Thomas Fitzanthony’s Borough: Medieval Thomastown in Irish History, 1171-1555

Norman Invasion of Ireland

Thomas Fitzanthony’s Borough: Medieval Thomastown in Irish History, 1171-1555 Marilyn Silverman In the Shadow of the Steeple VI, Duchas-Tullaherin Parish Heritage Society (1998) Abstract In the year 1295, King Edward I “ordered that all goods belonging to subjects of the King of France should be seized and sold”. A man named Richard Ie Marshall then […]

Persian silk worn by Vikings, researcher finds

Vikings-Persian-Silks - photo courtesy University of Oslo

When the Oseberg Ship was discovered in Norway in 1904, more than one hundred silk fragments were found among its artefacts. New research has shown that these silks were probably purchased from Persia through a trade network.

Two dozen and more Silkwomen of Fifteenth-Century London

Late Medieval Women

This article attempts to record systematically all the silkwomen of London who were daughters or wives of London mercers between 1400 and 1499.

The Introduction and Use of Eastern Drugs in the Early Middle Ages

Black Peppercorns

For the most part the recipes pertain to things of everyday life, e. g., remedies for coughing and removing lice, and for headaches, pain in the stomach, and wounds.

Kings, Conquerors, and Gods: The Autobiographies of Timur, Isma’il, and Babur

Babur

In 1360, a hundred years after the finalization of Mongol conquest, the most famous of these post-Genghisid rulers emerged in Kesh, not far from Samarqand. Timur Barlas, anglicized as Tamerlane, pursued a life-long career of warfare, first establishing himself in the ranks of the regional amir Kurgen and eventually awing the entire region from the Punjab to Cairo and Constantinople through his conquests. Like his predecessor Genghis, Timur has since been a hotly debated figure.

Vikings raided monasteries to feed demand for eunuchs in the east, historian finds

Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages

In Byzantium and the Abbasid Caliphate there was great demand for eunuchs – a new study suggests this demand was being met by the Vikings raiding monasteries in northwestern Europe.

Indigenous and imported Viking Age weapons in Norway – a problem with European implications

Viking Sword collection at the Royal Ontario Museum

The numerous Viking Age swords and spearheads found in Norway are a mixture of indigenous and imported items, but sound criteria for distinguishing between the two origins are lacking.

A Study on the Effects of Ghazan Khan’s Reformative Measures for the Settlement of the Nomadic Mongols (1295-1304)

Ghazan Khan converts to Islam

The Ilkhanid’s sovereignty in Iran was part of the great empire under the command of Genghis Khan and his successors. It extended broadly from Korea to Eastern Europe and China to Iran and Syria. Such conquest originated from Mongolia (Middle Asia), which was the original land of these homeless nomadic people. They lived by shepherding, hunting and sometimes looting nearby tribes or civilized centers.

Have archaeologists found a lost Viking trading centre in Norway?

The balance scale found by archaeologists in a boat grave north of Trondheim, Norway. Photo: Per Fredriksen

It was a routine archaeological dig, necessitated by the expansion of Norway’s main north-south highway, the E6, just north of Trondheim, the country’s third largest city. But the finds surprised archaeologists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum, who now believe they have solved a centuries-old puzzle posed in Norse sagas.

Aliens in Medieval Southampton

Aliens in Medieval Southampton

A student documentary on alien merchants in medieval Southampton

Rus’, Varangians and Birka Warriors

Varangians (Vikings)

Viking Age remains displaying a number of distinct similarities stand in strategic locations alongthe Eastern trade routes from Birka to Kiev.

Fraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth Century Provence

Paul Signac: Port St. Tropez, 1899

How did a Muslim mini-state emerge on the southern coast of France in the tenth century?

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French

Medieval Market Spice Stall

Until recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language.

The Slave Trade of Dublin: Ninth to Twelfth Centuries

Bridge over the Liffey in Dublin. Photo by Jerome

It is however, often assumed that taking of slaves reached it peak in the ninth and tenth centuries and that the advent of Christianity made the institution of slavery morally unacceptable.

Novgorod the Great in Baltic Trade before 1300

Medieval Novogrod

The information on trade contacts between Novgorod and Scandinavian countries preserved in the works of Old Norse

CRISIS OF CONTRACTS FOR MERCHANTS IN CRISIS: INSTITUTIONS, CORPORATE FINANCE AND GROWTH IN GENOA (11TH -17TH C.)

Merchants

My paper focuses these “merchant princes” from Genoa before the “industrial revolution”. The rise and fall of Genoa provides indeed a striking case about the success and failure of what, in the same vein than Bagehot, Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction”, and the role financial markets in that process.

Tolling the Rhine in 1254: Complementary Monopoly Revisited

rhine river

Given a demand for Rhine travel, an Emperor faced a classic complementary monopoly problem: how many toll stations to have, where to site them, and what toll to charge at each.

In It for the Money: The Birth of Commercial Book Production

In It for the Money: The Birth of Commercial Book Production

This lecture introduces the main players of this world of medieval book commerce — parchment makers, paid scribes, illuminators, shopkeepers — and discusses why these traditionally separate professions blended into a closely knit community that stands at the cradle of our bookish world today.

Adventures far from home: Hanseatic trade with the Faroe Islands

Hanseatic Cities

he voyage to Iceland, now a major destina- tion, took about four weeks (gardiner & mehler 2007, 403; Krause 2010, 150). The Faroe Islands are situated more or less in the middle of that distance and provided a fine stop-over. The islands were an additional market for their trade business and in case of storms offered a safe and most welcome shelter.

Avorio d’ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era

Medieval Elephants

Why, after a scarcity of elephant ivory in northern Europe during the twelfth century, was there sudden access to such large tusks around 1240?

Shifting Experiences: The Changing Roles of Women in the Italian, Lowland, and German Regions of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period

16th c. women

Specifically, the thesis compares and analyzes the changing roles that women could employ economically, politically, socially, and religiously.

The sea republic of Genoa and the conquest of Black Sea in 1261

Genoa in the 15th century

I’m going to explain how Genoa conquered the Black Sea in 1261, which was the most important, or better, only road to Asia

‘You say that the Messiah has come.’:The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and its place in the Christian anti-Jewish polemics of the high middle ages

Image of a Jewish cantor reading the Passover story in al-Andalus, from a 14th century Spanish Haggadah

Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist’s meeting with the North AfricanJew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerableinterest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta hador had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed inthe Disputation’s text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews andChristians.
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2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Jewish and Christian relations; Mediterranean trade in the middle ages; Ceuta; Genoa;Scriptural exegesis, Almohads
The Messiah came in the twelfth century. This time he did not arrive in themanner anticipated by the prophets of the Bible. Rather, his arrival occurred in theworld of polemics, where he suddenly emerged from relative obscurity to becomethe central topic of the continuing religious debate between Jews and Christians

Modelling Population and Resource Scarcity in Fourteenth-century England

medieval-peasants

Hallam argues that the steady population rise of the 12th and 13th centuries may not have been the main cause of the crisis of the 14th century. First, unprecedented harvest failures and animal diseases between 1315 and 1322 had significant adverse effects on peasant welfare.

Religion, Warfare and Business in Fifteenth Century Rhodes

Seal of Hospitallers

How did a military-monastic order manage the resources of an island commercially asimportant as that of Rhodes while overcoming the limitations due to its patrimonial struc-tureto cover their defensive needs? In this essay weattempt to answer this question interms of practice and in the light of relationsthatthe Knights maintained with two distinctgroups of merchants: the Catalan-Aragonese and the Florentines.

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