![The Byzantine-Bulgarian dialogue](/api/image/getbookcoverimage?id=document_cover-page-image_472000.jpg)
Keywords: War Memoirs; Sixtus mission; secret negotiations; separate peace; Smuts-Mensdorff talks; the fate of the Monarchy;
The author focuses his attention in this study on the role Lloyd George played in shaping the relation between Britain and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1917-1918. The article highlights the repeated attempts of the British Prime Minister to conclude a separate peace with the Dual Monarchy after Emperor Karl initiated a peace offensive in early 1917. The author relies primarily on the War Memoirs of Lloyd George and analyses the Sixtus-mission from a British point of view. The study also covers the secret Smuts-Mensdorff talks in December 1917.
More...Keywords: Ottoman empire; Ottoman empire wars; warfare; religious wars; seventeenth century; History; Balkan history
The study is based upon the representative ottoman historical narratives - the histories of Silahdar Mehmed Aga and Defterdar Mehmed Pasha - in search of typology of social behaviour of the Christian inhabitants of the Ottoman Balkan provinces during the war between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire in the end of the 17th century . The Ottoman authors whose reports will be analyzed are part of the historiographic direction that presents the military and political events in the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the 17th century. At the same time the chroniclers involve information about the life in the provinces, as a reflection of the war upon the reaya, and its reactions. The purpose of this report is to present the Ottoman viewpoint in the light of Ottoman historiography, as concrete events, happened in the Ottoman rear during the successful advance of the Habsburg forces. From the presented examples, concerning in particular the reaya of Dragoman, will be outlined some conclusions, characterizing the behaviour of part of the non-Muslim population in the context of the specific political situation.
More...Keywords: duty of loyalty; good faith; conflict of interest; corporate opportunity doctrine; fiduciary duties; agency
The duty of loyalty is the core of the fiduciary relationship between ownership and effective control of a company. This paper aims at identifying the contours of this heterogeneous fiduciary duty in corporate law, absent of clearly established legal limits. The objective is to highlight the pattern of this duty based on evolutionary case law, from the beginning of confluences between legal and microeconomic elements, by emphasizing the shades of current social and moral norms. The article renders both exposures of this duty, from the minimalist conception, "lack of betrayal", to the broad dimension of "active commitment". Various case law examples contribute to the identification of overlaps between loyalty and good faith, and of conflicts between applicability of the duty of care and duty of loyalty. The paper exposes a comparative analysis of the duty of loyalty among the jurisdictions of the European Union and Romania, emphasizing the influences of agency rules and traditional fiduciary values within civil law. The expansion of the duty is reflected by addressing the notions of conflict of interest and corporate opportunity doctrine. The findings reveal case law substantiated factors which facilitate the identification of duty of loyalty violations and differentiate them from good faith situations, where jurisprudence mainly facilitates the exclusion of this fiduciary duty.
More...The term polyphony is used with different senses in literary studies, linguistic pragmatics and discourse analyses. Our aim is to briefly examine the particular significance with which the term is employed in M. Bakhtin’s writings on literary genres and on the polyphonic novel. A separate section is devoted to tracing the perceivable markers of voice polyphony, as well as some markers of the implicit dialogism of oral narratives, as theycan be found in the incipit of Diderot’s novel Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître. The final section focuses on the way in which these specific markers of dialogism and polyphony are transposed in the Romanian translation of Diderot’s novel.
More...Soon after the Kosovo battle (1389), new Ottoman sultan Bayezid I Yildirim moved in rush from the region of Balkan Peninsula to Anatolia in order to consolidate his authority and reign. In the next two years, he had led several war campaigns against the Turkish emirates which he had wanted to conquer and include in Ottoman state. At the same time Bayezid I didn’t want to give up on the results of Europe conquest achieved by his father, trying to provide financial and military resources from already subordinated Balkan Christian states. The heirs of prince Lazar have accepted Bayezid’s supremacy by the year 1390. The exact chronology of referral Serbian legation to Ottoman ruler, headed by prince Stefan Lazarević who sworn allegiance and handed over his sister Olivera, as vassalage forfeit, has not been confirmed yet. The crucial argument for taking in consideration the year 1390 as a date when Serbian legation could have come to sultan Bayezids’ camp, could be traced in the Hagiography of Stefan Lazarević by Constantine the Philosopher. According to this source, the Byzantine emperor Manuel II and Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević at certain point have shared the same war experience in Bayezid’s campaigns. If the meeting of vassals in Serres in 1393 is excluded, which could not be considered as the military event, the reconstruction of possible joint participation in Ottoman campaigns leads us to two potential war episodes. The first is related to the siege of Philadelphia in 1390, the last Byzantine town in Anatolia. The second refers to the Ottoman conquest of Synope and Kastamonia from the year 1391. Stefan Lazarević’s possible presence in the Ottoman war camp during the siege of Philadelphia, indirectly constructed from the text of Byzantine historian Duca, some historians have used as the unquestionable fact. On the other hand, one letter from 1391, written by Manuel Paleologus during the mentioned Bayezids’ campaign leaves the hypothetical possibility that Serbian vassal troops, who had been fighting in Anatolia, were recruited from the Stefan Lazarević’s territory. Although it is impossible to give complete and fully reliable testimony of Stefan Lazarević’s formal participation in the conquest of Philadelphia, the confirmed presence of Serbian vassal troops in Anatolian campaigns show that political and social processes derived from the acceptance of Ottoman supremacy among the Balkan states were rampant. In the next historical phase of Ottoman conquests those changes brought to the complete breakdown of Christian states in the Balkans.
More...The paper presents an analysis of the impact that the apocalyptic texts had in the Serbian environment in the 15th and 16th centuries, a period which saw an increasingly important re-actualization of prophetic texts—most of all those attributed to Methodius of Patara and Leo the Wise—characteristic of the time of the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the subsequent Venetian plans for the colonization of the late medieval Mediterranean. In view of the changed historical situation as a result of Ottoman expansion, the purpose of the new versions of prophetic texts, particularly popular in the 16th century, was to foretell the future or second coming of the last liberator king who would re-establish the empire of the Rhomaioi. It was at that time that Byzantine apocalyptic literature rode a new wave of popularity, and that illuminated prophetic manuscripts were created in monastic scriptoria in the conquered Serbian lands. It was no accident that one such manuscript could be found at the monastery of Mileševa, just as it is not surprising that this particular milieu, where the tomb of St. Sava of Serbia was enshrined and which, consequently, was the focus of his cult, attributed the authorship of the prophecy to St. Sava. The paper offers the analysis of a report of Cornelius Duplicius Schepper, the imperial secretary and envoy of the Viennese court, claiming that he saw an illuminated Slavic manuscript of prophecies attributed to St. Sava at Mileševa in 1533. There is no doubt that the manuscript related the prophecy of the fall of Constantinople, because it contained the illustration of a city with seven towers (“seven hills”) and an iron gate. The chancellor also mentions illuminations depicting a fox, an eagle, a crowned lion, and a ship carrying the emperor and soldiers. This incidental information about the now lost manuscript suggests echoes of Pseudo-Methodius’s prophecies or the Oracles of Leo the Wise, whose Slavic translations are known to have appeared quite early. The Mileševa apocalyptic manuscript arose against the background of an already developed literary and genre tradition of prophecy and related writings such as “lamentations” and prayers which contained prophetic elements, possibly in emulation of popular Byzantine models. The earliest illustrations of prophetic texts about the end of the world do not appear until the second half of the 15th century, usually in Late Byzantine manuscripts. The best example is a rare 16th century manuscript kept at the Biblioteca Marciana (gr. VII, 22), a singular compilation of various Byzantine apocalyptic narratives. The text contains 410 illuminations, which are relevant to the topic discussed here insofar as they may shed some light on the enigmatic manuscript referred to by Schepper. Namely, the surviving compilations of Byzantine prophetic texts show that illustrated texts of this type are rare and relatively late, or not earlier than the time of Schepper’s visit to Mileševa. For several reasons, the centre of their origin was certainly Venice, with which Mileševa maintained special relations. As early as the 1530s, which is the time of Schepper’s visit, Božidar Vuković, a publisher and printer who had started his Venetian printing house in 1519, was in close contact with the monastery through its monks. The manuscript known to us only from Schepper’s report may have been the result of direct contact with Venetian models, which, by the way, were widespread in the Venetian colonies in Greece, notably Crete and Cyprus. The 16th century saw the emergence of a number of pseudo-prophetic texts accommodated to the political plans of the Habsburg and Hungarian courts. One of them, known as the Prognosticon, penned by the court astrologer of Matthias Corvinus at about the time of Schepper’s visit to Mileševa (1534), was focused on recent events such as the Ottoman conquest of Belgrade and Rhodes, the fall of Hungary and the failed siege of Vienna. An inevitable subject matter of the illustrations of prophecies created at the scriptoria such as that at Mileševa is the Pseudo-Methodian theme of the fall of the “city of seven hills”, which assumed layered meanings in the given context. Essentially, it is the archetypal Christian fortress which, in the reality of the 1530s, seemed increasingly close to the popular apocalyptic vision
More...Keywords: refugees; EU; Turkey; gender; policy
Debates on "migration of women" got stronger when globalization and its challenges were felt around 1980 and onwards. In Europe, the period between 1960 and 1973 was known as the golden age of social welfare state while in the 1990s this social welfare model came into a crisis and many European governments cut resources on social services. Suddenly, migrant women began to be a rational choice to compensate the gap as they provided cheap labour for social welfare services. As a result, home care became the most common social welfare service supplemented by migrant women (Öner, 2015: 358). This actually increased the demand for female migrant workers who often come from countries outside Europe. Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi argues from another perspective in her studies and says that the globalization and implementation of economic policies resulted in the feminization of poverty, which actually refers a situation where “women rather than man are especially at risk of being poor in industrialized countries” (Hyndman and Giles, 2011: 363).
More...Keywords: Czechoslovakia; Communist regime; happening; totalitarianism; "Merrier Present"; demonstrations;
The American historian Padraic Kenney dubbed events in Central Europe in 1989 a “carnival of revolution”. In his absorbing book he explores the activities of the new opposition groupings that gradually took shape in the second half of the 1980s. The ideological battles of the previous generations were either alien or not a matter of concern to their founders, who for the most part were members of the young generation. They had no illusions about the chances of reforming the political regime into which they had been born. They were focused on public events, organising various demonstrations, hunger strikes, petitions and happenings. Some of these became legendary. Among them were the street events of the Society for a Merrier Present (Společnost za veselejší současnost), which emerged several months before the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
More...Keywords: Czechoslovakia; Prague; Prague Castle; occupation; documents; Adolf Hitler; 1939;
The occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939 and Adolf Hitler’s stay in Prague on 15 and 16 March 1939 have been described in both specialist and memoir literature. Yet new archival materials relating to these events are still emerging. These include the report on the occupation of Prague Castle from May 1939 by JUDr. Karel Strnad, an official of the President’s Office, and two German documents: on President Emil Hácha’s return from Berlin on 15 March 1939 and on Adolf Hitler’s stay at Prague Castle.
More...Keywords: Czechoslovakia; Declaration of St James’s Palace; war criminals; prosecution; Wilhelm Wollner; Friedrich Dennert;
In January 1942, the representatives of nine occupied European countries, including Czechoslovakia, met in London to formulate their attitude to post-war punishment of Nazi war criminals and collaborators. Together they adopted the Declaration of St James’s Palace, which later became the basis of the principles according to which war criminals were prosecuted and which were also adopted by the Allied Powers and many other countries.
More...Keywords: Czechoslovakia; radio; VOA; RFE; government; broadcast; 1942; religion; sports; exile; state security;
Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe (RFE) were two of the most popular external radio stations prior to November 1989. The history of Voice of America’s Czechoslovak service and its past popularity in Czechoslovakia are unfortunately somewhat forgotten now.
More...Keywords: Czechoslovakia; Communist party; Transcarpathian Region; State Archives; Karel Vaš; interwar period; USSR; documents; interview;
Investigation file No. 29064 on Karel Vaš was preserved in the State Archives of the Transcarpathian Region. It contains a large amount of interesting information about his activities in the inter-war period as well as his internment in the USSR. The presented edition of documents from the file is supplemented by the transcription of an interview with Karel Vaš on this topic.
More...Keywords: Slovakia; foreign service; modernization; Good Management System; Strategic Management and Planning; Improving Citizen Services; a Transparent and Working System of Economic-Financial Management; HRM;
While 2007 was the year in which an in-depth process analysis was carried out with the aim of identifying and outlining the initial starting point, including pinpointing the most serious problems and opportunities for change, 2008 was the year in which the project itself was put into action. A whole range of individual projects were implemented in 2008 which substantially influenced the management system at the ministry.
More...Keywords: historiography;post-communism;Hungary;memory;
The following chapter explores how the Holocaust of 1944 and the end of the communist revolutionary project in 1989 are constructed in terms of their contemporary relevance in Hungary to thereby discuss some key questions of historical explanation and narrative coherence in post-communist times. My focus will be on major trends, key disagreements, and recent changes in Holocaust remembrance and the meanings assigned to 1989. I shall conceive of Holocaust remembrance as intimately linked to the issue of historical responsibility whereas I shall treat the remembrance of 1989 as a crucial problem of historical orientation that also has a decisive political stake.
More...Keywords: post-communism;historiography;
In the following chapter, the author wants to show that the fear Andrić talked about can from time to time lull us into blindly believing those stories that know nothing about “perhaps” or “anticipation.” Or to put it more precisely, in discussing the straightforwardness of post-socialist revisionist historiography, he shows how hope in the uncensored interpretation of the past that accompanied the “end of communism” gave way to the fear of yet another strand of one-sided politics of history
More...Keywords: Asymmetric Bertrand Duopoly; Normal-form Games; Software algorithms in Microeconomic Policy; Complete Analysis of a normal-form complex interaction; Pareto optima; valuation of Nash equilibriums
In this chapter we apply the Complete Analysis of Differentiable Games (introduced by D. Carfì in 2009 and 2010) and already employed by himself and others in Carfi, and Schiliro, 2011; Carfi, and Ricciardello, 2010 and Carfi, 2009) and some new algorithms employing the software wxMaxima 11.04.0 in order to reach a total knowledge of the classic Bertrand Duopoly (1883), viewed as a complex interaction between two competitive subjects, in a particularly difficult asymmetric case. The software wxMaxima is an interface for the computer algebra system Maxima. Maxima is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and sets, vectors, matrices. Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions, arbitrary precision integers, and variable precision floating point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions. The Bertrand Duopoly is a classic oligopolistic market in which there are two enterprises producing the same commodity and selling it in the same market. In this classic model, in a competitive background, the two enterprises employ as possible strategies the unit prices of their products, contrary to the Cournot duopoly, in which the enterprises decide to use the quantities of the commodity produced as strategies. The main solutions proposed in literature for this kind of duopoly (as in the case of Cournot duopoly) are the Nash equilibrium and the Collusive Optimum, without any subsequent critical exam about these two kinds of solutions. The absence of any critical quantitative analysis is due to the relevant lack of knowledge regarding the set of all possible outcomes of this strategic interaction. On the contrary, by considering the Bertrand Duopoly as a differentiable game (games with differentiable payoff functions) and studying it by the new topological methodologies introduced by D. Carfì, we obtain an exhaustive and complete vision of the entire payoff space of the Bertrand game (this also in asymmetric cases with the help of wxMaxima 11.04.0) and this total view allows us to analyze critically the classic solutions and to find other ways of action to select Pareto strategies, in the asymmetric cases too. In order to illustrate the application of this topological methodology to the considered infinite game, several compromise pricing-decisions are considered, and we show how the complete study gives a real extremely extended comprehension of the classic model.
More...Keywords: European Monetary Union; co-opetitive games; macroeconomic policy; bargaining solutions
The crisis within the euro area has become frequent during 2010. First, it was the Greek economy that faced a default problem of its sovereign debt; in November, it was Ireland that has been in a serious financial situation at the verge of collapse causing difficulties to the euro. In this contribution, we focus on the Greek crisis and we suggest, through a model of co-opetition based on game theory and conceived at a macro level, feasible solutions in a cooperative perspective for the divergent interests which drive the economic policies in Germany and Greece, with the aim of improving the position of Greece, Germany and the whole euro area, also making a contribution to expand the set of macroeconomic policy tools. By means of our general analytical framework of coopetition, we show the strategies that could generate feasible solutions in a cooperative perspective for Germany and Greece, where these feasible solutions aim at offering a win-win outcome for both countries, letting them share the pie fairly within a growth path represented by a non-zero sum game.A remarkable analytical result of our work consists in the determination of the win-win solution by a new selection method on the transferable utility Pareto boundary of the co-opetitive game.
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