Expert food historians provide detailed histories of the creation and development of particular delicacies in six regions of medieval Europe-Britain, France, Italy, Sicily, Spain, and the Low Countries.

From the divine right of kings to the political philosophies of writers such as Machiavelli, the medieval city-states to the unification of Spain, Daniel Waley and Peter Denley focus on the growing power of the state to illuminate changing political ideas in Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spanning the entire continent and beyond, and using contemporary voices wherever possible, the authors include substantial sections on economics, religion, and art, and how developments in these areas fed into and were influenced by the transformation of political thinking. The new edition takes the narrative beyond the confines of western Europe with chapters on East Central Europe and the teutonic knights, and the Portuguese expansion across the Atlantic. The third edition of this classic introduction to the period includes even greater use of contemporary voices, full reading lists, and new chapters on East Central Europe and Portuguese exploration. Suitable as an introductory text for undergraduate courses in Medieval Studies and Medieval European History.

This book examines the presence of the converted Jews in Sicily following the 1492 expulsion, discussing their legal status, economic activities and integration into Sicilian society, and the phenomenon of conversion and return of many exiles. The research is based on the account of books of the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily and other contemporary sources. Detailed inventories of confiscated property offer insights into the converts' cultural world, and can also be of interest to the scholar of social and material history in Early Modern Europe. By focussing on royal policies towards the converted Jews, and on the process of establishing the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily, the study sheds new light on Ferdinand the Catholic's politics in Sicily and southern Italy.

This book studies the converted Jews in sicily following the 1492 expulsion, using contemporary sources to examine their legal, economic and cultural circumstances. It also sheds new light on Spanish Royal policies and the establishment of the Inquisition in Sicily.

Medieval commercial transactions did not occur spontaneously. They were crafted by merchants with the support of numerous personnel on the medieval marketplace: notaries, innkeepers, brokers, transporters, and subordinate personnel of the merchant's entourage. This study introduces the reader to the challenges of trade in the Mediterranean world and to specific market conditions in the Mediterranean French town of Montpellier. A case study of the business of the Cabanis merchants permits an in-depth examination of the facilitation of trade by intermediaries whose activities are traced in the discovery phase of arranging a deal and in its closing and execution. Medieval business practice involved multiple layers of personnel. The complexities of medieval trade are revealed in the new emphasis given to those who assisted merchants in their commercial endeavors.

Why in the pre-industrial period were some settlements resilient and stable over the long term while other settlements were vulnerable to crisis? Indeed, what made certain human habitations more prone to decline or even total collapse, than others? All pre-industrial societies had to face certain challenges: exogenous environmental hazards such as earthquakes or plagues, economic or political hazards from ’outside’ such as warfare or expropriation of property, or hazards of their own-making such as soil erosion or subsistence crises. How then can we explain why some societies were able to overcome or negate these problems, while other societies proved susceptible to failure, as settlements contracted, stagnated, were abandoned, or even disappeared entirely? This book has been stimulated by the questions and hypotheses put forward by a recent ’disaster studies’ literature - in particular, by placing the intrinsic arrangement of societies at the forefront of the explanatory framework. Essentially it is suggested that the resilience or vulnerability of habitation has less to do with exogenous crises themselves, but on endogenous societal responses which dictate: (a) the extent of destruction caused by crises and the capacity for society to protect itself; and (b) the capacity to create a sufficient recovery. By empirically testing the explanatory framework on a number of societies between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century in England, the Low Countries, and Italy, it is ultimately argued in this book that rather than the protective functions of the state or the market, or the implementation of technological innovation or capital investment, the most resilient human habitations in the pre-industrial period were those than displayed an equitable distribution of property and a well-balanced distribution of power between social interest groups. Equitable distributions of power and property were the underlying conditions in pre-industrial societies that all

From the 12th century onwards merchants from the north Italian and southern French towns were able to take advantage of Christian conquests in southern Italy, Sicily and the Levant to penetrate and dominate the markets of these regions and of North Africa. The articles collected in this volume examine the economic, social and religious impact of this combination of trade and conquest . They include studies of the survival of Jews and Muslims in Sicily, of the debate about the 'under-development' of medieval southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia, of relations between the rulers of those regions and the merchants, and of mercantile penetration into the kingdom of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Tunis in the wake of Crusaders and Sicilian kings. A partir du 12e siècle, les marchands venant des villes du Nord de l’Italie et du Sud de la France étaient devenus à même de tirer avantage des conquêtes chrétiennes en Italie du Sud, en Sicile et dans le Levant et de pénétrer, ainsi que de dominer les marchés de ces différentes régions et de l’Afrique du Nord. Les articles rassemblés dans ce volume examinent l’impact économique, social et religieux de cette association entre la conquête et le commerce. Le recueil comprend des études sur la survie des Juifs et des Musulmans en Sicile, sur le débat à propos du ’sous-développement’ de l’Italie méridionale, de la Sicile et de la Sardaigne au Moyen Age, sur les rapports entre les dirigeants de ces régions et les marchands, ainsi que sur la pénétration mercantile du royaume de Jérusalem, de Chypre et de Tunis, dans le sillon des Croisés et des rois de Sicile.

These essays, comprising case-studies and broader surveys, deal with town-country relations and regional systems and identities in late medieval and early modern Germany, especially in their impact on social and religious change in the age of the Reformation.

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event? In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.