How to Cite
License (Chapter)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Identifiers (Book)
Published
Il rame quale oggetto di esportazione dal Regno d’Ungheria verso Venezia nel Trecento
Abstract Exports of copper from territories of presentday Slovakia represented one of the main articles that integrated the Kingdom of Hungary into the economiccommercial system of Europe between late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Copper was mainly extracted in two areas. The first to consider is that of Eastern Slovakia (the SpišGemer region), from which in the early decades of the fourteenth century copper was transported to Flanders via Poland and the Hanseatic cities. In Bruges, in relation to the aforesaid passage, it was called “Rame di Pollana” and on galleys of the “mude di Fiandra” on return it was brought to Venice for further processing. Major exports of copper – both in terms of imported volume and the amount of information received from the coeval Italian sources – were from central Slovakia (Banská Bystrica region), historically documented since 1369. To Venice, intended to become the main Mediterranean center for the processing and trading of copper, this came in a more direct way through Vienna or through Croatia and the Adriatic, through the Austrian or Tuscan mediators, among which the Medici in the first place. The copper of Banská Bystrica (“rame de Solio”) – with the related customs policy and processing strategies in order to favour its further commercialization in the Levant – intensively engaged the Venice Senate, which created special commissions of Savi (“Sapientes raminis”). The interest of the Venetian government for Slovak copper, in the context of the fluctuating political relations between the two countries, persisted until the beginning of the fifteenth century, when it gradually disappeared, also from the Senate registers. The importance of the copper of Banská Bystrica appeared again a century later, with the ThurzoFugger society, with which it reached the peak of production; but this represented another, successive and different chapter in the history of Slovak copper.
