This article examines the potential of webmapping for visualizing and understanding space in the Holy Roman Empire during the early modern period-and beyond. The current research about the Empire emphasizes that it should not only be viewed as a federation of largely autonomous, fragmented states but rather as a multi-layered association, which consisted of mutually dependent personal relationships, shared institutional structures and social practices, as well as a law that was binding for all. The resulting dynamic and complex intertwining of space, rule and everyday life in the Empire are not reflected on in existing maps. They reduce the early modern society to the execution of political rule. Furthermore, they make use of traditional cartographic design elements like area and line and serve teleological interpretations of 19th century nationhood. To extend the depiction of maps, this article suggests to include point-based approaches through the dynamic medium of web cartography. It will discuss the potential of visualizing the plural distribution of rights of dominion in space and the mobility of officials as an expression of cross-border social practice. Furthermore, the extended opportunities in visualizing dominion and mobility as heuristic tools for a more nuanced understanding of the Empire's spatial structure will be shown. The two approaches pursued here lead to alternative representations which we hope will better reflect current research on the history of the Holy Roman Empire and other early modern empires and states.
This article explores how the development of festivals in colonial Spain after the Conquista was entangled with two phenomena: first with the evolution of a culture sui generis of feasting in the young colonial society of Spanish America and second with the transfer of cultural models originating from the Italian Renaissance. As Roy Strong emphasized, the Italian tours of Charles V through Italy (1529/30, 1535/36) and the triumphal processions "all'antica" presented to him in many Italian cities deeply influenced Spanish public feasts for the rest of the century. Starting from the 1530s also in the colonial spaces of Mexico and Peru public feasts as well as popular tastes connected to fiestas were deeply influenced by the Renaissance. In the following, evidence is presented on the practices of celebrating neo-Roman triumphs in colonial Spain and on their characteristic as political communication. Colonial fiestas evolved in a tension between the expectations and goals pursued by European imperial actors and Non-European subaltern groups, like the members of the republica de los indios as well as the community of Africans-two groups which were actively involved in the festivals. The material presented in this article encompasses fiestas celebrated in Tenochtitlan and Tlaxcala on the occasion of the peace of Aigues-Mortes (1538), the triumphal entrances (entradas) of royal officials into American metropolises, as well as celebrations in Mexico and Peru in honour of the founder of the Jesuit order Ignatius of Loyola in 1610. The topic of feasting culture is important as well because it informs us about the way indigenous and African communities reacted to Renaissance culture and about their possibilities to combine it with their own cultural elements. This opens the perspective on an indigenized and creolized Renaissance in the Spanish Empire.
This paper examines the phenomenon of mixed marriages among the Hungarian high nobility against the backdrop of multiconfessionalism and political calculation. For a long time, researchers have been convinced that religious pluralization had only little impact on family networks and the magnate society as a whole. However, more recent studies, drawing on insights from Western European historiography, suggest that the affiliation of spouses to different denominations must be seen as a clear challenge to family life. This article focuses less on the potential for conflict and more on the pragmatism underlying mixed-confessional unions. Given the limited marriage pool of only about 50 families and the importance of political, dynastic, and economic factors in securing suitable matches, it is argued that the Hungarian high nobility, while not religiously indifferent, had little inhibition when it came to entering into interdenominational marriages. By taking a quantitative approach and analyzing a set of 134 marriages, it is demonstrated how the magnates entered mixed marriages out of opportunistic behavior, particularly in the context of the recatholicization of the Hungarian kingdom favored by its Habsburg rulers.
What do we see differently when we approach sources we haven't read for decades with new questions? In this contribution, I combine a renewed reading of early modern pamphlet literature on servants with an analysis of Lutheran baptismal sermons for converted Muslims and for people from West Africa who were labeled "heathens". These individuals had been taken to Germany in connection with the wars between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires or the transatlantic slave trade, and they often lived there as enslaved people in "German home towns", a term Mack Walker coined for small and medium-sized towns in the Holy Roman Empire. In the early 1990s, I examined conflicts in the burgher households by using the concept of the "Ganzes Haus" (the "whole house"). Building on the ideal type of the "German home town", I seek here to explain why slavery as a reality in early modern German towns remained unnoticed for so long. As the sources show, a key factor was the imprecise terminology used by contemporaries from the 16th to the 18th centuries to describe different forms of dependence. Enslaved people appeared in burgher households under labels such as Hausgenosse (associate), Leibeigener (serf), Knecht (male servant) or Magd (female servant). Overall, I argue for a postcolonial-inspired reinterpretation of the Holy Roman Empire drawing on recent German and Swiss historiographical debates about "colonialism without colonies" to highlight connections between the Holy Roman Empire and the seafaring nations in the West of Europe, although Germany did not become a colonial state before the 19th century.
