Нови сведения за развитието на рударството в българските земи през XV-XVI в./New information about the development of ore-mining in the Bulgarian lands in 15th-16th c. (original) (raw)

In modern historiography lacks a comprehensive study on the history of ore-mining and on the demographic and economic characteristics of the ore-miners in Sakar mountain in the XV-XVI centuries. The only research on these issues is the work by Elena Grozdanova and Stefan Andreev "Through the History of Mining and Metallurgy in the Bulgarian lands in the XVth -XIXth centuries. " In this work, the authors on the grounds of different types of published and unpublished Ottoman-Turkish documents survey and analyze the characteristics of the ore-mining settlements on the Bulgarian and Balkan territories, the organization of work, the population categories with specific obligations, involved in the mining and processing of ore, etc. The territorial frame of the survey comprises mainly ore-places and furnaces, located in present-day western Bulgaria, Eastern Serbia and Macedonia and Northern Greece. We must point out that the study does not contain information about mining settlements in Sakar mountain in the XVth-XVIth centuries. Much of this is due to the lack of documents for this chronological period that could attest to the presence of miners in these lands. Ottoman-Turkish unpublished documents from the collections of the Oriental Department of the National Library "St. St. Cyril and Methodius”, the Central State Archives in Sofia and Ottoman Archive (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi)-Istanbul will be tracked and translated with the implementation of this paper; documents, which give information about the existence of ore-mining settlements in Sakar mountain. Therefore, a study on these problematic issues is required that will provide answers to the numerous questions, related to the ethnic and religious, social and occupational structure of the population of the settlements in this part of the Balkan Peninsula.