In the fifteenth century, there were two different Iskender Bey serving in Rumelia. These two historically important figures, serving in the same century and in the same geography, often caused ...confusion. The main aim of this article is to discuss Iskender Pasha, the servant of Mehmed II and explain his activities in the fifteenth century Rumelia. Iskender Pasha was appointed by Mehmet II. as the Bey of Bosnia Sanjak in 1475. He served in this position until the end of the reign of Mehmed II. and continued his successful raids during the reign of Bayezid II. who appointed him as the Gavernor of Rumelia in 1483. After serving in this position for two years, he was appointed back as the bey of Bosnia sanjak in 1485. The appointment of Iskender Pasha multiple times as the bey of Bosnia sanjak is closely related to his successful raids as well as his knowledge of the region. He was promoted to the rank of vizier by Bayezid II. in 1489 and served in this position for ten years. Towards the end of his life, with the starting of the Ottoman-Venetian Wars, Bayezid II, with the aim of benefiting from his experience, reassigned him once again as the bey of Bosnia sanjak. Iskender Pasha continued his military and administrative activities until the last years of his life and died in 1505. Iskender Pasha is also famous for the intelligence network that he has established. In this context, he gathered information through his spies about the operations of various states in the Italian Peninsula. Through this he tried to change the balance of power in the region in favor of the Ottoman Empire. This study discusses the historical personality of Iskender Pasha and his activities in Rumelia in the light of the documents from the Ottoman archives, chronicles and copyright-review works.
The attempt to poison George Branković during the siege of Selymbria in 1411 provides an opportunity to examine the knowledge about poisons and poisoning in medieval Serbia. The research includes ...few, but diverse sources of genre-determined data. Sources of secular and ecclesiastical legislation have been considered, as well as records from chronicles, annals and histories regarding individual events, both real and legendary. However, the most significant source is the treatise on poisons from the Hilandar Medical Codex, which is a translation of Avicenna’s text on poisons from his Canon of Medicine. By analyzing the data from the surviving sources, we can reconsider the description of George’s poisoning in Constantine’s The Life of Despot Stefan in a broader social context and indicate the imprecise interpretation of the description in modern historiography.
A new history of one of the foremost printers of the
Renaissance explores how the Age of Print came to Italy.
Lorenz Böninger offers a fresh history of the birth of print in
Italy through the story ...of one of its most important figures,
Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna. After having worked for several
years for a judicial court in Florence, Niccolò established his
business there and published a number of influential books. Among
these were Marsilio Ficino's De christiana religione , Leon
Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria , Cristoforo
Landino's commentaries on Dante's Commedia , and Francesco
Berlinghieri's Septe giornate della geographia . Many of
these books were printed in vernacular Italian. Despite his
prominence, Niccolò has remained an enigma. A meticulous historical
detective, Böninger pieces together the thorough portrait that
scholars have been missing. In doing so, he illuminates not only
Niccolò's life but also the Italian printing revolution generally.
Combining Renaissance studies' traditional attention to
bibliographic and textual concerns with a broader social and
economic history of printing in Renaissance Italy, Böninger
provides an unparalleled view of the business of printing in its
earliest years. The story of Niccolò di Lorenzo furnishes a host of
new insights into the legal issues that printers confronted, the
working conditions in printshops, and the political forces that
both encouraged and constrained the publication and dissemination
of texts.
Based on historiographical findings and the documents from the State Archives in Dubrovnik, the historical role and activities of members of one of the most important patrician lineages of Ulcinj are ...considered prosopographically and multidisciplinarily. The chronological, genealogical and onomastic compatibility of this lineage to expatriates of Ulcinj, Antonine family Gabro of Dubrovnik, are pointed out, too. The Dabris are recorded in available historical sources from the 14th century to the 1600s. Their prominent social position vividly reflects the centuries-old manifold contacts and challenges of life on the border. Especially exemplarily in that regard were the personage and the fate of the young interpretor Pasquale Dabri.
In 1877 Josef Pekař first described the Hussite composite manuscript stored in Freiberg, Saxony, with the signature X 8o 40, which has now been re-dated to around 1510 due to the watermarks examined ...for the first time in the Leipzig handwriting center. The author of the present study analyzes the important content of the manuscript, which includes an old Czech translation of the Konstanz trial files of the Magisters Jan Hus and Hieronymus von Prag and, as the only source, the chronicle about the Hussite captain Jan Žižka, which was written between 1434 and 1470. The second and third parts of the study deal with the contextualization and transmission of the manuscript against the local background of the Reformation and finally with the description of the external characteristics of the Freiberg Hussite manuscript that has been made so far.
The 9th–15th century Angkorian state was Southeast Asia’s greatest premodern empire and Angkor Wat in the World Heritage site of Angkor is one of its largest religious monuments. Here we use ...excavation and chronometric data from three field seasons at Angkor Wat to understand the decline and reorganization of the Angkorian Empire, which was a more protracted and complex process than historians imagined. Excavation data and Bayesian modeling on a corpus of 16 radiocarbon dates in particular demand a revised chronology for the Angkor Wat landscape. It was initially in use from the 11th century CE with subsequent habitation until the 13th century CE. Following this period, there is a gap in our dates, which we hypothesize signifies a change in the use of the occupation mounds during this period. However, Angkor Wat was never completely abandoned, as the dates suggest that the mounds were in use again in the late 14th–early 15th centuries until the 17th or 18th centuries CE. This break in dates points toward a reorganization of Angkor Wat’s enclosure space, but not during the historically recorded 15th century collapse. Our excavation data are consistent with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the region’s continued ideological importance and residential use, even after the collapse and shift southward of the polity’s capital. We argue that fine-grained chronological analysis is critical to building local historical sequences and illustrate how such granularity adds nuance to how we interpret the tempo of organizational change before, during, and after the decline of Angkor.
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