazing of cattle and to the collection of firewood; the inhabitants of the town of Ciudad Rodrigo as well as the neighbours of the villages that surrounded those areas had rights of entitlement to access. The means of claiming communal rights over those spaces between eleventh and fifteenth centuries have been studied thanks to a combination of archaeological record and written sources. The main hypothesis is the use of a claiming strategy based on sacralisation. First, burials linked the territory to the ancestors during early Middle Ages, and after the construction of buildings with religious functions, small churches that were not parishes, would have been a key to preserve the commons. Those politics of the sacred coexisted with the progressive identification of the devasos as properties of the council as a result of the affirmation of the power of the town of Ciudad Rodrigo.

The origin of alphabetic script lies in second-millennium BC Bronze Age Levantine societies. A chronological gap, however, divides the earliest evidence from the Sinai and Egypt—dated to the nineteenth century BC—and from the thirteenth-century BC corpus in Palestine. Here, the authors report a newly discovered Late Bronze Age alphabetic inscription from Tel Lachish, Israel. Dating to the fifteenth century BC, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant, and may therefore be regarded as the ‘missing link’. The proliferation of early alphabetic writing in the Southern Levant should be considered a product of Levantine-Egyptian interaction during the mid second millennium BC, rather than of later Egyptian domination.

Based on the reconstruction of the monetary flows of a merchant-banking company operating in Barcelona at the beginning of the fifteenth century, this study aims to understand the reasons behind exchange-rate variations in the local currency with respect to the principal European markets, as well as the modalities and predictability of such oscillations. By using real rather than ‘hearsay’ rates, we present new assessments of the seasonal character of exchange rates and their sensitivity to conditions of currency abundance or shortage. In addition, econometric analysis shows that exchange-rate volatility was quite modest and dependent on geographic and macroeconomic factors, such as the system of commercial flows.

A 15th century Tibetan biography offers a rare glimpse into the life of the Tibetan princess Chokyi Dronma (1422–1455), who experienced marriage, childbirth, the death of her daughter and eventuall...

The study presents the first two generations of professors at the University of Kraków in the fifteenth century. The first generation was made up of Polish, Czech, and German professors from the University of Prague, who in the year 1400 organized the university in Kraków. The second generation of professors in Kraków formed thanks to years of work on the part of masters who came to Kraków from Prague and other European universities. Both generations had a decisive influence on the development of the University of Kraków in the fifteenth century.

During the late fifteenth century a new category of medical practitioner appeared in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire: the Franzosenarzt or French pox doctor. Until now, there has been no dedicated study of these practitioners. Through an analysis of municipal records from Nuremberg (circa 1495 to 1560), this paper offers the first dedicated investigation of the Franzosenärzte in this city, focusing on uncovering their relationships with Nuremberg's civic and medical hierarchies. It demonstrates why the Franzosenärzte gained a footing within the city's municipal healthcare system, but remained subject to the suspicions of the civic and medical authorities. These suspicions, combined with a competitive medical marketplace and Nuremberg's economic difficulties, precipitated the disappearance of the Franzosenärzte from the city around 1557. Nevertheless, for a brief moment, the Franzosenärzte's practical expertise in treating the French pox unsettled Nuremberg's nascent medical hierarchy and the ambitions of the city's physicians.

The study focuses on questions relating to the deaths of professors of the Utraquist university in Prague from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century (cause of death, funerals, estates, forms and means of commemoration, etc.). It is based on sources of official provenance as well as on certain egodocuments and literary, iconographic, and material sources. Because from the Middle Ages they most commonly served as the final resting places of university masters, attention is also devoted to the Corpus Christi Chapel in New Town, Prague, and the Bethlehem Chapel in Old Town, Prague.

Situated approximately ninety miles from Fukuoka, and just thirty miles from Busan, the island of Tsushima/Taema-do has been at the crossroad of East Asian geopolitics since the time of the Chosŏn court and the Muromachi/Ashikaga bakufu. In differentiating its position be-tween a maritime “frontier” and a “border(is)land,” this article argues how various historical agents from the island mediate the different hege-monic influences from Korea and Japan since the fifteenth century. I begin by examining Tsushima/Taema-do as a “frontier” where different influences overlapped and coexisted simultaneously. Then, I explore how the assertion of its identity as a “border(is)land” detached from the cen-tralized political institutions empowered the island to negotiate its deal-ings with the respective political centers. The last section focuses on non-state actors, specifically the local population and the pirate community, in articulating their agency by forms of negotiation and violence. Hence by reconceptualizing the island as a historical agent in its own right, this arti-cle highlights the need to consider the geographical and ideological space negotiated by the island during several major historical ruptures in the early modern period as Tsushima carved out its distinctive position in East Asian geopolitics.

This work presents the first results of the iconographic study and analytical characterisation of a set of four stained-glass panels that are part of the collection of National Palace of Pena (Sintra, Portugal). These panels were collected by the King Ferdinand II in the mid-nineteenth century, for his main residence the Palace of Necessidades (Lisbon, Portugal), and only first presented to the general public in 2011. This study contributes with the knowledge of Technical Art History and Heritage Science to a better and deeper understanding of their history, materials and techniques used in the production, where an art-historical and a scientific approach are applied to attribute their origins. Based on the analysis of the formal and stylistic characteristic of the panels, it is proposed that the drawings used for the production of three of these panels may be based on the design and painting being carried out in the same workshop, and that the four panels have the same provenance (Germany). The composition of the glass and grisaille was determined and colourising elements were identified. Through this approach, conclusive correlation between the analysed glasses was possible: all are calcium rich or calcium–potassium rich types, and the results also suggest that the same source of silica was used for their production. A typical mixture of glass and lead oxide was found in the grisaille applied on the painted panels. However, less usual was the use of a copper oxide pigment for the black grisaille. All these findings support the proposals made regarding provenance and production period (fifteenth century).

This paper elucidates and analyses one of the Muslim intellectual heritage in Indonesia which is phenomenal and cosmopolitan, what is called Islam Nusantara (Islam of the Archipelago). When reading the history of the arrival of Islam in Archipelago, most of the scholars studying Archipelago Islam agreed that Islamization of this area was conducted in a peaceful way. They assimilated and complemented each other to become what is called “citizen of the world”. Derridas called this as a model of universal hospitality or guiding principle to protect people from wars. As a religion of peace, Islam is cosmopolitan. This is proved by the fact that Islam is a religion which includes races and nations. This feature is marked by Nine saints (Walisanga) as Javanese unique agents in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, taking interactionist approach between Islam and local culture. This in turn creates Indonesian Islamic civilization which is called today “Islam Nusantara”, Islam without such obstacles as culture, religion, and nation, Islam with a peaceful face that respects humanity and emphasizes tolerance and empathy to human beings.

The rise of Western naval power in the world was the consequence of the earlier Iberian discovery of peoples, societies and cultures beyond the seas known to the Europeans of the early fifteenth century. It was indeed these forays and adventures that gradually led to the imposition of Western colonial and imperial rule over what were previously independent societies and cultures in Asia and Africa. The Muslim societies, along with Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Christian and traditional African peoples, were all brought under one European imperial roof, and their societies exposed to the transforming powers of Western industrial might. It was of course this rise of the West and the decline of the East that led to the parcelling out of Muslim lands and to the alteration in the direction and flow of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent and their brethren elsewhere in Dam1 Islam. With such a division of the Muslim lands, each Muslim people living under a given colonial power tried to maintain its Islamic identity against whatever odds there were in that colonial system. Pakistanis were part of this global phenomenon and the creation of their country in 1947 dramatized the Muslim feeling of loss of unity and the urgent need to recover the universal feeling of Islamic solidarity which colonial rule seemingly derailed from the tracks of human history. In this paper I intend to examine and analyze the role of Pakistan in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Working on the understanding that Pakistan at the time of the formation of the OIC in 1969, was the most populous Islamic state in the world and that its very creation was occasioned by the Islamic sentiments of the Muslim ...

The author's concept floodplain in V. Rutkivsky's novel „Dzhuras of Cossack Shvaika” is analyzed in the article. It is proved that this concept is manifested on the plot, composition, space-time, character and image levels. Leaving at its core a common meaning, the concept floodplain acquires uncharacteristic meanings. In the author's picture of the world, they appeal to both geographical space of Ukraine and its history, mean a new historical force that begins to form in the late fifteenth century and stands on the defense of Ukrainian lands, indicate a gradual change of cyclical thinking to linear, the emergence of a historical person with a new self-identification. V. Rutkivsky shows the psychological mechanisms of Ukrainians self-determination in the context of social and political relations, which determines the cognitive model of political behavior’s motivation. Characters are grouped on a locative basis: concept floodplain correlates with Cossacks, their antagonists are associated with the concept of the steppe. Loci with which the warring forces are associated, determine the different ways of fighting: Cossacks are in no hurry to go to the steppe, and Tatars bypass floodplain. The attitude to floodplain marks characters, plays a characterological role. Floodplain play a key role at compositional level, as shown by the titles of the chapters: „Court in the floodplains”, „Battle in the floodplains”. The culmination of the novel is transferred by the author to the now „own” territory for the Cossacks – in the floodplain, where they win. The concept floodplain used by the writer to create the figurative structure of the novel, including metaphors, place metonyms, antitheses, hyperbole, sarcasm, chiasm.

This article employs a large database of 10,360 deaths taken from registrations of graves dug and church bells tolled at Haarlem between the years 1412 and 1547—one of the largest samples and longest series of mortality evidence ever produced for medieval Holland—and systematically compares findings with a seventeenth-century burial register for the same city. It concludes that we should put aside any lingering notion that late medieval Holland was very lightly affected by epidemic diseases: in fact, in Haarlem, these mortality crises were more severe than those seen in the seventeenth century. The data also reveal not one overarching “medieval mortality regime” but distinct changes between fewer but more severe spikes in the first half of the fifteenth century, and higher frequency of smaller spikes later on—especially in the period 1480–1530—with the number of mortality crises damping down after 1530. These mortality crises tended to produce more adult female victims than male, supporting recent findings from elsewhere in the late medieval Low Countries.