Machiel Kiel and his View of the Bulgarian Empire on the Eve of the Ottoman Invasion

Epohi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolay Ovcharov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Almost All

Machiel Kiel’s attitude towards the culture of the Second Bulgarian Empire was extremely negative. In this regard, he blatantly manipulated and falsified the results of historical and archaeological studies. In his opinion, the Bulgarian cities of the 13th–14th centuries were small and unsightly, the churches were rough and impersonal, and the palaces of the kings were poky and ugly. Kiel told outright lies about the conquest of Bulgaria by the Ottoman Turks in the late 14th century. A careful examination of the available data shows quite a different picture. According to demographic studies of world-renowned academicians, such as P. Bairoch, J. Batou and P. Chèvre, medieval Bulgarian cities ranked among the best developed cities on the Old Continent. Moreover, according to the latest study, the capital of Tarnovgrad was on par with Rouen, the second largest city in France, and the southern capital of Toulouse, and had almost as many inhabitants as Cologne, the capital in the Holy Roman Empire. In Tarnovgrad, a total of 64 Christian churches have been uncovered so far, almost all of which were icon-painted and had marble and ceramic artistic decoration. In comparison, in the early 15th century, there were 53 churches and 19 monasteries in Thessaloniki, the second largest city of the Byzantine Empire.

The Reformation and the Establishment of Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Whaley
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
General Population ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles V ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
The Church

Martin Luther was a subject of the Elector of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. His emergence as a reformer was made possible by the sponsorship he received in Wittenberg. He owed his survival to the protection afforded him by the Elector when Emperor Charles V outlawed him and ordered that the papal ban of excommunication be enforced in the empire. The audience to which Luther appealed was the general population of German Christians, both lay and ecclesiastical, who wanted a reform of the church and the reduction of the pope’s influence over it. That his appeal resonated so widely and so profoundly had much to do with a combination of crises that had developed in the empire from the 15th century. That his reform proposals resulted in the formation of a new church owed everything to the political structures of the empire. These facilitated the suppression of radical challenges to Luther’s position. They also thwarted every effort Charles V made over several decades to ensure that the empire remained Catholic. Lutheranism became entwined with the idea of German liberty; as a result, its survival was secured in the constitution of the empire, first in 1555 and then in 1648.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Joachim Whaley
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Tribal Society

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was founded in 800 with the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by the pope, and was dissolved in 1806. ‘What was the Holy Roman Empire?’ explains that the original Frankish kingdom was a tribal society that followed an elected leader. On this foundation subsequent ruling dynasties developed what became a fully fledged feudal system. From the middle of the 14th century, the empire developed institutional and legal structures that ultimately became more important than the feudal relationship between the emperor and his vassals. The territories of the empire and its imperial coronations and insignia are described.

Switzerland

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph C. Head ◽  
David Y. Neufeld
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political System ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Printing Industry ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
History Of

The Swiss Confederacy was a product of the late 14th and 15th centuries that occupied an increasingly anomalous place within the mostly Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the European political system during the 16th and 17th centuries. The evolution of its complex political and institutional fabric, which long rested on late medieval feudal and communal practices, was accompanied by the emergence of a distinctive historical mythology, centered on the figure of William Tell and the three “Urschweizer” forest cantons, that profoundly shaped understandings of the Confederacy both inside and outside its boundaries. The Confederacy garnered attention from European thinkers from time to time as a model alternative to the emerging system of absolute sovereign states—for example, during the Dutch Revolt and before the French Revolution—but otherwise remained little more than a footnote in broader histories of Europe. The extraordinary richness of Swiss source material, ranging from the early medieval holdings of abbeys such as St. Gall to the extraordinary illustrated urban chronicles of the 15th century to the remarkably intact series of administrative records of the Swiss cantons from the 16th century onward, also contributed to various historiographical movements as historians’ interests changed. Inside Switzerland, a dense tradition of local and regional history grappled with the epistemic potency of Swiss historical mythology through repeated waves of revision and restatement, beginning in the first published overview by Petermann Etterlin in 1507 (Kronica von der loblichen Eydtgnoschaft, jr harkommen und sust seltzam strittenn und geschichten [Basel, Switzerland: Mich. Furtter, 1507]) and continuing to the present. The profoundly federal nature of Swiss politics always shaped Swiss historical practice as well, however, so that even today, much of the best historical writing on Switzerland is cantonal or local in focus, even as it embodies larger historiographical currents. This article seeks to provide access to this complex historical terrain by concentrating on the political, social, and cultural history of the Swiss region in particular. Larger European movements with significant Swiss components—including Humanism, particularly in the person of Erasmus of Rotterdam; the printing industry, which flourished early on in Basel; and the artistic currents of the northern Renaissance—are not included, since they are better comprehended in their European scope. Many publications on Swiss history carry titles in German and French, and often also in Italian; here, only one title is given in most cases, depending on the origin and focus of the reference.

Associations and the Discourses of Peace, Common Weal, and Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
German Nation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Almost All

Associations such as alliances and leagues were not merely functional tools. The rhetoric found in treaties and correspondence suggests that some members of associations perceived their participation as an activity freighted with political and moral significance. Almost all alliance and league foundation treaties and renewals contain appeals to clusters of ideas, centred on the concepts of divinely ordained peace, the common good of the community, and the Holy Roman Empire (conceptually linked, from the late fifteenth century, to the ‘German nation’). These discourses can only be found in this precise form in one other setting: the imperial diets and Empire-wide correspondence and legislation that they produced. This indicates that members of associations claimed to be involving themselves in the most significant and legitimate spheres of political activity in the Empire, even when their immediate objectives were modest and localized, or the legality of their alliances was challenged by other authorities.

scholarly journals A pápai Kúria tagjai és a magyar javadalmak a 14. században: Petrus Begonis életpályája

PONTES ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Maléth Ágnes
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Local Churches ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
Tax System ◽  
Great Opportunity ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Different Parts

The papal government was characterized by centralisation in the 14th century in which the tax system and the papal beneficial policy were two main factors. The Avignon popes strived to extend their influence on every stratum of the ecclesiastical hierarchy by rewarding the members of the Curia’s developing administrative system with benefices in the local churches. The changes in the functioning of the papal curia offered a great opportunity for a growing number of qualified clerics to build successful careers in the papal service. The process briefly described above had an impact on the contemporary ecclesiastical structure of the Hungarian Kingdom, as more and more clerics tried to obtain benefices with papal protection, especially in the second half of the 14th century. Soon not only papal officers, but cardinals and the members of their entourage held Hungarian ecclesiastical titles as well. The main aim of the present paper is to analyse the lifepath of a curialist, Petrus Begonis. First procurator of cardinal Guillaume de la Jugie, later papal chaplain, Petrus Begonis was granted various church offices – also in the Hungarian Kingdom – and charged with diverse diplomatic tasks in different parts of Europe (Hungary, Holy Roman Empire, Italy). His ecclesiastical career – spanning from the reign of Clement VI to that of Urban VI – gives an insight in the functioning of the papal curia in Avignon and helps us comprehend the administrational changes in the 14th century.

Lordship and Administration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Interconnected Networks ◽  
Territorial States

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Bounds of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
To Come

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

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