Post-glacial colonization of Western Europe brown bears from a cryptic Atlantic refugium out of the Iberian Peninsula

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 618-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana García-Vázquez ◽  
Ana Cristina Pinto Llona ◽  
Aurora Grandal-d’Anglade
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Brown Bears

Charlemagne’s Defeat in the Pyrenees

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xabier Irujo
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Chanson De Roland ◽  
The One ◽  
Epic Poems

The Battle of Rencesvals is the one of the most dramatic historical event of the entire eighth century, not only in Vasconia but in Western Europe. This monograph examines the battle as more than a single military encounter, but instead as part of a complex military and political conquest that began after the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and culminated with the creation of the Kingdom of Pamplona in 824. The battle had major (and largely underappreciated) consequences for the internal structure of the Carolingian Empire. It also enjoyed a remarkable legacy as the topic of one of the oldest European epic poems, La Chanson de Roland. The events that took place in the Pyrenean pass of Rencesvals (Errozabal) on 15 August 778 defined the development of the Carolingian world, and lie at the heart of the early medieval contribution to the later medieval period.

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.

The enigmatic moss Fissidens jansenii Sérgio & Pursell recorded on Plateau de Millevaches (Limousin, France) with comments on its morphological variability

Nova Hedwigia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
Vincent Hugonnot ◽  
Leica Chavoutier
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Morphological Variability ◽  
Similar Species ◽  
Small Populations ◽  
Distribution Map ◽  
Spore Dispersal ◽  
New Material ◽  
Number Of Individuals

The rare Fissidens jansenii Sérgio & Pursell is reported on plateau de Millevaches, Limousin (France), nearly 1000 km north of the nearest known population. As a result, F. jansenii is known from the Iberian Peninsula and now from western France. An updated distribution map of the species in Europe is provided. The new material is fully described and illustrated and the ecology in France is outlined. Gametophytically, French specimens of F. jansenii do not deviate significantly from Portuguese material and the variability of characters is discussed. In France, on plateau de Millevaches, F. jansenii is relatively frequent but constitutes rather small populations, with a low number of individuals. Sporophytes were regularly encountered and reproduction is most likely to be by spore dispersal. On plateau de Millevaches, F. pusillus (Wilson) Milde shares a comparable habitat but is easily distinguished from F. jansenii. Morphologically similar species occurring in Western Europe and that could potentially be confused with F. jansenii (F. rivularis and F. rufulus Bruch & Schimp.) are compared.

scholarly journals Arsāniyūs Shukrī al-Ḥakīm’s Account of His Journey to France, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy (1748–1757) from Travel Journal to Edition

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 202-244
Author(s):  
Feras Krimsti
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Travel Journal

AbstractIn 1748, the monk Arsāniyūs Shukrī al-Ḥakīm (1707–1786), a member of the Lebanese Maronite Order in Mount Lebanon, was sent to Catholic Europe, tasked with securing financial support and the protection of the French King for his indebted order. The literary byproduct of this journey through the Christian lands of Western Europe was an extensive travel account. Based on recent manuscript findings, the present contribution examines the different versions in which this ego-document has been transmitted, including the original travel journal written en route by Arsāniyūs himself, copies by contemporaries who turned the travel journal into a travelogue, an excerpt included in an anthology dating to the 1870s, and finally the edition by the Jesuit scholar Ferdinand Taoutel (1887–1977). The account of the journey, it is argued, remained the object of a philological engagement that was meant to guarantee the continuity of its relevance and use in changing contexts.

Predictive skill of atmospheric rivers in the Iberian Peninsula

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre M. Ramos ◽  
Pedro M. Sousa ◽  
Emanuel Dutra ◽  
Ricardo M. Trigo
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Extreme Precipitation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
North Atlantic Ocean ◽  
Forecast Accuracy ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Winter Precipitation ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Atmospheric Rivers ◽  
Predictive Skill

<p>In recent years a strong relationship has been found between Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) and extreme precipitation and floods across western Europe, with some regions having 8 of their top 10 annual maxima precipitation events related to ARs. In the case of the Iberian Peninsula, the association between ARs and extreme precipitation days has also been well documented, particularly for western Iberia river basins.</p><p>Since ARs are often associated with high impact weather, it is important to study their medium-range predictability. Here we perform such an assessment using the ECMWF ensemble forecasts up to 15 days, for events that made landfall in western Iberian Peninsula during the winters spanning between 2012/2013 and 2015/16. IVT and precipitation from the 51 ensemble members of the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) ensemble (ENS) were processed over a domain including western Europe and contiguous North Atlantic Ocean.</p><p>Metrics concerning the ARs location, intensity and orientation were computed, in order to compare the predictive skill (for different prediction lead times) of IVT and precipitation analyses in the IFS. We considered several regional boxes over Western Iberia, where the presence of ARs is detected in analysis/forecasts, enabling the construction of contingency tables and probabilistic evaluation for further objective verification of forecast accuracy. Our results indicate that the ENS forecasts have skill to detect upcoming ARs events, which can be particularly useful to improve the prediction of associated hydrometeorological extremes. We also characterized how the ENS dispersion and confidence curves change with increasing forecast lead times for each sub-domain. We employed the standard ROC analysis to evaluate the probabilistic component of these predictions showing that for short lead times precipitation forecasts are more accurate than IVT forecasts, while for longer lead times this result is reversed (~10 days). Furthermore, we show that this reversal occurs at shorter lead times in areas where the ARs contribution is more relevant for winter precipitation totals (e.g. northwestern Iberia).</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Acknowledgements</strong></p><p>The work done was supported by the project Landslide Early Warning soft technology prototype to improve community resilience and adaptation to environmental change (BeSafeSlide) funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal (FCT, PTDC/GES-AMB/30052/2017). A.M.R. was also supported by the Scientific Employment Stimulus 2017 from FCT (CEECIND/00027/2017).</p>

Theresa Earenfight, ed., Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: More than Just a Castle. Explorations in Medieval Culture 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. 416 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-251
Author(s):  
Charlotte A. Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe

This collection of sixteen essays examines the households of royal and aristocratic figures from the ninth through sixteenth centuries in Western Europe. Based on a variety of sources, ranging from economic records to letters, wills, legal charters, and inventories, the studies in this volume showcase the complexity of great households with their large cast of characters. While length restrictions make detailed discussion of individual essays impractical here, the different contributions complement each other along several thematic strands, notably court studies, economic history, and especially gender studies. Nine contributors focus on female households (Megan Welton, Penelope Nash, Linda E. Mitchell, Eileen Kim, Sally Fisher, Caroline Dunn, Manuela Santos Silva, Zita Rohr, and Theresa Earenfight), five on primarily male households (David McDermott, Alexander Brondarbit, Alana Lord, Audrey M. Thorstad, and Hélder Carvalhal), and one deals equally with the households of a king and queen (Isabel de Pina Baleiras). Many of the contributors focus on English material, although several essays give insights on France, Germany, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.

Educated Wandering Jews, 800–1250

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Business Opportunities ◽  
Vast Territory

This chapter shows that once the Jews became literate, urban, and engaged in skilled occupations, they began migrating within the vast territory under Muslim rule—stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India during the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and from the Byzantine Empire to western Europe via Italy and within western Europe in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In early medieval Europe, the revival of trade concomitant with the Commercial Revolution and the growth of an urban and commercial economy paralleled the vast urbanization and the growth of trade that had occurred in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates four to five centuries earlier. The Jewish diaspora during the early Middle Ages was mainly the outcome of literate Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, scholars, teachers, physicians, and moneylenders migrating in search of business opportunities to reap returns on their investment in literacy and education.

The earliest horse-bits of western Europe

1973 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 425-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. Balkwill
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
New Combinations ◽  
The Bronze Age ◽  
Burial Rite

Within recent years, much attention has been focused on the earliest objects of harness which have long been noticed in the archaeological record. They are a matter of some importance in the perception of social structure from extant remains; Kossack (1954) presented strong arguments in favour of interpreting, in this manner, the early Hallstatt (Ha C) horse harness from Bavarian graves. Other major publications have since added to the picture of widespread, supposedly aristocratic adoption of harness and wagons in association with burial rite (northern and central Italy in the Early Iron Age, von Hase 1969; the Iberian peninsula in the same period, Schüle 1969; the Middle Danube to the Russian Steppes and to the Asian hinterland, Potratz 1966). Nor has the thesis of Gallus and Horvath (1939) been ignored, and the activities of ‘Thraco-Cimmerian’ cavalry still play a large part in the interpretation of west European horse harness. Already in 1954, however, Kossack observed the continuing elements of native, western Urnfield Europe in the entirely new combinations of grave-goods in Ha C and he indicated that the cheekpieces, while being modelled closely on the lines of preceding types found in the region of the Middle Danube, were, in fact, local variants chiefly concentrated in the graves of Bohemia and Bavaria. That western Europe had long had its own forms of cheekpiece was demonstrated by Thrane in 1963, yet the mouthpieces themselves have received no consolidated attention. This paper is an attempt to redress the balance, by gathering together the earliest metal bits in Europe west of Slovakia and Hungary, in order to see what light they throw on the problems of continuity and transition at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.

The oldest metallurgy in western Europe

Antiquity ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (282) ◽  
pp. 897-903 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Ruiz-Taboada ◽  
Ignacio Montero-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Analytical Techniques ◽  
European Region ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Neolithic Site ◽  
New Information ◽  
Southeast Spain

Recent excavations at the Neolithic site of Cerro Virtud (Almería, southeast Spain) have produced new information about the development of metallurgy that may change ongoing research not only in the Iberian Peninsula but also in the rest of western Europe. The discovery of metallurgy in this region in the first half of the 5th millennium BC poses serious challenges to the interpretation of how this industry developed and spread, given that the nearest European region with similar evidence is the Balkans. This study presents the archaeological context of the discovery and the various analytical techniques (XRF, SEM, 14C) that have been applied to it.

Predicting the risk of an endemic focus of Leishmania tropica becoming established in south-western Europe through the presence of its main vector, Phlebotomus sergenti Parrot, 1917

Parasitology ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 140 (11) ◽  
pp. 1413-1421 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. D. BARÓN ◽  
F. MORILLAS-MÁRQUEZ ◽  
M. MORALES-YUSTE ◽  
V. DÍAZ-SÁEZ ◽  
M. GÁLLEGO ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Hot Spots ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Risk Model ◽  
Leishmania Tropica ◽  
Phlebotomus Sergenti ◽  
Risk Maps ◽  
Predictive Risk ◽  
Climatic Characteristics

SUMMARYThe aim of the study was the construction of risk maps for exposure to Phlebotomus sergenti, the main vector of Leishmania tropica, with a view to identifying hot spots for the potential establishment of this parasite in the southwest of Europe. Data were collected on the presence/absence of this vector and the ecological and climatic characteristics of 662 sampling sites located in the southeast, centre and northeast of the Iberian Peninsula (south-western Europe). The environmental factors associated with the distribution of P. sergenti were determined. The best predictors for the presence of this dipteran were ‘altitude’, ‘land use’, ‘land surface temperature’, ‘aspect’, ‘adjacent land cover’, ‘absence of vegetation in wall’ and the ‘absence of PVC pipes in the drainage holes of retaining walls’. Risk maps for exposure to the vector were drawn up based on these variables. The validation of the predictive risk model confirmed its usefulness in the detection of areas with a high risk of P. sergenti being present. These locations represent potential hot spots for an autochthonous focus of L. tropica becoming established. The risk maps produced for P. sergenti presence revealed several areas in the centre and south of the Iberian Peninsula to be the most prone to this process, which would make it possible for the disease to enter south-western Europe.

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