The Medieval Sea

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
English Channel ◽  
Naval Warfare ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This book provides an accessible study of how peoples bordering the Mediterranean, North Sea, English Channel and eastern Atlantic related to the sea in all its aspects. This book surveys how the peoples bordering the Mediterranean, North Sea, English Channel and eastern Atlantic related to the sea in all its aspects between approximately 1000-1500 A.D.How was the sea represented in poems and other writings? What kinds of boats were used and how were they built? How easy was it to navigate on short or long passages? Was seaborne trade crucial to the economy of this area? Did naval warfare loom large in the minds of medieval rulers? What can be said more generally about the lives of those who went to sea or who lived by its shores? These are the major questions which are addressed in this book, which is based on extensive research in both maritime archives and also in secondary literature. It concludes by pointing out how the relatively enclosed maritime world of Western Europe was radically changed by the voyages of the late fifteenth century across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and round Africa to India.

Holy Leagues and Unholy Alliances, 1500–1550

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Precious Metal ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Caribbean Islands ◽  
Far North ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Mediterranean

The reshaping of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Black Death was a slow process. In addition to political changes within the Mediterranean, notably the expansion of Ottoman power, events taking place beyond the Straits of Gibraltar would, in the long term, greatly transform the life of those who lived on its shores and in its islands. The opening of the Atlantic had already begun in the decade before plague arrived, with voyages down the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands, and it continued with the discovery and settlement of Madeira and the Azores by the Portuguese in the early fifteenth century. As sugar plantations developed on Madeira, it became possible to supply Flanders and other parts of northern Europe directly from the Atlantic with one of the costly products that had previously been obtained within the Mediterranean. By 1482, with the establishment of a Portuguese fortress at São Jorge da Mina (‘the Mine’) in West Africa, not far north of the Equator, gold was beginning to reach Europe without being channelled across the Sahara and through the Muslim ports of the Maghrib; the opening of this Guinea trade compensated for disappointment at the failure of Ceuta to pay for its upkeep. The Atlantic also became a source of slaves for Mediterranean masters: Canary Islanders, Berbers from the opposite shores of Africa and, increasingly, black slaves carried north from the Mine. Many of these eventually reached Valencia, Majorca and other Mediterranean ports, after passing through Lisbon. Then, with Columbus’s entry into the Caribbean islands in October 1492, Castile also acquired a source of precious metal that was ruthlessly exploited by imposing heavy taxes in gold on the Indians, even though they were supposedly free subjects of the Crown. The Genoese, despite their unpopularity in Spain, installed themselves in Seville and, with royal approval, ran the trans-Atlantic trading operations. At the same time, they turned their hands to finance. Turkish pressure on the Genoese possessions in the eastern Mediterranean increased, and so the Genoese allied themselves more insistently with Spain, the power that seemed best able to stand up to the Turks.

scholarly journals Astrological Medicine and the Popular Press in Early Modern England

2005 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. 73-93
Author(s):  
Louise Curth
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
University Curriculum ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
Huge Variety

For many centuries the study of the stars was considered to be a science in western Europe. In the middle ages both astrology and astronomy, thought be the practical and theoretical parts of the scientific study of the celestial heavens, were taught as part of the university curriculum. The advent of printing in the late fifteenth century resulted in a huge variety of publications that provided the general public with access to this knowledge. This essay will examine the major role that almanacs, which were cheap, mass-produced astrological publications, played in disseminating information about astrological medical beliefs and practices to a national audience.

scholarly journals European Goods Market Integration in the Very Long Run: From the Black Death to the First World War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Giovanni Federico ◽  
Max-Stephan Schulze ◽  
Oliver Volckart
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Price Convergence ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Goods Market ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This paper examines price convergence and changes in the efficiency of wheat markets, covering the period from the mid-fourteenth to the early twentieth century and most of Europe. The analysis is based on a new data set of prices from almost 600 markets. Unlike previous research, we find that convergence was a predominantly pre-modern phenomenon. It started in the late fifteenth century, advanced rapidly until the beginning of the seventeenth century when it temporarily stalled, resumed after the Thirty Years’ War, and accelerated after the Napoleonic Wars in response to trade liberalization. From the late 1840s, convergence petered out and turned into divergence after 1875 as policy decisions dominated technological change. Our results point to the ‘Little Divergence’ between North-Western Europe and the rest of the continent as starting about 1600. Long-term improvements in market efficiency began in the early sixteenth century, with advances over time being as uneven as in price convergence. We trace this to differential institutional change and the non-synchronous spread of modern media and systems of information transmission that affected the ability of merchants to react to news.

scholarly journals ‘So one would notice the good navigability’: economic decline and the cartographic conception of urban space in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bruges

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-25
Author(s):  
BRECHT DEWILDE ◽  
JAN DUMOLYN ◽  
BART LAMBERT ◽  
BRAM VANNIEUWENHUYZE
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
City Government ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
North Western

ABSTRACTDuring most of the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the main commercial hub of north-western Europe. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, Bruges lost much of its allure as an economic metropolis. One of the most urgent challenges the urban authorities were facing was the navigability of the waterways in and around the city. While the city government made structural investments to remedy the problems, written sources constantly emphasized how important it was that Bruges remained accessible from the sea. During the same period, the earliest preserved maps of the city and its environment emerged. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that these visual representations were informed by the same commercial ideology. Despite, or exactly because of, the city's decreasing maritime accessibility, they conceived Bruges as a place that could easily be reached by trading ships and where merchants could trade in the best possible circumstances.

Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness: Demographic Movements in Late Fifteenth-Century England

1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. Gottfried
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Marriage Patterns ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Demographic movements remain a controversial and largely unknown facet of medieval studies. This is particularly true for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later middle ages, which in western Europe coincided with the second and most destructive pandemic of plague in recorded history. Most observers of late medieval England agree that population declined from sometime early in the fourteenth century, and that the decline extended to at least 1450, but the precise causes, extent, and chronology of this decline are still very much in debate. A recent analysis of 20,000 testamentary records from East Anglia, London, and Hertfordshire from 1430 to 1480 indicated that epidemic disease was the primary element in controlling and establishing demographic trends. It also showed, however, that this pattern began to change in the early 1470s when child replacement ratios, the generational measure of parents to progeny at fixed periods in time, began to rise for virtually all socio-geographic groups surveyed. By process of elimination, it was concluded that this was the result of an upturn in fertility. Since population increases generally have been attributed to changes in marriage patterns and/or mortality schedules, and since mortality was the major element in regulating population from 1348, the onset of the Black Death and the second plague pandemic, the postulated fertility rise of the 1470s took on even greater interest. Were the events of the 1470s anomalous, or did the projected fertility rise continue on into the 1480s, and even lead to the long-term period of population growth which occurred in the sixteenth century?

scholarly journals The growth rate of the hake, Merluccius merluccius (L.), in the Clyde and other Scottish sea areas

1954 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. B. Bagenal
Keyword(s):  
Growth Rate ◽  
Continental Shelf ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Large Fish ◽  
Merluccius Merluccius ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
European Hake

Hake belonging to the genus Merlucdus are large fish often growing to overa metre in length; they are predators, being well streamlined and armed with formidableteeth; they feed pelagically on smaller fish of their own and other species. Of the various species distributed round the ocean basins, the European Hake, M. merlucdus (L.), ranges from Lofoten on the coast of Norway, to Dakar on the African westcoast; it is found most plentifully along the edge of the continental shelf of Western Europe but also extends into the Mediterranean and North Sea, whilestragglers occasionally range as far as Iceland.

Contextualizing Josquin’s Ave Maria…virgo serena

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-240
Author(s):  
Clare Bokulich
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Moment

Notwithstanding the reputation of Josquin’s Ave Maria…virgo serena as a touchstone of late–fifteenth-century musical style, little is known about the context in which the piece emerged. Just over a decade ago, Joshua Rifkin placed the motet in Milan ca. 1484; more recently, Theodor Dumitrescu has uncovered stylistic affinities with Johannes Regis’s Ave Maria that reopen the debate about the provenance of Josquin's setting. Stipulating that the issues of provenance and dating are for the moment unsolvable, I argue that the most promising way forward is to contextualize this work to the fullest extent possible. Using the twin lenses of genre and musical style, I investigate the motet’s apparently innovative procedures (e.g., paired duos, periodic entries, and block chords) in order to refine our understanding of how Josquin’s setting relates to that of Regis and to the Milanese motet cycles (motetti missales). I also uncover connections between Josquin’s motet and the music of earlier generations, above all the cantilena and the forme fixe chanson, that offer new insights into the development of musical style in the fifteenth century. The essay concludes by positioning the types of analyses explored here within a growing body of research that enables a revitalized approach to longstanding questions about compositional development and musical style.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document