Les Rois de Gao-Sané et les Almoravides

1991 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dierk Lange

In recent years the impact of the Almoravid movement on the sahelian societies has been the object of some debate. Ancient Ghana seemed to be the most rewarding area of investigation, since al-Zuhrī (1154) and Ibn Khaldūn (end of the fourteenth century) suggested its ‘conquest’ by Almoravid forces. The evidence provided by these narrative sources has been disputed, but it could not be discarded.A new field of investigation was opened by the discovery in 1939 of a number of royal tombstones in Gao-Sané close to the old capital of the Gawgaw empire. The dates of the epitaphs extend from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth century. However, none of the Arabic names given to the rulers of Gao-Sané seemed to correspond to any of the names provided in the chronicles of Timbuktu, the T. al-Sūdān and the T. al-Fattāsh. A closer look at the epitaphs shows that the third ruler of Gao-Sané, called ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and also Yāmā b. K.mā and who died in 1120, is in fact identical with Yama Kitsi mentioned in the chronicles. The available evidence suggests that by 1080 the local Berbers of Gao-Sané were able to seize power from the earlier Qanda/Kanta dynasty of Old Gao. This change of dynasty was certainly not the result of a military conquest, although it is likely that Almoravid propagandists contributed to arouse the religious fervour of the local Muslims in both Gao-Sané with its community of traders and Old Gao with its Islamic court members and dynastic factions. The clear message of the Gao epitaphs is that the new rulers of Gao-Sané, the Zāghē, tried to establish good relations with members of the former ruling clan resorting to a policy of intermarriage. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Zāghē rulers were so much integrated into the local Mandé society that they adopted the title Z.wā (Zā) which was originally the title of the Kanta rulers. Thus it would appear that in spite of the far-reaching dynastic effects resulting from the religious and political upheaval of the Almoravid period, there was no major incursion of Berber people into the kingdom of Gawgaw. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that the basic institutions of the original‘Mande’ society were destroyed only in the course of the fifteenth century, when Songhay warrior groups from the east under the leadership of the Sonni radically changed the ethnic set-up of the Middle Niger. In spite of these changes the Zarma, whose aristocracy descend from the Zā, preserve the tradition of their origin from Mali until the present day.

Author(s):  
George Garnett

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.


Author(s):  
Steven N. Dworkin

This short anthology contains extracts from three Castilian prose texts, one from the second half of the thirteenth century (General estoria IV of Alfonso X the Wise), one from the first half of the fourteenth century (El conde Lucanor of don Juan Manuel), and one from near the mid-point of the fifteenth century (Atalaya de las corónicas of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera). These passages illustrate in context many of the phonological, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features of medieval Hispano-Romance described in the body of this book. A linguistic commentary discussing relevant forms and constructions, as well as the meaning of lexical items no longer used or employed with different meanings in modern Spanish, with cross references to the appropriate sections in the five main chapters, accompanies each selection.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.


Author(s):  
Sherry D. Fowler

Two wooden sculpture sets of Six Kannon, the thirteenth-century set from Daihōonji in Kyoto attributed to the artist Higō Jōkei and the fourteenth-century set from Tōmyōji in the Minami Yamashiro district of Kyoto, are well-documented sets that show the history, modifications, and movement of the cult. Copious inscriptions inside images in the respective sets reveal diverse sponsorship, from an elite female patron in the former to a huge group of patrons from a variety of backgrounds in the latter. Extant thirteenth- to fifteenth-century written records on ritual procedures, such as Roku Kannon gōgyōki, which focused on Six Kannon, contribute to the knowledge of how the rituals related to Six Kannon were performed as well as how the Six Kannon functioned in response to different needs, such as assisting with the six paths, protecting the dharma, or bolstering sectarian heritage, throughout their changing circumstances and movement over time.


Traditio ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 428-443
Author(s):  
Frank Pegues

The fourteenth century was the great century of college-founding in western Europe. The previous century and a half had witnessed the origins and early growth of the great studia generalia in Italy, France, England and Spain. This previous age had also seen the creation and endowment of the first colleges within the universities, a development which was to make the college system the dominant organizational characteristic of the medieval universities. The College des Dix-Huit was set up at Paris in the last years of the twelfth century; the most celebrated of all colleges, the Sorbonne, was endowed in the thirteenth. Almost at the same time, Merton College came into being at Oxford. But what had been a slow growth in the thirteenth century became a phenomenal expansion and multiplication of colleges in the fourteenth century. These colleges, vastly increased in number, were almost invariably and naturally attached to the old centers. The college founded by Aubert de Guignicourt at Soissons is almost unique simply because it was a provincial college. Because provincial colleges were so rare, this particular foundation deserves examination.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 571-599
Author(s):  
Eduard Frunzeanu ◽  
Isabelle Draelants

AbstractA short astrological treatise about the properties of the planets in the zodiac, called De motibus / iudiciis planetarum and attributed to Ptolemy (inc. Sub Saturno sunt hec signa Capricornus et Aquarius et sunt eius domus), appears from the thirteenth century onwards in two distinct traditions: in the encyclopedias of Bartholomew the Englishman and Arnold of Saxony, both written around 1230–1240, and in astronomical miscellanies copied in the fifteenth century either in or around Basel and in Northern Italy. These fifteenth-century manuscripts fall into two distinct groups of astronomical texts: the first is copied together with the De signis of Michael Scot, the second together with a part of the third book of Hyginus' De astronomia. The present article aims to describe the characteristics of the distinct textual filiations of De m. / iud. pl. and gives the first critical edition of the text.


2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 37-78
Author(s):  
Pavel Krafl

It was relatively early that the archbishops of Gniezno began to convoke provincial synods - the oldest dated assembly which is marked in the sources as a provincial synod took place as early as in 1210. But even before this synod another provincial synod took place in 1206 (?). In the beginning, i. e. in the thirteenth century, it is important to distinguish clearly between bishops' conventions, or colloquia, and provincial synods. The first statutes backed up with evidence are the statutes issued by Archbishop Henryk Kietlicz around 1217 in Kamień. Another important archbishop was Pełka (Fulko, 1232 - 1258). Two statutes issued by this metropolitan are still preserved. An important role in the system of provincial legislation was played by legates' synods and the legates' statutes which were proclaimed at them. A number of provincial synods was summoned by the archbishop of Gniezno Jakub Świnka (1285, 1287,1290,1298, 1306, 1309). Several not dated fragments of statutes originate from his time. In the fourteenth century the situation changes - the only two provincial synods that we know of are the synods of Janisław (1326) and Jarosław Bogoria Skotnicki (1357). „Synodyk“, the first attempt at codification of the legislation of Gniezno church province, comes from Skotnicki's synod. We cannot agree with referring to the assembly at Krakow from 1356 as to a provincial synod. Similarly, the „convencio generalis“ in Łęczyca in 1402 could not have been a provincial synod. Thus the first reliably proved provincial synod of the fifteenth century is the synod of Mikołaj.


Author(s):  
Victor J. Katz ◽  
Karen Hunger Parshall

This chapter traces the growth of algebraic thought in Europe during the sixteenth century. Equations of the third and fourth degrees sparked quite a few algebraic fireworks in the first half of the century. Their solutions marked the first major European advances beyond the algebra contained in Fibonacci's thirteenth-century Liber abbaci. By the end of the century, algebraic thought—through work on the solutions of the cubics and quartics but, more especially, through work aimed at better contextualizing and at unifying those earlier sixteenth-century advances—had grown significantly beyond the body of knowledge codified in Luca Pacioli's fifteenth-century compendium, the Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni, e proportionalita. Algebra during this period was evolving in interesting ways.


1955 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
George C. A. Boehrer

When the portuguese began their great expansion in the fifteenth century, it was not surprising that the Franciscan friars would enter into the work. They had in the past evidenced a more than cursory interest in North Africa and the lands beyond. Indeed their first martyrdoms occurred in Morocco in the second decade of the thirteenth century. In the following years, they had regular establishments there. That their activity in North Africa was not entirely concentrated on the Mediterranean coast is shown by the treatise Libro del conoscimiento de todos los regnos y tierras by an anonymous fourteenth-century Castilian Franciscan. In the work the Atlantic coast to Sierra Leone is adequately described as perhaps also are the Azores. Although the friars working in North Africa before 1415 were Spanish or at least attached to Spanish provinces, it is not unlikely that Portuguese friars also labored there when the former union and the still close relationship of the Franciscans on the peninsula is considered.


1989 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-297
Author(s):  
Valerie Horsman ◽  
Brian Davison

Excavations in the New Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster, between 1972–4, have illuminated the development of this historic site on the northern periphery of the medieval palace. The Yard was first laid out in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century over previously marshy land at the edge of Thorney Island. In the central area of the Yard, part of the foundation of a magnificent fountain, known historically as the Great Conduit was found. Built in the mid-fifteenth century, the conduit formed a major landmark until its demolition some two hundred years later. Preserved within its foundation were the fragmentary redeposited remains of a high quality fountain of polished Purbeck marble, dated to the late twelfth century. Due to the enormous scale of the building works significant environmental evidence was recovered allowing elucidation of the topographical development of this important site, from the prehistoric period to the creation of the Yard in the late thirteenth century.This paper is published with the aid of a grant from the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England.


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