Mercenaries, traders and missionaries: travelling in the Slavic realm before the year 1000

Chronica. Annual of the Institute of History. University of Szeged. Vol. 9-10., 2009

The aim of the dissertation was to collect and analyze the written sources on the Eastern European trade contacts in the eighth-tenth centuries. The chapters of this work are: 1) Introduction; 2) Sources; 3) Europe and the international trade in the early Middle Ages; 4) Merchants, tradesmen, mediators and the peoples of Eastern Europe in the early Middle Ages; 5) Wares; 6) Trade routes; 7) The forms of trade, transport, markets; 8) Towns, religious, political and cultural connections between Eastern Europe and the neighboring civilizations; 9) Trade contacts of the Carpathian basin after the Hungarian conquest; 10) Summary; 11) Bibliography and maps.

The closing report of a press centre of the organizing committee of the tenth Slavic Congress (Kiev, November 2010) does not discuss only a concept of the literary reciprocity. Firstly, it presents a complex ideological program which includes cultural, economical as well as political integration. Secondly, it encourages work with the youth, ecological education and inspires re-establishment of the forgotten spirituality. The report also highlights the necessity of mutual communication among scholars, journalists, politicians, artists, sportsmen and businessmen 1 . There is no need to emphasise that the main idea of this congress -in the mechanism of throwback-refers to the distant historical Slavic unity.

Various unpublished letters and merchants' memoirs dating from the late 15th century Tuscany have enabled us to investigate the reasons for the lack of a network of major European trade companies in the Balkans. Western operators chose to trade with the merchants of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). Consequently, Ragusa assumed a dominant position in both the land trade routes with inland regions and in the land trade routes between East and West.

Settlements of Slavs and Byzantine Sovereignty in the Balkans In: Byzantina Mediterranea. Festschrift für Johannes Koder zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. BELKE, Wien 2007, 123-135.

The Balkan Jews and the minority issue in South-Eastern Europe, 2021

Benedetto Ligorio Connecting Cultures. Cross-cultural Trade Networks of Ragusan Sephardim in the 16th and 17th Centuries Unire le culture. Le reti di commercio interculturale dei sefarditi di Ragusa nel XVI e nel XVII secolo. Łączenie kultur. Międzykulturowe sieci handlowe Sefardyjczyków z Raguzy w XVI i XVII wieku strona

Between Three Seas: Borders, Migrations, Connections is the Third Biennial Conference of the Medieval Central Europe Research Network (MECERN) organized by the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with the Croatian Institute of History with the support of the Croatian National Committee of Historical Sciences and the Society for Croatian History. The conference is held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb 12–14 April 2018.

Journal of migration history, 2017

Migrations in the intercontinental macro-region have been studied as proto-Slavic early settlement; as transit zone for Varangian-Arab trade and Byzantine-Kiev interactions; as space of Mongolian intrusion and as a territorially integrated Muscovite state with rural populations immobilised as serfs. This article integrates migrations from and to the neighbouring Scandinavian, East Roman, and Steppe macro-regions up to the fifteenth century and, more briefly, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In these poly-ethnic worlds, resident and in-migrant cultural groups adapted in frames of intercultural contact, migration, hierarchies, processes of power imposition and of exchange. An important facet is the 'small numbers-large impact' character of many migrations before the advance of Mongol/Tatar armies. From the fifteenth century, elites of the new Muscovite state such as traders and colonisers moved east into Siberia's societies and attracted technical and administrative personnel from German-language societies. The traditional historiographical narrative, centred on an east-west perspective, is expanded to include the north-south axes of migration and cultural contact.

Facta Universitatis, 2018

This paper tries to determine the period when the first contacts between Serbs and Russians happened and to follow their development, as well as the parallels between the two nations up until the end of the Early Middle Ages, i.e., the end of the 12 th century. It is needless to say that the sources on this topic are extremely scarce. We shall rely on the data provided by Cosmas of Prague because there was some confusion over the similarity of the names Russian (Serbian: Rus) and Ras (citizen of Raška). We shall try to answer the question when the first encounters between the two nations could have happened. We shall point out the importance of worship in the Slavic language, the intertwining of the culture of both these nations, and the similarities when it comes to establishing the cults of the first saints. The first recorded arrival of a Russian to Serbia dates form the end of the 12 th century. A monk came to Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja's court, and after that Rastko left and went to a Russian monastery on Mount Atos.

Linguistica Brunensia, 2024

Archaeologists can rarely contribute to any discussions among linguists. However, they are in a privileged position, when it comes to identifying and delineating migrations. The paper is an attempt to assess the archaeological evidence pertaining to the supposed migration of the Slavs in the 6 th century, from their original homeland to the Danube. Wherever that homeland was located, in order to reach the Lower Danube (where the northern frontier of the Empire was located in the 6 th century), the Slavs had to cross the territory of present-day Romania. A special emphasis is therefore placed on the archaeological evidence of that country, particularly on those classes that have been typically associated with the early Slavs. However, no class of evidence attests to the existence of any migration across the territory of Romania. Migration is therefore not the mechanism that can explain the spread of Slavic.

Migrations in the Slavic Cultural Space. From the Middle Ages to the Present Day, 2022

Serbian migrations to the area of present-day Banat from the late 14th to the second half of the 16th centuries were primarily driven by Ottoman conquests. Ottoman incursions into southern Hungary after the fall of the Serbian state (1459) caused great demographic losses, which the Hungarian authorities tried to compensate for by organizing the mass relocations of the population from northern Serbia to their territory. They also accepted those Serbs who were moving to Hungary on their own and who were willing to enter the military service. This paper analyses the results of these migratory movements until the Ottoman conquest of Banat (1552), with a focus on the area of southern Banat, i.e. the nahiyes of Şemlik (Vršac) and Boğça (Bocşa), on the basis of data provided by the first Ottoman census of the Sanjak of Timişoara from 1554.

Historia Slavorum Occidentis, 2023

The history of South Slavs in West European literature from the second half of the 17 th century to the early 19 th century. The aim of this article is to present the most important issues related to West European perceptions of the history of South Slavs in the second half of the 18 th and the early 19 th century, a time of an increased interest in Slavic history, a process that ran parallel to the development of the Enlightenment perception of history. The analysis shows that in the second half of the 18 th c. and the early19 th c., in the face of the increasing weakness of Ottoman Turkey, the local Slavic communities were rediscovered in the Balkans. Although West European historiographies were familiar with them, the invention of new historical tools and contexts in the Age of Enlightenment resulted in a selective treatment thereof. It made it easy to consider South Slavs as uncivilised communities which, contrary to historical facts, remained at a primitive, tribal stage of development.