The Council of Constance: Its Fame and its Failure

1921 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 43-69
Author(s):  
David Schley Schaff
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Administration ◽  
The North ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Middle Ages

Van Der Hardt significantly entitled his voluminous collection of documents bearing on the Council of Constance, Magnum œcumenicum Constantiense concilium —the Great Œcumenical Council of Constance. The recent Catholic historian Funk pronounced it to be “eine der grossartigsten Kirchenversammlungen welche die Geschichte kennt”—one of the most imposing church assemblies known to history. In my own judgment, the council which assembled in Constance (1414) was, upon the whole, not only one of the most imposing of church œcumenical councils but perhaps the most imposing assembly of any sort which has ever met on the soil of Western Europe. In its sessions the urgent questions were discussed which agitated to its foundations Western Christendom during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. The Council had on it the smell of the Middle Ages and at the same time it felt the breath of the age about to open. It was an ecclesiastical synod and yet it had much of the swing of a democratic assembly. It was the first approach to a free religious parliament in which the lay element had recognition at the side of the clerical element. The two elements, mediæval and modern, strictly clerical and lay, had representation in its two places of meeting, the Cathedral, the temple of religion, and the Kaufhaus, the board of trade. The assembly was an ecclesiastical body, called to settle ecclesiastical questions; Constance was an imperial city, one of the centers of the North Alpine traffic. The questions discussed were of church administration and doctrinal purity, but the voting was done by national groups, “nations,” a wide departure from the habit of restricting the voting to the bishops, as at the Council of Nice, 325 A.D., and later councils.

scholarly journals I.—Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum, III, and IV

Archaeologia ◽  
1885 ◽  
Vol 49 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur John Evans
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Administrative District ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
East Region ◽  
Parallel Lines ◽  
North And South ◽  
Uncertain Boundary ◽  
The Middle Ages

Hitherto we have been concerned with the Dalmatian coast-cities and the great parallel lines of road that traversed the length of the Province from the borders of Pannonia and Italy to those of Epirus. From Salonæ there were, in addition to these highways to the North and South, at least two main-lines of Roman Way that traversed the interior ranges of the Dinaric Alps and led to the Mœsian and Dardanian borders that lay to the East and South-East. Milliary columns have been found at Salonæ, one recording the completion by Tiberius' Legate Dolabella of a line of road leading from the Colony of Salonæ to a mountain stronghold of the Ditiones—an Illyrian clan probably inhabiting what is now the North-East region of Bosnia; another, also of Tiberius' time, referring to the construction of a line, 156 miles in extent, from Salonæ to aCastellumof the Dæsitiates, an Illyrian clan belonging to theConventusor administrative district of Narona, and whose stronghold, according to the mileage given, must be sought somewhere on the Upper Drina, towards the Moesian and Dalmatian confines. This latter line may very well be that represented in theTabula Peutingerianaas leading from Salonæ to Argentaria, a name which seems to connect itself with the silver-bearing ranges lying on the uncertain boundary of the ancient Dalmatia and Dardania, and which, from its mineral riches, was still known in the Middle Ages asMonte Argentaro.

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Regional Cultures ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped — and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each chapter considers factors — demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological — that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each chapter, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century to 1340

1998 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Kelly DeVries ◽  
J. F. Verbruggen ◽  
S. Willard ◽  
R. W. Southern
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Rise of the Dutch Spice Trade in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Spice Trade ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

For medieval Europe, spices have always been of great significance, so the spice trade has become the object of competition for various countries in Western Europe. With the improvement of navigation technology, countries obsessed with spices have opened up the way to explore the origin of spices and monopolize the spices trade. Among them, the most typical country is the Netherlands. From the perspective of the spice trade, this paper discusses how the beneficiary of the spice trade, the Netherlands, has become a generation of marine hegemons by transferring spice to monopolizing the spice trade.

Segregation or Choice?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter assesses the argument that both their exclusion from craft and merchant guilds and usury bans on Christians segregated European Jews into moneylending during the Middle Ages. Already during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moneylending was the occupation par excellence of the Jews in England, France, and Germany and one of the main professions of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and other locations in western Europe. Based on the historical information and the economic theory presented in earlier chapters, the chapter advances an alternative explanation that is consistent with the salient features that mark the history of the Jews: the Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily entered and later specialized in moneylending because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets—capital, networking, literacy and numeracy, and contract-enforcement institutions.

On the Latin Sources of Thèbes and Énéas

PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
The Middle Ages

The French poems Troie, Thèbes, and Énéas, contemporaneous with one another in the sixth and seventh decades of the twelfth century, have many characteristics in common. They each repeat in a modernized form, and with incidents and details suited to their own age, the story of one of the great epics of classical antiquity, the Iliad, the Thebaid, and the Aeneid. They also combine with this traditional outline of adventure and conquest the narrative of romantic love and courtship, as conceived by Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And finally they each and all show an effort to attain some degree of excellence in style and composition. Thus they form a class by themselves, animated, as they are, by the same spirit and having the same purpose in view, and are the first exponents in the modern tongues of the ideals of chivalry. The sources of these poems, therefore, are an object of unusual interest to the student of mediaeval literature.

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