Local Narratives, Regional Histories, and the Demise of Great Zimbabwe

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Innocent Pikirayi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The North ◽  
Great Zimbabwe ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Local Narratives ◽  
Regional Histories ◽  
Written Sources

Archaeologists struggle to understand the demise of Great Zimbabwe because of poor appreciation of local and regional histories of the southern Zimbabwe plateau, post-fifteenth century. Listening to some of these extant regional histories and living narratives is key to understanding developments around Great Zimbabwe from the sixteenth century onwards. The focus in this chapter is on two sites, Boroma, a toponym east of Great Zimbabwe, and Chizhou Hill, some 80 kilometers to the north. In sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts, "Burrom" (Boroma) is presented as a prince in charge of a 'fortress' whose location coincides with Great Zimbabwe. Local narratives and indigenous histories collected from villagers near Chizhou Hill, as well as documented written sources, connect the site to the resettlement of the area by migrants from the Mutapa State in northern Zimbabwe. Combined, both sites attest to a complex process leading to the demise of Great Zimbabwe and its culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Literary Conduits for ‘Consent’

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kumar Jha
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The North ◽  
Literary Cultures

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.

Clerical Poverty in Early Sixteenth-Century England: Some East Anglian Evidence

1986 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Pound
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Average Salary ◽  
The North ◽  
High Social Status

The economic standing of the English parochial clergy in the early sixteenth century has been re-examined recently by Michael Zell, and the evidence at his disposal suggests that many of them were poverty-stricken in the extreme. He points to the large surplus of unendowed curates, chaplains and the like, and to the fact that when employment was available it was neither rewarding, in a monetary sense, nor necessarily secure. Stipends were officially regulated by an early fifteenth-century statute which set a maximum of £5 6s. 8d. per annum, and ‘evidence from all regions of England indicates that very rarely were curates and chaplains given more than that’. It was not uncommon for areas in the north to pay even less than this. In Lancashire, for example, the average salary of about 100 curates and chaplains in 1524 was £2 9s. 6d. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a year later it was £4. On the basis of such evidence, Mr Zell reasonably concludes that the unbeneficed clergy must have found it very difficult to survive, and that ‘the average country priest could not have been a person of high social status’.

scholarly journals Bremen’s trade with the North Atlantic, c. 1400–1700

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Adolf E. Hofmeister
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
The North ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Island Communities ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Insight Into

There is little evidence of Bremen merchants in Norway before the royal charters issued from 1279 onwards, even though Bremen had been the seat of the missionary archbishop for the Nordic countries since the ninth century. Trade in Bergen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dominated by the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea coast led by merchants from Lübeck. Despite opposition from Hanseatic merchants sailing to Bergen, merchants from Hamburg and Bremen developed new trading posts to barter cod on Iceland and Shetland in the fifteenth century. Traders from Hamburg and Bremen on Iceland competed for licences issued by the Danish king. The 1558 debt register of a merchant from Bremen in Kumbaravogur provides considerable insight into this trade. The Danish king restricted sailings to Iceland to Danish merchants from 1601. On Shetland the Scottish foud allotted landing places to foreign skippers and traders. Merchants from Bremen became respected members of the island communities and in the seventeenth century they changed to trading in herring. Several tariff rate rises led to the end of Bremen sailings to Shetland by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bremen merchants in Norway succeeded in breaking the Lübeck dominance in Bergen in the sixteenth century. By 1600, other Norwegian harbours in the North Atlantic, notably Stavanger, were also destinations for ships from Bremen.

De broer van de koning met de dood bedreigd: een 'exemplum iustitiae' in de vijftiende- en zestiende-eeuwse Nederlandse kunst

1994 ◽  
Vol 108 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Hugo Van Der Velden
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
History Of ◽  
Town Halls ◽  
Written Sources

AbstractA South Netherlandish panel in the collection of the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, painted around 1475-85, can be identified as one of the few surviving fifteenth-century justice pictures. Bruyn succeeded in tracing the painting's enigmatic iconography to a mediaeval 'exemplum', The King's Brother Threatened with Death, in which elements from The Sword of Damocles and from the story of the trumpet of death in the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat are combined into a single history. In the Gesta Romanorum, under the heading 'De timore extremi iudicii', the tale is told of a wise and righteous king who threatens to have his frivolous brother executed as a means of demonstrating his own state of mind: the thought of the Last Judgement makes it impossible for him to abandon himself to the pleasures of earthly life. In written sources this 'exemplum' is often associated with 'righteousness', becoming more closely interwoven with the practice of secular justice as time passed. In the fourteenth century, for example, it featured in a moralizing discourse on good and righteous government (the Ludus Scaccorum) and in the fifteenth century as a model of god-fearing conduct - even in a code of law (the Wetboek van Den Briel). This development corresponds closely with the literary history of other judgement scenes, such as the Judgement of Cambyses. The cited literary sources stress that judges should be filled with 'Timor Dei' as exemplified by the story of the king and his brother. The tenor of the 'exemplum' is a reminder that the secular judge will eventually have to answer for his actions to the Supreme Judge, an idea which was conveyed in town halls by representations of the Last Jugement. In view of the written tradition it is quite likely that the panel in Sarasota and two other representations of The King's Brother Threatment with Death - a drawing attributed to Lucas van Leyden and a stained-glass window - served as (designs for) a judgement picture. This interpretation is substantiated by sixteenth-century pictorial sources. In both a South German drawing and a print by Theodoor de Bry the story of the king's brother is combined with a number of familiar 'exempla iustitiae'.

XX.—Some Notes on the Heraldic Glass in Great Malvern Priory Church

Archaeologia ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-358
Author(s):  
Roland W. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
South Side ◽  
The North ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Henry Vii

In the latter half of the fifteenth century great changes took place in the fabric of the priory church at Great Malvern, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century it had been transformed from what was largely, if not entirely, a Norman church to one of Perpendicular character. With the exception of a doorway on the south side of the nave, the nave arcade, and the bases of the piers that support the central tower, there are no evidences of work prior to the alteration. To this rebuilding both Richard III. and Henry VII. are said to have contributed, the west window of the nave is said to have been the gift of the former and the north window of the transept that of the latter, besides a very long list of benefactors, members of well-known families of the day, local and otherwise; and it is therefore not surprising that even in its present comparatively mutilated state the decorative work in this church is among the finest in England of its date, and the glass and encaustic tiles practically unsurpassed for beauty and interest.

Ingombe Ilede and the demise of Great Zimbabwe

Antiquity ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 91 (358) ◽  
pp. 1085-1086 ◽  
Author(s):  
Innocent Pikirayi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Spatial Features ◽  
South Central ◽  
Great Zimbabwe ◽  
Regional Population ◽  
New Research

Although new research suggests multi-directional trajectories in the development of the Zimbabwe Tradition (see Chirikure et al. 2016), regional population shifts need not be discounted, as some of these generated states (e.g. Vigneswaran & Quirk 2015). Oral-historical data from northern Zimbabwe counters persistent but often misleading views of pre-colonial states in south-central Africa as exercising power over static and stationary populations (Pikirayi 1993). Rather, human mobility shaped, among other things, the Zimbabwe Culture's spatial features, its strategies for accumulating power and managing resources, and the regional political, social and economic actors to which it was connected. This occurred with the demise of Great Zimbabwe from the second half of the fifteenth century and for much of the sixteenth. Ingombe Ilede attests to post mid fifteenth-century regional shifts in patterns of trade that would lure the Portuguese to south-central Africa from the early sixteenth century onwards. The Zambezi became the preferred inland route. Great Zimbabwe's expansionary thrusts to control this trade undermined its own political control over the southern Zimbabwe plateau, as this spawned new political formations like the Mwene Mutapa state and other polities, including Ingombe Ilede.

V.—The Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie, with notes on the evolution of Italian armour during the fifteenth century

Archaeologia ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 117-142
Author(s):  
J. G. Mann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Black Paint ◽  
The Road ◽  
The North ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Santa Maria ◽  
The Church

The Franciscan monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie is situated on the bank of the Mincio some five miles west of Mantua on the road to Cremona. My attention was first drawn to it by the late Baron de Cosson during a conversation in Florence in 1926, when he showed me a photograph of the interior of the church. He understood that the local tradition was that the statues were clad in armour taken from the battlefield of Marignano in 1515, and mentioned that there appeared to be some basis for this belief as the armour looked to to him genuine enough, so far as it was possible to see it from the floor of the church. ‘Rien n'est plus rare qu'une arinure ancienne’ The suggestion that there might be in existence a church full of armour dating from the early part of the sixteenth century, hitherto unrecorded, inspired a desire to visit the place at the first opportunity. I was unable to fulfil my intention that year, but two years later I was in the north of Italy again and was able to make the promised pilgrimage. The antiquary is well used to receiving specious accounts of treasures which on examination turn out to be utterly worthless. Perhaps objects associated with warlike exploits lend themselves even more commonly to exaggeration than most, and I was prepared to find that I had made a journey in vain. On my arrival a brother informed me that the armour on the statues was only of carta pesta and not worth looking at. But the first figure that I inspected showed that my hopes had been exceeded. Not only was much of the armour real, so far as one could tell through a coating of thick black paint overlaid with the dust of countless Italian summers, but its form was not that of the time of Marignano but of some fifty years earlier, when the art of the Italian armourer had reached its zenith. Last year I returned to the monastery and arranged to have a scaffold erected, and to have the seventeen figures which wear armour out of the total of sixty-seven photographed; for permission to do this I wish to record my gratitude to Monsignor Guarnieri and the Soprintendente di Belle Arti of.the district.

Atlantic Winds and Ocean Currents in Portuguese Nautical Documents of the Sixteenth Century

1972 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 59-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Teixeira da Mota
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Trade Winds ◽  
Wind Variability ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
First Time ◽  
Current Systems

SynopsisThe idea that only after 1490 the European sailors had ‘come for the first time in recorded history to struggle with the limitations placed on sailing ships by the winds and currents of the open ocean’ does not correspond to reality. There is enough proof to show that much earlier, in the fifteenth century, the North-East Trades’ regularity, the wind variability in the zone directly north of them, and the Canaries Current were already known. When the fifteenth century ended, the Portuguese had already verified the symmetry of wind patterns in the Atlantic on both sides of the equatorial calm zone, which led them to apply the significant name of ‘ventos gerais’ to the trade winds of both hemispheres.Accurate knowledge of the wind and current systems was essential to good navigation and the Portuguese ratters of the sixteenth century, chiefly ‘carreira da India’ rutters, include an increasing amount of information on that subject, referring especially to zones in the passage from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic. The report of a voyage (1503) proves that at that time the Portuguese already knew the Gulf of Guinea winds and currents sufficiently well. As a result of oceanic sailing, the traditional ratters, exclusively coastal, developed considerably, not only by adding data about latitudes and compass variations but also by the indication of winds and currents. There appeared also an even newer type of ratter, the ‘oceanic rutter‘, in which the safest and quickest routes, because of the changeability of winds and current patterns, are indicated.Information about elements concerning winds and currents which are included in the Portuguese ratters was revealed in printed matter after the end of the sixteenth century and this allowed some European scientists to study, because of the availability of better information, the causes of those physical phenomena, which had already been treated briefly in the sixteenth century by two nautical treatise writers, D. João de Castro and Father Fernando Oliveira.

scholarly journals Architectural framing in the iconostasis as an instrument of commenting on the sacred image

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-49
Author(s):  
S. Olianina
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Multilevel Structure ◽  
Christian Origins ◽  
Sacred Image ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Written Sources

Before the seventeenth century, the icons in the Ukrainian iconostasis did not have frames as an arch or a blind arcade. The epistyles with images of Deesis of fourteenth – sixteenth century have not frames at all or the figures are divided by the rectangular pictorial frames. However, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the icons of apostles in a Deesis row had already framing by carved frames like as the blind arcade. This practice quickly spreads and becomes the rule for the representation of apostles at the iconostasis throughout the seventeenth century. The Christian origins of tradition to decorate sacral images by blind arcade to be continue from Byzantium. It is very important that this design of the icons is characteristic of the Byzantine templons. The epistyles of templons from the twelfth – fifteenth century are mostly framing by blind arcade. The same principle of decoration is passed to the Balkans, where the blind arcade also is fixed in the design of the Deesis row. I argue that the blind arcade in the Ukrainian iconostasis in the design of the Deesis row comes from the Balkans The introduction of frames in the form of a blind arcade for icons of the Deesis row created compositional parallels between Ukrainian iconostasis and the iconostasis of the Balkans. This unity of the used compositional formulas reinforced the relationship of the Ukrainian iconostasis with the Balkan, and visually showed its Byzantine origins. On the basis of artistic and written sources, I demonstrate that blind arcade emphasized the eschatological meanings of the Deesis row. It was also a kind of marker that indicated the presence of this row in the multilevel structure of the monumental Ukrainian iconostasis of the seventeenth century.

scholarly journals Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN MOLINEAUX ◽  
JOANNA KOPACZYK ◽  
RHONA ALCORN ◽  
WARREN MAGUIRE ◽  
VASILIS KARAISKOS ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Sound Pattern ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.

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