Suchergebnisse

The late Middle Ages witnessed the transformation of the county of Holland from a peripheral agrarian region to a highly commercialised and urbanised one. This book examines how the organisation of commodity markets contributed to this remarkable development. Comparing Holland to England and Flanders, the book shows that Holland's specific history of reclamation and settlement had given rise to a favourable balance of powers between state, nobility, towns and rural communities that reduced opportunities for rent-seeking and favoured the rise of efficient markets. This allowed burghers, peasants and fishermen to take full advantage of new opportunities presented by changing economic and ecological circumstances in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries

"Of all the illustrations depicting a section of the earth's surface, the first to resemble the actual circumstances closely are Medieval sea charts known as Portolan charts. These depictions appeared quite suddenly in the thirteenth century and exhibit a conspicuous chordal network, a linear system based on the point of the wind. Mathematical investigations of the coastlines shown on these sea charts have revealed an astonishing degree of precision in comparison to modern charts. It is not known what methods were used to determine the geodetic foundations for the Portolan works. The question of authorship leads back to Roman and Hellenistic antiquity, and it is not impossible to imagine a set of circumstances that could have allowed these mysterious documents to survive ancient times and be handed down through the generations to the Medieval period." (author's abstract)

Title Page; Copyright; Table of Contents; Body; Markus Stock and Nicola Vöhringer: Spatial Practices, Medieval/Modern; Oliver Simons: Spatial Turns around 1800; I.; II.; John K. Noyes: Space-Time Conversion and the Production of the Human; Bent Gebert: The Greater the Distance, the Closer You Get; I. Paradoxical Proximity: A Note on Travelling; II. Love Songs as Teleiopoetry: Two Examples from German Minnesang; III. `Teleiopoiesis' - the Making of Proximity Through Distance; IV. Teleiopoetry as Cultural Practice; V. Between Absence and Presence - Towards a Middle Ground

Die Aufnahme und Bearbeitung von Quellen ist in der Geschichtswissenschaft in den letzten Jahren zunehmend mit Hilfe der EDV vorgenommen worden. Die Möglichkeiten von Expertensystemen sind jedoch in diesem Bereich noch eher begrenzt. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt ein Forschungsprojekt vor, das die automatische Auflösung mittelalterlicher Zeitdatierungen in frei definierbare Subsysteme anstrebt. Bearbeitet und elektronisch gespeichert werden 9.000 Datierungen nach dem Heiligenkalender, da die Zeitschematisierung im Mittelalter nach Fest- und Heiligentagen geschah. (pmb)

The analysis of the shipping activities and harbours of Marienburg leads to the conclusion that a town harbour existed here during the Middle Ages, and that it may have been connected with the fishing harbour. The source material which has come down to us confirms the assumption that there was a separate timber wharf near the town, complete with specialized personnel. The harbour of Marienburg played no more than a minor role, and was not as important a commercial centre as the harbour in Thorn, for example. The volume of cargo transhipped here was relatively small, serving, as it did, the regular needs of the residents. The ship-masters - some of them simple fishermen - lived in the town and hired their vessels out to the Teutonic Order on occasion. Independently of the town, the order also possessed its own harbour. The latter was originally located at the Chapel of St. Nicholas, directly adjacent to the oldest warehouse. It was later replaced by the harbour on the bank of the Nogat nearby the long warehouse in the outermost fortification. It is to be assumed that, alongside the harbour of the Teutonic Order, there was also a timber canal in which the order kept the material it had purchased to meet its needs. The wharfs on the canal served the Teutonic Order as a shipyard. The only surviving sources in which reference is made to the vessels on the Vistula are the inventory books of the Marienburg commandery offices. The source material on the topic of shipping and harbours in Marienburg confirms the conjecture that the existence of the river harbours was closely related to the establishment of warehouses on the riverbanks, from which mass goods were transported via waterways. Questions pertaining to the construction of the vessels of the Teutonic Order as well as the operation of the shipyard at Marienburg Castle have yet to be analyzed in detail. In that context, archaeological sources bearing a connection to the Medieval construction of inland waterway vessels in the Vistula delta may well prove particularly helpful. Taking into consideration the results of the site analysis of the town and Teutonic Order harbours in Marienburg, it appears worthwhile to undertake similar investigations into other harbour centres on the Lower Vistula as well.