Late Fifteenth Century Research Articles

Кучумово городище – столичный город в Сибири или исторический миф (археологические факты и исторические предположения)

Research objectives: The article scrutinizes the arguments challenging the urban status of the Kuchum settlement (Isker), the capital of the Siberian Khanate. The author analyzes the available data on the vicinity, population, trading, and craft production of this capital. Research materials: The main sources are materials obtained during archaeological research in the ancient settlement in the twentieth and twenty-first century, as well as artifacts collected on the shallows of the Irtysh River from the destroyed cultural layer of the mo­nument since the 1880s. The cartographic materials of S.U. Remezov, V. Filimonov, and V.N. Pignatti were also used in the study. Results and novelty of the research: An analysis of the available data showed that the area of the monument reached at least 2.6 hectares by the late fifteenth century. In addition, archaeological research by A.P. Zykov and the author revealed a complex multi-level fortification system aimed at defending the capital of the Siberian Khanate. The artifacts found in 2019 suggest the presence of oversize brick structures in the capital. Such artifacts prove the important role of Isker as the center of trade located on the most convenient route which connected Central Asia, China, Eastern Europe, and the taiga regions of Western Siberia. The population of the settlement widely used silver and copper coins in trading. The collected data show that blacksmiths, casters, jewelers, tailors, and tanners lived and worked in Isker. A huge cultural layer, rich in artifacts, of the Kuchum settlement could be formed only by a fairly large population by Siberian standards, consisting of the khan’s family and its servants, close members of the nobility, Muslim clergy, warriors, merchants, and artisans. The total available data allows us to consider Isker as the political, commercial, craft, and religious center of the Siberian Tatars.

‘Iyani, A Shirazi Poet and Historian in the Bahmani Deccan

ABSTRACT This paper examines MS D. 92 of the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras/Chennai, which contains the works of ‘Iyani, a late fifteenth century Shirazi poet and historian. ‘Iyani had migrated to the Deccan, and wrote in Persian in the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1528), receiving the patronage of both Sultan Mahmud Shah (r. 1482–924) and Habib al-Din Muhibballah, a descendant of the Sufi saint Shah Ni‘matallah Vali of Kirman. The paper investigates ‘Iyani’s works, which comprise qasidas, ghazals, ruba‘iyyat and two mathnavīs, the Jangnama-i Shahrukh and the Fathnama-i Mahmud Shahi. The latter, recording the defeat of a rebellion led by the Abyssinian commander in Gulbarga, Dastur Dinar, sheds new light on the political and factional environment in the final stages of Bahmani rule. ‘Iyani’s works represent a new source for the cultural, literary and political history of the fifteenth century Deccan.

Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters

AbstractThe Cely Letters is a well-known collection of correspondence exchanged by members of this London family of wool merchants and their associates between 1472 and 1488. A substantial part of the corpus was written and received by factors based in Calais, which had been an English outpost in France since 1346 and was strategically connected to the wool marts of the Low Countries. The great majority of the letters are monolingual English texts, thus attesting to the widespread use of the vernacular in personal correspondence by the late fifteenth century. Nevertheless, behind the monolingual English surface, traces of multilingualism are revealed. In this paper, I intend to analyse this issue with a twofold purpose. In the first place, attention will be paid to the multilingual background of the letters, considering both the persistent use of French in late medieval England and the specificity of the business transactions carried out at Calais and the marts, where language contact must have been the norm. In the second place, different textual reflections of such contact in the letters are examined and classified, both as regards the generic conventions of letter writing and as part of the multilingual business context where they were produced and received.

The African Adoption of the Portuguese Crusade during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

AbstractThe Portuguese engagement with the continent of Africa following the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was framed, among numerous conditions, as a crusade (Portuguese: cruzada). However, crusading influences on Portuguese expansion are often sidelined in favour of economic motives. Unlike North and north-east Africa's connected histories with the Crusades (1095–1291) and the continual role of crusading in the following centuries, the fifteenth century offered a new arena. Kongo's adoption of Christianity in the late fifteenth century was the first time that an African power can be viewed as engaging in crusading ideology as a Latin Christian power. Significantly, Kongo was converted by Portuguese missionaries who were undertaking their own crusade. Yet, the crusading influence on Kongo's early development of its Christianity has hitherto been overlooked in Africanist scholarship. Similarly, the situation in Kongo remains a lacuna in Crusades scholarship too. This article calls for a closer discussion between the histories of Africa and the Crusades through the case of Kongo and comparative African examples, such as Benin and Ndongo, to highlight the need to better connect these histories.

A lake sediment–based paleoecological reconstruction of late Holocene fire history and vegetation change in Great Basin National Park, Nevada, USA

AbstractAnalyses of macroscopic charcoal, sediment geochemistry (%C, %N, C/N, δ13C, δ15N), and fossil pollen were conducted on a sediment core recovered from Stella Lake, Nevada, establishing a 2000 year record of fire history and vegetation change for the Great Basin. Charcoal accumulation rates (CHAR) indicate that fire activity, which was minimal from the beginning of the first millennium to AD 750, increased slightly at the onset of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA). Observed changes in catchment vegetation were driven by hydroclimate variability during the early MCA. Two notable increases in CHAR, which occurred during the Little Ice Age (LIA), were identified as major fire events within the catchment. Increased C/N, enriched δ15N, and depleted δ13C values correspond with these events, providing additional evidence for the occurrence of catchment-scale fire events during the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries. Shifts in the vegetation community composition and structure accompanied these fires, withPinusandPiceadecreasing in relative abundance and Poaceae increasing in relative abundance following the fire events. During the LIA, the vegetation change and lacustrine geochemical response was most directly influenced by the occurrence of catchment-scale fires, not regional hydroclimate.

From universal to local: German identity in Nicholas of Cusa’s Catholic Concordance

AbstractNicholas of Cusa’s Catholic Concordance stands as a landmark of fifteenth‐century political thought. Modern scholarship has devoted much attention to Nicholas’s argument about consent in Book Two, but he also develops one of the earliest expressions of German identity. This has not received attention in historical and literary scholarship. Nicholas grounds his conceptualization of a German people and land in the political and ecclesiological debates of his day while tying it to the importance that history plays in defining a people. He establishes a new type of history for them told in terms not of Roman imperial history but of the Germans. His work foreshadows the efforts of German writers in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who composed for the first time histories of Germany devoted to the Germans from their mythical origins to contemporary times and written in their own common language, German.

Colonial rainfed farming strategies in an extremely arid insular environment: Niche construction on Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain

The island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands was first settled by people from northern Africa in the first millennium BC and then colonized by Spain in the late fifteenth century. This colonial legacy reflects an intensive land use driven by a European commodities market that experienced a series of boom-and-bust cycles. Although arid and seemingly resource limited, colonial farmers in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries copied water capture techniques from the Indigenous population, were strategic in terms of field placement, and engaged in a range of niche construction techniques. An analysis of 420 soil samples for their chemical properties (e.g., pH, electrical conductivity, nutrients) has revealed that sixteenth to nineteenth agricultural infrastructure in the form of open fields, terraces, water capture basins, and mulched fields was constructed on the landscape avoiding areas of high soil salinity and placement was tailored to variations in terrain slope, elevation, and rainfall. These improvements fundamentally changed ecosystem relations resulting in increased agricultural productivity. A series of eolian and volcanic events in the eighteenth century resulted in environmental changes requiring counteractive responses and new processes of niche reconfiguration. Large tracts of land were initially removed from production, but processes of niche construction created new opportunities. These included constructing mulched pits for cultivating sweet potato and tephra mulching for enhanced moisture conservation and accelerated growth of cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus) production on cactus host plants. Cochineal production lasted for a period of sixty years (ca. AD 1825–1885) before a collapse of the market caused by the invention of chemical substitutes.

‘Also, I Am Sending You Two Cheeses’: Dutch Strangers, c. 1470–c. 1550

ABSTRACT The coming of the Dutch Strangers, religious refugees from the Southern Netherlands, to various cities in England – specifically London and Norwich – in the middle of the sixteenth century, is a new stage in the history of the presence of Dutch speakers in Britain; Dutch-speaking churches were founded, and printers in England became involved in printing Dutch texts. The ease with which these new communities established themselves, however, depended on a pre-existing presence of communities of Dutch speakers, and a long history of Anglo-Dutch cultural, mercantile and political interactions. This paper examines evidence for the existence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century of an Anglo-Dutch infrastructure along which people moved, and on which communities were built

Presidential Address: Memories of Better Times before the Christians Came to Mexico and Guatemala

AbstractThe author presented a draft of this essay as a presidential address at the 2012 meeting of the society in Springfield, Missouri. The theme of the meeting was “the apocalypse,” referring to a popular belief that the Mayan calendar predicted a cataclysmic event to occur in that year. The address proposed that the apocalypse had already occurred in the sixteenth century, when the Maya and many other Indigenous groups of the Americas were devastated by diseases brought by European immigrants. The author examined how the destruction was documented in Spanish surveys called the Relaciones geográficas, which were completed after a major epidemic devastated the Indigenous population of Mesoamerica. The author did not submit the paper for publication at the time. The current pandemic has lent some modest perspective to the many epidemic diseases that have swept through the Americas since the late fifteenth century. The author submitted this revised version of the original essay after editing the content, adding notes, and citing relevant works published since 2012.

Making Masters Moral: Household Subordinates and Upward Social Discipline in Late Medieval Basel

Abstract This article examines how late medieval non-nuclear household relationships shaped the pursuit of honorable social status. It examines in detail several witness depositions from the Basel municipal court (Schultheissengericht) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have long noted the concern of householders to regulate the morality of their servants and apprentices. However, the study will demonstrate that subordinates could and did defend their own household honor by policing the morality of their masters and other household members, both through verbal shaming and through the distinctive strategic option of refusing to work. The importance of subordinates as arbiters of honorable status was recognized and exploited by individual masters, guilds, and courts; in the region around Basel, it could even be formalized in the written genre of a Schelmbrief (shame-document). Social discipline was not simply a question of householder-masters controlling their subordinates, but also the reverse.

The ʾAgur: A Halakhic Code for Print

The ʾAgur—a relatively obscure and occasionally derided Jewish legal compendium of the late fifteenth century—represents the first halakhic work truly of the printed age, in that it was not simply a printed manuscript, a book that utilized the production value of the printing press without changes to its substance or presentation, but rather an original text, written by its author during his lifetime, to be precisely suited for the opportunities presented by print. Jacob Landau, the author, was wholly aware of the cultural ramifications of print and adapted his work to these new circumstances and possibilities. He created a text that could be used by both scholars and nonscholars and would appeal to a variety of geographically specific traditions. It was also the first Hebrew book to contain haskamot, which later were commonly used and even required in some Jewish communities. As the first halakhic book printed during its author's lifetime, justification was necessary for its very existence.

Zwischen Realität und Mythos. Tod und Begräbnisse von Professoren der Prager Universität vom 15. bis zum frühen 17. Jahrhundert

The study focuses on questions relating to the deaths of professors of the Utraquist university in Prague from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century (cause of death, funerals, estates, forms and means of commemoration, etc.). It is based on sources of official provenance as well as on certain egodocuments and literary, iconographic, and material sources. Because from the Middle Ages they most commonly served as the final resting places of university masters, attention is also devoted to the Corpus Christi Chapel in New Town, Prague, and the Bethlehem Chapel in Old Town, Prague.

Practice and power: the rise and disappearance of the Franzosenärzte, or doctors of the French pox, in Nuremberg, 1495-1560.

During the late fifteenth century a new category of medical practitioner appeared in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire: the Franzosenarzt or French pox doctor. Until now, there has been no dedicated study of these practitioners. Through an analysis of municipal records from Nuremberg (circa 1495 to 1560), this paper offers the first dedicated investigation of the Franzosenärzte in this city, focusing on uncovering their relationships with Nuremberg's civic and medical hierarchies. It demonstrates why the Franzosenärzte gained a footing within the city's municipal healthcare system, but remained subject to the suspicions of the civic and medical authorities. These suspicions, combined with a competitive medical marketplace and Nuremberg's economic difficulties, precipitated the disappearance of the Franzosenärzte from the city around 1557. Nevertheless, for a brief moment, the Franzosenärzte's practical expertise in treating the French pox unsettled Nuremberg's nascent medical hierarchy and the ambitions of the city's physicians.

Girding the loins? Direct evidence of the use of a medieval English parchment birthing girdle from biomolecular analysis.

In this paper, we describe palaeoproteomic evidence obtained from a stained medieval birth girdle using a previously developed dry non-invasive sampling technique. The parchment birth girdle studied (Wellcome Collection Western MS. 632) was made in England in the late fifteenth century and was thought to be used by pregnant women while giving birth. We were able to extract both human and non-human peptides from the manuscript, including evidence for the use of honey, cereals, ovicaprine milk and legumes. In addition, a large number of human peptides were detected on the birth roll, many of which are found in cervico-vaginal fluid. This suggests that the birth roll was actively used during childbirth. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to extract and analyse non-collagenous peptides from a birth girdle using this sampling method and demonstrates the potential of this type of analysis for stained manuscripts, providing direct biomolecular evidence for active use.

La iconografía de Trifonte en el gótico final en los reinos de León y Castilla

The three-faces man, a very common subject in gothic works of art from the late fifteenth century, combines the interest in pure ornamentation with a simbolism that is based on the relation profane-religious iconography, in the field of the discoveries of new Lands and the representation of fantastic creatures.

The socioeconomic effects of extreme drought events in northern China on the Ming dynasty in the late fifteenth century

This paper analyzes reconstructed data on temperature, precipitation, and extreme drought events in the late fifteenth century in Northern China, as well as historical records on population migration, financial crises, military farms, and national decisions during the Ming dynasty. We specifically examine the socio-economic effects of extreme drought events, which led to long-term changes causing the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Our results indicate that the first Cold Valley and the frequent extreme drought events of the Little Ice Age in the late fifteenth century led to a sharp reduction in the military farm system. Extreme droughts caused a large-scale population migration in Northern China and led to the collapse of the tax payment and corvee systems. To cope with the extreme droughts, the local financial reserve was reduced by 51.3%. As a result, local finances became extremely tight. To alleviate fiscal pressures, the court was forced to change the socioeconomic model implemented in the beginning of the Ming dynasty to the corvee equalization method and silver coin tax collection method. These new measures resulted in a decline of the dynasty’s control over households, to the abandonment of military farms, and to reduced control over the country’s social risks. This article explains the mechanism through which climate events led to the collapse of the Ming dynasty. We specifically explore the relationship between socioeconomic transformation and extreme drought in the late fifteenth century in order to better understand the relationship between climate change and social response.

European Goods Market Integration in the Very Long Run: From the Black Death to the First World War

This paper examines price convergence and changes in the efficiency of wheat markets, covering the period from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth century and most of Europe. The analysis is based on a new data set of prices from almost 600 markets. Unlike previous research, we find that convergence was a predominantly pre-modern phenomenon. It started in the late fifteenth century, advanced rapidly until the beginning of the seventeenth century when it temporarily stalled, resumed after the Thirty Years’ War, and accelerated after the Napoleonic Wars in response to trade liberalization. From the late 1840s, convergence petered out and turned into divergence after 1875 as policy decisions dominated technological change. Our results point to the ‘Little Divergence’ between North-Western Europe and the rest of the continent as starting about 1600. Long-term improvements in market efficiency began in the early sixteenth century, with advances over time being as uneven as in price convergence. We trace this to differential institutional change and the non-synchronous spread of modern media and systems of information transmission that affected the ability of merchants to react to news.

Spanish Urban Life in the Late Fifteenth Century as Seen in <i>Celestina</i>

No disponible.

God’s City: ‘Civic Humanism’ and the Self-Construction of the Ecclesia in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century England

This article considers one element within the long tradition of the church’s self-identification as a city. It focuses on England, c. 1450 to c. 1510, and considers how the civic rhetoric developed by Italian humanists, pre-eminently Leonardo Bruni, was refracted through an ecclesiastical lens and so appropriated for English clerical use. It describes how two useful elements were quarried from recent writings imported from Italy: the first was the emphasis on the city and its buildings as a locus of virtue; the second was that, because of its virtue, that city was under attack. The discussion begins with the time of social unrest in the mid-fifteenth century,in the wake of which Thomas Chaundler wrote his praise of Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells, and his building works in his episcopal city. It ends in the first years of the sixteenth century with the relations between Christopher Urswick, dean of Windsor, and Thomas Goldstone, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury. Their re-use of older texts, specifically the Speculum regis Edwardi III, which they assumed to be by Archbishop Simon Islip, and more recent humanist ones, by Celso Maffei and Goldstone’s predecessor as prior, William Sellyng, identified other enemies who attacked the church: invoking the name of Thomas Becket, they saw those oppressing them to be not rebels against authority but those in authority. This allows us to reflect on how a few English readers of humanist civic rhetoric found in it potentially radical force.

Humanist Philology and Its Impact on the Evolution of the Humanities in Early Modern Europe

The article considers how the humanist educational and research agenda influenced learning and scholarship from the late fifteenth century through the sixteenth century, and in particular its impact on the humanities (linguistics, bibliography and history). Beyond such essential requirements as free exchange of research information and mas- tering both classical languages in order to read the original ancient texts, scientific dis- ciplines made additional demands that went far beyond those of the Scholastic trivium. The author also addresses the adoption of textual criticism (e.g. the use of variations among manuscripts for interpreting difficult passages, comparing parallel passages in classical texts, etc.) and the broad application of genres and practices originally con- nected with the study of grammar and rhetoric, including most prominently the genre of commentary and the academic practice of collecting literary excerpts. The article provides an overview of questions and problems dealt with in contem- porary accounts of the history of sixteenth century science and philology as well as an analysis of several texts (from Cornu Copiae by Niccolò Perotti and Conrad Gess- ner’s bibliographical works), which supplements and corrects the views that prevail as the opinio communis in this field. As one instance, the rise of sixteenth century bibliography conformed to the agenda of humanist philology while also relying heavily on the potential of the new technology of book printing for seeking informa- tion and propagating it.