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In this highly original and influential book, Catherine Wendy Bracewell reconstructs and analyzes the tumultuous history of the uskoks of Senj, the martial bands nominally under the control of the Habsburg Military Frontier in Croatia, who between the 1530s and the 1620s developed a community based on raiding the Ottoman hinterland, Venetian possessions in Dalmatia, and shipping on the Adriatic. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including the archives of the Dalmatian communes under Venetian rule and military frontier records, Bracewell provides the first comprehensive analysis of the uskoks as a social phenomenon, examining their origins, their military and social organization, their plunder economy, their mental world, and their relations with other groups in this borderland between three empires. The uskoks lived on the Christian-Muslim frontier, and they invoked Europe’s struggle against Islam to justify their often bloody deeds. As Bracewell demonstrates, however, their actions were also shaped by the maze of local political and economic rivalries, social conflicts, and confessional antagonisms. In a book that tests the concept of the social bandit, the author analyzes the motives that guided the uskoks and distinguishes these from the factors that impelled various elements of the local population to support them.
The Memoirs of Sylvester Syropoulos is a text written by a Βyzantine ecclesiastical official in the 15th century. Syropoulos participated in the Council for the union of the Greek and Latin Churches held in Ferrara and Florence, Italy, in 1438-1439. As a high-ranking official and an eye-witness of the union, he offers a unique perspective on this important political and religious event that would so decisively contribute to the political, military and religious development of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Experts in different fields - historians, philologists, art historians and archaeologists - have come together in this volume to explore the actions and motives of the various political and religious groups that participated in the council. With Syropoulos as their starting point, the contributors of this volume reconstruct the living conditions, cross-cultural interaction, artistic and commercial exchange in the 15th-century Mediterranean. At the same time, they discuss the text as an invaluable source for political and diplomatic affairs at that time, as a travel account, an eye-witness narrative and as a literary work. Emphasis is placed on Syropoulos’s Section IV where he describes the journey of the Byzantine delegation from Constantinople to Italy, their stay in Venice and in Ferrara, the diplomatic contacts with the doge and the pope, and finally the beginning of the council’s proceedings. An annotated English translation of the text is included as an appendix to the book. The papers bring out the richness of the information in Syropoulos’s writings about the people involved in the Council of Ferrara-Florence and especially the interaction among different social, religious and political groups throughout that event. His work is unique because it is a rare eye-witness account, deriving from personal experience, rather than an objective historical narrative.
This work reflects preoccupations with the threats posed to our environment due to climatic factors, major and natural hazards of all kinds and demographic influences. Topics covered include land surface processes, coastal zones and atmospheric risks.
"This is history as it should be written. In When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans, a logical advancement on his earlier studies, Fine has successfully tackled a fascinating historical question, one having broad political implications for our own times. Fine's approach is to demonstrate how ideas of identity and self-identity were invented and evolved in medieval and early-modern times. At the same time, this book can be read as a critique of twentieth-century historiography-and this makes Fine's contribution even more valuable. This book is an original, much-needed contribution to the field of Balkan studies." -Steve Rapp, Associate Professor of Caucasian, Byzantine, and Eurasian History, and Director, Program in World History and Cultures Department of History, Georgia State University Atlanta When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans is a study of the people who lived in what is now Croatia during the Middle Ages (roughly 600-1500) and the early-modern period (1500-1800), and how they identified themselves and were identified by others. John V. A. Fine, Jr., advances the discussion of identity by asking such questions as: Did most, some, or any of the population of that territory see itself as Croatian? If some did not, to what other communities did they consider themselves to belong? Were the labels attached to a given person or population fixed or could they change? And were some people members of several different communities at a given moment? And if there were competing identities, which identities held sway in which particular regions? In When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans, Fine investigates the identity labels (and their meaning) employed by and about the medieval and early-modern population of the lands that make up present-day Croatia. Religion, local residence, and narrow family or broader clan all played important parts in past and present identities. Fine, however, concentrates chiefly on broader secular names that reflect attachment to a city, region, tribe or clan, a labeled people, or state. The result is a magisterial analysis showing us the complexity of pre-national identity in Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia. There can be no question that the medieval and early-modern periods were pre-national times, but Fine has taken a further step by demonstrating that the medieval and early-modern eras in this region were also pre-ethnic so far as local identities are concerned. The back-projection of twentieth-century forms of identity into the pre-modern past by patriotic and nationalist historians has been brought to light. Though this back-projection is not always misleading, it can be; Fine is fully cognizant of the danger and has risen to the occasion to combat it while frequently remarking in the text that his findings for the Balkans have parallels elsewhere. John V. A. Fine, Jr. is Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Merriam Press Military History. Lika is a region of Croatia known for its soldiers and poverty. This history of Lika has been divided into four epochs: the first, ancient Lika, when Lika was part of the Roman Empire; the second, Slav-Croatian Lika, that existed prior to the arrival of the Ottomans, when Lika was integrated into the European feudal system; the third, the Turkish wars, when the Habsburgs and their army controlled Lika; the fourth, from the 19th century to the present, when the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the country that became Yugoslavia, replaced Austrian rule in Lika. The author's family is from the Lika region of western Croatia. This is the only known history of Lika in English.