Inicijal. Časopis za srednjovekovne studije
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Initial is a multidisciplinary review of medieval studies intended for publishing contributions from all academic fields pertaining to the area of Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. This includes not only papers discussing new theoretical approaches in medieval studies or interpreting so-called „major issues“, but also those focusing on narrower, more specialized fields of research. However, with regard to the character of the review authors should craft their material to appeal to a wider audience of medievalists, providing the necessary context to readers who may not be so well-versed in the particular subject. Editions and translations of medieval sources may also be submitted for publication, especially if they are an essential component of a wider study.
Initial is open for publication of academic critiques and reviews of all medievalist monographs, periodical publications, and individual articles, as well as editions of medieval sources. Keeping track of academic life through reports on various gatherings, meetings, lectures, and field research is also an important segment of this journal’s profile.
Publisher: The Centre for Advanced Medieval Studies
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CEEOL
ISSN: 2334-8003
Pages
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- "Božje utvrde" Kraljevine Slavonije
- Since the middle of the 13th until the end of the 16th century, numerous defensive structures were erected on the territory of the Kingdom of Slavonia (by the roads, on mountain slopes and ridges, near river crossings). Among the most active builders were members of the clergy of the Bishopric of Zagreb (the Bishop of Zagreb, the chapter of Zagreb, the chapter of Čazma, the chapter of Vaškan), Catholic monastic orders (Benedictines, Paulines) and Catholic military orders (Templars, Hospitalers, Sepulchrales), who erected a number of burghs, fortified settlements, convents and churches, as well as many renaissance castles and fortresses, in order to protect their own vast domains. This article intends not just to elaborate the historical and archeological topography of these defensive structures, but also to show their peculiarities when compared to other types of fortifications of the age. Therefore, all sorts of defensive structures, their time of origin and spatial disposition are presented, with special emphasis on their significance in the shaping and development of Croatian and Central European cultural heritage. Although historical sources mention far more „God’s fortresses“, this paper deals with 37 such edifices, including both those wholly or partially preserved as well as those whose appearance could be reconstructed with the help of old drawings or photographs.
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- A Proposal for a Dating of De Septem Sigillis of Joachim of Fiore
- De septem sigillis plays an important role in comprehending the evolution of Joachim of Fiore’s thought. This brief apocalyptic treatise represents a quick model to summarize the hermeneutical efforts that the Calabrian abbot carried out in his previous works. By placing De septem sigillis within Joachim’s corpus, we can reach a broader knowledge of the development of the Calabrian theologian’s reflection. The structure of this treatise is based on a sevenfold model borrowed from the seven seals of the Apocalypse. Thanks to a binary concordia between the persecutions that took place in the Old and in the New Testament, Joachim tries to outline in this treatise the events that the Christian people will have to face before the final judgment. After having confronted the content of this text with the other works in which the same structure is presented, we have reasonable grounds to support that this apocalyptic treatise is a late product, written between 1196 to 1198, immediately before his most important work Expositio in Apocalypsim.
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- A Proposed Methodology for the Validation of Historical European Martial Arts
- Proposes a three-part interdisciplinary validation for practical interpretations of medieval martial arts as recorded in surviving European fighting treatises or Fechtbücher from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Suggests that the three main levels of validation revolve around the linguistic, which is covered through the traditional publication/challenge peer review process; the physical, which requires a blended textual and kinesiological testing through presentations to other practitioners; and tactical, which, owing to the lack of surviving original sources in the written text or from other manuscripts for comparison, might be tested through competition to see which interpretations demonstrate superior martial superiority.
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- A Systematic Reading of De libertate arbitrii
- The idea of freedom and the will in the influential and important work of Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) is being examined in this paper. Anselm discusses free will in a dialogue (De libertate arbitrii) that is the second part of a trilogy that he instructs us to consider as a whole. To understand the ideas of freedom and the will the texts are systematically being analyzed, with particular emphasis on the concepts of rectitude, truth, freedom and the will, the way that free will is given to the rational nature and how human beings are solely responsible for the perseverance of their freedom and will. As the texts are being read, some of the modern dimensions of the concepts under consideration will be simultaneously encountered.
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- Acta Jakšićiana. Documents Regarding the Jakšić of Nădlac Family in Romanian Archives
- The nobles of the Jakšić family were among the most representative members of the Serbian elite from late medieval Hungary. The Jakšić brothers took refuge in Hungary and settled near the Mureș River in Nădlac (Csanád County). Later, King Matthias donated to them various estates in several counties of his realm, including Transylvania. Although Transylvanian archives contain a substantial amount of data on the family, this has not been thoroughly researched. Documents presented in this study have not been previously published, except for the one from April 1559. They are found in the archives in Sibiu, Cluj and Oradea and they chronologically cover the period of the 16th century, containing information on both branches of the Jakšić family. Documents from the Romanian archives do not fundamentally change the established view on this family, but they supplement our knowledge and cast light upon some controversial or less known aspects of the history of the noble Jakšićs in medieval and early modern times.
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- An Unknown Creation of the 16th Century Hymnographer. Michael the Monk
- In a liturgical collection from the beginning of the 17th century, a new version of both services to SS. Boris and Gleb was found. In this version “non-corrected” and “corrected” hymns were combined with each other, and some hymns were corrected again. It contains, in addition, a new canon and cycles of stichera. The new canon in this service is signed as a creation of Michael the Monk. This signature is similar to that of a 16th century hymnographer called Michael, who mainly created princely services. His style was characterized by unlimited borrowings with minimal corrections. Textological analysis of these services and the service to St. Alexander Nevsky written by Michael the Monk shows them to be almost identical. The article analyses the creative style of the new service and tries to answer the question why was it necessary to correct the service to Holy Princes, when the widespread “exemplary” service attributed to Pachomius Logothete already existed.
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- Border and Periphery. The Southern Frontier of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary between Belgrade and Severin (14th–16th Centuries)
- he present study is an analysis of the defensive system of the southern border of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, namely the area today known as the Banat. In the Middle Ages the region was divided into several counties (Timiş/Temes, Caraş/Krassó, Keve, Torontal, Cenad/Csanád and Arad). From the last two decades of the fourteenth century it was under constant Ottoman pressure. To stop the incursions from the south of the Danube, a defensive line was built on the Hungarian bank of the river which took its final form at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The fortress of Severin was one of the main pillars of the Hungarian border defense, along with Belgrade fortress. The Danubian defense system contributed for a century to Hungary’s protection against Turkish pressure. In 1524 the strongholds of Severin and Orşova were conquered by Turkish troops, marking the fall of the southern defensive line. The collapse of the fortresses on the Danube had an ill-fated result for the Hungarian kingdom, which in the first half of the sixteenth century succumbed to the Ottoman advance.
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- Die Ehe Gavril Radomirs und der Tochter des ungarischen Königs
- According to sources, the daughters of the Bulgarian tsar Samuel (Miroslava and Theodora Kosara) concluded their marriages after the defeat at Spercheios river (997). These relationships – both marital and political – were motivated, of course, by this great Bulgarian defeat. The same reasons led to the marriage of Radomir, of which a source tells that he married a „daughter of the king of Hungary“. During this period a change on the throne took place in Hungary, but only Géza could have played the role of a princely father-inlaw since Saint Stephen couldn’the yet have had an adult daughter. Prince Géza married his children into royal and princely families, so Samuel must have already been the tsar of the Bulgarians at the time.46 Two dates are to be assumed as the beginning of Samuelʼs autocracy: 976/980 or 997, but Bulgarian historians rather accepted the latter because of the overall source data. Since Bishop Michael of Devol mentioned the daughter of the „King of Hungary“, it indicates that in his source – on which his additions to the work of Skylitzes were based – Géza was known as the ruler of Hungary. With regard to all of the facts above mentioned, it can be said that Radomir, the heir to the Bulgarian throne, married the daughter of Géza in the year 997 (or at least 998). This marital union was dissolved by Radomir because he had received no Hungarian military aid for his struggle against Byzantium.
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- Die Topographie der mittelalterlichen Stadt Skopje zwischen byzantinischem und serbischem Reich (13.-14. Jh.)
- During the 13th and 14th centuries, the city of Skopje, strategically placed in the valley of the river Vardar (Axios), along the route connecting the northern Balkans to the Aegean Sea, was contested by several empires of the time – Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian and Ottoman. Probably for that reason, historians who analyzed the information found in written sources about the city in that period have often been more interested in the macro-level of political events than in the micro-level of urban studies. The aim of the present paper is to illustrate how a rereading and reassessment of well-known and long since published Old Slavonic documents of Bulgarian and Serbian rulers from the 13th and 14th century opens new perspectives in historico-geographical research of the cityscape of Skopje and its surrounding area during a period of political changes in which it passed from the Byzantine Empire into the hands of the Serbian state ruled by King Stefan Uroš II Milutin.
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- Digital Diplomatics
- The essay discusses the research possibilities created by the computer for diplomatic research. Following the steps of traditional scholarly work with medieval documentary heritage (heuristics, documentation, comparison, grouping, establishing rules, diplomatic critique, scholarly edition) it evaluates recent studies applying digital methods to charters. It argues that the easier accessibility of images online, the possibility to process large numbers of documents and a new conceptualisation of editing bring significant changes to diplomatics. It tries to identify the major changes in five fields: (1) verbal description is characterised by classification, rather than representation; (2) visual evaluation is enhanced by easy access to images and by the help of image analysis software; (3) full text search supported by natural language processing software makes it possible to connect a single charter to others hidden in large charter corpora characteristic of the Late Middle Ages; (4) statistical methods and visualization of large data sets helps to see the single charter in its full contemporary context; (5) digital editing can aggregate work done separately in one common representation and makes the editors’ knowledge on the documents explicit. Raising the question if this “digital diplomatics” is fundamentally different from pre-digital diplomatics, it comes to the conclusion that digital diplomatics helps to relieve the research of medieval documents from epistemological constraints determined by the conceptualisation of its results as to be represented in the form of a printed book.
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- English Wool and Byzantine Silk in the Middle Ages
- The paper aims to explore the different environmental conditions that favored the development of wool and silk trade in England and Byzantium, respectively, and to study the economic, political, religious and cultural dimensions of it. Wool was the most important source of wealth in medieval England and the principal means of financing the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Wool manufacturing had a great impact on the society and provided an important foundation for medieval urbanization. Byzantium, on the other hand, established a monopolistic imperial silk weaving industry from the fourth century onwards. The Byzantines demonstrated their technological superiority in silk art crafts and impressed the West that assimilated it and tried to imitate it.
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- Fons sapientiae verbum Dei in excelsis
- In the thirteenth century, it is commonly related that the theologians at the University of Paris, mostly members of the newly-formed mendicant orders, were allowing philosophical speculation and disputation to replace their original commitment to the study of Sacred Scripture. However, each Chair of Theology at the thirteenth-century university was required to give an inaugural sermon whose form and content rebut this idea quite thoroughly. Each sermon began with a commendation of scripture, and followed with a delineation of scripture’s organization – consistently using scriptural analogies and imagery to do so. One inaugural sermon in particular, Fons sapientiae verbum Dei in excelsis, further undoes the narrative of Paris’ “addiction to speculative theology” by insisting that theology is more than speculation: it must also bring about change in the theologian. Such a bold claim highlights a thirteenth-century Franciscan-Dominican debate about the nature of theology, and clearly demonstrates the author’s determination to encourage his academic brethren to be “doers of the word and not hearers only.” What follows is a new English translation of Fons sapientiae, a source which can provide new perspective into the often-neglected inaugural sermon genre. It is accompanied by an introduction which seeks to frame Fons sapientiae in such a way that the authorship of Master John Pecham, which Joshua Benson argued for in his edition, is further evidenced by the sermon’s content.