Brushed Aside by Outside Progress: From Relative Decline to Colonization

Scholars of the madrigal have often emphasized Torquato Tasso’s role in the emergence of a serious musical manner that differed sharply from the widespread canzonetta style of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This emphasis is grounded in Tasso’s endorsement of musical gravitas in the dialogue La Cavaletta from the mid-1580s, as well as in some settings of Gerusalemme liberata, the musical style of which matched the heroic tone of the poetry. Tasso, however, produced many poems that were suitable to lighter musical styles. In particular, he wrote several short strophic compositions of light tone, that is, canzonetta poems. Numerous composers set these as such or as canzonetta madrigals, the hybrid genre that became popular in the late sixteenth century. This poetic-musical repertoire counters Tasso’s and scholars’ emphasis on gravitas and prompts a reconsideration of his impact on music that takes into greater account his substantial contribution to lighter genres.

The importance of kinship and lordship in determining relationships within medieval Scotland has long been acknowledged. In the late sixteenth century, however, Scotland underwent an intensification of government in which the crown increasingly drew judicial processes within its own remit, replacing the private justice dispensed by regional elites with the public justice of the central courts in Edinburgh. The assumption might therefore be that the older obligations of kinship and lordship would have been overridden by the newly persistent demands for personal accountability to the crown. This article demonstrates instead that such obligations were still significant in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that processes associated with traditional private justice were now being used in an unprecedented way by a Scottish crown, increasingly intolerant of violent crime. Familial and fictive familial obligations continued to shape how early modern Scottish society was organized and regulated.

This article analyzes the business organisation and activities of Genoese naval entrepreneurs who managed galleys for the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While conventional narratives of business history begin with the Industrial Revolution and focus on the rise of the modern corporation, this article brings to the fore early modern entrepreneurs from Italy and shows how they led family-controlled firms running permanent navies in the Mediterranean. By using private ledgers and merchant correspondence, the paper aims to understand how these naval entrepreneurs governed their affairs and managed resources internationally. We find that delegation (through family ties, hierarchy, and networks) was the main solution chosen to deal with distant commodity, labour, and capital markets. We retrace the different forms this delegation took and explain its determinants considering alternative options and providing comparative insights.

This article examines the wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on differences in wealth, ownership of property and social relationships. Using wills and subsidy lists, four broad categories of people were identified: gentlemen, yeomen, tradesmen and craftsmen and widows. There was no simple gradation of wealth between these groups; although gentlemen were generally among the richest subsidy payers, yeomen and tradesmen could also figure. In terms of social relationships and the ownership of property, there were differences. Gentlemen tended to marry within their own social group, appoint other gentlemen as overseers in their wills and were more likely to own land outside Croydon. The social relationships of yeomen and tradesmen/craftsmen were more focused on the town itself, as were their land purchases. Two groups of individuals can therefore be seen, not one homogenous entity as some scholars have argued.

French actors mediated North African cultures and shaped French perceptions of others in the Mediterranean world during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Francophone intermediaries experienced predominantly Muslim cultures as consuls, diplomats, military officers, naval captains, merchants, travelers, and prisoners in North Africa and across the Mediterranean during this period. This article reconsiders issues of race and conflict in the early modern Mediterranean by globalizing Francophone sources on the figure of the “Moor” and the conceptual space of the “Barbary Coast” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. After introducing French cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean, the article analyzes their depictions of North Africans through conflict narratives, geographic works, and ethnographic descriptions. New evidence of racial distinctions in the early modern French Mediterranean suggests that conflict reshaped French understandings of Muslims and produced racialized conceptions of “Moors.” This finding supports recent historical interpretations of race as a category of differentiation already articulated and operative in the early modern world.

Disputed Inheritances: Some Difficulties of the Nobility in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries Get access B. COWARD B. COWARD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Volume 44, Issue 110, November 1971, Pages 194–215, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1971.tb02064.x Published: 12 October 2007

The Nature of Ottoman History Karl Appuhn Sam White , The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Alan Mikhail , Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Environmental history, as a field, is nearly forty years old. Thus it is remarkable that until now there has been almost no work on the environmental history of the Middle East. In the last two or three years, however, this has begun to change, and the two books under review here represent a remarkable first foray into the environmental history of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Environmental historians tend, perhaps unconsciously, to divide themselves into two camps. The first, and perhaps most familiar, are those scholars who view the environment as a singularly powerful causal factor in human history—Braudelian deep structure, if you will. The second group sees the environment more as a heuristic device that helps historians understand human social relations and cultural ideas for the simple reason that environmental resources have so often been the locus of social conflict. The divide between these two groups is not necessarily stark, in the sense that all environmental histories have to grapple in some fashion with the problem of environment as structure. The distinction ultimately lies in how much agency the environmental historian chooses to assign to the environment and how much to the human protagonists of the story. Happily, one might say, the two books under consideration are representative of the two styles of environmental history, and thus offer an excellent starting point for future environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire. White offers a broad, environmentally-driven explanation for a major series of revolts in sixteenth-century Anatolia, while Mikhail looks at how shifts in agrarian life and economic organization in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Egypt altered the way in which the state understood and managed both the riparian environment of the Nile and the lives of its peasant subjects. For White, the key structural factor is the climate, specifically the so-called Little Ice Age of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historical demographers and environmental historians have long recognized the effects of what we now call climate change on past societies. Along with the Little Optimum of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Little Ice Age is one of the most famous climatic events in European history. White does a wonderful job laying out the case for thinking about the Little Ice Age as an important factor in Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. As he rightly points out, while the lowering of temperatures was a global event, its effects were unevenly distributed and varied a great deal by region. So while northern Europe experienced unusually wet conditions, for Anatolia and much of the Middle East the Little Ice Age meant cold winters accompanied by extreme drought conditions. In a region dependent on dry cereal cultivation, this was a recipe for dearth and, in White's telling, social unrest culminating in the Celali Rebellion, a series of armed insurgent uprisings against Istanbul in the late sixteenth century. White makes his case with care. The reader will become familiar not only with the history of the early modern Ottoman Empire, but also the effects of the [End Page 302] North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Oscillation (El Niño), the Maunder Minimum, and more. This kind of analysis is a traditional strength of environmental history, and White does it well. He brings his readers in close to look at the culture of the regions most affected by the climate fluctuations of the sixteenth century; takes them on campaign with the Sultan's armies to encounter crippling snowfalls and the frozen Danube; and pulls back into near-earth orbit to imagine a satellite's-eye view of the contraction and expansion of nomadic pastureland in response to the successes and failures of dry cereal agriculture. The book covers a lot of ground, both figuratively and literally. The core of the book concerns the Celali Rebellion, which White sees as directly caused by the droughts that accompanied the Little Ice Age in Anatolia. In short, the most ecologically vulnerable regions...

Until recently, the dominant Mac Giolla Phádraig narrative had the surname associated only with the Barony of Upper Ossory, with ancient origins in medieval Osraí (Kingdom of Ossory). Yet, it has now been demonstrated, mainly via sixteenth-and seventeenth century Fiants and Patent Rolls of Ireland, that there was a Clann Mac Giolla Phádraig Dál gCais present in Clár (County Clare) in the sixteenth century, having been domiciled there since the thirteenth century. Also, by interrogation of sixteenth-and seventeenth century Fiants and Patent Rolls, it is shown here that Mac Giolla Phádraig resident in Laighean (Leinster) counties had no association with the family of Upper Ossory. Notable from the early sixteenth century are the Mac Giolla Phádraig of Cill Dara (County Kildare), who were once possessed of several discrete territories, including one that bore their name, and at least one castle, evidencing extended kinship, i.e., clanship. Yet, with the demise of the Kildare FitzGeralds ca. 1537, there came an upheaval for the clann. In the years after the rebellion of ‘Silken’ Thomas FitzGerald, Mac Giolla Phádraig are found in association with the infamous ‘Keating Kern’, due to their prior common service with the Earls of Kildare. But after the ninth Earl’s attainment, Mac Giolla Phádraig were expelled from their Cill Dara territories. Yet, those Mac Giolla Phádraig re-established themselves – and their network grew. By the 1550s, they had become well-connected with the Uí Tuathail (O’Toole), Uí Broinn (O’Byrne), Caomhánach (Kavanagh), and other notable clanns of the day, of Ceatharlach (County Carlow), Cill Mhantáin (County Wicklow), and Loch Garman (County Wexford). The relationships with Laighean clanns expanded throughout the rest of the sixteenth century while the association with Keatings faded. Significantly, Mac Giolla Phádraig came to hold lands at Cúirt an Phaoraigh (Powerscourt) until they were dispossessed in the early seventeenth century. This article follows the Mac Giolla Phádraig Laighean from the sixteenth century and identifies their descendants today. Now bearing the surname Fitzpatrick, they belong to an ancient kindred group identified by the surname-specific Y-DNA haplotype R1b-Z255 … BY2849. Today, these Fitzpatricks reside all over the globe. But true to their ‘Irish Sea’ Y-DNA modality, i.e., R-Z255, many also live all along Ireland’s east, from Aontroim (County Antrim) to Cill Mhantáin, and some families are still domiciled near their ancestor’s sixteenth and seventeenth century territories. This speaks to the diversity of Clann Mac Giolla Phádraig Laighean, their distinct kindred identities among their individual septs, and the long endurance of their surname.

The last quarter of the sixteenth century marks the beginning of a substantial process, simultaneously of realignment and expansion, in the networks of overseas commerce involving the ports of southern India. In part, this is reflected in the rise of certain ports and the decline of others, for, as we have seen in the previous chapter, both Bhatkal and Pulicat – earlier the most substantial trading centres by far on the west and east coast respectively – now enter into decadence. These ports are not replaced by other neighbouring centres in a straightforward fashion; instead, one observes in the case of Pulicat a complex relationship with the rise of the north Coromandel port of Masulipatnam, and in the case of Bhatkal, a process of dispersion of trade to smaller centres along the west coast. The major centre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in south-western India is Cochin, and we shall be at some pains in this chapter to trace the fortunes of this port. Our discussion must commence however with the eastern seaboard of south India, and in particular with a consideration of the fortunes of the two ports that dominate its trade in the decades from 1570 to 1650, namely Masulipatnam to the north, and Nagapattinam far to the south. The Bay of Bengal, 1570–1600: introduction It has already been suggested that the major reorientations which occurred in Coromandel's trade in the sixteenth century took place in the latter half, being linked to a set of changes we have associated with the ‘second wind’ of Portuguese impact.

This chapter discusses the growth of a desire among the elite for detachment and splendid isolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which was reflected in the abandonment of country houses in the proximity of towns and villages, and in their construction in isolation in the midst of huge parks surrounded by high walls. At all times country houses of a size suitable for members of the country elite had been set amidst ample pleasure-grounds. In the sixteenth century, however, they often stood on the approaches of a village and had home farm buildings abutting on or close to the offices. One of the most remarkable examples of a major country house surviving to a late date on the edge of a large city is Anderson Place, which was built in 1580 actually within the walls of Newcastle on the site of a Franciscan Priory. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century country-house building was dominated by the great prodigy houses of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

This study examines the financial history of threewaqfs (those of Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî, Sadreddîn-i Konevî, and Selîm II) in Konya through their account records covering the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These waqfs (charitable foundations) had large agricultural holdings, and their financial developments consequently reflect the local agricultural conditions in central Anatolia. This analysis of the waqf account books deals with the short-term financial difficulties resulting from harvest failures and increasing grain prices. The widespread Celâlî rebellions seem to have caused agricultural crisis and the financial decline of waqfs in the early seventeenth century.

THE New World of the sixteenth century grew directly out of the Old not merely in a physical but in an intellectual sense. The men of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who found the new lands overseas, were educated in a humanistic tradition which made the classical past, especially the Roman past, alive and relevant to them. Consequently, there is an element of continuity in the thinking about the discoveries and the problems they presented on the basis of older intellectual concepts, which continues to influence much of the thought of the sixteenth century about cosmography, natural history and about the planting of colonies in lands unknown to the ancients. It is astonishing how Ptolemy remained the standard bearer of the new discoveries: maps of the New World and other novel areas, added to his Geography for the first time in 1513, continued to proliferate in edition after edition until by the later sixteenth century the original maps and text had been so overlaid with new matter that they bore even less relationship to the original than the first issue of Gray's Anatomy has to the current edition. It was much the same with Pliny: the Natural History remained the starting point for New World and Asiatic botany and zoology throughout the sixteenth century. Oviedo in 1526 paid his respects to the master before suggesting that genuine novelties could now be added to his text: well before the end of the century Pliny too had been swamped in new material, though his text was also retained intact.

Histories of the Ottoman Empire based on Oriental and Western sources have been written by outstanding scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These histories trace the development of the Empire as a whole without giving too much consideration to the separate contributions of political entities or significant figures within the Empire. In short, the lacunae of Ottoman history must now be filled in by studies of the component parts of that history. The Crimean Khanate is one such political entity which has attracted very little systematic study outside of Russia and Turkey, The Crimean Khanate maintained a significant position in the relations between the Ottoman and Russian Empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, during which time a chance took place in the balance of power in Eastern Europe and Western Asia - a change generally to the advantage of Russia and at the expense of the Ottoman State. The present study attempts to make a detailed survey of the relations of the Khanate with the Ottoman Empire and other foreign powers between 1578 and 1608 and, at the same time, to throw light on the institutions and political life of the Khanate by tracing the life of one of the most significant Khans of the Crimean Tatars, Gazi Giray Khar. II (1588-1608). The note on sources discusses systematically the widely scattered sources pertinent to the study of the Crimean Khanate in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the introduction the writer seeks to place the study in a sixteenth century Eastern European and Western Asian context, giving special attention to the Black Sea and the steppe environments of the Khanate, The first three chapters then describe the relations of the Khanate within the three principal orbits of its political activity, the Caucasus, the Steppe and Eastern Europe respectively, between 1573 and l606; Chapter IV provides an evaluation of these far flung activities.

With the economic and social changes in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century and the formation and consolidation of an urban network throughout the continent, questions such as poverty, sanitation, and hygiene began to pose acute problems in the cities of the age. A new school of thought, known in Spain as Ciencia de Policía and in the Mediterranean area as Policy Science, proposed solutions for these problems and tested them through practical interventions inside the urban setting. In this article the author compares the work of two thinkers: Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, a Spaniard, and Nicolas Delamare, a Frenchman. Writing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Pérez de Herrera examined the organization of Madrid, the newly founded (though still not firmly established) capital of Spain. Delamare based his study on the Paris of the early eighteenth century. The author stresses the coincidences in some of the ideas of both thinkers and shows how their writings begin to embody a new idea of the city, many aspects of which have survived until the present day.

Puritan and conformist divines both sought to “own the Hebrew doctors” just as they had appealed to patristic sources in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The puritan Walter Travers drew upon the rabbinic commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra to argue for the refashioning of the church in the 1570s. Elizabethan ecclesiastical controversy in turn helped “invent” central features of avant-garde conformity by prompting Richard Hooker's use of Jewish precedent to stabilize the church from the 1580s onward. Mutual claims to the Hebrew doctors exposed disagreement over how to proportion the New Testament church in relation to layered Jewish tradition. Yet, by the early seventeenth century, the separatist Henry Ainsworth began to make more extensive, even promiscuous, use of Maimonides. This signaled movement away from simply attempting to “own the Hebrew doctors” to conscripting Jewish authorities as more active, and less mediated, participants in early modern debate.