The Rise of the Dutch Spice Trade in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  

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.

Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein

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.


Author(s):  
D. Heirbaut

AbstractDue to a lack of sources, the makers of customary law in the middle ages are largely unknown to us. However, a unique source, the Lois des pers du castel de Lille, makes it possible to identify the spokesmen of customary law courts, who were the intellectual authors of these courts' judgements and, thus, the main creators of customary law. An analysis of their careers shows that they were legal advisers, lords and/or bailiffs and members or spokesmen of other courts. In short, they were their community's legal experts. They had learned their trade by doing and can be considered to have been semi-professionals. Certain spokesmen were more successful than others and served as a court's main spokesman, but it is hard to determine why someone became the main spokesman or spokesman at all, though knights had more 'natural' authority for acting as spokesman than others. In fact, although the spokesmen formed a community of legal experts in their area, two subgroups (the knights and the others) can be distinguished. The case studied in this article concerns the spokesmen of a Flemish castellany court around 1300, but spokesmen can be found in Flanders already in 1122 and they were common in North-western Europe. Therefore, this article concludes with a call for further research about these key figures of medieval customary law.


Author(s):  
Hans Hummer

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring that question, this book offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high Middle Ages, the period bridging Europe’s primitive past and its modern present. It critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deeper prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. It argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. It delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. The book reveals that kinship in the Middle Ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor is it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by “the most righteous principle of love.”


1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L. Nelson

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.


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.


Author(s):  
Francesc Morales

Abstract: The palates of the nationalist authors of the 19th century found the common past exemplified by the Roman Empire to be too homogeneous a taste. Although this premise may be valid for all European nationalist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the discussion here is limited to Spain’s problematic national construction during the 19th century and the group formed by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Spain and ‘Benelux’ were chosen because they represent complex problems in the construction of a key dynamic of European nationalism: a political contemporary diversity linked to pre-Roman and post-Roman pasts. Despite these political and historical connections, the paths taken by these nationalisms are significantly different.Key words: Rome, Netherlands, Spain, nationalism, EuropeResumen: Un pasado común ejemplificado por el Imperio Romano pasa por ser demasiado homogéneo para el gusto de los autores nacionalistas en el siglo XIX. Esta premisa puede ser válida para todos los movimientos nacionalistas europeos, pero voy a limitarme a la problemática de la construcción nacional en España durante el siglo XIX y al grupo formado por Bélgica, los Países Bajos y Luxemburgo. Ambas regiones representan similares complejidades en la construcción de un nacionalismo europeo: una diversidad política contemporánea enlazada con un pasado prerromano y post-romano. A pesar de tener conexiones políticas e históricas, el camino de estos dos nacionalismos es significativamente diferente.Palabras clave: Roma, Países Bajos, España, nacionalismo, Europa  


1998 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Kelly DeVries ◽  
J. F. Verbruggen ◽  
S. Willard ◽  
R. W. Southern

PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren

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.


Author(s):  
John W Cairns

This chapter considers the experience of one Scottish student in the Netherlands, specifically the education of Sir David Dalrymple, third Baronet of Hailes (1726–1792). Unusually for a Scots lawyer of his era, he was educated at Eton and was admitted to the Middle Temple on August 8, 1744. In 1745 he moved to study at the University of Utrecht, remaining there until 1747. After public defence of his theses on February 20, 1748, he was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh on February 24. He was elevated to the Bench of the Court of Session in 1766, taking the judicial title of Lord Hailes. In 1776 he was also appointed one of the Commissioners of the Justiciary Court. Hailes is best remembered, however, for his work as an historian, particularly of the Middle Ages in Scotland.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document