Sabine-Florence Fabijanec, Zrinka Novak, and Zoran Ladić, eds. Social and Individual Spatial Mobility in Late Medieval and Renaissance Croatia in European Context

This contribution focuses on the dynamics of spatial mobility in medieval and Renaissance Croatia. The region played an important role in the European road network during these periods. The contributors use varied sources: travelogues, notarial sources, last wills, chronicles, statistical data, cartographic sources, and so on, showing how topical the theme is in historiography and what different possibilities it can offer for future research.The book consists of five parts. The first part examines the political aspect of spatial mobility. Gordan Ravančić focuses on the counts of Krk, the Frankopani, and attempts to trace the chronology of their spatial expansions around the end of the thirteenth century. Ravančić concludes that the Frankopani most likely based their territorial expansion on gaining as much control as possible over the major routes that connected their territory to the mainland.Krešimir Regan combines the political with gender by examining the travels of Queen Catherine of Bosnia from the fifteenth century, after the Ottoman invasions and before her arrival in Rome. Sources largely drawn from the Ragusan Archives show that Catherine stayed in various places in Herzegovina and Dubrovnik, where she also formed her court.In the second part on the religious aspects of spatial mobility, Zoran Ladić and Ivan Šutić continue the gender theme, focusing on female pilgrimages in maritime Croatia. Using last wills, they argue that, from the fourteenth century, there was an increase in female pilgrimages, influenced by the regulation of political and juridical life and cults of saints that motivated women. Growing literacy among women could also motivate them to make a pilgrimage. Ladić and Šutić further explore the communes of Rab, Šibenik, and Poreč.Zrinka Novak focuses on the dynamics of Rab's inhabitants in the sixteenth century by using last wills. What Ladić and Šutić confirmed about the increase in the number of female pilgrims and their greater freedom in the sixteenth century is further demonstrated by Novak's case study. Men were still more mobile and left the commune for military and business reasons, while women left the commune for religious reasons, the search for a better life, or because of exile. Novak focuses on the family status, social position, gender, profession of travelers from Rab, and foreigners in the commune.The third part considers travelogues. Irena Radej Miličić focuses on the sixteenth-century genre ars apodemica. By trying to identify the main principles of this genre in the travelogues of Feliks Petančić and Juraj Hus, she concludes that both sources show pragmatic aspects as a feature of the genre because of the education and political position of the travellers and their experiences with the Ottomans.Maja Matasović's attempts to approach Jacob Bunić's sixteenth-century epic poem De vita et gestis Christi as a travelogue by looking at his personal experiences in Egypt and Israel. Matasović comes to a similar conclusion that Bunić's work shares similarities with the characteristics of the ars apodemica genre. She clarifies that the poem cannot be considered a travelogue, however, because of the lack of personal experiences, but it can be seen in the zeitgeist because the author did adhere to the period's writing style.The fourth part focuses on security, cohabitation, and emotions. Krešimir Kužić maps the bays for anchoring galleys and pilgrim ships in the Eastern Adriatic based on German travelogues. Kužić describes fifty different bays between Istria and Ulcinj that exposed about three naval routes and consequently formed a chain of safe havens for travellers.Sabine Florence Fabijanec emphasizes the multicultural aspect among traders in the Adriatic trade network by analyzing narrative sources and statistical data. Fabijanec concludes that traders of Levantine origin were present on transporters in the sixteenth century. Greek transporters played a mediating role between the Christian and Muslim worlds. She concludes that Western traders were only sporadically present during this period.Mirko Sardelić combines travelogues with the history of emotions by analyzing how Pietro Casola and Felix Fabri experienced the pilgrimage to the Holy Land psychologically and how factors such as extreme weather conditions, poor hygiene on the ship, spread of diseases, and lack of privacy affected the pilgrims' psyche.The fifth part considers the importance of medieval Croatian scholars. During his academic career, the late Franjo Šanjek analyzed the life of the twelfth-century scholar Hermann of Dalmatia. Branka Grbavac's contribution focuses on Šanjek's work, paying attention to Hermann's travels to the Middle East with Robert of Ketton, where they helped translate Arabic scholarly works into Latin. The purpose is to show that Hermann of Dalmatia was one of the pioneers of scholarly and scientific exchange between Western Europe and the Middle East.The different perspectives of the contributions only confirm how medieval and premodern spatial mobility can be interpreted in different ways and still has a lot to offer in terms of historical research.