Preliminary Programme

A sixteenth-century seigniorial lordship was both a legal institution and a social indicator. First, the lord possessed personal judicial and usually fiscal rights over the inhabitants of a certain area. Second, contemporaries considered owning a lordship as the cornerstone of being noble. Scattered evidence for the Low Countries suggests that from the late fifteenth century onwards lordships became more and more concentrated in the hands of an ever-smaller group of lords. This paper seeks to explore this concentration process and its social effects for the sixteenth-century County of Flanders specifically. That is, did this concentration process influence the composition and accessibility of the rural elite?
Using data on Flemish lordships and lords, the first objective is to make a quantitative analysis. Furthermore, attention will go to the mechanisms behind this concentration process. Which strategies did families use to obtain or hold on to a lordship? Which other actors and events shaped this process? Finally, the composition of the rural elite as a social group will be examined. Given the increased aggregation of lordships, one expects that this rural elite became more exclusive. If that is the case, this concentration process of lordships altered the dynamics of social mobility. (Show less)

The historiographical debate on the evolution of urban political elites of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages and Early modern period is largely shaped by the dichotomy between “open elites” and “closed elites”. Whether a city was an open or closed political community was determined by local political factors, such as the agency of the established elites to manipulate the criteria of those that were eligible for urban office, or the extent in which the princely state could shape the composition of the urban magistracy. The late medieval and early modern city of Ghent in the County of Flanders, a constituent part of the Burgundian and Habsburg Low Countries serves as a case study to assess the inclusion and exclusion of political newcomers. First, Ghent was the largest city in the county and an important entrepot for regional trade. Second, it was the fiercest opponent to princely centralization, leading the way in a series of urban revolts. This paper addresses whether (resistance against) state formation affected the composition of the magistracy. Did the process of state formation turn the city of Ghent into a more open or closed magistracy? Were more or less newcomers welcomed on the urban political scene? And how did the city’s political elite weather the increased power of the princely state over the city? This paper will on the one hand provide an insight in how processes of state formation affected the power of the local, urban political establishment, and on the other hand allow for conclusions on how the urban political elites reacted to these changes. (Show less)

Renaissance Florence is well known for its long-lasting Republic, but also for its relatively “open” political class. The participation of the families to the city’s government was therefore one of the elements that defined their social status, which could rise but also decline. How did these leading families manage to maintain or improve that component of their social status? During the past decades, historiography has highlighted the importance of network strategies, such as clientelism. By analysing private books, written by leading Florentine families between the fourteenth and fifteenth century, this paper illustrates that transmitting historical and political knowledge to the next generation was also a way to achieve that goal, at least in the fathers’ mind. In their family books, they did not write about Florence’s public life out of personal curiosity, but because it served the family strategy. We can actually notice a correlation between, on the one hand, the hunger (and sometimes the emergency) for social mobility and, on the other hand, the presence and the forms of historical and political discourses in the Florentine family books. (Show less)

Over the course of time, towns became very complex social environments, strongly appealing to outsiders. The main pursuits of townsfolk entailed the production and sale of various goods, allowing them to more easily amass wealth and ascend the social and economic ladder. Medieval urban society was divided into several layers, with this structure more obvious in Western and Southern Europe, and less so in Eastern regions, a perspective which can be explained by the more numerous and detailed historical sources available for the West, as compared to fewer and scantier sources in the periphery. Based on the sources available, this paper will focus on a peripheral region of Europe, Wallachia, which has attracted less attention from researchers.
Unfortunately, Romanian historians showed little interest in Wallachia’s urban society in the 14th-15th centuries, and for various reasons. The condition of sources is one of them, but also the fact that, in Communist times, the focus was on the lower groups of people (the peasants) or political history and diplomacy. This paper will discuss those who were part of the upper layers of society, usually called “the patriciate”. Based on some less researched sources, I will highlight the elements which place members of this elite on a par with similar groups in towns of Central and Western Europe: their involvement in the lucrative international trade; the large amounts of money they amassed, as well as their lands, houses, and vineyards in towns. It goes without saying that they also had privileged relations with the Church, the boyars, and even the ruler, who intervened on their behalf. They were also literate and had an altogether luxurious lifestyle, compared to the rest of the townspeople.
These people – yet without a name – did exist, and this research will bring them into focus. The paper will create more insight into the urban patriciate of Wallachia and will be an opportunity for a comparative approach on the topic. (Show less)

The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of different political/administration systems in the shaping of Late medieval urban landscapes in Dalmatia, in particular by means of comparing the different practices and policies of governing bodies. From the 10th century onwards, despite the ever-changing relations of power towards the Byzantium and Croatian (later Hungarian-Croatian) Kingdom, the Venetians sought to secure the traffic on the maritime route along the East Adriatic coast. At the beginning of 13th century two strategically most important towns - Zadar and Dubrovnik - acknowledged Venetian sovereignty. Their great councils (assemblies of local patricians, i.e. the urban nobility) were presided over by the counts sent from Venice and chosen by the Venetian government. It is therefore that the certain practices regarding the legislation and the decision-making processes in spatial issues were introduced. In 1358 Dalmatia became the part of Hungarian-Croatian kingdom, but after a half-century rule of the kings of Anjou dynasty, Venetian dominance was re-established in all major cities with the exception of Dubrovnik.
The nature of the so-called "Second" Venetian rule in Dalmatia was substantially different in respect to the one in the previous period. Instead of a system of confederate city-states, the 15th century Venetian Province Dalmatia became part of a territorial state. What in the earlier centuries used to be a transfer of Venetian urban governing practices turned into direct subordination of local political institutions. Regarding the 15th century urban realities in the Venetian realm, the following questions would be raised: what were the methods of introducing the changes in urban policies and what were the means of securing their implementation; to what extent could still existing city-councils influence the shaping of urban space and through what mechanisms they could have achieved it; how did the social groups other than the urban nobility react and did they seek to profit from the new circumstances? At the same time, on the contrary, in post-Venetian Dubrovnik (i.e. from 1358 until the end of the Dubrovnik Republic in 1807) we witness the notable longevity of institutions and attitudes that have been established in the period of Venetian domination, including those connected with the issues of urban space.
The comparison between the practices in the towns of Venetian Dalmatia and the contemporary developments in the city of Dubrovnik – particularly in the matters of common defence, real-estate market control, institutions like orphanages and hospitals etc. – will clarify the reasons of rather drastic change on one hand, and a strange longue durée on the other. (Show less)