Konfliktregulierung auf den eidgenössischen Tagsatzungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts

After two centuries of intense creativity of the terministic logic and of the calculatores in Oxford, which had a great success and impact all over Europe, and most of all in Italy, the philosophical culture in the British Isles underwent a period of severe crisis and decline, which lasted throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Schmitt has stated that ‘the picture that emerges from a consideration of the philosophical and scientific culture of England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of a steady decline from the position held during the fourteenth century’, while Ashworth has concluded that ‘the intellectual life at Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century was somewhat sluggish … there seems to be no record of any original writing on logical subjects until the mid-sixteenth century’.

Marbling and monochrome paint layers on the reverse of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century panel paintings have received little attention and are often poorly preserved. A link is suggested between painted marbling and oriental marbled paper. Marbled paper was first manufactured in China in the tenth century; it is reasonable to suppose that marbled papers were introduced into Europe long before the fifteenth century and that painters were aware of their use in the Persian and Arab worlds for writing, fine arts and administrative purposes. Similarities in use as well as in techniques support this hypothesis. Marbling on panel painting was intended for decorative effect rather than charged with symbolism. Reverses were also often painted in a monochrome paint layer. The favourite colour in the fourteenth century was red; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was black, probably in accordance with fashion at the Burgundian court. In the sixteenth century, the reverses of wings were sometimes painted in other colours. These monochrome paint layers often have texts with gilded letters. They are also often overpainted, for example with portraits of donors, sometimes added at a later date and after the painting had been moved to another location. Even marbling was occasionally overpainted with a coat-of-arms or the figure of a donor. Art historians should be aware of this possibility when assigning dates and attributions.

O urbanizmu Osora nakon 1450. godine

Obnova jadranskih gradova pod mletačkom vlašću obuhvatila je i sva centralna urbana naselja na Kvarnerskim otocima. Krajem 15. i tijekom 16. stoljeća Cres je dobio novi prsten zidina, kneževu palaču, gradsku ložu, gradski toranj sa satom nad lučkim vratima, fontik, zbornu crkvu te se proširio na područje srednjovjekovnog burga. Redizajn Krka provodio je mletački providur Vinciguerra krajem 15. stoljeća, a opsežni graditeljski pothvati zahvatili su i Rab. Osor, antička metropola Cresko-lošinjske otočne skupine, u tom se razdoblju radikalno smanjuje. Sredinom naselja, koje je od prapovijesti zauzimalo cjelokupnu površinu niske prevlake smještene između otoka Cresa i Lošinja, podignut je novi potez bedema kojim je grad prepolovljen. Istočna polovica naselja, u kojoj je smješten ranokršćanski katedralni kompleks, ostala je izvan bede-ma. Istočni bedem vremenom se urušava i razgrađuje, katedrala se reducira na središnji brod jedne od bazilika, a gradsko tkivo nestaje.

Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. By Annabel S. Brett. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 254.) The word ius, as anyone acquainted with medieval juristic or scholastic texts recognizes immediately, poses a baffling array of problems for those who wish to explicate its range of meanings. Annabel Brett has written an important and stimulating book that provides such an explication with respect to scholastic discourse of fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well as writings of Spanish Neo-Scholastics of sixteenth century and Thomas Hobbes in seventeenth. In asuming this challenging undertaking, Brett has performed a signal service for scholars. Our knowledge of uses to which this term was put has been enriched substantially by her work. Brett's work is divisible into two large sections, each consisting of three chapters. In first half of her book, she addresses formation of scholastic discourse of individual rights. She begins by rebutting notion, advanced by historians like Richard Tuck, that equivalence between ius and dominium made by some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers amounts to the `origin' of modern subjective right in its most radical form . . . in which it is preeminently associated with liberty, with property, and with a certain idea of (p. 10).To be sure, some thirteenth-century writers, especially theologians associated with Franciscan Order, did make such an equation. St. Bonaventure and John Pecham, for instance, equated ius and dominium as part of a larger effort to understand freedom of will necessary to renounce goods of this world: Ius as much as dominium involved ability to claim in court (p. 18), and so violated spirit of humilitas required of every Friar Minor. But most medieval authors, Brett continues, did not make ius-*dominium equivalence a central part of their thought on freedom of individual. Brett brings this point home by reviewing works of Roman lawyers like Bartolus of Sassoferrato and authors of Summae confessorum of late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. She closes chapter by looking to writers of late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, such as Conrad Summenhart and John Mair, to conclude that analysis of the equivalence of dominium and ius . . . did not bequeath to scholastics of sixteenth century a language of ius as sovereignty or indifferent choice (p. 48). After refuting those who would see dominium-ius as origin of Western subjective rights talk, Brett turns her attention in next two chapters to role played by scholastic writers in shaping of Western rights vocabulary. The story she tells is compelling and important. She sees William of Ockham as playing a crucial role in development of this vocabulary, especially in philosophically rigorous definition he offered of ius as a potestas licita. She avoids pitfall of tracing Ockham's definition back to his nominalist and voluntarist roots, recognizing that practice of characterizing scholars' work as nominalist or realist and reading into such characterizations assumed commitments about right and justice has deeply distorted much older writing about history of subjective rights. Brett's intention is to take full account of the many intellectual strands that have come to shape early history of rights (p. 50). She thus considers contribution of such writers as Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif. She closes chapter with a discussion of Jean Gerson, who articulated a theory of rights as faculties or powers held or exercised in accord with right reason. Brett's treatment of Gerson is marred by her shortchanging possibility that Gerson was influenced by a tradition of rights discourse that extended back to twelfth-century decretists. …

The object of the analysis of this article is Sŏnsan County, the most advanced agricultural region of the Chosŏn Dynasty during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This advanced region, however, started to go downhill from the sixteenth century and declined further in the seventeenth century. The rise and fall of Sŏnsan was closely tied with its geographical and irrigation conditions. The region, located around the Naktong River, the greatest river in Kyŏngsang Province, had favorable conditions for development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the spread of the farming method of broadcast seeding to wet rice fields (水耕直播法) and the active development of both plains and hilly areas. But, this area faced adverse conditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the new farming method of transplanting rice seedlings (移秧法) was widely introduced, shifting development to more mountainous regions.

International relations (IR) research has increasingly explored non-Eurocentric histories by analyzing, for example, different historical international systems, societies, and orders beyond Europe, as well as the agency of non-Western polities in constituting world politics (see Phillips and Sharman 2015; Hobson 2020; Spruyt 2020). Before the West contributes to this burgeoning literature. Zarakol offers a longue durée “account of the history of Eastern ‘international relations’” (p. 6), focusing on the interactions between Eurasian polities and the rise and fall of Eurasian world orders between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis starts with the rise of the Mongols and their conquests across Eurasia, resulting in the establishment of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. This historical event constituted the foundation for three successive Eurasian world orders to emerge: the Chinggisid world order of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the post-Chinggisid world order, consisting of the Timurid Empire (Iran and Central Asia) and the Ming Dynasty (China) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and the “global” post-Timurid world order of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which incorporated Eurasian and European polities.

The discussion on the legal power of documents generated by the researchers exploring the written culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invites for a more detailed analysis of the usage of a written document in the legal process, the chronology of its legal regulation, the document’s place in the system of evidence as well as its meaning in the legal consciousness of the nobles. The legal proceedings and rulings recorded in the judicial affairs books incorporated into the Lithuanian Metrica reveal the process when, with the development of the written culture and the increase of the demand for documents in the state’s internal affairs, the written document evolved into an independent and sound legal evidence in the judicial process. In the civil cases, primarily concerning the land ownership, the legal power of a written document was recognized already in the middle of the fifteenth century (although there was no peremptory requirement to present written documents in the judicial process), and approved by the extended edition of the First Statute of Lithuania. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the long-lived “colorful robes of justice” (the oath, the gesture, the placing of one’s cap) were replaced in the system of legal evidence by written documents which, from then on, were considered as more reliable evidence than a personal oath, and, in some cases, even a testimony. Eventually, this view found its place in the consciousness of the nobles who documented their transactions and used documents to solve legal conflicts. Moreover, in Lithuania, unlike in the Kingdom of Poland, the judges considered not only the public, but also the legitimate private documents as legal evidence of equal importance. Although, the hierarchy of legal evidence, that prioritized the documents was embedded only in the Second Statute of Lithuania (chapter IV article 52, entitled “On evidence and defense” (O dovodech i otvodech), the analysis of sources allows to decisively affirm that the main source of the aforementioned article was the practice of the courts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Previous articleNext article FreeIn an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800Nir ShafirNir ShafirUniversity of California, San Diego Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is the story of a holy land in the Middle East—but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj—that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries.1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey.2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders scholars from understanding its historicity. How did the hajj complement and compete with other forms of Muslim religiosity, such as saint worship/Sufism? Can we speak of an "Ottoman" hajj, and what significance did this pilgrimage carry for the many non-Muslim subjects of the empire? Approaching the hajj from the shrines of Damascus, no longer so holy today, rather than Mecca and Jerusalem's hallowed sites, allows us to scratch away a bit of the gilding of enduring holiness and find a history of choices and contingencies, controversies and contestations.3I argue in this article that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries an Ottoman holy land emerged that comprised the traditional sanctuaries of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, as well as the lands of greater Syria. Following the conquest of the Arab lands in the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty turned Damascus into both the center of an Ottoman imperial cult around the grave of the medieval theosophist Ibn ʿArabī and the empire's primary logistical hub for the hajj in response to the challenges of its religious and political competitors. As tens of thousands of Rūmī—that is, Turkish-speaking—pilgrims used the new infrastructure to stream into and through Damascus, the hajj also became an extended pilgrimage to visit the numerous tombs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Non-Muslims too began to use the same infrastructure to partake in their own pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs, which they also referred to as the hajj. These overlapping claims to the hajj brought Rūmīs, Arabs, Christians, and others into competition and collaboration over the significance of the Ottoman holy land.As the logistical hub for the hajj, Damascus offers a view onto how religion was shaped by the forms of mobility available at the time, especially due to the development of material infrastructure. I take inspiration from recent scholarship, specifically that on the hajj, that has emphasized how new technologies of travel, such as steam and jet power, transformed Muslim religiosity by expanding its geographical horizons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 These works, with their focus on modern technologies, refrain from commenting on the premodern period, yet their insights can be applied to early modern forms of mobility. An unexpected complement to these studies is the recent book by James Grehan on everyday religion in greater Syria during the early modern period. He argues that an "agrarian religion" centered on saint worship flourished in rural parts of the Middle East among both Muslim and Christian communities. Although not explicitly framed as such, Grehan's argument is about mobility and materiality. According to Grehan, a shared religious practice of saint worship emerged from the timeless patterns of rural life and the inability of the "high" Islam of scholars and jurists to move into the countryside. Only the technological and infrastructural transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered the shocks needed to dismantle the material conditions underpinning saint worship, bring the high tradition of legalistic Islam to all areas, and make Muslim and Christian peasants realize that they belonged to distinct religious traditions.5 Grehan deserves credit for pushing scholars to pay attention to the difference between urban and rural religious life in the early modern Middle East. However, we should not assume, as Grehan does, that increased circulation inevitably homogenizes devotional practice and obliterates saint worship.6 As Nile Green has demonstrated, modern technologies like steamships and steam-powered printing presses actually fed a florescence of religious practices centered on saintly miracles.7 Moreover, I disagree with Grehan's presumption that premodern Ottoman society, even in rural areas, was static and immobile. People (and objects) traveled on camels, horses, and on foot rather than on steamships and trains, but the empire was always on the move, and these movements redefined its religious landscape. While the mode in which people traveled remained largely the same, there were particular circuits and forms of mobility unique to the Ottoman Empire; the road from Damascus was one of these.The second part of this article's argument is that the regime of circulation built on the road from Damascus gave rise to a specifically "Ottoman" lived religion in general and a shared culture of pilgrimage in particular. The hajj became a central component of the lived religion of many of the Ottoman Empire's inhabitants, Muslim and non-Muslim. Christian subjects of the empire, for example, came to refer to their pilgrimage to Jerusalem as the hajj, even integrating the honorific hajji—that is, someone who completed the hajj—into their names and titles. Asking how the hajj became "Ottoman," in turn, opens a number of related questions for the study of religion. How did the Ottoman hajj differ from earlier iterations, given that the ritual itself did not change? What is the role of the state in the creation of common religious practices? And how does the religious practice of one community—in this case, the Muslim practice of pilgrimage—come to be a shared aspect of the lived religion of a diverse and multiconfessional early modern empire?To speak of an "Ottoman" hajj also requires probing the analytical valence of the word "Ottoman." In its most restricted sense, the word applies only to the actions of the ruling dynasty, the eponymous house of Osman. In the early modern period, the word was used largely in this limited sense, both by the dynasty itself and its observers. Modern historians, however, employ a more expansive definition of "Ottoman," in which the word is a blanket term that applies to anything and everything that occurred within the empire's boundaries. Moreover, many implicitly extend this idea conceptually and assume that every subject within the empire's boundaries also possessed a shared "Ottoman" mentality or culture, which in turn drove their political and intellectual choices.8 The mechanisms for the dissemination of a common Ottoman culture or mentality are rarely articulated, however. Most often, historians point to the actions of the state as creating an Ottoman culture. For example, the sociologist Karen Barkey argues that the Ottoman state intentionally promoted a policy of religious tolerance, one that broke from earlier and supposedly narrower iterations of Islam.9 Even if we accept Barkey's assertions of a state policy of ecumenicalism, they do not necessarily help explain how cultural practices like the hajj came to be shared by all the empire's subjects at the community or individual level. Like many premodern empires, the Ottoman government did not attempt to homogenize its diverse population under a single imagined culture. While the state actively intervened in the daily religious practices of Muslims and the institutional structure of Islamic law, it never contemplated the creation of shared "Ottoman" religious practices among its subjects.10 How then did the hajj become "Ottoman"?To understand how the hajj became a practice that left its mark on nearly all Ottoman subjects, we have to rethink our understandings of empire. Historians today, especially those focusing on the Ottomans, have often understood empire to be a set of institutions that govern by replicating or projecting the rules and culture of the imperial center onto its provinces.11 In other words, empire is regarded as a synonym for the state. Other scholars highlight the inherent social diversity of empires, using empire largely as a foil to the linguistic, ethnic, or religious homogeneity of the nation-state.12 I treat empire differently in this article. I see empire as a specific assemblage or network of heterogenous human and nonhuman actors connected in myriad relationships.13 The specific elements of the network, and their arrangement, varied in time and place. Thus, the "Ottoman" hajj was different from the "Mamluk" hajj, for example, not because the ritual radically differed but because it brought together an alternate set of material and social elements: the movement of Rūmī Muslims to the Arab provinces, the kilns of Iznik and Kütahya that produced the empire's ceramics, and especially the lines of pilgrim infrastructure centered in Damascus, among others. The shared "Ottoman" culture of the hajj was not the intentional construction by the state but an unintentional by-product of the interaction of these elements, a network that could only have existed with the empire's expansion and sustained presence.14This article traces the network that brought about the creation of an Ottoman hajj and holy land. Damascus functions not as the site of a fine-grained local study but as a gateway that illuminates the various connections streaming through it. My argument brings together a constellation of actors, both human and nonhuman, that connect to form a larger picture. Moreover, since I focus on the transformation of what Nancy Ammerman has termed "lived religion," I draw the reader's attention to the creation of an Ottoman pilgrimage culture from everyday practices rather than in theological works.15 The article jumps from Egypt to Hungary and the many places in-between, but it begins with the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Damascus in 1516, which first provided the Ottoman dynasty the possibility of administering the hajj. The centrality of the hajj in Ottoman religious life was far from assured, however, in these initial years. I situate the dynasty's first operations in Damascus in a wide array of other forms of state-sponsored Muslim religiosity available to the dynasty, such as the creation of a set of imperially sponsored saintly tombs. I then turn to the Ottoman state's eventual commitment to the hajj and its massive investment in the physical and textual infrastructure of pilgrimage. The hajj became progressively important in the daily lives of Rūmī Muslims from the empire's heartland, and it even expanded to incorporate visitation to tombs and shrines. Christians too used the same infrastructure to turn their pilgrimage to Jerusalem into what they themselves referred to as the hajj. The last section examines how this network led to a shared Ottoman culture of the hajj and also to competing claims by Arabs, Rūmīs, and Christians as to who could define the Ottoman holy land.Holy Lands, Old and NewUpon his return to Damascus, fresh from the victories against the Mamluks in 1517, Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) set out immediately to thank a saint.16 The sultan seems to have attributed his victory to the omens and intercession of Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—an Andalusia-born Sufi theorist whom the Ottomans believed had prophesized the rise of the dynasty in a pseudepigraphic work, Al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya—and thus decided to build an imperial tomb at the site. Sultan Selim ordered that the residences, bathhouses, and an already standing mosque in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood be bought from their owners and quickly demolished. Within three months, a congregational mosque had been erected around the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī.Even today, Ibn ʿArabī is a notorious figure. Thanks to his pantheistic theories of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd), he is regarded as either the greatest Sufi master or the master of the infidels.17 The residents of Damascus, however, knew little of Ibn ʿArabī before the Ottomans' entry. Despite the fact that it had been well known that he had died in the city, travelers who sought out his grave state that it was being used as a rubbish dump in the fourteenth century. In 1499, one apparently had to scale the wall of a bathhouse in order to access the neglected graveyard housing Ibn ʿArabī's unvisited tomb.18 Other observers, such as Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546), the future imam of the mosque built at Ibn ʿArabī's tomb, tell us that the site was already the tomb of a certain Ibn al-Zakī.19While they knew little of Ibn ʿArabī, the residents were at the center of their own holy land, populated by the graves of local saints and holy men, many of them being ṣaḥāba, the companions of the Prophet. This Syrian holy land had been built up over centuries; the oldest surviving collection of the faḍā'il (virtues) of the area comes from the mid-eleventh century and reflects the traditions and stories that had been collected up to that moment about Syria's sacrality.20 The arrival of the Crusaders—who built at least four hundred chapels and churches in the Levant over the course of their two-hundred-year presence—prompted the resacralization of greater Syria.21 As the Ayyubids (under Salāh al-Dīn, r. 1174–93) and the Mamluks (under Baybars, r. 1260–77) reclaimed this land, they quickly began a campaign of creating a new Muslim holy land in southern Syria. Rulers, military men, and common townsfolk took part in rediscovering, often in an inspired dream, the locations of the tombs of early Islamic figures and heroes from the wars against the Crusaders and then contributing to their construction and upkeep. Older, smaller pilgrimage sites, such as the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, were greatly expanded, and non-Muslims were banned from entering them. Churches and monasteries were converted into Sufi lodges; revenues from villages that previously supported monasteries and churches were seized and reendowed to support the new shrines.22 Whereas earlier holy sites had predominantly stressed biblical events and urban locales, this new wave of shrine building saw the establishment of the graves of a wide variety of early Islamic figures, learned scholars, and military heroes throughout both the urban and rural landscape. Geographies and pilgrimage guides (pilgrimage to shrines, that is) of the period, like those of al-Idrīsī (d. 1165) and al-Harawī (d. 1215), included these shrines and sites. While the Crusader incursion might have spurred the renewed sacralization of the lands of Syria, the spread and establishment of shrines by themselves was part of the growing shift in the middle to late medieval period toward an Islam centered on saints and holy men—that is, Sufism.23The Ottoman government's warmhearted embrace of Ibn ʿArabī and its intervention in the sacred landscape of Damascus were not acts intended for the locals but rather for its competitors in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Iran. In the post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world, especially on the frontiers of Anatolia and the Balkans, there was a constant potential for holy men and saints' descendants to raise the flag of rebellion in their fortress-like lodges and become contenders for political power.24 Only a few years before his conquest of the Mamluk lands, Sultan Selim had quelled a serious rebellion in central and eastern Anatolia by the Kızılbaş followers of the Safavid Shah Ismail, a man who had used his holy ancestry to found a state in the late fifteenth century. Even cities like Cairo were not exempt from this particularly Turco-Iranian idiom of political sainthood. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ottoman conquest, a new holy man from Anatolia, Ibrāhīm al-Gulshanī (d. 1534), started gathering a following and consolidating power in Cairo.25 In these uncertain times, the Ottoman government took a distrustful stance against many Sufi orders and instead decided to turn Ibn ʿArabī into a "nondenominational grand master of spirituality from whose esoterism all Sufi orders could get inspired, and ideologized, in defense of the Sunni faith and its political patrons."26This type of experimentation was found in other early modern Islamicate empires throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) developed a sort of Sufi order in which he was the holy shaykh and his courtiers and subjects were disciples.27 Later, when the Mughals conquered the Deccan, they the shrines of the Muslim The built massive tomb in around their in creating a cult of the around the other Sufi The Ottomans too with this throughout the sixteenth century, for example, a tomb shrine for Sultan on the Arab observers, however, saw the Ottoman government's of Ibn ʿArabī's tomb as an attempt by Muslims from the to and even the hajj and the holy sanctuaries of Mecca and The residents of Damascus referred to the many Ottoman as In its most sense, Rūmī a and someone who and came from the lands of the central lands of the Ottoman between the in the and the in the have of the medieval from however, is actually a of his or from the lands of This early modern at with its in both the medieval and modern In the medieval period, the both the and in the and fourteenth centuries, it began to refer to Muslims in the This and was by the development of Ottoman in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries into an and of competing with a that the Rūmī from that of the more or In the nineteenth century, however, the it applied to subjects of the empire, which is its In local Arab residents of Damascus saw the as with only a of Islam and its to build a tomb over the grave of Ibn ʿArabī being the of their of the of the events by the Ibn a number of omens for the future of Ibn ʿArabī's new the the bought the and to the general and that the had The as they the a and the the the man who the sultan to build the mosque and tomb in the first Only a had also were at the foot of Ibn ʿArabī's grave as the their to it into a holy site. they erected a a traditional of over the tomb and more but only under the of being of what the people might and that no one find out about While the sultan to the and a for a Ibn ʿArabī, the people of Damascus of high due to the and the of in their an of the Safavid one when an of the and the was into the by his to its As the shrine they from a building that a had that these had been from the tomb of saint the of the an to the of Ibn Selim and the Rūmī the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī on the of The of is the central of the hajj, when the stream onto the of and for the this a hajj Ibn Ṭūlūn that the Ottomans were to the hajj with pilgrimage to the new tomb of Ibn ʿArabī, as they had the pilgrimage to the and to against the significance or the might have with their of was however, because the of the Rūmīs, was so that he could not the and the of even with a In other words, he the a were to the and were throughout the sites of the the of the and were given out in the by the As he the it for a moment that he had built the shrine of a of holy on the eastern of the it was an it was at the employ of the of it spread among the the and the men of state. it was that it was the of one of the bathhouses, which became with and when the they believed it to be holy only did the to the locals but also few of the and of the to the were that as residents decided to because of the high brought on by the Ottoman Ṭūlūn a the when he was the and of the mosque at Ibn ʿArabī's While he with the that what is for few of his came to visit in his new The of the land to visit the tomb when he came to the more traditional tombs at the He was left with the Rūmīs, who had it their to visit the tomb during their and like a certain who came with his to the tomb to to be by one should us that it was not a that the Ottoman government both and into the hajj and the the Islamic world, there were a wide variety of that and saintly power, and the same the construction of Ibn ʿArabī's a cult centered on Ibn ʿArabī was not so Ibn take on Ibn ʿArabī's tomb the that the religious of the Ottomans immediately following the Other Arab scholars of the period a of the religious and the cult of Ibn the tomb and the cult among Rūmī scholars in as Rūmī scholars a of Ibn ʿArabī, for the saint needed to be among all the scholars in the imperial Although the tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained a for Rūmī Damascus and the Arab lands become the center of a different holy Ottoman Ottoman government for a different of a state that did not on the creation of imperially tombs of holy men and The tomb of Ibn ʿArabī remained but the dynasty instead to become a of and a of Islam centered on following Islamic the course of the sixteenth century, it and in congregational in every and and that Muslims them as it to a particular of religiosity on practices such as and the The dynasty undertook these actions to itself from its imperial competitors like the and as had their own of shrines and but also with an toward the it had at greatest in a Sunni for the empire in its of the the of Mecca and that it had from the Even with these sites at their Ottoman in the hajj were a of for of the sixteenth For example, only toward the of the sixteenth century did the dynasty support for the tomb of Sultan in Hungary and order its shaykh to move to Mecca and focus his and on the grave of the to the the of Arab the government's shift toward the hajj was a In of over a hundred years the conquest of the Arab lands, the (d. a book in of The of the of the Ottomans were to other dynasty, or to set a number of and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known by their of of the or the of the house of The had their of Rūmī which them the site of an about the of imperial and in the Arab the Ottoman dynasty as a of both religious and a view to the the Ottoman and a century Whereas they had been as they were of especially to their massive investment in the religious sites of the hajj and the people who lived how they of thousands of on the of Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and Hebron, so so that they were never This was in to the on the military to the of the from The was by no an the from the seventeenth century that the and became and These imperial were by from the of the the which lands, and from both Muslims around the empire and of the dynasty The government also the around and Jerusalem, renewed of the area around the built and and all the in and hajj was a every which if not of thousands of through and massive infrastructure needed to be developed to bring to Mecca and Moreover, the pilgrimage had to be so that at the time in Mecca to the of the the left Damascus or there was not a to traveled on or horses, and a few were in However, the which included the many and that came traveled by The most was the between Damascus and Medina, the pilgrim were to the Syrian had been used during the Mamluk period, it no or infrastructure to to other than the few Thus, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty began a of in the Syrian hajj The first was a

JOHN M. BOWERS, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 405. ISBN: 10:0-268-02202-x; 13:978-0-268-02202-0. $45. John Bowers's new book is destined to stir controversy and response. In an extensive and discursive argument richly supported by references to works and authors from the late fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, he explores the literary and cultural dynamics that elevated Chaucer and relegated Langland in literary history. Bowers's complex argument-alternately persuasive, speculative, and provocative-is rooted in the logical assumption that Chaucer read Langland and in the consequent premise that Chaucer reacted to Langland's style and politics in his own work, especially during the 1390s. Bowers contends that the Tales 'became Chaucer's last best chance for engaging with Langland's literary achievements and topical challenges while also rebelling against Langland's kind of literature.' Moreover, he contends, the 'entire Chaucer tradition would carry forward this burden of anxiety, repressed and neurotically expressed, into the fifteenth century'(3). Langland emerges as the 'black hole whose gravitational field consistently determined the shape and luminosity of the bright star Chaucer' (3). Because of its densely argued and consistently allusive exposition, this is a hard book adequately to summarize in a review. It begins with an extended introduction that serves as a prevenient summary of its project which is to analyze the forces that helped shape the 'dual posterities' (8) traceable in manuscript and print production of Langland's and Chaucer's works into the sixteenth century. Chapter 2, 'Beginnings,' posits that after 1360 England entered a period of relative isolationism that correlates with a growth of nationalism and interest in the English vernacular. Chaucer, connected to French courtly literature and its cultural antecedents, presented himself in his work as the 'sole English heir of European literature' (17); Langland, more and more distinctly concerned with a native English tradition 'did not even recognize the nature of the competition' (17). In the third chapter, 'Naming Names,' Bowers explores the multiple forces that created Chaucer's reputation, and obscured Langland's in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, paying particular attention to Lydgate's influence. Lydgate, Chaucer's self-styled literary heir, was well aware of the value of what Foucault terms the 'author function' and helped shape Chaucer the man into Chaucer the author in a time when Langland's identity and name fell into 'profound obscurity...after his work had outlasted his original coterie readership' (102). …

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Reviewed by: The Medieval Military Engineer: From the Roman Empire to the Sixteenth Century by Peter Purton Susan Broomhall Purton, Peter, The Medieval Military Engineer: From the Roman Empire to the Sixteenth Century (Armour and Weapons), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2018; hardback; pp. xiv, 351; 30 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781783272875. As its title suggests, the ambition of this work is to focus on the changing experiences and status of the military engineer in the Middle Ages. Warfare made these individuals important skilled workers: indeed, critical assets for leaders. This does not mean, for the most past, tracing who these workers were and what they did, but rather what kind of people they must have been, the skills that they would have required, and the varied transmission pathways by which they could acquire such knowledge. Peter Purton traces a continuous, evolving corpus of professional and technical knowledge across the period, assessing the impact of new forms of warfare—from the introduction of mobile siege towers to gunpowder—on the practitioner and the skills that these demanded. The time period covered here as 'medieval' extends from late antiquity to the early sixteenth century with Leonardo da Vinci. The earlier period has a relative deficit of direct sources for this subject, and Purton thus pulls together written sources, archaeological material and visual evidence from many social levels. He is interested in what might be revealed about these workers, not just in the employ of rulers but also that of noblemen, bishops and other kinds of leading officials who were also responsible for warfare or defence. Purton's investigations span Christian Europe in interaction with the Islamic world, with brief investigations into the activities of the Mongol empire and Chinese technologies that impacted Europe. As might thus be expected, there is no consistent terminology for such workers, as they change skillsets and significance across the period, and in the context of varied kinds of documents in which references to their work appears. The word 'engineer', which combines both the functional making of engines and machines and the creative, in the sense of ingenuity, is employed in the title and throughout the work as an acknowledged shorthand for a group of skilled men in varied roles and of different status, who would not necessarily have identified with this term. It is difficult to sustain any clear distinction between civil and military engineering and thus Purton's subject ranges across land reclamation, hydraulic engineering, dams, canals, and ship building, as well as more familiar military technologies such as the trebuchet. For the earlier periods, there are fewer names and more conjecture from archaeological evidence about the skills and knowledge that must have been needed to exploit advanced technologies such as irrigation, bridge-building, geometry (for laying an encampment), as well as arms manufacture. Individuals start to emerge from the records more consistently by the twelfth century, as payment records provide details of who such men were, how they were paid, and for what appear to be increasingly specialized technologies. By the thirteenth century, there are growing references to military technology in advice to rulers, but far less is said about the men who were needed to make [End Page 238] and maintain it. Account records, though, suggest that there are more of such men and performing more specialized roles. With the introduction of gunpowder and new artillery forms in the Christian and Muslim worlds by the fourteenth century, designated gun masters emerge among the named individuals whose careers can be fleshed out to some extent. In the fifteenth century, increased literacy assisted the production of practically oriented manuals and the advent of the expert master-author such as Jörg of Nürnberg, papal gun master, who left his own account by which something of a professional career can be constructed. Purton concludes that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are marked by moves towards ever more defined specialisms, making famous polymaths such as Leonardo outliers to the broader trend. The work concludes with an appendix of military engineers and miners listed in the Pipe Rolls of the English Exchequer, showing something of Purton's methodology for identification, and a useful...

Christy Anderson Renaissance Architecture Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 258 pp., 151 color illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9780192842275 We are all familiar with the narrative of Italian Renaissance architecture: Filippo Brunelleschi produced a series of technically and stylistically innovative structures in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century that are taken as the starting point of a new kind of architecture. This foundation gave way to Leon Battista Alberti’s buildings and writings in the next generation, then in turn to Giuliano da Sangallo, Donato Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Vignola, and Palladio. Other architects are usually included, as are excursions to Urbino, Milan, Mantua, and Venice. This progression has served as the spine of a series of important surveys by Peter Murray, Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, which has introduced two generations of undergraduate students to Renaissance architecture, forming their view of the material.1 In Anglophone architectural history, this account of Italian Renaissance architecture has often represented the development of building in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries more generally. In Architecture of the Renaissance , published in a series on world architecture, Peter Murray expands this narrative by appending a short closing section on buildings in France, Spain, the Low Countries, Germany, and England.2 A relatively small group of scholars have championed architecture elsewhere, but even these accounts have often been presented as something of an adjunct to the Italian Renaissance. For example, Anthony Blunt’s essential survey of French art and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries opens with an account of King Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494, and its cultural effects. Much …

Readings in Times of Crisis: New Interpretations of Stories about the Settlement of Iceland

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were ones of momentous change in Europe. Out of the crises of feudalism arose the new nation-states. By the end of the period labor had taken precedence over bullion in the market, and the capitalist “world-system” had been born. In the fifteenth century the two subcontinents were inextricably linked within the Mediterranean economy, by virtue of the gold trade. The association of those called the Wangara with the interior gold trade of West Africa was one known in medieval times. The Wangara, then, were Malians who specialized in the management of long-distance commerce, and the growth of the West African gold trade was closely linked with the extension of the range of their activities. The commercial situation at Elmina in the late fifteenth century clearly presupposes the existence in its hinterland, first, of a well-developed gold extractive industry and, second, of a well-organized distributive trade.