Mesto a dejiny 2/2018 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
If you want to order this book, please contact PR of the Croatian Institute of History, Mr. Kresimir Krznaric: krznaric@isp.hr, or here: https://www.agm.hr/hr/shop/towns-and-cities-of-the-croatian-middle-ages,631.html There is hardly a topic that has been more inspirational for the medievalists than urban communities. In order to understand the life of cities and towns in the Middle Ages, it is important to define authority and property as related to urban space, and see the interplay between these two notions. These issues are not new in the European historiographies, especially in the recent years, when scholars have been investigating the legal aspects of ownership and the operation of urban real-estate market. Yet there are very few comparative studies on the European cities, and those that exist do not include the Croatian ones. Moreover, not too much research has been done on the relationship between property and the different levels of authority. This book is a result of an international conference that focused on this issue, based on the example of Croatian medieval towns and cities. The conference titled “The Town and the City of the Croatian Middle Ages: Authority and Property” took place in Zagreb (Croatia) in November 2010 at the Croatian Institute of History. Our intention was to stimulate discussion on some of the fundamental questions of urban history: What did it mean to own a town or a segment of urban space in the Middle Ages? What was the role of the owner, or the holder of an urban estate, in the development of a town? What did changes in ownership entail? Which sources should we use and which methods should we apply to investigate the relationship between authority and property? What was the legal nature of property over urban land? This volume focuses on urban estates, as they were the key elements in urban structure. They reflect urban politics and institutional organization, individual interests and their economic and social status, church regulations, and a wider political framework. Croatian medieval towns are barely represented in the international surveys of medieval and early modern urban culture. The aim of this volume was also to addressthis specific imbalance and to emphasise the entangled nature of local, regional, and international urban histories. For all these reasons, it seemed important to bring together prominent scholars who study the history of medieval (in the first place Croatian, but not only) urban development.
Povijesni prilozi 56 (Zagreb, Croatian Institute of History), 2019
The papers in this volume present final results of the research project founded by Croatian Science Foundation (2015-2019) and conducted at Croatian Institute of History (Zagreb) titled "Cities of the Croatian Middle Ages: Urban Elite and Urban Space" (URBES). (http://urbes.s2.novenaweb.info/en/) At the centre of that project was the relationship between the space and the society (elites) in a medieval town, a relationship that in recent international historiography has been stressed as key to understanding of the urban history of the Middle Ages. The research was focused on selected medieval cities of two geographical regions of nowdays Croatia: (coastal region and interamnium of sava-Drava rivers), leaving out central so called “mountainous region of medieval Croatia” because of its specific types of non-agrarian settlements that deserve different kind of research attention. The foci of URBES project were selected medieval Slavonian towns that developed from the thirteenth century onwards as free royal cities: Gradec – nowadays Zagreb, and Varaždin (both politically and economically the most significant towns in medieval Slavonia) and selected Eastern Adriatic cities, from Istrian urban communes on the north to Dubrovnik in the south: Istrian urban communities of Labin and Rovinj; northern Adriatic island commune of Rab; Zadar, the civic centre of medieval Dalmatia; Trogir, the city with the longest urban continuity in Croatia; Šibenik, selected as new medieval town that developed from a castrum into a civitas; and finally Split and Dubrovnik, whose urban development began as late as early Middle Ages although their tradition went back to Antiquity. This project examined the period between the High and Late Middle Ages (midthirteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). The interdisciplinary analysis of this “elite-space” relation conducted by URBES used comparative methods to place cities of the Croatian Middle Ages in a broader European context. Although the cities of the Croatian Middle Ages are in the centre of URBES, we focused on the issues that go beyond the scale of individual towns in order to make comparisons of similar phenomena between cities and towns in a broader geographical and political context, and to trace residential mobility of the urban elites. For instance, URBES (in relation to development of urban space) followed strong liasions of urban elites of nowdas north-eatern Croatian cities with elite of nowdays Slovenian cities (Štajerska region); compared elite-space relation of Dalmatian and Istrian cities in broader context of Stato da mar; or Dubrovnik in comparison with Venice. The novelty of this project layed in the systematic investigation of archival sources with respect to urban development. The URBES project reconstructed and analysed the matrix of chosen urban elite families, households, properties and buildings in chosen cities of nowdays Croatia, and traced their evolution over time, gaining new insights into social and spatial structures and the agents and circumstances of urban change. URBES combined methodological tools of prosopography and social topography in order to reconstruct the most influential element of the urban society (elite), their personal relations, social positions and interactions with urban space.
The City and History / Mesto a Dejiny, 2018
Written documents are particularly valuable when researching medieval urbanity, since many buildings or spatial constellations are no longer extant or have been restructured over the centuries. The issue of ownership over immovable property is crucial when it comes to exploring historical urban areas, since its owners/users directly infl uenced its appearance and alterations. Information on the types, locations, and owners of immovable property are found scattered in notarial documents, mostly in various legal actions related to property transfer. In this paper, we have analysed this type of data linked to immovable property and its descriptions in the notarial records, focusing on the 13 th-century Dalmatian cities of Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir, Split, and Dubrovnik (present-day Croatia). These data constitute a database that serves to reconstruct various spatial and social relations in the medieval city. Introduction In medieval cities, immovable property was a key element of wealth and power. Institutions, groups, or individuals were holders of a precisely determined set of rights and powers over property, having the authority to use the land, rather than the exclusive rights to it. The relationship between townsmen and their property in medieval cities was very complex and defi ned by a number of diff erent local and external circumstances. The property-acquiring strategies in the urban societies of medieval towns are relevant for understanding the real-estate market and urban economy. Urban space existed within the legal and administrative framework of a particular community, in which urban development was regulated by the statutes, but even more by legal practice. Throughout the 11 th and 12 th centuries, the European urban population grew and the economy experienced rapid transformations. It was a period of increasing investment in urban land, which created the need for new theoretical models and practical instruments that would be more appropriate to the demands of an urban society. Many distinctive features of urban laws and customs developed to respond to the new needs of these growing towns. A new and effi cient legal order was needed, with mechanisms that could deal with commercial contracts, property transfers, and municipal governments. From the 12 th and 13 th centuries onwards, documents recording urban properties multiplied. New legal terminology and procedures developed to enforce and recover property rights. Most medieval documents do not include exact data about the types of ownership-they only describe ownership transfers. Nevertheless, these transactions