This impressive volume is the first part of the final report of the underwater excavation that to... more This impressive volume is the first part of the final report of the underwater excavation that took place between 1977–1979 of a Byzantine medium sized merchant vessel that shipwrecked in the third decade of the eleventh century in SerÅe Limanı, a natural ...
It is usually argued that the primary importance of Corfu, like the other Venetian colonies, was ... more It is usually argued that the primary importance of Corfu, like the other Venetian colonies, was for its agricultural output and its port. The colonies in general produced the basic agricultural products required in Venice and southern and western Europe (wine, raisins, oil, cheese, honey and wheat) and industrial raw materials (wool, silk cloth and hides). Moreover, their ports provided safe anchorage for Venetian mercantile and military vessels. This is why Enrico Dandolo, the Venetian doge, required their inclusion in the partition agreement of the former Byzantine Empire with the Crusaders on the eve of the conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (1204).1 Corfu was an important provider of salt, one of Venice's monopoly products, and also functioned as a transhipment port for that commodity from Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras. 2 Salt was exported not only to Venice but also to Scutari, Cataro, Durres (medieval Durazzo) and Dalmatia.' In terms of agriculture, ...
Composed of 13 papers by authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and North Afr... more Composed of 13 papers by authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and North Africa, this volume, which includes an extensive bibliography, is a tribute to Braudel’s work and methodology and to their influence regarding the importance of the Mediterranean in the early modern period. Indeed, his magnum opus, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranée à l’époque de Phillipe II, written in 1949, revised in 1966 and translated into English in 1972–3, has been seen as a seminal work of European history and widely used by scholars: both in agreement and disagreement (p. 23). Maria Fusaro, the chief editor of the volume, stresses that one of the volume’s two aims is to introduce to the Anglophone audience the products of recent research in other Mediterranean historiographic traditions of this sea, while reassessing some aspects of the socio-economic history of the Mediterranean (pp. 5–6). It focuses on the period between the last quarter of the sixteenth century, when the English and the Dutch started to trade in the Mediterranean, and the eighteenth century, when the European trade in different parts of the Mediterranean Ottoman Empire reached its quantitative peak. Colin Heywood, a co-editor of the volume, highlights the importance of detailed analyses of the people and vessels engaged in voyages in understanding the Mediterranean’s character and scale (pp. 23–44). Although mainly focusing on the English, he also refers to the French participating in the seventeenthcentury Mediterranean commerce, arguing, unlike Braudel, that they were not northerners, but from Marseilles. Heywood challenges the macrohistory and narrative mythology employed by the ‘Braudelian’ school, as well as by post-modernist historians, and suggests instead the use of a microhistory approach to maritime history that until recently has been almost entirely a land-based phenomenon. Subsequent chapters deal with maritime activities born inside the Mediterranean. The late Daniel Panzac discusses two intimately linked phenomena, plague and seaborne trade (pp. 45–68). Shipping proved to be an efficient tool for spreading plagues as early as the sixth century ad. Panzac emphasizes this efficiency in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean, and shows that reached its peak in the nineteenth. The author also discusses the slow development of an efficient health defence system, which saw the introduction of the lazaretto and quarantine and necessitated the institution of health administration, starting in the late fourteenth century at Venice and Dubrovnik. Six papers deal with various aspects of piracy inside the Mediterranean. Of these three focus on northern Africa. Fatiha Loualich (pp. 69–96) examines aspects of the daily life of the corsairs in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Algiers, the cosmopolitan base for these activities. Based on case studies from the Algerian national archives, the author focuses mainly on the ordinary rather than the exceptional, and on the privacy of the corsair’s home and his immediate social needs. In the next chapter, Nabil Natar deals with the maritime decline in the Mediterranean of the Magharib in the seventeenth century, focusing on Tripoli and Algiers, which witnessed Britain and France rise to Mediterranean supremacy (pp. 118–37). He argues that a formal European strategy, mainly British and French, aimed, from the mid-seventeenth century, to immobilize North African seafaring in order to monopolize Mediterranean trade and commercial activity. Mohamed-Salah Omri, the third co-editor of the volume, authors the chapter that concludes the volume (pp. 278–98). He adds another angle to Mediterranean history through the discussion of historical novels as crucial sources that fill up documentary gaps ‘in the reconstruction of what the past may have been pinning fiction down to historical research’. He focuses on North Africa, mainly Algeria, which he finds crucial to the rise of this type of source and its direct connection to captivity narratives.
The shores of the Mediterranean-Black Sea basin were home to some of the earliest urban communiti... more The shores of the Mediterranean-Black Sea basin were home to some of the earliest urban communities and some of the earliest literate cultures. Their complex history and rich archaeological heritage have been studied by generations of scholars, to a degree of detail comparable to no other macro-region of our planet. Its waters, too, have been the object of intense and systematic investigation, motivated not only by scientific curiosity but also by increasing concern for the well-being of their marine life. Yet until recently, there have been few attempts at integrating the results of different scientific approaches in order to write the ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In this volume, eighteen scholars from eleven different countries and representing a wide range of scientific disciplines address the question of how humans have interacted with the Mediterranean-Black Sea ecosystem from the dawn of prehistory until the twentieth century; how they have exploited its ...
This volume is the product of the five days Summer School (31st August -4th September 2009) entit... more This volume is the product of the five days Summer School (31st August -4th September 2009) entitled “When Humanities meet Ecology. Historic changes in Mediterranean and Black Sea marine biodiversity and ecosystems since Roman period until nowadays. Languages, methodologies and perspectives”. The Summer School, initiated and organized by Prof. Ruthy Gertwagen, the co-ordinator and teams leader of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) of Mediterranean and Black Sea programme, was held as “hosted activity” at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste (Italy); it was co-organised by Dr. Saša Raicevich, Dr. Otello Giovanardi and Dr. Tomaso Fortibuoni (ISPRA – Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research; Chioggia, Italy), and by Dr. Simone Libralato and Dr. Cosimo Solidoro (OGS - National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics; Trieste, Italy). The Summer School was funded by Sloan Foundation through H...
This paper discusses Venice’s policy between the thirteen and fifteenth centuries towards the Isl... more This paper discusses Venice’s policy between the thirteen and fifteenth centuries towards the Islands in the Ionian and Aegean seas. The traditional modern historiography attributes the establishment of the Stato da Mar or maritime empire by Venice to the outcomes of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) and to the partition agreement of the former Byzantine empire between the Venetian Doge and the Crusaders in October 1204, five months after the conquest of Constantinople by the host of the Fourth Crusade. Being a mercantile polity, Venice preferred ports and islands that ensured the Venetians safe anchorage on the way to the eastern Mediterranean as well as fertile islands that produced the products required in Venice. It is also argued that the Venetian empire was neither accidental nor philanthropic. The Venetian government actively worked to acquire and control territories beneficial to its own interests: to control the material and human resources of the Adriatic and Aegean in order to protect Venetian shipping and to bring honour and glory to the city. This paper revises these arguments and argues instead that, in the thirteenth century, Venice lacked the economic and military resources to create a maritime empire. While chronologically unfolding related events from the morrow of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, this paper argues that only from the late fourteenth century did Venice follow a systematic policy of annexing islands that formed its Stato da Mar.
The study of historic ports properly should be both multiand interdisciplinary, and should includ... more The study of historic ports properly should be both multiand interdisciplinary, and should include, at a minimum, history; architecture and urban architecture; geography and geology; marine engineering; archaeology; and sociology and antropology. I reached this understanding through a good deal of experience in research and teaching maritime history, underwater archaeology (including fieldwork) and architectural history. My main interest, as will be apparent in this essay, is the study of medieval ports. As obvious as this interdisciplinary perspective might seem, it has seldom been adopted by scholars, with the result that many studies are less convincing than they might be. As a medievalist, I accept that it is fundamental to use both archival documents and secondary studies, which together provide basic data that are indispensable for any study. The texts need to be examined carefully, as any historian would do. At this point the other disciplines are tangential, although they often help to clarify arcane or imprecise language, as well as to enrich the study and put the evidence in its proper context. Documents relating to medieval ports can provide a wealth of evidence, even though some of it may be at best only indirect. Still, they help to understand the motivation to construct a port, as well as explanations for its geographic setting and, where appropriate, for its decay. They can shed light on the role a port plays within a local, regional or national economy, and can help us to comprehend port design, installation, construction and maintenance (or lack thereot). They frequently tell us something about the relationship between the port and the port town, which are often not the same entity. There may be evidence about architecture, marine engineering or contemporary vessels and their own particular needs. Or they may tell us about the workforce involved in construction, maintenance and administration, or who work in port-related
As a consequence, the present book is essentially a Malta-based "take" on aspects, main... more As a consequence, the present book is essentially a Malta-based "take" on aspects, mainly litigious ones, of Greek maritime activity in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean. It builds on some of Greene's main preoccupations in a number of her earlier publications, most notably in her powerful revisionist article on Brandel's "Northern Invasion" (Past and Present, 2002), and her contribution to the "postBraudelian" discussion in Fusaro, Heywood and AI-Omri (eds.), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean (20 I0), 177-202 (reviewed in IJMH XXIII , No. 1,348-350). It focuses, wisely, noton corsairs and corsairing as such but on what she defines as "the Greek Orthodox victims of piracy [sic]." Greene claims novelty for her view of this phenomenon as part of what she terms "a more conflictual and chaotic process" than the "smooth" imperializing projects of the European maritime powers. In this, one would be forced to observe that the "imperializing projects" whatever thatterm may be taken to mean in the pre-Napoleonic era ofthe maritime powers were themselves hardly smooth but were equally chaotic and conflictual. Just consider, for example, the ongoing debates, reversals ofpolicy, and sheer incompetence at high levels of command, both in London and at sea, which marked British maritime policy in the Mediterranean from the time of the acquisition and subsequentabandonment ofTangier down through successive contretemps over Gibraltar and Minorca from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The detailed descriptions and analyses ofnumerous cases taken from the files of the Tribunale degli Armamenti, which make up the bulk of the book's successive chapters, repay close reading. They are particularly revealing for their insights into the mentalites of the hundreds of(for the most part) "little people" involved, all attempting to ply a trade and navigate a vessel in waters that brought upon them not only the natural perils of the sea but the greater perils of other seafarers, and most particularly of the Maltese corsairs. Greene's basic approach, predicated by the sources at her disposal, is virtually a microhistorical one.qualitativehistoryrather than quantitative (and hence, also, post-Annaliste), although she appears not to make use of the term "microhistory" or to have been influenced by the major practitioners and theoreticians ofthe field. It isperhaps this fact which accounts for a certain unfocussed quality in what is otherwise a substantial contribution to the expanding field of Mediterranean maritime history.
by, but in other respects far removed from, the stylistic traditions of the original Slavic mater... more by, but in other respects far removed from, the stylistic traditions of the original Slavic material. Roslund therefore demonstrates and discusses the enormous formal and stylistic heterogeneity of this category of material which for the several reasons he outlines had been largely obscured in earlier discussions of this category of ceramics. It is a shame that for completeness the author was unable, apart from a few exceptions, to accompany his study of the formal attributes by a similarly detailed description and analysis of fabrics. The fifth and final chapter contains the author’s interpretation of the evidence presented in the preceding chapter in the light of the theories and aims set out at some length earlier. He does so in terms of what Baltic Ware can tell us about Slavic presence in Scandinavia and how this traditionwas transferred to local potters. The author protests that ‘this is not a book about pottery’ (p. 77) and the final chapter goes some way to demonstrating this. Roslund considers production relations and makes the suggestion that to some extent the empirical evidence can be interpreted in terms of some of the Slavs (in Scania) being brought north as slaves as part of a massive economic realignment and the creation of large estates in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries as part of the connections between the Danish élite and the Slavic Obodrites and their conflicts with their neighbours.Although being critical of simplistic explanations of ‘trade’ as the only mechanism by which Baltic Ware can be explained, the author shows that some pots were indeed imports. The book is attractively illustrated throughout with a large number of excellent pot drawings. The decision to have a 530-page book arranged in only five chapters each incorporating discussions of several different topics, however, requires a clearer differentiation of the different parts of each. The layout problem becomes especially acute in the corpus of Baltic pottery finds from southern Sweden, which is the central part of the book but is somewhat difficult to follow in its present form. In particular it would have benefited from the allimportant map and its key (pp. 262–263) being a pullout in order to avoid the reader constantly turning back to it. Furthermore, the cross-referencing between the different sections of this lengthy book is meagre and the index is inadequate to serve the purpose. This is one of those cases where one can easily perceive the solid university thesis behind the book, and one feels this text could have benefited from much closer editing to make the one into the other. The main part of the book only seems to get under way somewhere about page 260. The chapters with lengthy presentation of the theory and parallels will, however, undoubtedly be useful for some readers for other purposes, but it has to be said that disappointingly little of it seems to be directly employed in the later chapters. The author has gone to great pains to clarify the background to his own personal approach to the data but this is perhaps a little to the cost of the transparency of the construction of the arguments and conclusions themselves. The latter, however, are of great interest; furthermore they have implications wider than just one type of pottery in one area of northern Europe. This book therefore can be recommended above all for having successfully broken out of the awkward compartmentalization that has for too long affected the study of this period and region, and as a thought-provoking contribution to the study of the factors which led to this fragmentation. The book and the ideas it contains therefore well repay close study.
... The Island or Corfu in Venetian Policy in teh Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries. Autor... more ... The Island or Corfu in Venetian Policy in teh Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries. Autores:Ruthy Gertwagen; Localización: International journal of maritime history, ISSN 0843-8714, Vol. 19, Nº. 1, 2007 , págs. 181-210. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. ...
This impressive volume is the first part of the final report of the underwater excavation that to... more This impressive volume is the first part of the final report of the underwater excavation that took place between 1977–1979 of a Byzantine medium sized merchant vessel that shipwrecked in the third decade of the eleventh century in SerÅe Limanı, a natural ...
It is usually argued that the primary importance of Corfu, like the other Venetian colonies, was ... more It is usually argued that the primary importance of Corfu, like the other Venetian colonies, was for its agricultural output and its port. The colonies in general produced the basic agricultural products required in Venice and southern and western Europe (wine, raisins, oil, cheese, honey and wheat) and industrial raw materials (wool, silk cloth and hides). Moreover, their ports provided safe anchorage for Venetian mercantile and military vessels. This is why Enrico Dandolo, the Venetian doge, required their inclusion in the partition agreement of the former Byzantine Empire with the Crusaders on the eve of the conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (1204).1 Corfu was an important provider of salt, one of Venice's monopoly products, and also functioned as a transhipment port for that commodity from Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras. 2 Salt was exported not only to Venice but also to Scutari, Cataro, Durres (medieval Durazzo) and Dalmatia.' In terms of agriculture, ...
Composed of 13 papers by authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and North Afr... more Composed of 13 papers by authors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and North Africa, this volume, which includes an extensive bibliography, is a tribute to Braudel’s work and methodology and to their influence regarding the importance of the Mediterranean in the early modern period. Indeed, his magnum opus, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranée à l’époque de Phillipe II, written in 1949, revised in 1966 and translated into English in 1972–3, has been seen as a seminal work of European history and widely used by scholars: both in agreement and disagreement (p. 23). Maria Fusaro, the chief editor of the volume, stresses that one of the volume’s two aims is to introduce to the Anglophone audience the products of recent research in other Mediterranean historiographic traditions of this sea, while reassessing some aspects of the socio-economic history of the Mediterranean (pp. 5–6). It focuses on the period between the last quarter of the sixteenth century, when the English and the Dutch started to trade in the Mediterranean, and the eighteenth century, when the European trade in different parts of the Mediterranean Ottoman Empire reached its quantitative peak. Colin Heywood, a co-editor of the volume, highlights the importance of detailed analyses of the people and vessels engaged in voyages in understanding the Mediterranean’s character and scale (pp. 23–44). Although mainly focusing on the English, he also refers to the French participating in the seventeenthcentury Mediterranean commerce, arguing, unlike Braudel, that they were not northerners, but from Marseilles. Heywood challenges the macrohistory and narrative mythology employed by the ‘Braudelian’ school, as well as by post-modernist historians, and suggests instead the use of a microhistory approach to maritime history that until recently has been almost entirely a land-based phenomenon. Subsequent chapters deal with maritime activities born inside the Mediterranean. The late Daniel Panzac discusses two intimately linked phenomena, plague and seaborne trade (pp. 45–68). Shipping proved to be an efficient tool for spreading plagues as early as the sixth century ad. Panzac emphasizes this efficiency in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean, and shows that reached its peak in the nineteenth. The author also discusses the slow development of an efficient health defence system, which saw the introduction of the lazaretto and quarantine and necessitated the institution of health administration, starting in the late fourteenth century at Venice and Dubrovnik. Six papers deal with various aspects of piracy inside the Mediterranean. Of these three focus on northern Africa. Fatiha Loualich (pp. 69–96) examines aspects of the daily life of the corsairs in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Algiers, the cosmopolitan base for these activities. Based on case studies from the Algerian national archives, the author focuses mainly on the ordinary rather than the exceptional, and on the privacy of the corsair’s home and his immediate social needs. In the next chapter, Nabil Natar deals with the maritime decline in the Mediterranean of the Magharib in the seventeenth century, focusing on Tripoli and Algiers, which witnessed Britain and France rise to Mediterranean supremacy (pp. 118–37). He argues that a formal European strategy, mainly British and French, aimed, from the mid-seventeenth century, to immobilize North African seafaring in order to monopolize Mediterranean trade and commercial activity. Mohamed-Salah Omri, the third co-editor of the volume, authors the chapter that concludes the volume (pp. 278–98). He adds another angle to Mediterranean history through the discussion of historical novels as crucial sources that fill up documentary gaps ‘in the reconstruction of what the past may have been pinning fiction down to historical research’. He focuses on North Africa, mainly Algeria, which he finds crucial to the rise of this type of source and its direct connection to captivity narratives.
The shores of the Mediterranean-Black Sea basin were home to some of the earliest urban communiti... more The shores of the Mediterranean-Black Sea basin were home to some of the earliest urban communities and some of the earliest literate cultures. Their complex history and rich archaeological heritage have been studied by generations of scholars, to a degree of detail comparable to no other macro-region of our planet. Its waters, too, have been the object of intense and systematic investigation, motivated not only by scientific curiosity but also by increasing concern for the well-being of their marine life. Yet until recently, there have been few attempts at integrating the results of different scientific approaches in order to write the ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In this volume, eighteen scholars from eleven different countries and representing a wide range of scientific disciplines address the question of how humans have interacted with the Mediterranean-Black Sea ecosystem from the dawn of prehistory until the twentieth century; how they have exploited its ...
This volume is the product of the five days Summer School (31st August -4th September 2009) entit... more This volume is the product of the five days Summer School (31st August -4th September 2009) entitled “When Humanities meet Ecology. Historic changes in Mediterranean and Black Sea marine biodiversity and ecosystems since Roman period until nowadays. Languages, methodologies and perspectives”. The Summer School, initiated and organized by Prof. Ruthy Gertwagen, the co-ordinator and teams leader of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) of Mediterranean and Black Sea programme, was held as “hosted activity” at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste (Italy); it was co-organised by Dr. Saša Raicevich, Dr. Otello Giovanardi and Dr. Tomaso Fortibuoni (ISPRA – Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research; Chioggia, Italy), and by Dr. Simone Libralato and Dr. Cosimo Solidoro (OGS - National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics; Trieste, Italy). The Summer School was funded by Sloan Foundation through H...
This paper discusses Venice’s policy between the thirteen and fifteenth centuries towards the Isl... more This paper discusses Venice’s policy between the thirteen and fifteenth centuries towards the Islands in the Ionian and Aegean seas. The traditional modern historiography attributes the establishment of the Stato da Mar or maritime empire by Venice to the outcomes of the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) and to the partition agreement of the former Byzantine empire between the Venetian Doge and the Crusaders in October 1204, five months after the conquest of Constantinople by the host of the Fourth Crusade. Being a mercantile polity, Venice preferred ports and islands that ensured the Venetians safe anchorage on the way to the eastern Mediterranean as well as fertile islands that produced the products required in Venice. It is also argued that the Venetian empire was neither accidental nor philanthropic. The Venetian government actively worked to acquire and control territories beneficial to its own interests: to control the material and human resources of the Adriatic and Aegean in order to protect Venetian shipping and to bring honour and glory to the city. This paper revises these arguments and argues instead that, in the thirteenth century, Venice lacked the economic and military resources to create a maritime empire. While chronologically unfolding related events from the morrow of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, this paper argues that only from the late fourteenth century did Venice follow a systematic policy of annexing islands that formed its Stato da Mar.
The study of historic ports properly should be both multiand interdisciplinary, and should includ... more The study of historic ports properly should be both multiand interdisciplinary, and should include, at a minimum, history; architecture and urban architecture; geography and geology; marine engineering; archaeology; and sociology and antropology. I reached this understanding through a good deal of experience in research and teaching maritime history, underwater archaeology (including fieldwork) and architectural history. My main interest, as will be apparent in this essay, is the study of medieval ports. As obvious as this interdisciplinary perspective might seem, it has seldom been adopted by scholars, with the result that many studies are less convincing than they might be. As a medievalist, I accept that it is fundamental to use both archival documents and secondary studies, which together provide basic data that are indispensable for any study. The texts need to be examined carefully, as any historian would do. At this point the other disciplines are tangential, although they often help to clarify arcane or imprecise language, as well as to enrich the study and put the evidence in its proper context. Documents relating to medieval ports can provide a wealth of evidence, even though some of it may be at best only indirect. Still, they help to understand the motivation to construct a port, as well as explanations for its geographic setting and, where appropriate, for its decay. They can shed light on the role a port plays within a local, regional or national economy, and can help us to comprehend port design, installation, construction and maintenance (or lack thereot). They frequently tell us something about the relationship between the port and the port town, which are often not the same entity. There may be evidence about architecture, marine engineering or contemporary vessels and their own particular needs. Or they may tell us about the workforce involved in construction, maintenance and administration, or who work in port-related
As a consequence, the present book is essentially a Malta-based "take" on aspects, main... more As a consequence, the present book is essentially a Malta-based "take" on aspects, mainly litigious ones, of Greek maritime activity in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean. It builds on some of Greene's main preoccupations in a number of her earlier publications, most notably in her powerful revisionist article on Brandel's "Northern Invasion" (Past and Present, 2002), and her contribution to the "postBraudelian" discussion in Fusaro, Heywood and AI-Omri (eds.), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean (20 I0), 177-202 (reviewed in IJMH XXIII , No. 1,348-350). It focuses, wisely, noton corsairs and corsairing as such but on what she defines as "the Greek Orthodox victims of piracy [sic]." Greene claims novelty for her view of this phenomenon as part of what she terms "a more conflictual and chaotic process" than the "smooth" imperializing projects of the European maritime powers. In this, one would be forced to observe that the "imperializing projects" whatever thatterm may be taken to mean in the pre-Napoleonic era ofthe maritime powers were themselves hardly smooth but were equally chaotic and conflictual. Just consider, for example, the ongoing debates, reversals ofpolicy, and sheer incompetence at high levels of command, both in London and at sea, which marked British maritime policy in the Mediterranean from the time of the acquisition and subsequentabandonment ofTangier down through successive contretemps over Gibraltar and Minorca from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The detailed descriptions and analyses ofnumerous cases taken from the files of the Tribunale degli Armamenti, which make up the bulk of the book's successive chapters, repay close reading. They are particularly revealing for their insights into the mentalites of the hundreds of(for the most part) "little people" involved, all attempting to ply a trade and navigate a vessel in waters that brought upon them not only the natural perils of the sea but the greater perils of other seafarers, and most particularly of the Maltese corsairs. Greene's basic approach, predicated by the sources at her disposal, is virtually a microhistorical one.qualitativehistoryrather than quantitative (and hence, also, post-Annaliste), although she appears not to make use of the term "microhistory" or to have been influenced by the major practitioners and theoreticians ofthe field. It isperhaps this fact which accounts for a certain unfocussed quality in what is otherwise a substantial contribution to the expanding field of Mediterranean maritime history.
by, but in other respects far removed from, the stylistic traditions of the original Slavic mater... more by, but in other respects far removed from, the stylistic traditions of the original Slavic material. Roslund therefore demonstrates and discusses the enormous formal and stylistic heterogeneity of this category of material which for the several reasons he outlines had been largely obscured in earlier discussions of this category of ceramics. It is a shame that for completeness the author was unable, apart from a few exceptions, to accompany his study of the formal attributes by a similarly detailed description and analysis of fabrics. The fifth and final chapter contains the author’s interpretation of the evidence presented in the preceding chapter in the light of the theories and aims set out at some length earlier. He does so in terms of what Baltic Ware can tell us about Slavic presence in Scandinavia and how this traditionwas transferred to local potters. The author protests that ‘this is not a book about pottery’ (p. 77) and the final chapter goes some way to demonstrating this. Roslund considers production relations and makes the suggestion that to some extent the empirical evidence can be interpreted in terms of some of the Slavs (in Scania) being brought north as slaves as part of a massive economic realignment and the creation of large estates in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries as part of the connections between the Danish élite and the Slavic Obodrites and their conflicts with their neighbours.Although being critical of simplistic explanations of ‘trade’ as the only mechanism by which Baltic Ware can be explained, the author shows that some pots were indeed imports. The book is attractively illustrated throughout with a large number of excellent pot drawings. The decision to have a 530-page book arranged in only five chapters each incorporating discussions of several different topics, however, requires a clearer differentiation of the different parts of each. The layout problem becomes especially acute in the corpus of Baltic pottery finds from southern Sweden, which is the central part of the book but is somewhat difficult to follow in its present form. In particular it would have benefited from the allimportant map and its key (pp. 262–263) being a pullout in order to avoid the reader constantly turning back to it. Furthermore, the cross-referencing between the different sections of this lengthy book is meagre and the index is inadequate to serve the purpose. This is one of those cases where one can easily perceive the solid university thesis behind the book, and one feels this text could have benefited from much closer editing to make the one into the other. The main part of the book only seems to get under way somewhere about page 260. The chapters with lengthy presentation of the theory and parallels will, however, undoubtedly be useful for some readers for other purposes, but it has to be said that disappointingly little of it seems to be directly employed in the later chapters. The author has gone to great pains to clarify the background to his own personal approach to the data but this is perhaps a little to the cost of the transparency of the construction of the arguments and conclusions themselves. The latter, however, are of great interest; furthermore they have implications wider than just one type of pottery in one area of northern Europe. This book therefore can be recommended above all for having successfully broken out of the awkward compartmentalization that has for too long affected the study of this period and region, and as a thought-provoking contribution to the study of the factors which led to this fragmentation. The book and the ideas it contains therefore well repay close study.
... The Island or Corfu in Venetian Policy in teh Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries. Autor... more ... The Island or Corfu in Venetian Policy in teh Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries. Autores:Ruthy Gertwagen; Localización: International journal of maritime history, ISSN 0843-8714, Vol. 19, Nº. 1, 2007 , págs. 181-210. Fundación Dialnet. Acceso de usuarios registrados. ...
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