At the end of the Middle Ages, the city of Bardejov owned numerous vineyards in the Tokaj- Hegyalja region of Zemplén County. Their most valuable vineyard was purchased in early 1486 for 1,000 gold fl orins from the noble Kispalugyai family, originating from Liptov. However, later that same year, George Schwarz, who would subsequently become a member of the Košice city council, claimed preemption rights to the vineyard and challenged the city’s ownership. This resulted in a decade-long legal battle before secular and ecclesiastical courts: the fi rst phase of the dispute unfolded before the palatine, the second under the authority of Angelo Pecchinoli, a papal legate, and the fi nal phase before papally delegated judges. During these years, the lawsuit became one of the most signifi cant events in the history of Bardejov. As a result, an excellent collection of sources related to the case has been preserved in the Bardejov archives, comprising more than 80 charters and other documents that detail the developments of the matter. Among these sources of varied types, the expense ledger in which the city meticulously recorded its expenditures for the case is particularly notable. This study examines the history of the lawsuit and the contents of the expense ledger.

The City and History [Mesto a dejiny] je vedeckým recenzovaným časopisom, ktorý vznikol na Katedre histórie Filozofickej fakulty UPJŠ v Košiciach s tematickou orientáciou na príspevky z oblasti urbánnych dejín. Uvedený zámer súvisí s jednou z vedeckých priorít pracoviska – výskumom dejín Košíc. Ambíciou je však vytvoriť širšie fórum pre historikov aj odborníkov z iných oblastí, v ktorom by sa koncentrovali výsledky ich práce orientované na urbánne, príp. regionálne dejiny. Časopis je vydávaný dvakrát ročne. Doposiaľ počas trinástich ročníkov v ňom bolo uverejnených 142 vedeckých článkov od 156 autorov. Z nich 88 pochádzalo zo zahraničia, čo predstavuje 56% z celkového počtu autorov. Časopis je evidovaný v knižniciach a databázach Web of Science (ESCI), Scopus, ERIH PLUS, CEEOL, CEJSH, EBSCO, MIAR, H/Soz/Kult, Index Copernicus, WorldCat, Databázy historickej literatúry v SR a Google Scholar.

Over the centuries, important towns and cities around the world have been the subject of a signifi cant number of drawn, painted, engraved and printed representations. Cultural historians and art historians have tended to neglect such images considering them of low quality. However, historical images are important testimonies, recording on-the-spot observation of the events depicted, thus allowing us to imagine the past more easily. In fact, their roles have included bringing news to the public and presenting curiosities from the exotic worlds of others, of those with other customs, languages, religions, geographical locations and so on. They satisfi ed a need for images from distant places felt by those who could not travel. We are tempted to look at historical images only as valuable objects displayed in museums or kept in special cabinets, forgetting from our modern technology-dependent perspective that their purpose was diff erent. This paper aims to draw attention to the cultural and educational purpose of historical images of towns, studying their role as a medium for transmitting important knowledge on European cultural heritage.

The phenomenon of tenement housing in medieval Prague is as yet understudied. This study attempts to outline the character of tenement housing on the basis of extant written sources from the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries using an interdisciplinary perspective and the prism of four select themes: 1. contracts of lease; 2. the town house and its layout from the viewpoint of history and construction history; 3. analysis of Old Town tenement books for 1427 and 1429; 4. the social structure of inhabitants of an average Prague house using the example of three persons: the owner, the tenant-conventor, and the lodger-inquilinus. It appears that the Prague agglomeration being the centre of the Czech lands and the residence of the ruling Luxembourg dynasty, it was an exclusive urban centre in which only the members of the urban upper and upper-middle classes could aff ord to own a house. Small craftsmen and tradesmen had to rent their living space and workspace. The metropolis experienced a construction boom throughout the fourteenth century. Building lots were much more densely covered and dozens of new houses appeared built for the purpose of tenement housing (as opposed to being the residence of the owner). It is clear that this development had a signifi cant impact on the architecture and urban structure of the medieval city.

The history of shoemaking and the footwear industry is a well-established topic in Czech economic and social, as well as regional and urban historiography. A broad range of topics and approaches to this area of research can be found in Czech historiography. One drawback of the continuous interest in the history of shoemaking and the footwear industry is the lack of suitable methodology and the existence of many as yet unexplored topics, especially as regards the period after 1945. This study presents an overview, based on chronology and genre, of the existing historiographical work in the fi eld of economic, social, regional and urban history. It also draws attention to the so-called New Product History (Produktgeschichte), a methodological perspective not yet established in the Czech environment. Its advantage lies in its broad contextualization of the history of a particular product by conducting a historical analysis of the product life cycle (historische Produktlinienanalyse).

Despite being centres of art, it is mainly outside large cities that the development of art takes place. This paper focuses on the Spiš region during the eighteenth century, the fi nal phase of a period during which various territories of the region were under the administration of the Hungarian or Polish crown. The fi rst part of the text explores the local sculpture and painting scene, with a particular focus on the two generations of artists of the Theresian era. Then the region serves as a model for non-central areas in terms of their typologies and place in art-historical and broader cultural-historical development. The paper analyses the current approaches to the issue of centre and periphery and discusses the impact of smaller towns and administrative settlements on the cultural and artistic profi le of the area.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the problems associated with ceremonial royal entrances in Poland. These ceremonies formed part of political ritual and were an opportunity to manifest splendour and royal power. Based on surviving source records, mainly chronicle descriptions, the royal entrances to late medieval Kraków (Cracow) were analysed. They were held on various occasions, such as coronation entries, entries of royal brides arriving for marriage or entries after victories in battle. Thanks to surviving descriptions, it was possible to trace the various entry routes and capture the city’s preparations for these major events.

The architectural appearance of Banská Štiavnica in the Romanesque period, especially its older developmental stages, is still not clear to us from an architectural or urban planning point of view. Since the declaration of the city as a Preserved Area (since 1950), much architectural-historical research has been carried out, which enables the summarization of new knowledge in the context of urban development. The current identifi cation and documentation of the oldest houses of burghers and miners followed up on previous research carried out in the 1980s and 1990s, which, however, lacked consistent documentation and interpretation. Although the results of our research still do not allow a complete identifi cation of the oldest buildings in the entire assumed urban area, this study presents the results of research into the architectural- and urban-historical development of the prosperous mining town of Banská Štiavnica during the Middle Ages. URL: https://www.upjs.sk/filozoficka-fakulta/katedra-historie/10984/

The paper addresses the changes in the city administration after the Second World War related to the process of purge in the territory of southern Slovakia, which between 1938 and 1945 was ceded to Hungary. I intend to examine the changes in the city administration of Košice, a city located on the Hungarian–Slovak ethnic border. Its inhabitants were confronted with anti-Hungarian policies after the war, handled by the local authorities – the members of the Administrative Commission and the National Committee. These members possessed extensive competences concerning the confi scation of the property of “Germans, Hungarians, traitors and collaborators”, land reform, the purge of public and political life, the establishment of national administrations, the restoration and reconstruction of the national economy and tasks in the social and health spheres. This also included legal measures against public and civil servants of Hungarian and German nationality, adopted by the Slovak National Council. In my research, I intend to answer a number of questions: How did the local authorities deal with the civil servants? Which civil servants were dismissed and which remained in place? What criteria were important for them to remain in their posts? Why did some of them continue to work for the city? In addition, how did the loyalty of these civil servants to the restored Czechoslovakia change?

According to the prominent sociologist Henri Lefebvre, space is an instrument of power. Every state regime strives to use space for social control through various interventions. While in democratic regimes the use of public space is the result of by majority-accepted interventions, in non-democratic regimes these are power interventions usually based on ideological starting points, not generally accepted by society. On the contrary, interventions into public space are becoming one of the tools for implementing state ideology into the consciousness of society. In their research on public space, German sociologists Walter Siebel and Jan Wehrheim defi ned its four basic dimensions – legal, functional, social and material-symbolic. Interdisciplinary sociological-historical research of interventions into each of these dimensions seems to be a suitable analytical tool in understanding the relationship between public space and the state regime, the conclusions of which allow a detailed understanding of the nature of individual non-democratic (authoritarian or totalitarian) regimes typical for twentiethcentury Europe, as well as transnational ideological connections. In the article we introduce our interdisciplinary socio-historical approach on the example of the authoritarian para-fascist regime of the Slovak state (1939–1945).