Download PDF | Balázs Nagy, Felicitas Schmieder, András Vadas - The Medieval Networks in East Central Europe_ Commerce, Contacts, Communication-Routledge (2018).
317 Pages
THE MEDIEVAL NETWORKS IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE
Medieval Networks in East Central Europe explores the economic, cultural, and religious forms of contact between East Central Europe and the surrounding world in the eight to the fifteenth century. The sixteen chapters are grouped into four thematic parts: the first deals with the problem of the region as a zone between major power centers; the second provides case studies on the economic and cultural implications of religious ties; the third addresses the problem of trade during the state formation process in the region, and the final part looks at the inter- and intraregional trade in the Late Middle Ages.
Supported by an extensive range of images, tables, and maps, Medieval Networks in East Central Europe demonstrates and explores the huge significance and international influence that East Central Europe held during the medieval period and is essential reading for scholars and students wishing to understand the integral role that this region played within the processes of the Global Middle Ages.
Balázs Nagy is Associate Professor of Medieval History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and visiting faculty at the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Budapest. His main research interests are medieval economic and urban history.
Felicitas Schmieder is Professor of Premodern History at FernUniversität Hagen. Her main research interests are the history of cross-cultural contacts, urban history, cultural memory, and pre-modern cartography.
András Vadas is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His research interests are the environmental, urban, and economic history of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Dariusz Adamczyk is a researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw in a project about monetization and commercialization in the Middle Ages funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and teaches the history of Eastern Europe at Leibniz University of Hannover. He is author of the book Silber und Macht. Fernhandel, Tribute und die piastische Herrschaftsbildung in nordosteuropäischer Perspektive (800–1100) (Wiesbaden, 2014) and co-editor (together with Stephan Lehnstaedt) of Wirtschaftskrisen als Wendepunkte. Ursachen, Folgen und historische Einordnungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, (Osnabrück, 2015) and with Norbert Kersken of Fernhändler, Dynasten, Kleriker. Die piastische Herrschaft in sozialen und kontinentalen Beziehungsgeflechten vom 10. bis zum frühen 13. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2015).
Florin Curta is professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Florida. His main research interests are the history and archaeology of the early medieval Balkans and East Central Europe, but he has published extensively on many topics of medieval history and archaeology. His books include The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube, ca. 500–700 (Cambridge, 2011), which received the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association; and Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1250 (Cambridge, 2006). Curta is the editor of five collections of studies, and the editor-in-chief of Brill’s series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450.
Matthias Hardt is honorary professor for the early history and archaeology of Central Europe at Leipzig University. His research focuses on the trade networks and circulation of coins in early medieval Central Europe. He is the author of the monograph Gold und Herrschaft. Die Schätze europäischer Könige und Fürsten im ersten Jahrtausend (Berlin, 2004) and co-editor of numerous volumes on the archaeology of the early medieval period in Central Europe.
Matthew Koval is a PhD candidate at the University of Florida and received his MA from that university in 2014. He has presented his research at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo and the CEU-sponsored “Forgotten Region” conference in Budapest. He is the author of an article in Medieval and Early Modern Studies for Central and Eastern Europe and of several entries in Great Events in Religion: An Encyclopedia of Pivotal Events in Religious History. His dissertation topic is childhood and growing up in the minds of medieval people.
Beata Mozejko is Professor of the Medieval History of Poland and Auxilliary Sciences of History at the University of Gda ńsk. Her main field of interest is the history of late medieval Gda ńsk and the Hanseatic League. She also focuses on the study of medieval society and King Kazimierz Jagiello ńczyk of Poland. In her recent monograph, she presents Peter von Danzig– the Story of a Great Caravel, 1462–1475 (2011). She is also co-editor of the volumes: The Natural History of Food. Between Ancient Times and the Nineteenth Century (2012); Catalogue of Documents and Letters of the Kings of Poland. From the State Archive in Gdańsk (to 1492) (2014), and In the Era of Sailing Ships. Sea Between Ancient Times and the Eighteenth Century (2015).
Sergiu Musteaţă is Professor at the History and Geography Faculty of Ion Creangă Pedagogical State University in Chisinau, Moldova. He holds a PhD in history from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași. He is a former Fulbright research fellow at the University of Maryland, OSI scholar at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, Stanford University, and Central European University. He was DAAD and Humboldt Foundation fellow at the RGK (the German Archaeological Institute), and has been visiting professor at Bonn, Freiburg, and Braunschweig universities. He is the author of seven monographs, more than 200 scientific publications, editor of over 20 books, as well as the editor of two journals. His major academic interests are the archaeology and history of the Eastern Europe, cultural heritage preservation, and textbook analysis.
Grzegorz Mysliwski is Associate Professor at the Institute of History at Warsaw University. His research focuses on the socio-cultural and economic history of East Central Europe (especially on long-distance trade). He has written two monographs: Człowiek średniowiecza wobec czasu i przestrzeni. Mazowsze od XII do połowy XVI wieku [Medieval man towards time and space. The Masovia Region from the 12th to the mid-16th century] (Warsaw, 1999) and Wrocław w przestrzeni gospodarczej Europy (XIII–XV wiek). Centrum czy peryferie? [Wrocław in the economic space of Europe between the 13th and the 15th century. Core or periphery?] (Wrocław, 2009).
Balázs Nagy is Associate Professor of Medieval History at Eötvös Loránd University and visiting faculty member at the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Budapest. His main research interest is the medieval economic and urban history of Central Europe. He is co-editor with Frank Schaer of the Latin-English bilingual edition of the autobiography of Emperor Charles IV (Budapest, 2001), has edited with Derek Keene and Katalin Szende, Segregation – Integration – Assimilation: Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe (Farnham, 2009), and with Martyn Rady, Katalin Szende, and András Vadas Medieval Buda in Context (Leiden and Boston, 2016).
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks is a senior researcher at the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History in Bucharest, Romania. She defended her PhD in 2004 at the Central European University in Budapest, and her dissertation was published as a monograph: Sibiu-Hermannstadt. Oriental Trade in Sixteenth Century Transylvania (Cologne, 2007). Her research interests include trade and merchants in the Ottoman Balkans and the social and economic history of Transylvanian towns in the Early Modern period.
Bence Péterfi is Research Fellow of Medieval History at the Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. His main interest lies in the political and social history of Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages, especially the relations between Austria and Hungary. He has published a book on the career of a late medieval condottiere of the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus (Egy székely két élete. Kövendi Székely Jakab pályafutása [Two lives of a Szekler man: The career of Jakab Székely of Kövend], Pécs, 2014) and coedited of three volumes of the book series Micae mediaevales with Judit Gál, Zsófia Kádár, Gábor Mikó, and András Vadas (Budapest, 2012–2013).
Christian Raffensperger is Associate Professor of History at Wittenberg University, as well as an Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has published multiple books, including Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World (Berlin, 2012) and Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus’ (Cambridge, MA, 2016). He is also the series editor for Beyond Medieval Europe, a book series published by ARC Humanities Press.
Sébastien Rossignol is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador. He is the author of a monograph on early urbanization in Central Europe (Aux origines de l’identité urbaine en Europe centrale et nordique, Turnhout, 2013) and co-editor of several collected volumes dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of medieval Europe east of the Elbe. In addition, he is interested in the history of Slavic tribes in the Elbe area in the Carolingian age and has written articles on the Linons, the Dalemincians, and the text of the so-called Bavarian Geographer
Felicitas Schmieder Professor of Premodern History (“Geschichte und Gegenwart Alteuropas”) at FernUniversität Hagen since 2004 and recurrent Visiting Professor at the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University (Budapest).
Her main research interests are medieval cross-cultural contacts and perceptions, prophecy as political language, medieval German urban history, pre-modern cartography, and, most recently, European cultural memory. She has authored a number of monographs, amongst others Europa und die Fremden. Die Mongolen im Urteil des Abendlandes vom 13.–15. Jahrhundert (Sigmaringen, 1994), Johannes von Plano Carpini, Kunde von den Mongolen (1245–1247) (Sigmaringen, 1997), and edited with Marianne O’Doherty Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages. From the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Collected Papers of the IMC Leeds 2010, “Travel and Exploration” (Turnhout, 2015)
Daniel Syrbe is Post-Doctoral Researcher in the NWO research project “Constraints and Tradition” at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research interests are in the field of political and cultural transitions between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In his current project he explores how societies and politics in this period were shaped by traditions originating from a Roman imperial past and how these traditions were transformed over time. Together with Orsolya Heinrich-Tamáska, Ivan Bugarski, and Vujadin Ivanišević he co-edited a volume on the transformation of the middle Danube area between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (GrenzÜbergänge, 2016). He has also studied the interrelations between nomadic and sedentary people in late Roman and Byzantine North Africa and at the lower Danube.
András Vadas is Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) from where he holds a PhD. His research interest is the environmental and economic history of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. His works discuss the problem of the environmental change brought about by military activities in the Carpathian Basin as well as mills and milling in medieval Hungary. His monograph Körmend és a vizek. Egy település és környezete a kora újkorban (Körmend and the waters. A settlement and its environment in the Early Modern period) was published in 2013; he co-edited Medieval Buda in Context with Balázs Nagy, Martyn Rady, and Katalin Szende (Leiden and Boston, 2016).
Mária Vargha is Research Assistant at the Institute of History at the University of Vienna and PhD candidate at the Central European University, Budapest. Her research interest is the material culture of the High Middle Ages, the archaeology of religion, and the Christianization of East Central Europe. Her work also deals with GIS analysis of archaeological data and socioeconomic and religious processes focusing mostly on the Carpathian Basin. She has published a monograph entitled: Hoards, Grave Goods, Jewellery: Objects in Hoards and in Burial Contexts during the Mongol Invasion of Central-Eastern Europe (Budapest, 2015).
Roman Zaoral is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the Faculty of Humanities, at Charles University in Prague. His research in the field of monetary and financial history concerns medieval trade and cultural exchanges between Venice and Bohemia, the collecting of papal tithes in Central Europe, taxation of late medieval towns, the ready money of pilgrims, and the circulation of gold in Italy. He also participated in the international project entitled Fuchsenhof hoard Der Schatzfund von Fuchsenhof (2004). He recently edited the volume: Money and Finance in Central Europe during the Later Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2016).
INTRODUCTION
History writing has always been influenced by the biases historians apply automatically – necessarily taking the perspective of their own time and place. Scholars have usually treated East Central Europe, if at all, as somewhere between three regions (the West, Byzantium, and Russia/the Central Asian steppes), a dead end, a road or, at best, a region of passage. In the second half of the twentieth century, not the least due to the influence of the Cold War, the medieval East and West were judged to be completely separate from each other. What can historically be defined as Central Europe – the regions between the Rhine (with its German urban culture) in the West and the rim of the expansion of Latin Christianity on the east – was torn apart politically and its role in historical processes was not considered. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, shortly before the regime changes in East Central Europe and the fall of the Iron Curtain around 1990, both historians and the general public inside and outside the region began to devote increasing attention to East Central Europe, that is, east of the cultural region of Central Europe.
This has helped the region reinforce its identity in the European context; scholarship in Western and West Central Europe has benefited from a broadening of the framework of investigations.1 Now, half a generation later, the framework has shifted once again and European history is seeking its place within a new conceptualization of the “Global Middle Ages” that is on the agenda worldwide. One trend is that specific attention is turning towards regions that are usually considered somewhere on the margins. Researchers are using different conceptual frameworks – frontier regions, interregional, and global contacts – instead of national histories. They are focusing more and more on spaces in between and looking for regions that serve as bridges. Among the first attempts to broaden the focus were those looking at seas: the Mediterranean Sea, the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, but also the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea as centers of cultural regions instead of barriers between them.
Scholars began to examine vast lands such as deserts and steppes with seemingly few cultural achievements. This has led most importantly – for the topic of this volume – to utilizing the benefits of comparative Eurasian history and demonstrating contacts between (Western) Europe, the Middle East, and China, mostly through the vast network usually called the “Silk Road”. Nevertheless, East Central Europe – neither a cultural center nor a typical transition zone in the sense just mentioned – continued to be ignored and global historians seldom took into account the results of research on the region.3 It is time that the region is examined seriously as a contact zone between global regions, and at the same time as a microcosm of the contacts that enabled global contact and the resulting exchange. What kinds of persons, ideas, institutions, cultural and material goods found their way to other parts of the world from East Central Europe or through the mediation of this region? What motivated such transfers and interactions? In the past few years, new initiatives have aimed at understanding how much historians of the Middle Ages can benefit from engaging in global history.4 A number of research fields – climate and disease history, material culture studies, the history of communications, the history of symbols and gestures, migration history, frontier studies, and others – have benefitted from integrating the results of research on Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Australia in comparative studies.5 In most of these works, however, East Central Europe never took on major importance, perhaps because of the variable national historiographies and regional languages. So how can considering this region contribute to or challenge a new interpretation of the Middle Ages beyond its traditional limits in space and time and beyond the established conceptual schemes? As this volume aims at demonstrating, in the past decade, thanks to a growing number of written sources accessible to scholars as well as numerous archaeological excavations and new techniques, significant results have been achieved in better understanding the relationships between medieval East Central Europe and the rest of the world as well as the connections within the region itself. In order to communicate the research results of recent decades a new network was founded in March 2014, the Medieval Central European Research Network (MECERN).6
The aim of the MECERN is to create a common platform for historians of medieval Central Europe to think in non-national narratives, to integrate the research results of neighboring countries. The first conference of the new initiative was held in Budapest in 2014, organized by the Central European University. The conference – A Forgotten Region? East Central Europe in the Global Middle Ages – demonstrated that there is considerable interest in the region and the need for a better understanding of the region in the context of the Global Middle Ages. The first step in this process was to develop a clear picture of East Central Europe as a historical region. A number of papers were dedicated to this issue at the conference, and many of them have been published recently in the volume edited by Gerhard Jaritz and Katalin Szende (Medieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective: From Frontier Zones to Lands in Focus. New York: Routledge, 2016).
The other main problem the conference addressed was briefly noted above: the problem of East Central Europe as a region of transfer in the Middle Ages, a contact zone. The essays in this volume apply the theoretical framework provided by the studies of the volume edited by Jaritz and Szende to discuss this issue and show that the region was anything but a no man’s land in the Middle Ages. It had a wide range of connections – cultural, political, economic, religious, and many others – with all the surrounding regions. These studies not only touch upon external connections, but also aim to illuminate the intraregional connections and demonstrate how close these connections were in different periods of the Middle Ages. János M. Bak, in his short reflections written as an epilogue to the volume by Jaritz and Szende, came to the conclusion that “it is to be hoped that the alleged special character of the region will vanish and merge into an all-European (or even global) view of the past.”7
The entanglement of the polities and economies of East Central Europe with other powers of Eurasia leaves little doubt that in the long term the histories of East Central Europe will be organic parts of the histories of medieval Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, Eurasia, and so on. The different chapters of this volume move towards understanding the nature of these economic, cultural, and religious connections. The papers are grouped in four main thematic units. The first group deals with the problem of the region as a zone between major power centers in the Middle Ages. This group of essays can be understood as an introduction to the area as a contact zone. Based on different sources, they all argue that East Central Europe and Europe as regions have to be constantly reconsidered and re-conceptualized. In different forms and based on diverse evidence – both written and archaeological – these papers argue that what was outside and what was inside Europe has changed constantly not only in the modern scholarly and political perception but even in the perception of the medievalWest.
In his paper, Christian Raffensperger re-thinks the static understanding of medieval Europe. He emphasizes the need for a more dynamic conceptualization of medieval European history with borders open to other regions, ideas, and cultures. His paper calls for looking towards the East in order to ‘create a larger medieval Europe.’ Expanding what medieval Europe is also means that historians have to open their eyes to areas and periods without literacy. Due to the lack of written sources, the early medieval history of the Carpathian-Danube region has to be written based solely on archaeological material and has therefore not been written in its own right at all until very recently. Sergiu Musteață has assembled a synopsis of the results of settlement archaeology and started constructing a map of a “region without history” that still shows gaps to be filled by further research.
The Slavs have always been considered one of the “youngest” European peoples, not the least because they started to produce their own written sources only relatively late in the High Middle Ages, and also because they seem to have been mostly overlooked by Western contemporaries.8 Sébastien Rossignol shows the prominent place Slavic groups had on the mental map of an early ninth-century world chronicle written in southern Gaul, demonstrating that medieval Europe was not as divided as is conceived by many modern historians. The steppes, especially the steppes “beyond” East Central Europe, have been considered a cultureless region where civilization ends and where no one wants to go anyway.
By re-evaluating this bias among Western historians and showing the nomadic lifestyle of medieval Westerners as well as the cultural achievements of nomads, Felicitas Schmieder tries to enhance the meaning of Central Europe as a transmitter of modern world historical research. The second thematic group offers case studies on the economic and cultural implications of religious ties. If East Central Europe is not only a region of passage but a region where traditions (from having been inside or outside the Roman Empire) and influences from all sides formed a distinct culture worth looking at, then it is especially interesting to look at traditional Christianity or Christianization between East and West and the cultural, social, and technological changes that came with it. Daniel Syrbe looks at the transition period between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, examining letters that Pope Gregory the Great, as bishop of Rome, sent to the region (Dalmatia and Illyricum) in order to understand the means by which Rome tried to bring its bishops under control.
The role of legal arguments as well as customs and tradition can be identified as tools not necessarily effective immediately, but important for later periods that referred to Gregory’s authority. Florin Curta and Matthew Koval examine radical changes in the burials of children and possibly funeral rites in two different regions of East Central Europe with different traditions and different outside influences – Hungary and Poland – in a period when Christianization took place. While it is difficult to pinpoint the influence of Christianization on social structures, the burials show that the very notion of family changed in both Poland and Hungary in the period of the appearance of Christianity.
Medieval monasteries have generally been considered transmitters of civilization in the regions where they were established. András Vadas reviews material that seems to indicate that water mills came to East Central Europe together with Christianity around 1000 and shows that there is reason to doubt in principle whether the establishment of monasteries also brought water mills to the kingdoms of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. Mária Vargha is interested in the same period (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), the social basis of the organization of the network of parochial churches in Hungary, and looks specifically at their correlation with castle buildings. Mapping parish churches and castles shows a clear correlation that is worth comparing with what was called the Eigenkirchen system in the German-speaking lands of the Early and Early High Middle Ages. The third group of essays addresses the problem of trade during the processes of state formation in the region. These studies argue that despite the relative shortage of written evidence, archaeological sources can significantly broaden the knowledge of contacts among the peoples of East Central Europe as well as between the region and outside polities in the fifth through the eleventh century.
The authors of the third unit look at different ways the connections of East Central Europe with the outside world can be investigated during the period of state formation. Historians of East Central Europe, depending on the different political regimes in modern times, have emphasized different directions that seem to have had strong historical economic and political ties. Dariusz Adamczyk looks at a direction perhaps the least emphasized in the national historiographies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the link with the Islamic world. Adamczyk argues, based mostly on archaeological evidence, that a sophisticated and well-organized network was created among the tribal leaders of East Central Europe and Islamic merchants which contributed to the establishment of new elites in the states of East Central Europe. Matthias Hardt’s contribution also touches on a rarely discussed area. He shows that Slavic princes and the Moravian Principality exchanged their subjects for silver through trade connections from North Africa to Central Asia.
Bence Péterfi’s paper also deals with the period of state formation. He looks at regional trade connections based on a rarely investigated type of evidence – pottery. Graphite pottery, a regional trade item not produced locally, has been recovered in great quantities at Óbuda (on the edge [or periphery] of present-day Budapest), one of the most important early economic and political centers of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Péterfi shows that despite the lack of written sources on Hungary’s trade relations at the time, archaeological data can contribute to understanding the relations of Hungary with other regions of Central Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The last group of essays makes use of the significant amount of written evidence available on the inter- and intraregional trade of the countries of East Central Europe after the state foundation processes. This source material is somewhat different than those of the earlier periods; up to the twelfth or thirteenth century, as demonstrated by the essays in Part 3, most researchers use primarily archaeological evidence when discussing inter- and intraregional trade connections.
From the thirteenth century onwards, however, with literacy increasing in East Central Europe, written sources come to play a key role in the study of these connections. The essays in this section use mostly economic history sources – account books, customs registers – to provide an image of the connections Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary had with each other and the surrounding polities such as the Hanseatic towns, the Italian city-states, and the Ottoman Empire. Roman Zaoral’s paper discusses the effects of precious-metal mining and administration in Bohemia and the roles Italian businessmen played in its formation. He argues that, on the one hand, Italian businessmen tried to get interests in mining and/or coinage of the precious metal extracted in the country, and, on the other hand, tried to collect taxes for the Papal Curia, which also proved to be a major source of income for some Italian families. Beata Możejko focuses on the role of one city, Gda ńsk, as an intermediary between the Western, Hanseatic and East Central European areas, covering not only commercial but also political and diplomatic links. She argues that King Kazimierz Jagiello ńczyk (1446–1492) played a crucial role in the formation of these contacts.
She demonstrates clearly the potential of sources traditionally exploited by political history in the study of late medieval trade connections. Grzegorz Myśliwski also discusses the trade connections of a Polish town, Wrocław. He focuses on the town’s links with Hungary in the Late Middle Ages. Wrocław, one of the leading urban centers of the region, created a key hub of commercial contacts in the region.
Myśliwski accessed a whole set of archival sources not utilized previously to reconstruct trade routes and lists of the most significant commercial goods. He shows that the town had extensive connections with Hungary and that merchants from all over the country frequented Wrocław for both buying and selling; the town’s merchants entered Hungary on a regular basis to trade with different goods. In the last paper of this part Mária PakucsWillcocks investigates the appearance of two commercial goods, textiles, and spices, in the customs registers of Brașov and Sibiu at the turn of fifteenth century.
Both towns, situated at the southeastern corner of medieval East Central Europe, played important roles in the transit trade with the Middle East. Pakucs-Willcocks demonstrates that these connections did not cease to exist later, when the Black Sea trade was controlled by the Ottomans. In the final essay of this part, Balázs Nagy takes a historiographical approach. It is an often-repeated point in recent scholarship that the integration of this region into a wider European framework depended partly on its commercial contacts. Nagy reviews the historiography of the last decades on the trade contacts of East Central Europe with special attention to the approaches of the main handbooks that cover the economic history of this region. These perceptions vary from complete disregard through limited discussion to detailed analysis.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق