The Iberian Atlantic to 1650

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart B. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Demographic Factors ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Political Control ◽  
Ethical Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Two Kingdoms

The Castilians and Portuguese were the first Europeans to create systems of continual communication, trade, and political control spanning the Atlantic. Following medieval precedents and moved by similar economic and demographic factors, these two kingdoms embarked in the late fifteenth century on a course of expansion that led to the creation of overseas empires and contact with other societies and peoples. This process produced a series of political, religious, social, and ethical problems that would confront other nations pursuing empire. Portugal and Castile were sometimes rivals, sometimes allies, and for sixty years (1580–1640) parts of a composite monarchy under the same rulers. Their answers to the challenges of creating empires varied according to circumstances and resources, but they were not unaware of each others' efforts, failures, and successes nor of their common Catholic heritage and world-view that set the framework of their imperial vision, their rule, and their social organisation. This article focuses on the history of the Iberian Atlantic to 1650, the Atlantic origins and Caribbean beginnings, conquest and settlement to 1570, and imperial spaces and trade.

THE FEAST OF THE SEVEN SORROWS OF THE VIRGIN: PIETY, POLITICS AND PLAINCHANT AT THE BURGUNDIAN-HABSBURG COURT

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 261-307
Author(s):  
Emily S. Thelen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Economic Instability ◽  
Habsburg Court ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Devotion to the Virgin of Seven Sorrows flourished in the Low Countries in the late fifteenth century during a period of recovery from civil war, famine and economic instability. The Burgundian-Habsburg court took a special interest in this popular lay movement and, in an unusual move, sponsored a competition to generate a liturgy – a plainchant office and mass – for the growing devotion. This article identifies new sources for the text and music of the Seven Sorrows liturgy and ties them to the court’s competition. An examination of the surviving office and mass demonstrates the texts’ dependence on an earlier Marian celebration of the Compassion of the Virgin. The reworking of this older devotion reveals that the plainchant competition and the creation of the new Seven Sorrows liturgy were part of the court’s political agenda of restoring peace and unity to their territories.

Nizam al-Mulk Remembered

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Neguin Yavari
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The focus in the fifth and final chapter is on the afterlife of Nizam al-Mulk, of his legacy as well as of his representations. By the late fifteenth century, in Timurid Iran, Nizam al-Mulk is already the stuff of legend. In one historian’s estimation, the vizier is a veritable eleventh-century avatar of the martyr par excellence of Shi’i lore Husayn b. ‘Ali (d. 680), and the progenitor of modern Iran. But the story of Nizam al-Mulk does not end with his metamorphosis into a crypto-Shi‘i and a proto-Iranian patriot. In the 2010s, it is Nizam al-Mulk who is the most regularly invoked exemplar of legitimate Islamic governance, exhorting prudence and expedience to guide the Iranian polity through the treacherous waters of nuclear negotiations with the West, and to domesticate outlier and extremist fervor. The Iranian invocation of Nizam al-Mulk differs radically from his depiction in modern Sunni—Arab or Turkish—historiography. That living legacy is the true history of the laureled vizier.

Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-252
Author(s):  
Marta Celati
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Humanist Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Ideal

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of literature on conspiracies was influenced by, but at the same time contributed to, the phenomenon of the literary fashioning of the profile of the ideal ruler, who now corresponded to the figure of a princeps. This literature also contributed to the creation of a new language and symbology of power through the multifunctional reworking of the classical legacy. This evolution culminated in Machiavelli’s attention to the issue of political plots in this work, with an approach that proves to be partly inspired by the previous cultural horizon, but already prominently projected towards an utterly new conceptual world. This analysis, besides providing a missing chapter on the background of Machiavelli’s work, more generally, underlines the significant contribution made by the humanist tradition, through its various literary expressions, to the development of modern political theories and to the history of our culture.

scholarly journals THE PRESERVATION OF CROSBY HALL, c. 1830–1850

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 687-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSEMARY SWEET
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

ABSTRACTThis article offers a case-study of an early preservation campaign to save the remains of the fifteenth-century Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, London, threatened with demolition in 1830, in a period before the emergence of national bodies dedicated to the preservation of historic monuments. It is an unusual and early example of a successful campaign to save a secular building. The reasons why the Hall's fate attracted the interest of antiquaries, architects, and campaigners are analysed in the context of the emergence of historical awareness of the domestic architecture of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as wider recognition of the importance of this period for Britain's urban and commercial development. The Hall's associations with Richard III and other historic figures, including Thomas More and Thomas Gresham, are shown to have been particularly important in generating wider public interest, thereby allowing the campaigners to articulate the importance of the Hall in national terms. The history of Crosby Hall illuminates how a discourse of national heritage emerged from the inherited tradition of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and highlights the importance of the social, professional, and familial networks that sustained proactive attempts to preserve the nation's monuments and antiquities.

Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino*

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 667-711 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

AbstractThis article discusses the manner in which Ficino employs the figure of Pythagoras and various aspects of the Pythagorean tradition in the philosophical areas of psychology, moral philosophy, and ontology. It also argues that the figure of Pythagoras as prophet was particularly appealing to a Ficino situated in the cultural environment of late fifteenth-century Florence. Text, culture, and ideology interacted in a complex way: spurred on by his early appreciation of Iamblichus's soteriological presentation of Pythagoras, Ficino helped create an ideology in Florence which was receptive to a prophetic figure. The piece thus suggests that Ficino viewed a certain segment of the history of thought through late ancient, Iamblichean eyes.

The Challenge of the New

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Pagden
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Canary Islands ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
History Of Europe

Europe's incursion into the Atlantic — the ‘occidental break out’ — after the mid-fifteenth century created many challenges and generated many kinds of ‘newness’ for all of those caught up in it. For the peoples of the African littoral, of the Canary Islands, of the Caribbean, and of the American mainland, the contact with Europeans throughout this period was inevitably, if not always initially, violent. Both Africa and America had been the site of large political structures which the Europeans called ‘empires’, Zimbabwe and Benin, Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru, before the fifteenth century. The discovery of America had seriously undermined both classical geography and the traditional Christian accounts of the creation and subsequent peopling of the world. It offered, however, other, less direct, challenges to the ancient understanding of the world which in the end, were to be even more devastating for the subsequent history of Europe.

Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shi'ism in Iran, 1487-1565

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Kia
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Illustrated Text ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

Some of the world’s most exquisite medieval paintings, from late fifteenth-century Herat and the early Safavid workshops, illustrate well-known episodes of popular romances––like Leyla & Majnun––that give prominence to depictions of unrelated figures such as a milkmaid or a spinner at the scene of the hero Majnun’s death. This interdisciplinary study aims to uncover the significance of this enigmatic, century-long trend from its genesis at the Timurid court to its continued development into the Safavid era. The analysis of iconography in several luxury manuscript paintings within the context of contemporary cultural trends, especially the ubiquitous mystical and messianic movements in the post-Mongol Turco-Persian world, reveals the meaning of many of these obscure figures and scenes and links this extraordinary innovation in the iconography of Persian painting to one of the most significant events in the history of Islam: the takeover of Iran by the Safavids in 1501. The apparently inscrutable figures, which initially appeared in illustrations of didactic Sufi narrative poetry, allude to metaphors and verbal expressions of Sufi discourse going back to the twelfth century. These “emblematic” figure-types served to emphasize the moral lessons of the narrative subject of the illustrated text by deploying familiar tropes from an intertextual Sufi literary discourse conveyed through verses by poets like Rumi, Attar and Jami, and ended up complementing and expressing Safavid political power at its greatest extent: the conversion of Iran to Shiism.

Texts and Tombs

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-128
Author(s):  
Jyoti Gulati Balachandran
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Regional Networks ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

The consolidation of a texted past around Sufi migrants in fifteenth-century Gujarat was accompanied by the development of the tomb-shrines of Aḥmad Khattū and two members of the Suhrawardi spiritual fraternity, Burhān al-Dīn ‘Abdullāh (d. 1453) and Sirāj al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1475). Texts and tombs represented conjoined processes that enabled ongoing community formation. The tomb shrines created regional networks of disciples and pilgrims focused on the burial sites of the Sufis just as texts increasingly cohered the history of the buried Sufis and their community into genealogies and overlapping personal connections. This chapter argues that the participation of the Gujarat Sultans in the creation of a sacral geography—through patronage, shrine veneration, and not least of all the building of palatial structures and royal tombs in close proximity—reflected the intertwined processes of state, community, and region formation in fifteenth-century Gujarat.

Sight, sound and ceremony in the chapel of Galeazzo Maria Sforza

1993 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 151-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn S. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Musical Taste ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Bernardino Corio's late fifteenth-century history of Milan covers the city's past from its foundations to the collapse of the Sforza dynasty. Following the historiographic traditions established by Leonardo Bruni, its essential outlines are founded on careful use of sources and, for more recent events, contemporary memories and impressions. It is, however, also characterised by judicious revisionism and anecdotal invention. The careful reader always needs to ask why digressions have been included and what hidden points are being made. It is therefore well worth inquiring why Corio, a member of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza's court, chose to link his master's assassination on 26 December 1476 with a passage on his chapel choir and musical taste.

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