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The author describes a collection of medieval coins found at the Dniester Riverside near Tarasova village (Resina, Moldova). Using medieval written records and maps and the folk toponyms, the author suggests that this settlement can be identified with the medieval town (market town) of Ustia.
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The paper introduces scattered materials found at Tarasova village (Resina, Moldova). The collection includes items made of base metals as well as of iron (mainly items of armament and household utensils). The items can be divided into several chronological groups. The earliest are items of late 9th-11th cc. finding direct analogies on sites of Echimauti-Alcedar type in the territory between the Prut and the Dniester Rivers, as well as among the antiquities of South-Eastern, Central and Eastern Europe. Rather more representative is the collection of items dated by 15th-17th cc., the time when an important trade and industrial settlement of Moldavia is thought to have existed here along with its necropolis. A certain chronological gap between the latter and the former group is filled by a number of crosses-enculpions of the Old Russian type, which are dated within 13th-15th cc.
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The article publishes a unique complex of kilns dated by the late Middle Ages and meant for saltpeter-making, which is the main component of the black powder. The complex was studied by the authors in 2005-2006 within the western fortified section of the Belskoe settlement dated by the Scythian time (Dnieper’s forest-steppe left side, Vorskla River basin).The materials are considered in the context of available data, first of all, written records, telling about saltpeter-making in Ukraine, where one of the main centers of saltpeter-making was located in Poltava region in 16th-19th centuries.The archaeological evidence published here is a significant contribution to our knowledge of making such a strategic product as saltpeter.
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The article is dedicated to the most significant head-dress decorations typical of the population in the Carpathian-Danube Region in 13-17 cc. There are several main traditions in the jewelry art of the time. The Byzantine tradition was still one of the brightest. The Byzantine prototypes served as sources for specific variations of kolts and bead decorations, typical of the jewelry dress in the region. Another tradition surviving till 16 c. was wearing signet-rings, which may be characterized as a common Slavic one. Besides, some decorations are distinguished that find analogues in the Ancient Rus’ (some specific versions of plaques for head-dresses, kolts, bead decorations). As for the diadems, these items reveal Byzantine, West-European and Old Russian parallels. In late 13-14 cc. the head-dresses in the said region acquire decorations of the Golden Horde type (ear-rings shaped as “question mark”, rings with dragon head, ear-rings with teardrop-shaped pendants). Starting with 15 c., items of Turkish fashion were actively borrowed.
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“Voronoch” or “Voronach” – one of the suburbs of the Pskov Republic in XIV-XV cc. The town was situated in the South-Eastern part of the Pskov land, near the Pskov-Lithuanian border. The historical records normally mention the town of Voronoch in the context of military activities in XIV-XVII cc.The archaeological study of Voronoch knows a number of attempts – in 1951 (S.A. Tarakanova), 1956 (P.A. Rappoport and N.N. Gurina), 1969 (V.D. Beletskii), 1980-1981, 1998, 2002 and 2003 (S.V. Beletskii). It has been revealed that the City’s Kremlin in XIII-XVI cc. was a settlement near the village Voronich close to the manor of Trigorskoe. The settlement Voronich 1, almost equivalent in size to the existing village, was in XIII-XVI cc. a Great posad (settlement) of the medieval town; the modern set-up of streets in the village corresponds to the description of the Great posed from a scribe’s book of 1585-1587. Settlements Voronich 2-3 in XIV-XVI cc. made up the town’s posed of Cosma and Damian, set on the right bank of the Sorot’ in front of the settlement.The digging and the recovered finds documented presence of the artefacts of XIII-XVI and XVIII-XIX cc. on the town place and settlements, with very scarce materials of XVII c. This corresponds to the desolation of the city’s Kremlin noticed by the chronicles and a sharp decrease in the number of population on posads during the Livonian war (after 1581). The location of the town also yielded a scarcely preserved layer of the late I – early II millennia AD.
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A successful campaign led by the Grand Vizier Gedik Ahmed Pasha to the Crimea in 1475 brought new territories to the Ottoman Empire — the Southern Taurica and the eastern edge of the Kerch Peninsula, which previously belonged to the Genoese and the local principality of Theodoro. This event, as well as new political and economic realities, had a significant impact on the material culture of the local population. Substantial changes also occurred in the ceramic assemblage. According to the written sources of the first half of the 16th century, pottery manufacturing in Taurica, particularly in the Ottoman province Kefe (former Genoese Caffa), also persisted. However, archaeological data tell about disappearance of glazed pottery, inherent for the previous epoch. In the Ottoman period, the new forms and decorations of vessels, more common for the central regions of the Porte, prevailed among ceramic utensils used by the local inhabitants. At the same time, import from other lands of the Empire became a significant part of the Crimean ceramic assemblage too, especially in the early years of the Ottoman rule. Among them, there are ordinary courseware and glazed tableware, which came in significant amounts. For the first time, changes in ceramic assemblages, which occurred after the catastrophe of 1475, are analyzed on the basis of the materials from well-dated archaeological contexts of the end of the 15th — beginning of the 17th centuries, from various archaeological sites of the Crimea.
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V prvej polovici septembra 2019 sa v Ružomberku, na pôde Filozofickej fakulty Katolíckej univerzity, prednášalo a diskutovalo o otázkach tvorby, praktizovania, prejavov, dôsledkov a o špecifikách kultového správania v priereze dejín. Dialosa tak na fóre 3. ročníka konferencie zameranej na kultúrne dejiny, ktorej organizátorom bola, okrem už spomínanej hosťujúcej Katedry histórie FF KU v Ružomberku, aj Česká společnost pro slavistická, balkanistická a byzantologická studia.
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This work was the result of a field study aimed at locating, recording, photographing and describing old, tombstones, wooden crosses in the Catholic cemetery in Tutnjevac, which belongs to the parish of Spionica in church and administrative terms. The settlement of Spionica has a centuries-old continuity, it is mentioned in the first half of the 16th century, while the first author's well-known record of a Catholic cemetery in the town of the same name dates from 1772. The wooden crosses that are the subject of this work date from the second half of the 20th century, but they undoubtedly have a longer tradition, which was interrupted under various circumstances at the end of the last century. At the cemetery, in November 2017, we found twelve such crosses, among which there is a differentiation between male (6 pieces) and female (6 pieces). Making such crosses is one of the types of vernacular art that will not be seen in situ.
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U radu se govori o jednom manje poznatom lokalitetu nadgrobnih spomenika „Staro mezarje“, na lokalitetu Babina Luka u općini Kalesija, posebno o „Babinom mezaru“, koji je u mnogo čemu epigrafski karakterističan. Autor ovo svoje istraživanje zasniva na značaju ovog lokaliteta kao dobra kulturnohistorijskog naslijeđa Bosne i Hercegovine, koji do sada nije istraživan pa otuda ni kategorisan kao kulturno-historijski spomenik. Nakon ukazivanja na značaj epigrafskih spomenika kao historijskih izvora, a koji su do sada nedovoljno istraživani, autor donosi nove podatke o ovom lokalitetu nišana, posebno o „Babinom mezaru“ koji je stavio u fokus svoga istraživanja. Dosadašnja uzgredna i površna osvrtanja na ovaj lokalitet nišana, autor mijenja i dopunjava svojim istraživanjima provedenim na samom lokalitetu. Otkriva da se radi o jednom od raritetnih nišana iz prvih decenija osmanske vladavine, sa ucrtanom šakom i sa uklesanim datumom izrade, a sve to potkrepljuje sa više priloga – karata, skica i fotografija, sve to sa osnovnom namjerom da stručnoj i naučnoj javnosti i čitaocima uopće pruži što realniju predstavu o ovom spomeniku kulture, kako bi nadležne institucije poduzele potrebne aktivnosti da se isti kategoriše i time adekvatno zaštiti.
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The research topic is actually an episode of what we may call the “survival” of Byzantium in the political culture of the Romanian Principalities. The field of Law was one of the controversial aspects of this issue. My incursion into the characteristics of the imperial Byzantine ideology is meant to explain certain political behaviours of the reign in Moldavia, mainly in the legal practice in late 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century. The Byzantine political tradition present in the Romanian Principalities until the 18th century entailed a reprisal of the governing principles of the Empire. The princes of the country continued to get on the Moldavian throne “with God’s mercy”, a title preserved by those who occupied the princely see in the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century. The princely institution was affected severely by the Turkish-Phanariote regime of the 18th century but, at the level of the domestic princely policy, the institution per se did not undergo significant changes. In terms of legal practice, historical sources attest – as shown throughout my paper – that the princes preserved their right of jus gladii, namely of sentencing to death the persons guilty of several criminal acts. The princes would use this right, as always, as they saw fit (my italics). As we get to the 19th century, death sentences are ever rarer. Most penalties were limited to mine labour, preceded by mutilations and – quite often – by beatings. How can one explain the change in paradigm? On one hand, by the fact that – for criminal power – the loss of an asset or right as a punishment method became far more effective in terms of attaining punitive purpose. On the other hand, we must consider the consolidation of the princely institution, given that it imitated the ideological imperial Byzantine model, based on the image of a good and merciful prince. I believe that these explanations prove valid because legal practice attests fully the reprisal of the Byzantine ideological foundation of oikonomia in governing the country, with the two essential principles: philanthropy and leniency.
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The authors focus on the issue of urban elites in two Adriatic towns, Rab and Rovinj, which differ in their origins and development alike. Rab is an ancient civitas, while Rovinj was classified as a terra in the Venetian administrative system. The two towns also differ in the amount of their preserved written sources. Whereas the medieval sources for Rovinj are only sporadic, for Rab there are a number of notarial books from the late Middle Ages, which allows for a different approach to the spatial identification of urban elites than in Rovinj’s case. Based on the available sources, the paper compares the development, significance, and status of urban elites in both towns.
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Burials dug into Roman period – Viking age barrows can be distinguished in the context of the cemeteries from Lithuania’s Late Medieval – Early Modern period (late 14th–18th centuries). So far, at least 400 late burials have been found in 26 Lithuanian barrow cemeteries while only fragmentary information is available about another 25 such barrow cemeteries. The earliest historical period burials in old barrows should be dated to the late 14th–15th centuries, but this burial practice began to occur on a mass scale in the 16th–17th centuries. The main incidence range of this custom is Samogitia and North Lithuania. In respect to their construction, orientation, and grave good assemblages, these burials do not differ in any way from the context of the historical period cemeteries. The return of burials to old barrow cemeteries should be connected with the Christianisation of Lithuania. On the one hand, up until the 16th century the evangelisation of Lithuania’s rural population was not intensive and therefore burial in a churchyard and Christian rites were not well established. On the other hand, the compressed church network during the Reformation and especially the CounterReformation, the increased pressure from the Church to observe Christian burial rites and pay the exorbitant fees for them, and the lack of Christianity’s authority could have provoked the population’s hostility, forcing people to look for more remote locations for cemeteries, locations some communities found in old pagan barrow cemeteries.
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The Polish-Lithuanian Parliament of 1569– 1795 consisted of three houses: The King, Senate and House of Representatives. The King and Representatives were elected in general election. The members of the Senate were arbitrarily appointed by the King for a lifetime tenure. There is an extensive literature on the forming of the Polish-Lithuanian elite of power in the 16th–18th centuries. The article proves that the literature missed several vital aspects of the issue. Even if the appointments to the Senate were arbitrary, they reflected the real position of politicians in the country’s social network, as if the social network were the real ruling power in the country, influencing the King’s decisions. And the status of politicians was better connected to the network position of their mothers and wives than to their surname and male line.
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The aim of the article is to present life expectancy calculations for magnates, the elite of the nobility (but not an exact equivalent of European aristocracy) from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th–18th centuries (life tables for women and men). The paper also contains a comparison with the results previously obtained for Western European aristocracy. The author tried to verify if there were differences in life expectancy between men and women from two parts of the Commonwealth: The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Because only a small amount of data was collected, 95% confidence intervals were calculated from the sample. The calculations were based on genealogical data collected for 8 families from the Kingdom of Poland and 9 Lithuanian families.
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Review of: Umbrüche innerhalb der Schriftlichkeit in profanen und sakralen Übersetzungstexten des Deutschen, Tschechischen und Polnischen vom 15. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert. Hrsg. von Sebastian Seyferth . (westostpassagen – Slawistische Forschungen und Texte, Bd. 19.) Olms. Hildesheim 2014. 186 S., 7 Ill. ISBN 978-3-487-15137-3. (€ 34,80.). Reviewed by Thomas Daiber.
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The article examines the process of transformation of ideas about gender identity on the material of Russian culture of XVI c. and the beginning of the XVIII c. The main goal of the work is the analysis and description of differences in the concept of gender and age characteristics; as well as the description and analysis of the process of the formation of female discourse as independent. According to the authors of the study, the identification of a man and a woman from the point of view of belonging to the home (gender, family) as a whole, which is characteristic of the traditional culture, does not imply an independent gender identity, but only a functional one. At the same time, the fixation of the functions of the wife and husband, as well as servants and children (“Domostroĭ”) leads to the fact that the custom acquires a normative character and, as a result, each of the functions acquires legal independence, which makes it possible, on the one hand, to transfer the structure of the home (as the relationship of functions) to other cultural phenomena (for example, the state), as A. Kurbsky does. On the other hand, the independence of individual functions, the possibility of their absence in the system, the features of such points of view are demonstrated by Ivan IV. Nevertheless, one should admit that on the whole they retain traditional semantic patterns. However, it is this approach that allows independent female images to emerge in the XVII c. embodied by the teachers of the schismatic Morozova and Urusova or princess Sophia. At the beginning of the XVIII c., a complete reformatting of the cultural sphere takes place and one can speak of an independent female discourse as well as the male one. In the second half of the XVIII c., a man and a woman were already perceived separately, although, for example, for M. Shcherbatov it was the result of “damage to morals”.
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In this paper, 74 medical terms excerpted from Nowy dykcjonarz (New dictionary) by Michał Abraham Trotz were subject to semantic and formal analyses. The relevant material was presented in the context of the medical lexis being in operation in the 16th and 17th centuries and confronted with the medical vocabulary present in the study by W. Bystrzonowski titled Informacya matematyczna (Mathematical information) of 1749. The analysis of the medical terminology collected by Trotz is aimed to expand our knowledge of the medical vocabulary present in the Polish language of the first half of the 18th century since, as specialists note, there are few studies discussing the medical lexis of that period, and therefore our cognition of the scientific sphere of the human activity in this respect is limited. The presented analyses show that the medical terminology collected in Nowy dykcjonarz is mainly old lexis, which is well-established in the Polish language, the origin of which is Polish (lexical borrowings include 13 units), and which came into existence as a result of word formation, syntactic, and semantic derivation. The presence of numerous synonymous names, which prove, among others, that the Polish medical terminology has still been in the phase of formation, has also been noticed.
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The impressive size stronghold in Konopnica has raised the interest of many researchers since 1930. The object was repeatedly investigated by subsequent researchers such as: Jan Fitzke, Konrad Jażdżewski, Janina Kamińska and the others. Excavations on the earthwork castle and on the place so-called “mieścisko”, the results of which were presented in this article, conducted J. Kamińska in 1964. During the excavation they were made 2 excavations on the stronghold - No. 1 located on the plateau and No. 2 in the moat I. The next 2 excavation were located on the place so-called “mieścisko”. The chronology of artifacts was established by researcher for the time between the 13th - the first half of the 15th and the 16th - 17th century. After many years we can confirm the accuracy of her findings, both in terms of observation of layers in excavations and dating of archeological materials.
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Splendid Encounters VII: Conflict and Peace-Making in Diplomacy (1300–1800). Premodern Diplomats Network, Conference, 27–28 September 2018, Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania
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