In this paper, I focus on the channels of communication between the free royal towns of Šariš and the county authority at the beginning of the 16th century. In this period, the towns of Bardejov and Prešov became feudal landowners in the county and, as a result, they had to develop a close relationship with the county nobility. Alongside the official documents of the county authority, the noble judges also often wrote letters to the towns, in which they often mixed official and private matters. There were also verbal lines of communication; the noble community of Šariš county frequently sent emissaries to the town, and these elected envoys were often chosen from the former or acting noble judges who lived in the villages neighbouring the towns. This had the added advantage, for the towns, that they could draw upon the legal experience of these former officeholders. Both Bardejov and Prešov employed former noble judges as town lawyers.

The former palace in Łobzów, which currently houses the Faculty of Architecture of the Cracow University of Technology, has an exceedingly rich architectural history. Since the Middle Ages, it has gone through a series of changes that have significantly altered its form each time. Thanks to modern digital reconstruction technology, it was possible to recreate all of its architectural phases in the form of 3D models on the basis of archaeological studies and the analysis of historical materials. The models were then used to reconstruct the most probable appearance of the building during the period when the Polish king John III Sobieski lived there. Determining the most probable state of the palace’s preservation during King Sobieski’s rule, which had not been investigated thus far, was possible only because of the combining of traditional research methods with modern technology.

This study contributes new research exploring cases of collaboration with the German authorities and the phenomenon of delators (denouncers), informers and agents in occupied Krakow, as well as letters of denunciation. Cases linked to the blackmailing at the beginning of World War II of Jews, and as the war continued of colleagues and neighbours working for the resistance and of disliked relatives and in-laws are also taken into account. Letters written by Krakow inhabitants – some anonymous, others signed – are appraised for information contained therein on political, racial, economic, social and fi nancial matters. The article also describes the activities of the Polish resistance against collaborators and the post-war settling of scores through the Krakow Special Criminal Court in the early post-war years.

Social mobility is a relatively common phenomenon in society; however, in the period of the Slovak State (1939–1945) it was predominantly caused by the economic and social engineering of the single ruling Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. Anti-Semitism was made one of the main pillars of the internal state policy. Systematic pauperisation of the Jewish community gradually aff ected each perspective of everyday life of Jews in Slovakia, including the limitation of Jewish people’s living space. This practice led to involuntary moving out from houses and fl ats in designated urban zones. Subsequently, this process culminated in the Aryanization of the housing formerly owned by Jews. The main aim of this contribution is to analyse spatial and social consequences of the reshaping of the Jewish housing opportunities with special interest in the entangled social mobilities of both Jews and Gentiles, which will be mainly exemplifi ed through selected cases from the Banská Bystrica district.

Sport has become a significant part of our lives in the modern era and sporting sites contribute considerably to the image and texture of modern cities. Regarding the popularity of sport, especially football, the stadium has become an important modern space where specific kinds of social interaction take place. Despite the fact modern stadiums had their pre-modern models, they have been transformed substantially, so that we can talk of new urban spaces. This paper shows how football pitches gradually turned into stadiums, using the example of the Czech lands. The choice is by no means autotelic: interwar Czechoslovakia had one of the most successful football teams on the continent.

This study deals with the fate of the only three Czech royal towns, which during the protracted confl ict over the Czech throne (1468–1479) declared themselves under the auspices of the Hungarian ruler Mathias Corvinus (České Budějovice, Pilsen), or had his authority under the title of King of Bohemia (from May 1469) successfully applied over them (Cheb). It reveals the motives for their leaning to the side of Mattias Corvinus and analyses their positions as military powers and, to a lesser extent, intelligence centres, deals with the changes in the holdings of real estate property in the towns in the course of Corvinus’s reign, and shows the compositions of the town councils, their eff orts to maintain independent political approaches (especially in the case of Cheb) and the development of their relations with the military command of the city. Attention is also paid to the ecclesiastical administration and cultural level of these municipalities during Matthias’s reign.

The article focuses on the collective political institution, the veche, of the Russian medieval city of Pskov. The author argues that the horizontal political ties within that city prevailed over the vertical ones in the period before its subjugation to the Muscovite State in 1510. Pskov is put into a broad comparative perspective which results in the conclusion by the author that the development of Pskov in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries very closely resembled that kind of urban synoecism which was practiced by Western European communes in their early stage of development (eleventh–twelfth centuries). It means, first, that the Russian Middle Ages repeated in some important features that which had occurred in Western Europe, and, second, that it happened not due to a borrowing of political institutions (as was the case with many East European countries) but independently because of similar conditions arising, albeit after a two-century delay.

This article gives an insight into the industrialization and colonization processes of northern Scandinavia. Urbanization due to industrialization is a vital part of the perspective, and brings us into an industrial mega system in Swedish Lapland in the late nineteenth century based on iron ore export. It was to be connected to the industrial centre of Europe, especially the Ruhrgebiet of Germany, and paved the way for a new kind of urban development in peripheral Europe – the industrial network town. The history and foundation of the Norwegian harbour town Narvik is vital for gaining insight into this mega system. By studying Narvik we can envisage particularities of, and similarities and differences between Norway and Sweden when it comes to their urban economic foundations, urban development/planning regimes, and the relations between the municipalities, the modern nation states and the dominating companies. Even the development of a uniquely Scandinavian identity connected with the labour movement and the development of a post-war social democrat order visibly results from the new industries. Thus the common Swedish-Norwegian figure of the rallar – something like navvy or construction worker – has a significant place in this study, and the use of the figure in addition to later processes of memory creation, both within the Norwegian and Swedish labour movements, is addressed.

The utilization of a GIS (Geographical Information System) permits the highlighting of urban strategies seen through textual fonts in early modern Lyons. The town council applied a long-lasting micro-urbanism aiming to improve traffic, to enlarge squares and to control the spatial usage. However, popular culture remained very reluctant, defending two kinds of appropriation. Streets and squares were considered a normal extension of professional premises, and militia units often came into conflict over shared parade grounds.

The extension of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century, which hit most European states, required political interferences within the highest legislative and executive authorities of states as well as in local administrations and bodies of self-government. Legislative interventions resulted in the formation of new local political elites whose representatives, mostly recruited by the criterion of political reliability, held the defining positions and played the significant role in implementing anti-Jewish policy during the Holocaust era. The main aim of this contribution is the analysis of the mechanisms of legislative interventions into the creation of new local political elites in selected examples of Nazi-occupied countries (General Government, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) and allied regimes (Slovak State and Hungary).