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The geography of the world presented in Spanish chivalric romances combines real spaces or areas inspired by them with others, completely made-up, purely born in the author’s imagination. As a rule, toponyms used in the chronicles of adventures of knights-errant are not meant to inform the reader about the characteristics of the place in which the action unfolds. Wherever the adventure happens: a sinking ship, a battlefield, a duel location or a magical trial, the focus point is the protagonist, not the place. However, authors of chivalric romances use numerous toponyms and do not refrain from mentioning countries that are less familiar to their readers in order to introduce a certain diversity and make their work stand out in the swarm of other publications. In this way, the toponym “Poland” appears in the stories of knights-errant, sometimes as the location of the adventure, but most often as the homeland of warriors who are frequently becoming friends with the main character. This article analyses the image of Poland and Poles as outlined by the authors of chivalric romances, both where the area performs a purely episodic function and when it becomes one of the most important places in the geography of the fictional world. The author also hypothesises about the possible sources of inspiration for describing the territory of Poland and her inhabitants.
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This article explores the adventure of bread, one of the essential substances of human nutrition, in Istanbul during Suleiman I's reign. It follows the primary sources about the production, supply, grinding, and distribution of wheat, the raw material of bread. In addition, it addresses the situation of the mills and bakeries supplying flour and bread and the quality, weight, and varieties of bread. It focuses on the production of wheat and its transportation to Istanbul, grinding and distribution, difficulties caused by disruptions in the supply-demand balance, and the arrangements of wheat-related procedures. It determines that the bread problem in the capital during the period was primarily concerned with wheat and had a strong relationship with mills. A central finding is that the low wheat yield and the inadequacy of mills grinding qualified flour were the most significant obstacles to adequately supplying the highly populated city. The city's supply, which was at the level of a knife-edge in terms of wheat, caused a severe shortage of bread in 1530. On the other hand, the bread varieties explicitly produced in this period show that the Turks carried some of their Central Asian habits to Istanbul and kept them alive until this period.
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Review of: Yaşar, Murat. The North Caucasus Borderland: Between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire, 1555-1605. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 272 Page, ISBN: 9781474498692 Based on a comparative analysis of the Ottoman and Muscovite diplomatic correspondence, this book presents a historical account of the North Caucasus peoples from 1555 to 1605, when Russia expanded into the region. The North Caucasus becomes a contested borderland, with the Ottomans, Safavids, Crimean Khanate, and Muscovy competing for influence externally, and the Nogays, Cossacks, Dagestanis, and Circassians internally. This elaborate interplay of cooptation, persuasion, loyalty, and betrayal eventually led to the Ottomans and Dagestani allies expelling the Muscovites from the region.
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The article presents the results of research on miniatures of manuscripts and engravings of printed books of the 13th—16th centuries — important pictorial sources on material culture, including costume and household items related to the life of a child, as well as their games, toys and dolls. The medieval miniatures have been massively studied by students of historic costumes, seldom toys, while this article addresses the miniatures and engravings as the most important pictorial source on the Middle Ages and early Modern times. References are provided to specific images from books and their digitized copies and some replicas.The identified sources show that the book illustration of the studied period is able to provide what is necessary for understanding how medieval children grew up and developed, how they were dressed, slept, what and how they played. Gospel stories about Jesus Christ’s infancy were most important in this matter. Among the secular subjects, quite informative are illustrations with the births of princely children and the lives of historical figures, known and anonymous characters of miniatures and engravings.
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The authors present a paleoanthropological study of the necropolises from several 16th—18th century towns and villages in the western part of Russia. In this area and time period, the average life expectancy was very low. The lowest, 14.5 years, is observed in the population of the borderline fortress Blokhino-1 in Saransk County. The higher the infant mortality in the groups, the lower the average life expectancy. The infant mortality rate in different localities was different.The peak of infant mortality falls on 0—5 age group in all studied groups from the western part of Russia of the 16th—18th centuries. The representativeness of this cohort often depends on the mortality rate of children in the first year of life. The high mortality rate of young children was associated with a low level of medical development, lack of antibiotics, and sometimes with historical situations.Mortality in the first year of life, especially newborns, was the highest in the borderline fortress Blokhino-1 of Saransk County. The reason for such a dangerous demographic situation here was the historical purpose of the fortress and the task of the population to defend their homeland. Much less attention was paid to everything else. In general, the most prosperous demographic situation was in the village of Isupovo, Kostroma region, in the city of Kazan and on the territory of Nizhny Novgorod Posad near the Kremlin (necropolis on the Verkhnevolzhskaya embankment) in the 16th—18th centuries.
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The article discusses the strength and functioning of the quarter army (pol. wojsko kwarciane) between 1589–1591. At the time in question a large Tatar invasion was in progress, which resulted in the rapid enlargement of the entire Crown army. Huge tax increases were introduced due to the prospect of an offensive war against the Ottoman Empire. The rapidly expanding army did not receive its due pay, leading to the first army confederation (pol. konfederacja wojskowa) in history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Consequently, there was a reduction of the quarter army.
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Starting Long Wars which could occupy the state for a long time on the western front and the emergence of the Romanian nationalist Michael the Brave on the same dates changed politic balances in Wallachia turned against Ottoman. Taking advantage of the wars with the Habsburgs, Michael rebelled against Ottomans in Bucharest on 13 November 1594, he turned his direction to the towns and villages along the Danube and he inflicted great damages to the Muslim people living this region. After the danger of security along the Danube, Ottoman authorities decided to produce more permanent solutions in Wallachia. In this context, the Wallachian voivodeship was directly transformed into an Ottoman province and Satırcı Mehmed Pasha was appointed as a governor. Also, ulufe soldiers were appointed to the castles which about to be built in Bucharest and Târgoviste. The task of implementing decision taken by the Porte was given to Ferhad Pasha. As a matter of fact, Ferhad Pasha came to Ruse after providing the ammunition and soldiers etc. necessary for Wallachian campaign. For a while, he supervised the bridge works that would facilitate Ottoman army’s crossing to Wallachia and later he was dismissed from his duty due to the pressure of his rivals in Istanbul.
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Post-mortem facial reconstruction is a technique that uses anatomical knowledge of the human skull to flesh out the face of a deceased individual. Forensic artists work with law enforcement to identify victims of crime when skeletonized remains are found. Archaeologists use the same technique to learn what a person who lived and died long before photographs may have looked like. The skull of Michael the Brave (1558-1601), ruler of Romanian principalities in 1600, was photographed around 1918-1920, and the Manchester three-dimensional data were used for peg anthropological analysis. Based on these new technologies, a physical model of the skull was obtained and used for facial reconstruction according to forensic art methods. Finally, the reconstructed face was compared with contemporary portraits of Michael theBrave (like Aegidus Sadeler or Domenicos Custos portraits).
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The study discusses the cognitive benefits of a discourse-oriented reading of old texts whose confessional polemic discourse of the Reformation period becomes meaningful again. The object of research are the communicative aspects of language and the various dimensions of socio-cultural life. The aim of the analysis is not so much discussing the characteristics of the code, but the description of its users, seen as subjects of discourse, and of the relations among them, of their knowledge system, ways of thinking about the world, basic concepts, ideas and values (or rather their profiles) contained in discourse, the communication strategies used, as well as the cultural and social conditions and institutional framework in which the discourse takes place. While on the one hand, from the research perspective, all these parameters make up the characteristics of discourse, on the other, the category of discourse allows for a consistent inclusion of such diverse properties in its description.
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Review of: Cătălina Bălinișteanu-Furdu, Old and Middle English Literature. The Literature of the Renaissance, Bacău, Editura Alma Mater, 2021, 212 pages.
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The article uses an interdisciplinary approach to selected early modern poems of John Donne and aims to delineate the research area which still awaits systematic exploration. The textual analysis of his elegy: The Comparison, operating within the communicationoriented theory of genre blending, leads to the detection of its multigeneric and dialogic patterns. It reveals the intricate manner in which features and functions of various literary and non-literary forms are intertwined and harmonized in one poem. It is also argued that Donne’s elegy derives its imagery from an experimental trend toward caricatures (grotesquery) followed by the 15th/16th-century portraitists and genre painters. The general conclusion is that Donne utilizes various, then available, communication channels to ensure intermediality of his message and that his concept presupposes certain cognitive and creative processes on the addressee’s side.
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The article describes the composition of the Polish army from the period preceding the Battle of Lubieszów, as well as from several weeks later. The main source are two registers of this army that are contained in the marshal’s book from the time of Stefan Batory’s rule. In the author’s opinion there are many reasons to recognize that it was a court army – a permanent mercenary army of the king. One of the objectives of this article is to do wider and more detailed research on this issue. In the text itself the experience of the commanders of individual army units has been analyzed as well as their relations with the royal court and their background. The bulk of the article has been devoted to the comparison of the mounted cavalry units – their number, the size of the cavalry masters’ and comrades’ detachments – before and after the Battle of Lubieszów. The composition of the units supporting the cavalry, i.e. infantry and artillery, has also been described. At the very end, in the form of an appendix, editions of both registers of the court army have been featured.
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This paper presents the preliminary study of a cemetery, dated between the second half of the XVIth century and the beginning of the XVIIth century, uncovered in the northern part of the Vînători-La Jolică archaeological site area. The site was first excavated in 1972-1974 by archaeologists M. Florescu and M. Nicu, when, among other discoveries, they managed to identify a previously unknown “feudal” necropolis. Unfortunately, none of these findings have ever been rigorously published, only mentioned. The present article strives to continue the effort of publishing inedited materials and archaeological contexts that are part of the new excavations carried out in the Vînători-La Jolică dig site which refer, at this time, to the Late Mediaeval/premodern period.
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Mentioned since the ancient times in mythology and documents, the messengers formed the central component of the correspondence system. In the Principality of Moldavia of the 15th-17th century, the information was mostly passed by spoken word. A large part of merchants, travellers or priests practiced this activity, but they only could be regarded as simple transmitters. The official messengers and emissaries were mostly found in the Princely Courts and served only for the state official interests. As the Moldavian territory was situated on the border between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, many of them acted as spies, too. Thus, choosing the right messengers was a pretty delicate job for the princes. Another important aspect was the instructions received by the messenger or emissary for successful accomplishing his mission. During the Medieval period, a large part of the dispatch riders or emissaries had an official job (correspondence carriers) as well as an unofficial one (spies), which made the instructions absolutely necessary in order for the delegate to safely accomplish his tasks. The last question involves the rights and privileges of the messengers in order to keep them as safe as possible. Because they often went through foreign territories, the princes made special deals in which they reciprocally permitted the messengers to cross their territories.
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This investigation - aimed at reconstructing the historical framework most conducive to the activity of translating the Psalter into Romanian for the first time - attempts to valorise the novelties accumulated by the research of the last decades concerning the effort of translating and retranslating this biblical text into Romanian. The example of the Psalter printed in Alba Iulia in 1651 seemed to me to be a useful landmark from which to look back, because it is the last version for which we can invoke an external confessional impulse, it is at the end of a long course of translation experiments, and the knowledge accumulated about its editing allows us to discuss with a high degree of probability the context in which it was produced. We have also found useful the help that could come from 17th century texts due to the standoff in which research has reached as a result of the identification in all the texts of the Scripture translated in the 16th century of a linguistic layer of the Banat-Hunedoara language, which would necessarily indicate the place where the translation was made, while all the preserved copies and the main sources of the printed versions come from Moldova. The appearance of the Alba Iulia Psalter is analysed in comparison with the Coresi Psalter of 1570 (as the earliest preserved printed Romanian version of the Psalter, for which we also know the confessional context in which it went to press) and the Sibiu Tetraevangel of 1551-1553 (as the earliest preserved translated and printed Romanian text). The comparison takes into account the sources from which the translations were made and the type of Slavonic wording to which they belong, the identity of the translators and their collaborators (editors, printers, authors of the prefaces), the motivation and the context in which the printed versions were composed. The conclusion drawn from this comparison is that the success enjoyed by the original of the first Romanian translation of the Psalter must be attributed to a high level of religious and/or political patronage, which assumed the accuracy of the translation and supported its dissemination. The following working hypothesis is proposed: the first Romanian translation of the Psalter took place in ”Ruthenia” (historic Maramureș, northern medieval Hungary, the southern part of the Polish – Lithuanian kingdom and northern Moldavia), and was made by a scholar from Banat – Hunedoara, who used a Serbian manuscript of the Bălgrad Psalter type brought to the area by Serbian settlers from estates acquired after 1439 by the despot George Brankovich. As for the motivation for the translation, it must have been the missionary zeal of the Orthodox hierarchy united with Rome by virtue of the Florentine Council, or – on the contrary – the anti-unionist discourse, since neither Catholicism nor Orthodoxy are opposed to the translation of reading books, but only of books for the church service. It remains to be seen which of the two sides took such an initiative, and not only in ”Ruthenia” but also in Moldavia, where the Florentine union also has a troubled history.
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The schism between the Western and Eastern churches, which formally took place in Constantinople, gave rise to a rich polemical literary tradition, but anti-Latin theme entered relatively late into hagiography as a special literary genre. This did not happen in Byzantium until the 30s of the 13th century. There is not a single hagiography completely devoted to the denunciation of the Latins in the Greek circle of writing (in Byzantium, Cyprus and Crete, Palestine and Mount Athos) of the 13th–16th centuries. This topic is associated exclusively with biographical details and is mentioned episodically in the hagiographies. None of the monuments of late Greek-Byzantine hagiography with anti-Latin fragments entered the Old Russian literature. On the contrary, there is not only an increase in interest in this topic in ancient Russian literature, but there is even a life written purposefully as an anti-Latin pamphlet — the life of the holy martyr Isidore of Yuryev. The dynamics of the emergence of anti-Latin theme in Old Russian hagiography is asynchronous with Byzantine hagiography — it became relevant in Old Russia only in the second half of the 15th century. Almost all Russian saints whose lives contain anti-Latin themes are associated with the Baltic region. This is the legendary origin of the holy fools Isidor Tverdislov of Rostov and Procopius of Ustyug, the monks Anthony the Roman and Serapion of Pskov, the military-political activity of the prince Alexander Nevsky and the holy martyr Isidor’s of Yuryev death at the hands of the Latins. The article concludes that Byzantine hagiography did not play a role in the formation of anti-Latin theme in ancient Russian hagiography.
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Until recently, historiography has lacked major comparative studies on the phenomen of Holy in Central Europe. Meanwhile, there were very vast regions in which there were no local saints until the end of the Middle Ages. One of these historical regions was Upper Saxony. What was the way of formation of the sacral cult here? What political or socio-cultural factors played a decisive role in the emergence of the cult of saints? And what were the functions of the saints in a changing society? The problems are studied on the example of St. Benno, Bishop of Meißen, who was canonized in 1523. He became the last saint of the medieval Latin Church and the first saint for the Wettin dynasty. The article shows the instrumentalization of his memory at various stages. From the 13th century he acted in the service of the bishops of Meißen, who aspired to become imperial princes. From the 15th century the princely dynasty of the Wettins (Albertine House) was busy about the canonization of Benno in order to strengthen their own authority in the Holy Roman Empire. The decisive contribution in this direction was made by Duke George the Bearded. Two events marked the efforts of the Saxon prince in the public space: the translation into German of the Life of St. Benno, made by Hieronymus Emser in 1517 and the transfer of Benno’s relics in the cathedral of Meißen in 1524. During the Reformation, the cult of St. Benno was called upon to oppose Protestantism. Paradoxically, however, he was able to play his role as a link between the dynasty and subjects only in Bavaria from the end of the 16th century.
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There is limited historical information available about Batumi's early history prior to the 19th century in Georgian sources. Therefore, the Ottoman archival materials preserved in the archives and libraries of the Republic of Turkey play a crucial role in bridging this informational gap. Among the valuable records stored in the archives, there is an extensive log dedicated to Batumi, cataloged under code 122 within the Main Archive of the Department of Land and Cadastre in Ankara. This document, yet to be introduced into scholarly discourse, holds significant importance for unraveling the history of Batumi and its surrounding region. Page B of this document contains a detailed text dating back to September 1704, offering intriguing insights into Batumi and the neighboring villages. It mentions that this area was part of the Gurieli kingdom until a relatively recent period. This reference is instrumental in pinpointing the timing of Batumi's incorporation into the Ottoman Empire, as historical literature has offered differing opinions on this matter. While some scholars believed Batumi became part of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16th century, others asserted it was in 1703. The historical source provided supports the latter perspective, indicating that Batumi and its adjacent villages were ultimately annexed by the Ottoman Empire in the early 18th century, leading to the establishment of Batumi as an administrative center. According to the documents we have analyzed, during this specific era, the boundaries of the Liva of Batumi extended to the western coast of the Black Sea and encompassed the territories of Atina (known today as Pazar). This document offers a comprehensive description of the region, allowing for multidimensional exploration of the period, including aspects such as socio-economic dynamics, political developments, ethnic composition, religious influences, demographic changes, and more.
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Amikor Tonk Sándor 2003-ban bekövetkezett halála után átvettem a magyar paleográfia oktatását a kolozsvári Babeş–Bolyai Tudományegyetemen, megörököltem a Tanár úrtól azokat a fényképmásolatokat, amelyek önmagukban is lassan már történeti (írott) emléknek minősülnek, hiszen még az 1970-es években készíttette azokat didaktikai eszközként Jakó Zsigmond, a tárgy akkori oktatója. A különböző írásfajták és irattípusok kora újkori (16–17. századi) erdélyi elterjedését szemléltetni kívánó fényképmásolatokat láthatóan tudatosan és kiváló érzékkel elsődlegesen az erdélyi nemes családok (Jósika, Wesselényi, Bánffy stb.) fennmaradt levéltárainak magyar nyelvű iratanyagából válogatta ki Jakó Zsigmond.
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