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The article describes the history of Polish relations with China, starting from the end of the 13th century to the end of the 18th century. It focuses mainly on political and economic relations, but it refers to the civilizational and cultural relations as well. The Author omits, already quite well analyzed, issues concerning the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries in China. The Author mentions the Battle of Legnica on Dobre Pole on 9th April 1241, which should be considered as the first contact between the Poles and the Mongols. The Author mentions diplomatic mission of the Franciscan Benedict the Pole who on 22th July 1246, as the first Pole, reached Karakorum in Mongolia. However, the most part of the article concerns the attempts to find a simpler way to China through the lands of Moscow, which has failed, and even in the 12th century, the Poles used the sea route or traveled through Persia. The article highlights the efforts of missionaries and diplomats in that matter. As the most interesting issue in Polish-Chinese relations in the period until the end of the 18th century, the Author indicates an attempt to establish direct relations between the king Jan III Sobieski and the Chinese emperor Kangxi. Jan III Sobieski after the victory over the Turks at Vienna has sent one of his portraits to the emperor’s court, who accepted the gift and has responded writing him a letter. Moreover, in the 18th century, not only the king Jan III Sobieski, but also merchants, middle-class bourgeois and landowners possessed Chinese products, especially Chinese porcelain.
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Subject of research is the activity of Amirdovlad Amasiatsi in Plovdiv. He is among encyclopedic figures in the Ottoman Empire during the in its expansion in the Balkans in the XV century. Its activity is reflected in official documents and original medical works. The new read activities of Amasiatsi aims not only to promote a medieval physician and pharmacologist working in the Bulgarian lands, but whose works reveal scientific and cultural trends imposed during XV – XVII century. The activity of Amasiatsi consider three aspects that represent three separate research tasks – the role of Amasiatsi as a physician and scientist in the specific historical conditions in the Balkans, focusing on its activities in the region of Plovdiv and placing this work in the context of trends imposed in called. «Dark ages» – the destruction of the Christian intelligentsia, the collapse of education and scientific knowledge depersonalization of culture. Positive trends are striving to defend the faith, creation of literature in spoken language, care for the education of students – future healers and pharmacologists. In this sense, what Amasiatsi in Plovdiv is an expression of moral, ethical and human values inherent in the spirit of the Hippocratic medicine scientific medical school in Constantinople.
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The German Reformation raised many questions in all spheres of the public life, including university traditions and practices. In years before the Reformation, Martin Luther had challenged the necessity of teaching of some Aristotle’s works in universities. The humanist Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), the closest friend and follower of Martin Luther, at the very beginning supported “the expulsion” of Aristotle from universities. However, his attitude towards Aristotle underwent a noticeable evolution by the late 1520s, which led him to the program for returning of the ancient philosopher’s works to German universities. The paper is focused mainly on Melanchthon’s oration entitled “De philosophia” (1536) setting forth the humanist’s views on the Aristotelian heritage. We analyze different meanings of the concept of “liberali eruditione” (liberal erudition), which was understood by Melanchthon as a synthesis of ancient erudition and new religiosity.
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The houses on the Dominikanske Square 11 and Alzbetina Street 17 are situated in the northwest quarter of the medieval city. An important finding was reached during the research of the houses, what is the definition of the medieval ground alignment. The house at the Dominikanske square 11 had practically today's niveau and the plain of the square leaned towards the Dominican church. At Alzbetina Street 17, there is the 15th century entrance situated in the depth of approximately 3m below the surface. The primary single-room houses were apparently shifted behind today’s street front. The 14th century heart of the house on Alzbetina Street 17 was partly vaulted and partly covered by flat ceiling. The 15th century house on Dominikanske Square 11 apparently replaced older building. The single room with the barrel vault remained.
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Medieval towns were not an isolated island, but a living organism with intense interactions with its environment. From a demographic point of view they were dependent on the flow of people from beyond its walls. The town needed new people to its natural development and functioning. In the example of five Slovak towns (Bratislava, Trnava, Bardejov, Prešov, Košice), we have shown how immigration and immigrants contributed to their demographic picture. The main sources for exploring this question were the registers of new burghers and also the tax registers. These sources, however, do not register low-income inhabitants forming a significant part of the urban population. Therefore, on the basis of their analysis, we can not form a realistic picture of the immigration. German patriciate played a leading role in researched towns, what is reflected by the data coming from the registers of the burgher rights acceptance. They provide evidence that the burgher rights were granted mostly to the persons of German nationality (except Trnava). The regular trade contacts with foreign countries have led to the immigration of foreigners mostly of German origin. Location of the city and its surrounding neighborhood with different ethnicity played also its role.
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In 1965 František Matějek pointed to the mutual rivalry between what we can call municipal and manorial economy in the 16th through the 17th century. However, the question to what extent did the residues of the duchy land tenure made it hard for the municipal council to gain control of all the suburban domains whose legal status was different seems to remain unexplored – the conjecture here is that it was just the foregoing landlord domain that tried to prevent the municipality from making attempts at the use of the considerable economic potential and benefits that the overall area of the Opavian suburbia definitely rendered. The purpose of the following contribution therefore lies in showing whether or not did the municipal council succeed in exploiting at least some parts of the suburbia and, if they did, whether the latter underwent some changes that suited the interests of the community.
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The study presented sets its aim as setting out the key themes and significance of the complex research of the municipal offices, using the example of Bohemia and Moravia, so the knowledge gained could become an indispensable base for further study of urban history. Despite the undoubted difficulty, which is placed on the researcher of research focused in this way, the reconstruction of the Hradec (Králové) municipal office activities to 1620 for instance proved that even with the greatly fragmentary nature of the material, it is possible to reach quite fundamental knowledge on the development of the Bohemian urban milieu, especially thanks to overcoming the formal diplomatics analysis and studies of the isolated sources and thanks to the use of knowledge from a number of historical disciplines. Another indisputable advantage is monitoring a longer time period of the development of the relevant office, which can easily reveal the progress or regress of the individual towns, that had not yet formed a homogeneous whole in Bohemia and Moravia even in the period of the Early Modern Period, namely not even in the case of royal towns. This certain individual nature is typical also for the area of municipal offices, the organizational structure of which and the method of keeping the documents reflect the importance and emancipation of the relevant urban milieu and generally also the number of its denizens. It was only the reform interventions of Maria Theresia and especially then Joseph II that created the new conditions for the development of municipal office practices and for their unification, which arose from the new classification of Bohemian and Moravian towns.
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This study focuses on some aspects of the ways and mechanisms for preserving the memory of traumatic events during military conflicts among the subjects of the Sultan. These aspects have to do with the functioning of the Ottoman bureaucratic, judicial and military institutions on local and central level, and communication with the local population. For this purpose, the study analyzes the case with the citizens of Silistra and their conduct, as well as that of the Ottoman authorities, during and after the war with the Holy League in 1593–1606 and the late 17th century. The analysis of the sources reveals that the process of preserving and passing on the information involved functionaries from all levels of the Ottoman hierarchy and that various bureaucratic practices were applied related to the registration and taxation of the population, and to the creation of formal and informal archival collections. There were several ways of preserving and passing on of the memory: by means of written communication among the institutions (through document flow toward the centre and back to the provinces); by oral communication between the representatives of the authorities and taxpayers in the kadı court, and discussions among the members of the community and its elders who attended the court sittings. Written evidence of the war events, or more specifically, of the feelings that overwhelmed the people and the disturbing thoughts that haunted them in those troubled times was left by a number of literate Bulgarians in marginal notes on pages of liturgical books and even on church walls. These short notes testify that the clash between the warring armies did not bring any hope to the Christians, but only fear in their souls and awareness of the trouble that had befallen them in those “severe and turbulent times”. Finally, the folklore also provides information about the war, transforming in a specific way the memory of events and people, people’s attitude towards the afflictions that befell on them. The analyzed sources show that the memory which the Bulgarians have preserved and transmitted to next generations is charged with predominantly negative assessment of the traumatic events during the war and of Michael Viteazul’s image. It seems that the scope of the devastation and the suffering caused by the Wallachian armies to the Christian population were a stronger factor in the process of constructing the collective memory of the events than the war victories of the Voivode over the Ottoman ruler in the lands south of the Danube. That is why the themes of killing, enslavement and displacement of the population as well as the motif of the unforgivable sin of Voivode Michael stand out in the Ottoman documents, in the marginal notes, and the folk songs.
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Based on a variety of mainly Ottoman primary sources – kadı sicills, tapu tahrir defters, single documents, as well as contemporary narratives, the article aims at elucidating the impact of the wars waged by the Ottomans with their neighbours at a time of expansion and retreat in one Ottoman border region and city. More specifically it analyses the influence of the war and the frontier on the defence system and the military institutions, on the establishment and development of the provincial administration and the agrarian regime over a period of nearly four centuries. The focus is on the city of Vidin during the wars at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century following which it again came at the frontline of Ottoman defence, and on the influence of the frontier on the relations between the two main religious communities in the region, the Muslims and the Orthodox Christians.
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By comparing the historiographical narrative of Karadzha Pasha Mosque in Gotse Delchev and content of the documents on which it was built, this article raises several questions, the answers to which give cause for rethinking the facts.
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Based on unpublished Ottoman tax registers (tapu tahrir defteri) kept at the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, the article examines the process of transformation of the Byzantine town of Adrianople into the Ottoman Edirne; the change in the architectural and ethnical and confessional layout of the city; the location of a part of the Muslim and Christian population and of the urban quarters inhabited by them; the Jewish communities and the dynamics in the quantitative indicators of the registered households; the condition, designation and functions of the ancient and medieval fortress of Adrianople and the way in which it fitted into the new Ottoman urban setting. Having surrendered voluntarily the fortress of Adrianople to the Ottoman, the Christian population was granted the right to continue to reside in its quarters in its interior. In the 16th century massive communities of Christian citizens inhabited the space among the fortress walls of the Byzantine fortress and the majority of their neighborhoods were situated around churches and bore the name of the respective church, while others were named after their current or former priests. Upon the conquest of the city by the Ottoman troops some of the churches in the fortress were turned into mosques for the purpose of demonstrating the dominant position of Islam and meeting the spiritual needs of the Muslim population. After the takeover of Edirne the Muslim population settled outside the walls of the ancient and medieval fortress, where it set up its neighborhoods. Besides Muslims and Christians many Jews continued to live in the city as well. They included romaniotes as well as Jews from the sepharadim and ashkenazim groups.
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Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman Empire has expanded its territory on the Balkan Peninsula, by permanent military crusades. As a result of the continuous military operations, to the territory of the empire have been included new lands and peoples, leading to the emergence of new military-administrative divisions. Some of them have inherited those from the Second Bulgarian Kingdom era, and some of them have arose out in the course of the Ottoman conquest.The population migration is a different result of the Ottoman territorial expansion. As a result of the process, on the territory of the Medieval Bulgarian State and Byzantium have voluntarily or forcibly settled Muslim and non-Muslim population, leading to the changes in the ethno-religious, social and professional structure of the villages and towns on the Balkans. Among the urban and rural population of the Sakar Mountain region have settled representatives of various military formations, the Muslim cult, craftsmen, traders and persons engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding, who have migrated from different parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor and have settled in the specified area of the Bulgarian and Balkan territory.The present report shall follow the migration of the Muslim and non-Muslim population in the town of Edirne and the villages, part of the Edirne kaza during the period 15th – 16th century, on the basis of unpublished Ottoman tax registers from the tapu tahrir defterleri group, stored in the funds of the National Library "St. St. Cyril and Methodius" in Sofia and the Ottoman Archive in Istanbul.
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The medieval heraldry of the town of Bistrița incorporates – in a very peculiar way when compared to other urban communities in Transylvania – symbols directly related to the Angevine royal dynasty of Hungary. Starting from the examination of the historical sources that record and use these specific attributes, both documentary (textual) and sigillographic (iconographic), the present paper pursues two main objectives: (1) to determine a more accurate chronology of the use of Bistrița’s urban seals, until around 1540, in relation to the relevant historiography of the subject; (2) to argue new hypotheses regarding the way Bistrița assumed the iconography of its first urban seal, particularly the way in which the crowned ostrich with a horseshoe in its beak came to be considered the main symbol of collective identity of this medieval Transylvanian town.
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The authoress summarizes what we know about the earliest Jewish settlement in Prague and presents the building of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague from the point of view of history and architecture.
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This paper discusses how the Venetian chronicles written in the 14th–18th centuries represent the episode in which the ban on wearing beards in Venice under Doge Domenico Michiel is connected to the hostilities with the Byzantine Empire in the context of the expedition against Cephalonia in 1126. It is about a strange connection at the first glance; however, some Venetian chroniclers that inserted this event were tempted to consider this decision as an act of contempt against the Greeks that even made Emperor John II Comnenus decide to end the hostilities and demand peace. The paper also brings fragments that introduce this event in Venetian chronicles.
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The article deals with the prologue (synaxarion) Vitae of St. Nicholas in Slavonic Cyrillic literature from the 13th to the 17th century. These texts function within the hymnographic composition practice and can be found in two types of liturgical books – the Prologue and the Menaion. They are usually extracts from extensive narratives, which is why this paper also looks at texts from two other types of medieval books (the Panegyric and the Reading Menaion) that contain The Acts of St. Nicholas, The Miracles of St. Nicholas and the so-called „Another” Vita – St. Nicholas of Sion Vita. These texts also functioned as synaxarion vitae. The Vita of St. Nicholas in the Simple Prologue is the shortest and earliest version of a hagiographic narrative about the saint translated in Bulgaria during the First Bulgarian Empire, and it is very rarely found in the hymnographic composition of the Menaion. St. Nicholas’ Vita in the Turnovo translation of the Verse Prologue is the most popular and common after the sixth song of the canon in the hymnographic composition practice. That Vita is a more extensive version of the Acts of St. Nicholas, based on the Metaphrastian Vita, preceded by a verse and an added miracle of St. Nicholas. The article mentions two interesting cases in Serbian menaia of the 15th century, which present different traditions to place the synaxarion texts.
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The paper analyzes how the Byzantine law influenced The Town Law of Novo Brdo, which represents the second part of Despot Stefan Lazarević’s Novo Brdo Legal Code of 1412. A possible connection between the town law of Novo Brdo and certain provisions of The Syntagma of Matthew Blastares and one of the privileges that the town of Ioannina received from the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II in 1319 is suggested. Accordingly, it is assumed that certain provisions of the Town Law of Novo Brdo could have been formulated during the reign of Emperor Stefan Dušan.
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