Category Archives: economics

by | 13 December 2023 · 6:23 am

Buda and Pest Under Maria Theresa

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

The relative peace and stability of Maria Theresa’s reign brought growing prosperity, and living conditions in the twin towns improved, though slowly. Some municipal services began running fairly well. From the 1770s the water supply in large parts of both Buda and Pest were built – first with wooden and then lead pipes. The first postmark in Buda dates from 1752 and the first post office opened in 1762, opposite the Matthias Church in Buda. A music conservatory, a veterinary school and a botanical gardens opened in Buda in the 1780s. In the 1730s in Pest there were very few stone buildings; most were made of puddled clay with thatched roofs. By 1765 453 of the 1,146 known buildings on the Pest side of the river were made of stone, and by 1790 around three-quarters of the 2,250 buildings were.

But there was no boom for business, and no lines of credit available to start one. The Hungarian nobles – the lesser and higher – had a disdain for commerce and trade that the British gentry had lost sometime in the seventeenth century. The few financiers, manufacturers, large-scale traders and better-off artisans of both Buda and Pest invariably came from non-Magyar families, which in any case formed the majority of the twin towns’ population. The earliest, almost immediately after the siege of Buda ended, were a number of Greek families who saw an opportunity – as well as escape from Turkish rule – and established businesses in Pest. Their names, Magyarized from around the 1730s onwards, became well known: Haris, Sina and Nákó for milling and foodstuffs, Sacelláry, Lyca and Mannó for textiles, leather and timber, Agorasztó and Muráthy for the wine trade. Then more came from further afield: Gregerson (Norwegian) and Ganz (Swiss) for clothes; the Swiss traders Aebly, Haggenmacher and several Serbs – Petrovics, Vrányi, Grabowski, Bogosich, Mosconyi – for assorted trades from metalwork to carpentry. Few Magyars were setting up businesses. The real problem, in Buda especially, was that comparatively few people engaged in any kind of trade or industry – according to contemporary economists who studied census figures, just one in eighty-nine people in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, compared to one in fourteen in Austria and one in nine in the Lombardy region.

The British naturalist Robert Townson visited Budapest in 1790, as few of his compatriots did then. Pest and Buda were definitely not on the Grand Tour at that time. The Turkish baths of Buda fascinated him; they were not strictly segregated as they would be from the middle of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, but were more gender-neutral.

…

The animal fights in Pest, involving bears, cocks and dogs, horrified him. His journal mentions many times how diverse the towns were, with Greek, Balkan and Jewish traders crowding the marketplace. He mentioned one type of business that as much as any other was the defining feature of the Habsburg lands, and crucial to the culture of the city that would become Budapest. Kemnitzer’s was the progenitor of all the coffee houses in the golden age of Budapest and it became an instant success. It was the creation of Johann Kemnitzer, a master tanner, who had done well in his trade and built a large, three-storey house at the Pest side of the pontoon bridge, where Vigadó Square meets Deák Street today. In 1789 he opened the ground floor as a café and within a few months it was the most famous coffee house east of Vienna, with spacious rooms, marble columns, stucco on the arched ceilings, four crystal chandeliers, ornately gilded fireplaces and a fine kitchen.

Townson went there every day during his stay to listen and watch, surprised at the varied clientele who frequented the place: ‘All ranks and both sexes may come; hairdressers in their powdered coats, and old market-women come here and take their coffee or drink their rosolio as well as Counts and Barons…it is an elegant house and very comfortable dinners may be had.’

Another thing that surprised him was that the main language he heard on both sides of the river was German, spoken by Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Jews on the streets. He almost never heard the sound of Magyar.

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by | 10 December 2023 · 6:09 am

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

…

Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

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Filed under Austria, economics, food, Germany, Hungary, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey, USSR

by | 7 December 2023 · 6:01 am

Budapest in 1896

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 12-14:

In 1896 Budapest was the largest city of mills in the world (rivalled at that time only by Minneapolis). Wheat from the great plains of Hungary and other parts of the Balkans was turned into flour in the mills of Budapest. Many of the successful entrepreneurs who began their business lives as grain traders became mill owners and then diversified. Budapest was by far the busiest port on the Danube. The (mostly nationalized) Hungarian river transport company, MFTR, had overtaken the Austrian equivalent more than thirty years earlier and was thriving. A pleasant daily Budapest–Vienna overnight journey on white paddle steamers was highly popular until the 1920s. Trains between the two cities were fast – four and a quarter hours in 1896. In 2022 it was three hours and thirty-five minutes.

Budapest finance caught up and surpassed the growth of agricultural and industrial production. By 1900 Budapest became the banking centre of Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1867, the date of the ‘Compromise’ which created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and 1914 the number of Hungarian banks grew from eleven to 160 and their capitalization increased fivefold. A few of them – the First Hungarian Commercial Bank and the Hungarian Credit Bank – rivalled the biggest Viennese and German banks in size and prestige, as their palatial headquarter buildings in downtown Budapest, designed by the most renowned European and Hungarian architects, showed. Their owners, such as the Wolianders, the Wahrmanns, Hatvany-Deutsch and Chorins, joined the European super-rich.

Sixty per cent of the Hungarian manufacturing industry was based in Budapest, from small enterprises to the giant Manfréd Weiss works, which employed more than 5,000 workers by 1913 in a vast factory complex on Csepel Island in the Danube, just north of the city. The factory exported munitions to Spain, Mexico and Britain, whose forces would soon be using them in a war against Austria-Hungary.

Little suggested that the unprecedented boom would not continue. Tekla Szilard, the mother of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leo Szilard, who would later flee Budapest from fascism and work on the Manhattan Project that designed and built the first nuclear bomb, described her mood on her wedding day, 25 April 1897, and ‘the boundless optimism we all feel…The city was growing by leaps and bounds. I felt as though this was my progress…my development.’ But some prescient people were more wary about the pace of change and thought of what was left behind. Krúdy wrote in 1900 about his beloved Budapest: ‘They kept on building every day, palaces topped by towers rising towards the sun; and at night it seemed there were endless burials…of the town’s broken matter, of old people and old houses, of old streets and old customs.’

Within a generation much of this new wealth, optimism and confidence would disappear. In the millennium year Hungary was nearly three times the size it would be just twenty-five years later and its population around 50 per cent higher. Most of present-day Croatia and Slovakia, a third of Romania and a large slice of Serbia were all part of Greater Hungary. It possessed a busy seaport [Trieste] on the Adriatic with a busy merchant navy. Then the disaster of the First World War struck and Zweig’s World of Yesterday came to an end. Hungary has never recovered from the shock.

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by | 26 November 2023 · 3:30 pm

Hagi Castle in Choshu Domain

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1800ff:

Hagi Castle was built between 1604 and 1606 by the Mori Clan, lords of Choshu fief. Before the battle of Sekigahara, the Mori fief was the second largest in all Japan, but after that epic struggle, in which the Mori were on the losing side, their fief was reduced to about one-fourth its original size. Even with this reduction it was still one of the 10 largest in the country. The castle was laid out so that the five-story donjon was situated at the edge of the inner moat. It measured, on the ground floor, 65 feet east to west and 53½ feet north to south. The top floor was 20½ feet by 17½ feet, and the total height was about 47 feet. Fourteen generations of Moris lived in a mansion on the castle grounds, which were practically on an island, with a bay on one side and a river and moat on the others. An observation tower was placed on a hill behind the castle overlooking the sea.

Choshu fief was a hotbed of anti-Tokugawa feeling after Sekigahara. Children were put to bed at night with their feet toward Edo as a form of insult to the shogunate, and they were told never to forget the defeat of their ancestors at Sekigahara. Dislike for the Tokugawas also may have stemmed from Tokugawa disrespect of the Imperial House; the Mori Clan claimed direct lineage to the imperial family and therefore had strong feelings of loyalty toward the emperor.

Hagi was the birthplace of Yoshida Shoin, the imperial patriot who advocated the overthrow of shogunate rule and a return of power to the emperor. At his school in Hagi he preached this philosophy until his death at the hands of the shogunate a few years before the Restoration took place. Many of Shoin’s pupils became leaders of the Restoration era.

The leaders of Choshu were also resentful of the shogun’s relations with foreign countries, and in 1863 their shore batteries fired on an American ship off the Choshu coast and effectively blocked the Shimonoseki Straits to foreign shipping. The following year a combined force of Dutch, American, British, and French warships put an end to the harassment, and Choshu agreed to pay an indemnity. After this incident the Choshu leaders came to friendly terms with the foreigners.

During the revolt against the shogunate, Choshu, along with most of the clans in western Japan, firmly supported the imperial cause. To show their complete loyalty to the emperor, the Choshu leaders were the first to tear down their castle (1874). The samurai were now without employment, but the head of the Mori Clan encouraged them to become peaceful farmers and raise fruit. This enterprise is still carried on today by their descendants.

Only the stone walls of the inner court and the inner moat of the castle remain. The base of the donjon can also be seen, and the huge stones used for pillar supports are still imbedded within the foundation. Steep stone steps running the entire length of several of the inner walls, overlooking the moat, provided a means of rapid troop deployment when immediate defense was imperative.

It is interesting to note that time has not touched Hagi as heavily as it has most other castle towns, and some descendants of samurai families still reside at their ancestral home sites behind old walls in the samurai quarters of the town.

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by | 8 November 2023 · 8:09 am

Osaka: From Castle to Commerce

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1017ff:

After 1615, Osaka was no longer an important military center, but became one of the three chief cities under direct control of the shogunate. (Note: The others were Edo and Kyoto.) A 10-year restoration of the castle was begun in 1620, but the donjon was struck by lightning and destroyed in 1665, During the remainder of the feudal period the castle grounds served as the seat of local government and for the garrisoning of troops.

As time went on, Osaka became the most important commercial center in the country. Hideyoshi had encouraged merchants from the fortified city of Sakai to move to Osaka and supply the castle and the town, which was rapidly growing. After Ieyasu took over, more merchants came in from Fushimi. Although the daimyo of the Ou and Kanto districts built warehouses in Edo to store and distribute their revenues of rice, most of the feudal lords converted rice into cash at Osaka. Soon there were some 500 to 600 warehouses in the city which not only processed food, but many other forms of merchandise as well.

During most of the Tokugawa period the city remained a peaceful but busy commercial center. In 1837, however, the peace was broken by a riot led by one Oshio Heihachiro. Many fires were started, and homes and buildings (especially of the rich) were destroyed before troops garrisoned at the castle could bring the situation under control. This riot was an overt expression of national dissatisfaction with the government, a malcontent feeling that eventually led to the downfall of the Tokugawa regime. During the 1850’s and ’60’s the castle was used to receive foreign diplomats when the shogun was in residence there.

In September 1868 part of the castle was burned by Tokugawa troops as they retreated before troops loyal to the emperor during the civil war that brought about the Restoration. In 1931 a donjon of ferro-concrete material was constructed atop the 45-foot foundation of the former keep, and the castle grounds were opened as a public park. During the Pacific War troops were again garrisoned on the castle grounds. Although the new donjon was not touched by the war, four turrets were destroyed. Today the castle grounds are again used as a public park, and the donjon contains exhibits relating to the history of old Osaka including a display of archeological interest and a model of the castle showing what it was like at its prime.

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by | 7 November 2023 · 9:15 am

Azuchi Castle Innovations

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~830ff:

Azuchi Castle had several distinct features that differentiated it from its predecessors. Its massive proportions and the use of stone as a major building material, as noted in an earlier chapter, were to provide protection from the most destructive firearms available at that time. Other innovations such as the use of high towers and the location of the castle on a hill rather than in mountains with dense vegetation, were also related to a change in the tactics of warfare. These changes made guns an extremely effective defense because the enemy could be seen a long way off and met by gunfire precisely directed from the height of the donjon.

Just as Azuchi Castle was the prototype of the present-day relics of feudal times, the castle town created by [Oda] Nobunaga outside the castle walls was the prototype of a new kind of castle town in general. He had built quarters for his various soldiers and retainers but they were slow to occupy them, and it was two or three years before the town became fairly well settled. (Note: By 1582 the population had reached about 5,000.) At the same time, he made conditions attractive for tradesmen and artisans so that the town would be supplied with the necessary commodities to make it prosper. In 1577 Nobunaga issued a town charter stating that Azuchi was to be a free-market town with no taxes levied on sales or purchases. All merchants traveling along the Nakasendo had to seek lodging in the town when passing through, there were to be no taxes on building or transportation (except in time of war), and in the event of cancellation of debts in the province, debts owed to the town’s residents would not be included. These concessions to tradesmen were made to attract money to the town, but the motive was more political than economic. With free trade, goods flowed from all parts of the country to the population and market centers, thus increasing the wealth of the cities and in turn the lord of the area. At the same time, the roads were improved to facilitate the movement of goods, and in time of war the same roads could be used to move troops. Free-trade practices also attracted skilled artisans whose talents could be used to make the tools of war.

It was during this period that Jesuit missionaries arrived in Japan and received encouragement from Nobunaga, who regarded them as a rival to Buddhism for which he had little use. When Father Gnecchi Organtino and some other priests visited Nobunaga at Azuchi, Nobunaga was so flattered that he offered the Jesuits a building site for both a church and a house; the missionaries were only too happy to accept.

After Akechi Mitsuhide killed Nobunaga at Kyoto on June 21, 1582 he marched to Azuchi, took over the castle, and distributed gifts from Nobunaga’s treasury to likely supporters. (Note: Akechi is said to have treated the missionaries well.) He did no harm to the castle, but Azuchi nevertheless met its downfall shortly thereafter. It is known for certain that the fortress burned to the ground, but by whom is open to controversy. One popular and often repeated story is that Nobunaga’s son, in a fit of rage, grief, or perhaps both, put the castle to the torch. Sansom acknowledges the story, but indicates that looting townspeople probably were responsible for the fire. Still another version says that the tower was destroyed by Nobunaga’s adversaries. In any case, the castle burned, leaving only the stone walls, moats, earthworks, and tower foundation (Fig. 23).

The town of Azuchi is now a country village populated by people (some of whom are direct descendants of Nobunaga) who till the land, fish in Lake Biwa, and are proud of their history. At one time they wanted to rebuild the castle donjon but the idea was abandoned for several reasons including lack of funds. Also, the remains of the castle have been declared a special historical relic, and the Committee for the Preservation of Cultural Assets is reluctant to allow construction of a new donjon because of possible damage to the ruins. In addition there is some question whether reliable plans and drawings exist from which a reasonable facsimile could be built. Proponents of the project claim that drawings of the original castle exist and are the property of a temple at the foot of Azuchiyama, but the only known evidence of drawings is a sketch of the exterior on a scroll hanging in the temple.

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by | 5 November 2023 · 6:26 am

Japan’s Golden Age of Castle-building

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~460ff:

In December 1614, [Tokugawa] Ieyasu gathered together a large host and laid siege to the castle in what is known as the Winter Campaign. In less than a month the two sides came to terms in which [Toyotomi] Hideyori agreed to allow the outer defenses of the castle to be destroyed as a gesture of his good faith. The Tokugawa forces went a bit further, however, and also filled in the inner moat.

Soon after the besieging army left, Hideyori again began to gather troops at the castle. When he ignored Ieyasu’s command to cease this activity, the Tokugawa forces again descended on Osaka. This was the opening of the Summer Campaign, which began in May 1615 and ended early in June when the besieging forces fought their way into the castle. Hideyori committed suicide, bringing an end to the Toyotomi Clan. The Tokugawa were now supreme. Ieyasu died about a year later, but he had laid a foundation that gave his descendants rule of Japan for over 250 years.

The period of history just discussed might be referred to as the golden age of castle building, starting with Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle, which was designed as a fortification to resist forces armed with the matchlock. Its high stone walls, deep wide moats, corner towers, and tall donjon were intended to cope with this new weapon. At the same time the castle’s design enabled defenders to use firearms to best advantage. Next came Hideyoshi’s castle at Osaka, even more formidable and impregnable. These two structures set the pattern for later castle construction. (Note: It is thought that the Portuguese helped with the design of these two fortresses.) Most castles and castle ruins extant today were built in the short three-decade period from 1580 to 1610, employing the architectural design of the Azuchi-Momoyama period. It was then that Kato built his fortress at Kumamoto with its high, imposing walls, Ikeda greatly improved and enlarged the small castle at Himeji, and Ieyasu took the small castle at Edo and developed it into one of the largest fortresses in the world.

Shortly after Sekigahara, Ieyasu called upon the tozama [“outsider”] lords to contribute heavily to the building of Edo Castle. These lords were those who were not related to, or had no hereditary tie with, the Tokugawa family and had remained neutral during Sekigahara or submitted to Ieyasu thereafter.7 In addition to Edo Castle, they were also compelled to build other castles including those of Nijo, Hikone, Nagoya, and Sumpu [in Shizuoka], and to enlarge and remodel still others. Most of these castles were located in strategic areas between Kyoto and Edo and were built on the pretext of providing for national defense. Most, however, were never used in the kind of warfare for which they were designed. The building program was undertaken to reduce the resources of the tozama daimyo, whom Ieyasu did not trust, and to keep them under control.

Policies were also laid down by the Tokugawa government to control the tozama daimyo in ways other than financial. Castles were not to be built, remodeled, or repaired without permission from the shogunate. Men of the samurai class were obligated to live in the castle town. This requirement, an extension of Hideyoshi’s sword hunt, tended to strengthen the feudal system. Marriages between the daimyo families had to be approved by the shogunate to prevent hostile alliances from developing, Tokugawa vassals were placed in fiefs where they could observe the activities of their tozama neighbors and report any evidence of conspiracy to Edo. They were moved frequently to prevent them from becoming too well established and forming alliances.

The daimyo were permitted to govern their fiefs without much interference from Edo, but they were obliged to observe the regulations imposed by the shogunate. Although they were allowed this freedom, they were required to alternate residence between their fiefs and Edo. This policy, known as sankin-kotai, was designed to prevent them from conspiring against the Edo government. While they were away from Edo, they left their families there as hostages. The traveling to and from Edo was another form of control, for the daimyo were expected to travel with a huge retinue, thereby incurring expenses that sapped their resources.

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by | 3 November 2023 · 10:09 am

Japanese Castles and Castle Towns

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~172ff:

The castles of Japan are an integral part of both feudal and modern Japanese history. During the 14th and 15th centuries the petty feudal barons built defensive castles to serve as or to protect their residences. These fortifications also became the seats of government for the domains over which the barons ruled, and they became the social centers for the areas as well. It was also during this period that domestic and foreign trade began to flourish, thus adding increased status to the castle town as an economic center.

As the 16th century opened, the struggle between the feudal barons intensified with each one attempting to spread his influence over a wider territory. During this struggle the castles assumed greater importance as more people moved to the castle towns. The result was that these economic centers became increasingly vital. About 1542 the first firearms were introduced to Japan by the Portuguese, an event that radically changed the course of warfare. Defenses were substantially reinforced to offset the new weapons, and those barons who were not fortunate enough to have acquired them were defeated. By the end of the century almost all of Japan had been brought under the unified control of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was made shogun (military ruler of the country) in 1603. Ieyasu set up his seat of government at Edo (present-day Tokyo) and from there administered the country as one feudal fief. The daimyo, or lords of the various fiefs, generally ran their domains much as the shogun ran the country. Similarly, the provincial castle towns began to resemble Edo, to the point where street names were identical.

Under Tokugawa rule, each fief was allowed to have only one castle; so all subsidiary strongholds were torn down, and the samurai who had manned them were transferred to the remaining castle and its town. This shift in population attracted merchants and artisans, and it was not long before the castle town was the commercial center of the fief. The samurai, who had little to do because there were no longer battles to be fought, became administrators, and many took up scholarly pursuits while others interested themselves in the arts. Thus castle towns evolved into commercial and cultural centers.

When the feudal period ended in the mid-19th century, the importance of the castle town did not diminish. Many such towns continued to flourish as population centers, and today half of the 60 or so cities with populations over 100,000 are former castle towns. That these feudal towns continue to be important administrative centers is indicated by the fact that 34 of the 46 prefectural capitals were once castle towns.

But the importance of the castle in Japan does not end with its relationship to modern urbanization. The architectural style employed in castle construction is one of the forms that is most truly Japanese in that it was relatively little influenced by Chinese design. This architectural style is called Azuchi-Momoyama after the period of history in which it developed. The amazing fact about this period was its short duration, for it lasted only from 1568 to 1603.

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by | 27 October 2023 · 5:30 am

Cromwell, Coffee, and a Synagogue

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 307-308:

Tulips, anemones and irises were not the only exotic commodities taking hold in Cromwell’s England, either. In 1657, a London jury prosecuted James Farr, a barber, ‘for making and selling a drink called coffee whereby in making the same he annoyeth his neighbours by evil smells’. Coffeeshops had appeared in Oxford in 1650, where it had been drunk in the university in the 1640s, and in London in 1652 (opened by an Armenian).

Far from being the international pariah it had been in 1649, England was now opening itself up to the world, with London the centre of a growing empire of trade and power. Cromwell’s most remarkable project, though, was to make England welcoming to the world’s Jews. In 1655, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Manasseh Ben Israel, had arrived in London. Lodging on the Strand, he was entertained by Cromwell, who agreed to try and facilitate the readmission of Jews to England, largely because he hoped to convert them and thus usher in the Second Coming. In the end, Cromwell was blocked by a combination of the self-interests of English merchants and the anti-Semitism of his political class. However, because the expulsion in 1290 had been by royal decree, Cromwell could use his Protectoral power to reassure Jewish representatives that they wouldn’t be prosecuted. The rabbi himself was given a state salary of £100 a year, a burial ground for Jews was purchased and a synagogue on Creechurch Lane became established from 1657, where it remains today, in the heart of the City.

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by | 26 October 2023 · 6:50 am

Status of Moldova, 2006

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 363-364:

To this day, the Republic of Moldova, with its population of about 4.5 million people, remains the poorest of European countries. In 2002 it still ranked behind Albania, which, however, received four times the international monetary aid. In 2006 the per capita gross domestic product was a 991 US dollars (the comparative figure for Germany was at 34,433 US dollars). The world’s largest steel mill on the Dniester that once employed ten thousand workers has virtually fallen silent. The once-flourishing “vegetable and fruit garden and vineyard of Russia” lies fallow in many places. Its rich soils are depleted and overfertilized, its water polluted. As always, Moldova belongs to the ten largest wine producers in the world but has tried in vain to gain a foothold in the international market. Until recently, more than 90 percent of Moldovan wine production was exported to Russia. For that reason, Russia’s 2006 declared import ban has hit the Moldovan wine industry quite hard. The Republic of Moldova is therefore trying even more to intensify relations with the European Union; it strives for integration into the European structure as an independent partner. Germany is one of Moldova’s most important trade partners. Several German firms have already become successfully engaged in the region.

Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of young people still seek employment abroad. In recent years, almost 300,000 Moldovans have obtained Romanian passports, giving them freedom of travel. More than anyone, the elite (e.g., academics and physicians) are moving away. Hospital conditions are a catastrophe; tuberculosis and hepatitis are rampant. On the other hand, one finds a considerable number of Western luxury limousines and sports cars on Chișinău’s boulevards. Apparently a stratum of the nouveau riches is doing profitable business, e.g., in smuggling cigarettes, gasoline or with weapons out of Transnistria. Until early March 2006, there was no customs check between Transnistria and Moldova, allowing goods from Ukraine to flow into the country unhindered. As a result, the country lost an immense amount of tax collections. An especially lucrative business for the criminal circle—here subsumed under the name “Mafia”—is apparently white slave trade. Ostensibly, according to press reports, up to thirty thousand young women and girls have been placed in western and central European brothels in recent years.

The capital Chișinău has changed its appearance. Old Jewish residential districts on the city center’s edge were torn down over large areas from the close of the 1980s through the early 1990s and replaced by apartment buildings and arterial roads. Many large-scale projects ventured earlier now stand as abandoned ruins. Meanwhile, one can observe how with American support a new beginning of Jewish life is developing in the city. American youth groups of the Jewish movement Chabad assisted in the revival of a small district with Jewish facilities around a synagogue, which is conducted by the Lubavitch Hassidic school of thought.

In the heart of the old city Chișinău, behind high walls and relatively unnoticed by city dwellers and tourists, there is the house that Russian poet Alexander Pushkin occupied from 1820 to 1823 during his banishment to Kishinev. Here today is a small, lovingly appointed museum that houses witness to all phases of the poet’s life. Within sight of the building resided his protector, Governor of Bessarabia, General Inzov, of whose palace not a single trace remains today.

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