Preliminary Programme

Throughout the second half of the fifteenth century Antwerp succeeded in equalling and eventually supplanting Bruges as the financial, commercial and industrial focus of north-western Europe. The gradual shift from Bruges to Antwerp and the following era generally known as Antwerp’s Golden Age are subject of continuous research since the 1940s. Very little however is known about the first stage of Antwerp’s economic growth. In the last decades of the fourteenth century Antwerp grew steadily from a quiet regional market into a prospering trade centre, mainly because of a revival of the city’s two annual fairs. These fairs temporarily paralyzed trade in Bruges and served as key places where merchants of many nations based in Bruges met those coming overland from Germany and central Europe. The importance of the Antwerp fairs as vital centres of trade is generally acknowledged. But due to a lack of sources scholars have not yet been able to grasp their economic and social impact on the city. A GIS-based study of the Antwerp real property market between ca 1395 and 1430 yields new insights into the financial strategies of locals and foreigners and into the (social) geography of the growing medieval town, it can also contribute to our knowledge of the rise of Antwerp and the decline of Bruges.
In late medieval Antwerp, as in many other cities in the Low Countries, local magistrates recorded every transfer of real property located within the city’s jurisdiction. The Antwerp records are preserved from 1396 onwards. Similar and sometimes even older registers can be found in other cities. In the 1970s and 1980s such registers of real property transactions successfully served as an instrument to identify urban development trends in the pre-statistical period, or to study the distribution of wealth within pre-modern urban societies. Nowadays the voluminous records are seen as rich but highly unattractive sources. Surprisingly no-one has noticed their extreme suitability as intermediaries for the analysis of medieval and early modern urban societies by means of GIS. Using a method transferable to other Flemish and Dutch cities it is possible to convert non-spatial data derived from thousands of property transactions into spatial information fit for GIS-analysis. The same method can be used to construct rather accurate ‘cadastral’ base-maps of the medieval city upon which a wide variety thematic data can be overlayed and analyzed on the small-scale level of the single dwelling or parcel.
In this paper I discuss the construction of the GIS for late medieval Antwerp. And I will illustrate the system’s potential with the first results of my Ph.D. research on the Antwerp real property market as both social display and driving force of the late medieval growth of the city. (Show less)

With the help of technology the German King and Emperor Frederick III, who reigned from 1440 until 1493, has come more into focus of historical research. In previous decades he was not as highly a respected medieval ruler but new research methods have brought him to into a better light. The collection of sources – the prestigious Regesta Imperii (www.regesta-imperii.org) – concerning the emperor’s government is not only printed, but is available as a database with 18,400 registers of decrees; it is accessible for free over the internet. Using these datasets – including the parameters time and space for each historical document – I built the basis for the creation of this project using a Historical GIS. The focus of my research project is the question: Were there any stationary or mobile phases during Fredrick’s III reign? Which time periods did these phases cover? In what kind of historical context did these phases fall? During the central and final interpretation of the graphs and maps for the project eleven phases were identified. These phases are differentiated in time periods, and then divided by more or less mobility of the emperor. The analysis using a Historical GIS showed that Frederick III – German king and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire – was a very mobile monarch in the typical medieval style, but at the same time was already developing centres of power like Vienna’s Newtown. Because of this Frederick III can be classified as a ruler at a turning point in history. This Magister-Artium-thesis was supervised at the University of Hamburg, Germany, by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Sarnowsky, Professor of Medieval studies (juergen.sarnowsky@uni-hamburg.de). Keywords: Late Middle Ages, Holy Roman Empire, Frederick III, itinerary, ArcGIS 9.1, MS-Excel, KMLerPro, Google Earth, Animation (Show less)

This contribution focuses on the influence of socio-economic features of a rural community on the occupation of the cultivated area, a topic that has received little attention so far from historical geographers and socio-economic historians.
The size of the holdings or the distribution of the holdings among different categories of cultivated area is as an important socio-economic feature of a rural community. In the Early Modern Era, the countryside of Inland Flanders usually consisted of a majority of little intensive freehold farms and a few large, often leasehold, farms. In this study, we will focus on the question whether the size of holdings was reflected in the occupation of the cultivated area of a rural community.
By using GIS the cultivated area of the village was traced out by lots of arable land with per parcel the owner and the leaseholder. The necessary cartographic information and the information about property and lease is provided by a village land register, a cadastral document that contains topographically ordered descriptions of all the parcels of land belonging to a rural community with for each parcel a number referring to a cadastral map. The location of the farmsteads and the cultivated area of the different farmers could be exactly situated, represented and analysed by the GIS-software.
We focused on two aspects concerning the reflection of the size of holdings into the occupation of the cultivated area of the village. First the location of the farmsteads was analysed in function of the size of the holdings for possible spatial patterns. Can we see for example a concentration of the largest farms in a specific part of the village? Or were the little and large farms rather spatial interwoven with each other? In other words, can we see a geographical expression of the socio-economic relations between peasants and the largest farmers? Secondly, the spatial organisation of the farms, also in function of the size of the holdings, was analysed. We made a difference between the farmland in freehold and that in leasehold. Where for example were the cultivated parcels situated compared to the location of the farmstead of the peasants? And which parcels were cultivated by the largest farmers? In other words, was the socio-economic position of a farmer being reflected in the spatial organisation of his holding? (Show less)