Bucureștii în secolul al XVII-lea: structuri socio-economice

Author(s): Georgeta Bordei / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 5/2016

In the first half of the eighteenth century, Bucharest experienced an upward economic recovery due to the diversification crafts,enhance the exchange and propagation of merchants. After 1650 Bucharest and Romanian entire country has experienced a period of nearly six decades of relatively peaceful development, because of the onset „Eastern crisis”. At the time of Brancoveanu, they were recorded over 60 crafts and craftsmen had organized themselves into guilds. Royal Court have significant commercial links with European markets through emissaries or large merchants Bucharest. There were four major fairs. Two days were traditional fair on Tuesdays and Fridays, then, the fair was held and on religious holidays, such as „estates” at the end of June. From this religious holiday and the place where they met buyers and merchants, has been preserved to this day street name „Mosilor”. The streets were named after the merchandise or craft respectively.The names are used in the XXI century: Lipscani, Şelari, Gabroveni, Blănari etc. The most famous inns were those of Serban Cantacuzino and Constantin Brancoveanu. Part of entry into the cellars of the inn Serban Voda can be seen through archaeological excavations in front of the National Bank of Romania

Taming Mars: Customs, Rituals and Ceremonies in the Siege Operations in Dalmatia during the War for Crete (1645–69)

Author(s): Domagoj Madunić / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

The main question of this study is how seventeenth-century European societies attempted to regulate the conduct of warfare. It deals with a peculiar aspect of seventeenth-century siege warfare, namely the customs, ceremonies and rituals that regulated various aspects of a siege, such as the observation of truces and immunities, the negotiation of surrenders, the treatment of prisoners etc. So far, most historians dealing with Early Modern siege warfare have been more concerned with its technical and operational aspects: the digging of trenches, the development of various elements of fortifications, wastage rates of combatants, hardships brought about by lack of food and epidemics, and so on, than they have been with these “decorative elements” of engagement. Nevertheless, these activities, although usually without any obvious operational military value, provided a medium for a discourse between the besieger and besieged and thus, as I argue, played an important role in the final outcome of a siege. Through descriptive analyses of three cases, each dealing with one siege operation in the Dalmatian theater of operations during the War for Crete (1645–69), this inquiry provides an account of customs, rituals, ceremonies and rules of “proper” conduct of a siege, with particular emphasis on the most critical part of a siege: the surrender of a fortified site.

Kommunikáció és híráramlás. A Habsburg-oldal tárgyalási stratégiája az 1627. évi szőnyi békekötés során

Author(s): Gergely Brandl,Csaba Göncöl,Krisztina Juhász,Gellért Ernő Marton,János Szabados / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2018

Nagy Péter pozsonyi látogatásáról

Author(s): Iskra Schwartz / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2019

Russian tsar Peter the Great visited Pressburg for a few days during the summer of 1698. This study aims to reconstruct the exact date of the visit based on various sources and tries to answer the question why the tsar visited this particular city, even though he passed near Prague during the trip, and didn’t visit the city at all. The first reason is probably that by the order of the young tsar a wooden fortress was built in the village of Preobrazhenskoye on the left bank of the Yauza River in 1684, which was named Pressburg. It was most likely named after the famous imperial castle, about which the tsar might have heard from his teacher or the builders of his “toy fortress”. The plan to equip the Pressburg castle with state-of-the-art defences came up in the preceding decades, and maybe this piqued the Russian monarch’s interest. Another reason behind his trip might have been to see the Emperor’s Danube fleet. In Pressburg he could visit the shipyard while new ships were being built. It is likely that Peter was not only interested in the process of building ships, but also wanted to recruit builders for his own ships. The “great diplomatic tour” (which included the visit to Pressburg) had well-defined political aims as well: furthering the goals of the Holy Alliance, strengthening the relationship between the allies, and gathering support for the fight against the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate. Further goals included getting loans, recruiting professionals, ordering and buying weapons and munitions, and acquiring new training methods.

Polish Slaves and Captives in the Crimea in the Seventeenth Century

Author(s): Mikhail Kizilov / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

The article examines the history of the trade in Polish slaves and captives in the Tatar and Ottoman Crimea in the seventeenth century on the basis of hitherto unknown archival evidence and rare printed sources. After the capture an average Polish slave of simple origin was transported to the Crimea, where he had been sold on the local slave markets. Unless he had some special qualifications, a slave usually had to fulfil agricultural duties and do heavy manual work. The slaves usually had some limited free time and could attend Catholic services in the churches of the Crimea's large urban centres. Rich Polish captives were treated in accordance with their high social status and were ransomed for a considerable redemption fee. Important role in ransoming such rich captives was played by Jewish, Tatar and Armenian merchants.

Dávid Rozsnyai’s “Orphans”: A Stepfamily through Divorce in Seventeenth-Century Transylvania

Author(s): Kinga Papp / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

My paper examines the documents pertaining to the life of a stepfamily made through divorce in seventeenth-century Transylvania. The focus is on the interfamilial relationships before and after the divorce. I examine the ways in which the attitude of the father, Dávid Rozsnyai, toward his first wife and children changed during the divorce and after formation of a new family. I also consider how the appearance of the new family members (second wife, half-siblings) affected the equilibrium within the family. My analysis shows that in Early Modern Transylvania there were social and personal customs involving the assignment of social positions to both adult and child members of a family broken by divorce, which facilitated the integration of these families into the community. The scattered family documents and witness hearings show that the divorced father ensured, through his testament and other documents, that the two sons from the two different marriages would share inherited wealth equally. In their turn, the stepbrothers worked together to pay off their father’s debts.

400 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF HUMENNÉ A POLISH SOURCE ON THE SIEGE OF VIENNA AND ITS AFTERMATH (1619-21)

Author(s): Radosław Sztyber / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

The article is an attempt to present The exploits of Polish elears, who were formerly called Lisovchiks (Przewagi elearów polskich, co ich niegdy lisowczykami zwano) by Wojciech Dembołęcki. The book’s form varies between that of a chronicle, a memoir, and a detailed diary. Nevertheless, the report contains an abundance of valuable and interesting data on the Battle of Humenné and its immediate consequences, particularly the pacification actions led by Polish mercenary troops. Dembołęcki’s Exploits can be thought of as, for many reasons, a unique source of knowledge on several historical episodes of the initial stage of the Thirty Years’ War. Its convention, however, is to show the Lisovchiks as an army of God, and therefore the publication (printed in Poznań in 1623) is also evidence of propaganda-motivated glorification of the notorious elears who supported Ferdinand II’s forces twice (in 1619-21 and in 1622). Despite the exaggerated written praise, these soldiers were soon outlawed (in 1623) because of their conduct, especially during peaceful periods. The diary gives the reader a chance to get acquainted with authentic documents, such as correspondence addressed to Poles and signed by imperial authorities. The article mainly recalls selected facts (war tactics specificity, battles, marches, negotiations, etc.) in the chronological order on the basis of the account, but some examples of Dembołęcki’s comments are also cited, paraphrased, or discussed to give a better idea of the nature of the original memoir. In the concluding part of the study there are some remarks on Dembołęcki’s other work, enriched with a short description of a Latin manuscript (preserved in Prague) and a pair of booklets, the first of which was issued in Vienna and the second somewhat later in Poland (the precise place of publication is unknown).

Erdély mohácsa

Author(s): Antal-Pál Bakk / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 07/2020

B. Szabó János: Erdély tragédiája 1657–1662. Corvina Kiadó, Bp., 2019.

„Én is anyja lévén leányomnak”. Gondoskodás a mostohagyermekről a 17. századi győri családokban – a végrendeletek tükrében

Author(s): József Horváth / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 82/2020

Of the 880 wills which survived from seventeenth-century Győr, 55 were drafted by men who made references to a second marriage and 77 were drafted by widowed women who had remarried. Thus, there were potentially at least 132 families in the city in which children from different marriages may have lived together. 50 testament-makers noted that their children came from various marriages, and 41 mention their stepchildren. This corpus is analyzed in this study. In the wills that survived from Győr, the testament-maker usually mentions his or her stepchildren who lived in the same household, almost always mentioning at least their given names. They were rarely specified as heirs (usually only if the testament-makers did not have children of their own), but the shares bequeathed to them were usually of a larger value than those given to distant relations. There are very few cases when a stepchild received no share of an estate or inheritance, but there were also a few cases in which testament-makers treated stepchildren as equal to their own children.

A jezsuita iskolákban végzett diákok és karrierlehetőségeik a Magyar Királyság 17. századi fővárosában

Author(s): Frederik Federmayer / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2018

The paper examines the first graduates of Jesuit grammar schools and in particular of the University of Trnava, who began to settle in the Hungarian capital, Pressburg, after 1635. The author identifies eight types of career possibilities, which he describes in detail in separate subchapters, as ways of employment in the following areas: 1. royal offices; 2. the offices of the highest state dignitaries and judges; 3. the administration of the royal courts; 4. the chapter of Pressburg as a place of authentication (locus credibilis); 5. in the service of the Catholic Church in Pressburg; 6. in the service of the Pálffy Lord Lieutenants and in the administration of the county of Pressburg; 7. in the service of the city of Pressburg and in its administrative offices; 8.the liberal professions (lawyers or doctors, for instance). The paper explores each of these career options through several examples of Pressburg men of education – graduates of Jesuit schools.

A pozsonyi jezsuita kollégium mint összetett intézmény a 17. században

Author(s): Zsófia Kádár / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2018

The Jesuit College of Pressburg [Bratislava/Pozsony], founded on 11 September 1626 by Archbishop Péter Pázmány of Esztergom, is made doubly remarkable by the early date and the location of its establishment. The study explores the first period in the history of the convent and college, until 1671, mainly on the basis of Jesuit sources. It analyses the process of foundation, burdened with conflicts with both the Lutheran urban government and the local chapter, and the two phases of the college’s construction (1628–1635). Based on a prosopographical reseach, the author presents the 341 members who served in the college until 1671, most of them doing pastoral work, the rest laymen and students. She also surveys the functioning of the college and the alumni (class structure, numbers, age, nationality, social status, confession) with the help of the surviving registers, and examines the ways of preaching, catechesis, administering the sacraments, religious retreat, social discipline, missionary work and popular religion, thereby emphasising the importance of pastoral work for the Jesuits.

Két díván Budán. I. Rákóczi György erdélyi fejedelem és a magyarországi oszmán hódoltság elitje (1630 1636)

Author(s): János B. Szabó / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 02/2019

György Rákóczi I. achieved this result contrary to the fact that as a magnate of the Kingdom of Hungary he had no routine whatsoever in finding his way in the labyrinth of Ottoman politics and it is clear that it took him years to get used to and start managing the system, the logic of which stood quite far from his personality. The prince’s honest dedication to the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War seemed to be in vain. The peace he had to conclude with the emperor in 1633, as well as his stance for Christian solidarity in the Polish crisis of 1634 alienated from him the pillars of the Transylvanian system of alliances in Ottoman politics one after the other. The Ottoman dignitaries, who were interested in a European war became disinterested in maintaining Rákóczi’s rule, just as well as the Orthodox Christian lobby he faced in the Wallachian and Polish issues, or the influential ambassadors of anti-Habsburg powers at the Sublime Porte. Decisions about rulers of Transylvania were seemingly prepared in Ottoman Hungary, more specifically at the divans at Buda both in 1630 and 1636, but as we have seen, many of the positions presented there were also initiated in Constantinople. The opinions coming from the elite of Ottoman Hungary were important in 1636 only in order to validate and legitimize intentions formulated at the imperial center: the complaints coming from the borderland area found deaf ears at the Sublime Porte if there was no intention there to put pressure on the prince of Transylvania.

Thököly Imre elfogása: a felső-magyarországi oszmán vazallus állam bukása és az erdélyi diplomácia

Author(s): Gábor Kármán / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 03/2019

One of the events of the wars in Hungary at the end of the seventeenth century that found the most resonance in contemporary newsletters and pamphlets was the incarceration of Imre Thököly by Ahmed Pasha, the beylerbey of Várad in 1685. This action led to the imminent fall of the Ottoman tributary state of Upper (or in the Turkish terminology: Middle) Hungary (Orta Macar), established only three years before and ruled by Thököly. Western European prints repeatedly presented with sarcastic commentaries the absurd situation that the existence of this short-lived state ceased essentially due to the action of Ottoman dignitaries, who allegedly should have been interested in its maintenance for the greater glory of the sultan. This paper analyses the interconnectedness of this act with the peace initiatives of Seytan İbrahim Pasha, the commander (serdar) of the Ottoman troops in Hungary, who wanted to make a gesture towards the generals of the Holy League’s army by removing Thököly from the political scene. Also, it highlights an aspect unnoticed in earlier literature: the secret involvement of Transylvanian diplomacy in the project, motivated by Prince Mihály Apafi I’s competition with the leader of the rival Hungarian principality.

Esterházy Miklós mint családfő: utódlás és érzelmek egy 17. századi arisztokrata dinasztiában és mozaikcsaládban

Author(s): Gabriella Erdélyi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 04/2019

The study investigates the ways the performance of the responsibilities of an aristocratic ”anxious patriarch” modified in a stepfamily context. It focuses on the central concern of patriarchs to secure the continuity of the lineage by designating an heir and peacefully transmit the wealth and prestige to the next generation. By reading the testaments, family correspondence and the exceptional series of instructions to his eldest son, the case study shows what kind of strategies the stepfamily patriarch, Miklós Esterházy applied in order to maintain family concord and solidarity in the face of a latent rivalry between his half-sibling sons for the position of the family patriarch.

Acta Pacis Westphalicae. A császári tárgyalások

Author(s): Fanni Hende / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2014

Acta Pacis Westphalicae. Die kaiserlichen Korrespondenzen. Serie II Abt. A Band 9. Mai – August 1648. Bearb.: Fraedrich-Nowag, Stefanie. Münster, Aschendorff Verlag, 2013. 534 p.

Túlélésre kényszerítve. Az örménység az újkor hajnalán

Author(s): Kornél Nagy / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2014

This article dedicated to Armenian history tries to answer when and how this nation entered the threshold of modern era from an ecclesiastical and secular point of view. It is widely believed that the real mark of this historic moment for the Armenian nation happened definitely in the 17th century. Ecclesiastically, the creation of the Mechitarist order in the late 17th century proved to be a great success in the following centuries, because the culture, education, scholarly research and, of course, the Enlightenment propagated by these fathers had a constituency of the Armenian people ready willing to embrace it. The Armenian nation got prepared to accept the message by the Mechitarist fathers coming from the Western world because it had already entered the modern era in the previous century. From an institutional perspective, the formation of new merchant social class was regarded as a symbol of transformation and social mobility within the Armenians. Moreover, the role of merchant culture in the new urban centers in the 16th and 17th centuries boosted a significant change in the daily life of the Armenians.

Negotiating Widowhood and Female Agency in Seventeenth-Century Hungary

Author(s): Gabriella Erdélyi / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2020

The case study focuses on the tactics of aristocratic women to negotiate their familial roles and identities primarily as wives and widows. By reading closely the rich family correspondence of the Várdai-Telegdi family in the first half of the seventeenth century and concentrating on the intensive negotiating period between getting widowed and remarrying the study argues that the role of the go-between and the marginal status of women in the patrilineal and patriarchal family created some space for them to maneuver. Moreover, the cultural context of female familial roles and ties (mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, half-sisters) was the female court, which created horizontal and intimate ties between women, which also empowered them.

Loving Husbands, Caring Fathers, Glorious Ancestors: Male Family Roles in Early Modern Transylvania

Author(s): Angelika, T. Orgona / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2020

The study examines how a Transylvanian nobleman, Gáspár Kornis of Göncruszka (1641–1683), created a narrative concerning four generations of his family. Though in his memoir, a patrilineal lineage scheme dominates, a close reading of scattered family documents also provides insights into the practices of horizontal bonding among relatives. The letters and last wills reflect the life cycle changes and represent emotional relationships among family members. By considering the act of writing as an emotional practice, the essay tests the claims of the memoir with the help of other archival and extratextual sources. What were the narrated roles of heroized protagonists, and what were the everyday duties of noble heads of family in the early modern period? The study depicts the transformations of the family network during crisis situations in the Transylvanian Principality.

Mongolian place names in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação

Author(s): Alfonso Xavier Canosa,Benjamin Brosig / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The Mongolic term khaan (‘king’), for which there is full correspondence, semantic and phonological, in sixteenth century Portuguese cão, is used as a starting-point to identify the graphemes that correspond to several Mongolic consonants in place names transcribed in the chapters related to the Tartars in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação (1614). With the deduced rules of pronunciation at hand, it is possible to establish new pairs of lexical correspondences and solve a brief lexicon extracted from the list of Tartar toponyms.

Az arecayái felkelés. Fegyveres guaraník a határnál

Author(s): Pedro Miguel Omar Svriz Wucherer / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2016

This article focuses on an indigenous rebellion in Paraguay in the 17th century, providing a wider perspective as well as a new aspect of the rebellion. More specifically, the article examines the role of Guaraní militias from the Jesuit reductions, which participated actively in the events by defending cities (Asunción, Villarrica and Corrientes) from native tribal attacks, building forts, performing “entradas” to the “unfaithful” territory and other actions. The paper also discusses the history and the difficulties of the village of Arecayá over the years preceding the 1660 rebellion. Various factors involved in the rebellion have been brought into focus, for instance, the role of the Governor, the Jesuits, Guarani chieftains, “reduced Indians” and “Indian enemies”. The primary aim of the research presented herein was to explore the consequences of this indigenous rebellion. It is also necessary to consider a comprehensive analysis of the primary sources on the Guaraní resistance, which can essentially be found in the Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain) and can largely contribute to a better understanding of the particularities of the border region affected by the war as well as the role of Guaraní militias participating in the events.