scholarly journals The Beginnings of the Cooperation of Free Royal Towns in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-73
Author(s):  
István H. Németh

The study presents the possibilities and framework for cooperation between towns in Hungary through the operation of the Town League of Upper Hungary. The cooperation of towns in the Kingdom of Hungary happened primarily through regional relations. At first, the basis for cooperation was provided by common economic interests, but this area broadened considerably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the battle of Mohács (1526), the towns of Hungary became full members of the Hungarian Estates. The Kingdom of Hungary, which was part of the Habsburg Monarchy, gained considerable autonomy in internal politics. This was based on a compromise with the Habsburg rulers to ensure protection against the Ottoman Empire. The free royal towns were the least influential members of this country that had strong Estates. Nevertheless, cooperation between the towns became nationwide. The diets provided the forum for all free royal towns in the country to represent their common interests in a coordinated way. There are traces of this nationwide cooperation as early as the mid-sixteenth century, but it was from the early seventeenth century that it was the strongest. The reason was that in those decades state taxes were becoming heavier and more burdensome for towns. This nationwide cooperation was not only manifested in the field of taxation, but from the first quarter of the seventeenth century onwards, it increasingly extended to religious matters. In the background, there was the increasing recatholization of the Habsburg Monarchy. In this special matter, close links were forged also with the otherwise strongly anti-urban lower nobility.

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.


Author(s):  
A S Shngreiyo

<div><p><em>T</em><em>he origin of the Saint Thomas, who is believed to be buried at Mylapur gradually led to the emergence of San Thome as an important trading post for the Portuguese in the Coromandel Coast. The Portuguese discovered the remnants of the Saint when they excavated the place and it become a major influence in their settlement of the town called San Thome. San Thome slowly developed as an urban center in the sixteenth century. The chapter also attempts to show the crucial role that the Portuguese played in the process of urbanization and in the social and political spheres as well. Down the coast lies another Portuguese port called Nagapattinam probable it was the first Portuguese to settle at Coromandel Coast in the 1520s. The first Portuguese settlers were mostly private traders interested in the rice trade to Sri Lanka. Later it become one of the flourishing ports as many individual Portuguese settle down and do commerce.  It is said that more than seven hundred sailing vessels were frequently docked at the same time on the river. Every year these vessels carried more than twenty thousand measures of rice from here to the western Coast of India. The trade here attracted merchants from all parts of India as well as from Pegu, Malacca and Sumatra. However, both the port did not enjoy for long as it sweep away by the coming of other European countries in the following centuries.</em></p></div>


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snježana Perojević ◽  
Branislav Trifunović

At the end of the fifteenth century the Ottoman Empire won the land at the middle of the eastern side of the Adriatic, between the town of Omiš and the Neretva River. Thus exposing the northern settlements of the island of Brač, which were under the Venetian Administration at the time, to immediate danger from the Turkish invasion. The settlement of Pučišća was particularly vulnerable. Therefore, the settlement was intensively fortified, and a series of thirteen individual small coastal towers was built, after which the entire settlement was named Castello Pucischia in 1600. One of these towers –the Aquila tower– had a key role in defending Pučišća during the Ottoman-Venetian War, also known as the War of Cyprus (1570-1573). The Aquila tower was built at the beginning of the sixteenth century and today it is a well-preserved detached building situated on the Pučišća coast. Despite all the damage and transformations endured in the past, all the tower elements have been sufficiently preserved to reconstruct its original appearance, including the residential character of the overall interior: a stone wardrobe and a built-in stone basin (Cro. pilo), a fireplace, stairs, as well as those of a defensive character: mechanisms for lifting the drawbridge, loopholes, cannon openings, channels for extracting gunpowder smoke. The wooden beams’ supports in the walls above the first floor have also been preserved, as well as the barrel vault over the ground floor and the groin vault over the second floor which are still intact even today. On the external of the tower, the original corbels of machicolations as well as the semi-circular cornice above the escarp are partially preserved. By analysing the remains of the tower and by studying historical and bibliographic sources, a reconstruction of the original appearance of the Aquila tower has been made, both for the external and internal part, including transformations that took place over the time, since its construction to the present day. This has contributed to the knowledge of the typology of Renaissance coastal fortifications as well as to providing basis for potential renovation and reconstruction of the Aquila tower.


1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville Chittick

This article, based on a critical examination of the Pate Chronicle in the light of archaeological and external historical evidence bearing on the subject, presents a case for a revision of the early history of the town. It maintains that Pate was the latest of the settlements to rise to importance in the region, being of little importance before the sixteenth century, and preceded by other city-statés, the earliest of which was Manda. The origins of Pate do not go back before the fourteenth century; the first dynasty there, the Batawi, was ruling up to around the seventeenth century, after which the Nabahani took over the sultanate.


Author(s):  
Mehrdad Shokoohy

AbstractThe ex-Portuguese town of Diu on the island with the same name off the south coast of Saurashtra, Gujarat, is one of the best-preserved and yet least-studied Portuguese colonial towns. Diu was the last of the Portuguese strongholds in India, the control of which was finally achieved in 1539 after many years of futile struggle and frustrating negotiations with the sultanate of Gujarat. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth century Diu remained a main staging post for Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean, but with the appearance of the Dutch, and later the French and British, on the scene the island gradually lost its strategic importance. The town was subjected to little renovation during the nineteenth century while in the twentieth century Diu was no more than an isolated Portuguese outpost with meagre trade until it was taken over by India in 1961. As a result, unlike the other former Portuguese colonies in India – Daman and Goa – Diu has preserved most of its original characteristics: a Portuguese colonial town plan, a sixteenth-century fort and a number of old churches, as well as many of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses.


Author(s):  
J. Hathaway

Abstract This article surveys the employment of eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire. After placing the use of court eunuchs in a global historical context, the study turns to the earliest eunuchs in Ottoman employ, who were probably Byzantine prisoners of war. By the early fifteenth century, East African harem eunuchs had become an important element of the palace eunuch population, and the article discusses their procurement and castration. The construction of Topkap Palace in newly-conquered Constantinople during the 1450s laid the ground for the dichotomy between African harem eunuchs and white Third Court eunuchs. An equally important watershed occurred in the late sixteenth century, when the Chief Harem Eunuch assumed the supervision of the imperial pious endowments for Mecca and Medina, making him one of the most powerful figures in the empire. By the late seventeenth century, deposed Chief Harem Eunuchs often commanded the eunuchs who guarded the Prophet Muhammads tomb in Medina. The influence of all palace eunuchs decreased during the eighteenth century, as the grand vizier acquired ever more control over the empires administration. Nineteenth-century reforms dealt a permanent blow to the harem eunuchs authority, which ended entirely when the Young Turks disbanded the harem in 1909.Аннотация Статья рассматривает вопрос о привлечении на службу евнухов в Османскои империи. После общего обзора роли придворных евнухов в глобальном историческом контексте, исследование обращается к первым евнухам на османскои службе, которые вероятно были византиискими военнопленными. К началу XV в. восточно-африканские евнухи гарема стали важнои фракциеи среди дворцовых евнухов в статье рассматривается методика их отбора и кастрации. Строительство дворца Топкапы в недавно завоеванном Константинополе в 50-х гг. XV в. положило начало дихотомии между африканскими евнухами Гарема и белыми евнухами Третьего Двора. Не менее важным рубежом становится и конец XVI в., когда старшии евнух Гарема принял на себя обязанности по управлению имперскими благотворительными пожертвованиями в Мекку и Медину, что сделало этого сановника одной из самых могущественных фигур империи. К концу XVII в. низложенные главные евнухи Гарема часто принимали командование над евнухами, охранявшими гробницу Пророка Мухаммеда в Медине. Влияние дворцовых евнухов оказывается ослабленным в XVIII столетии, по мере того как великии визирь получал все большую власть над управлением империи. Реформы XIX столетия нанесли решающии удар по власти евнухов Гарема, которая полностью сошла на нет при расформировании его младотурками в 1909 г.


2011 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-111
Author(s):  
A.C.S. Peacock

AbstractThis article examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman sources for the Funj sultanate that ruled the Gezira and Nile Valley regions of the modern Sudan. It also aims to elucidate the relationship between the Ottoman empire and the Funj sultanate. In the first part of the article, the sixteenth-century Ottoman sources, largely documents from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, are translated and analysed. In the second part, two seventeenth-century Ottoman accounts of the Funj are examined: that by the famous Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, and that by the geographer Abu Bekr el-Dimaşki. The text of the relevant passage from Dimaşki's work is provided alongside a translation. The article also examines evidence for religious links between the Ottomans and the Funj.


Ars Adriatica ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Marijan Bradanović

The paper discusses the urbanistic development of Dobrinj, one of the medieval castle settlements on the island of Krk, which developed in the shadow of the town of Krk - an ancient urban and Episcopal centre with unbroken continuity of occupancy since  Roman times and proto-history. Although situated away from the sea, from Dobrinj it was possible to survey the Vinodol Channel in the direction of Kotor, its counterpart on the mainland of the neighbouring Vinodol, founded above the mouth of the river  Dubračina. From Dobrinj it was also possible to control indirectly the salt-works of the Dukes of Krk in the nearby Saline Bay.  Dobrinj’s location on an isolated mountain ridge caused the characteristically linear development of its oldest part, the downtown area of Dolinji Grad. In spite of subsequent significant remodelling which updated the originally modest buildings, even today it is possible to recognize the characteristic rows of  rectangular residential single-floor structures with a single-room layout. The houses’ façades faced each other and the ground floors were separated by narrow passageways. However, on the first floor level they were joined by barrel-vaulted structures which supported roof terraces. The rows of houses along the outskirts of  Dolinji Grad adopted a fortification function through their predominantly block-like exteriors. Representative residential structures were concentrated around the Plokat square, below the parish church of St Stephen. Numerous pieces of information are provided by comparative analyses: in particular comparison with other settlements on the island of Krk, but also in combination with written sources and toponomastic research. From the confined area of Dolinji Grad, the settlement spread from the parish church towards the south. Here, around the field which stood in front of the settlement, the inhabitants built churches from the middle ages onward and a graveyard gradually developed. During the sixteenth century, this area was  gradually transformed into Placa, the new communal centre, following the example of the main square at Krk, which was developed by the Venetians. Although few material remains survive in situ, it can be observed that in this area Renaissance houses were provided with the characteristic door-cum-window openings (called "na koljeno") indicative of shops on the ground-floor level. Written sources reveal that in the sixteenth century  religious building focused on Placa. The beginning of the seventeenth century saw a further contraction in the area of Dolinji Grad, and the completion of the work on the parish church which had begun in the second half of the sixteenth century. From the second half of the seventeenth century, following the end of the dangers posed to Dobrinj by the Uskok War, the settlement spread out in a horse-shoe shape southward into the area of the upper town - Gorinji Grad. The  process continued in the eighteenth century and thus  the example of small and urbanistically underdeveloped Dobrinj demonstrates that this late period of Venetian rule does not necessarily stand for urbanistic stagnation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Nerina Rustomji

This chapter traces the French and English relationship with the Ottoman Empire and accounts for the introduction of the term “houri” in French in the seventeenth century and English in the eighteenth century. Through surveying sixteenth-century polemics about Islam, seventeenth-century travel writings, and eighteenth-century literature, the chapter argues that French and English writers used the idea of the houri as a source of critique in anti-Islamic polemics and travel writing even while their views of Islam and Islamic empires could be ambivalent. By the eighteenth century, writers also began to employ the term “houri” as a way to describe a model of feminine beauty.


2021 ◽  
pp. 369-389
Author(s):  
Miriam Bodian

The western Sephardic diaspora was created by descendants of Jews who underwent forced baptism in Portugal in 1497, just a few years after the expulsion from Spain had brought a flood of Jewish exiles across the border. These conversos, many of them crypto-Jews, became known as the “nação” (“nation”), a term that conveyed an ambiguous identity that had made them targets of the Portuguese Inquisition. At first, some immigrated to Iberian colonial lands or fled to Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, some who were active in the expanding Atlantic trade began settling in southwest France as “New Christians.” In the seventeenth century Portuguese ex-conversos were able to build a thriving, openly practicing Jewish community in the Atlantic commercial center of Amsterdam. This became the hub of a diaspora that eventually included the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America. Although some of its traditions have been carefully preserved, by the mid-eighteenth century this once dynamic diaspora had lost much of its commercial and cultural vitality.


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