For Europe, the death of French King Charles VIII was perhaps the largest and most far-reaching of the numerous shocks of 1498. At the ripe age of 27 while residing at his family's Orleans estate in Amboise, the place where he grew up, the King of France hit the top of a door with his head. Rushing off to a tennis match, he hit a door lintel, and then, continued on his way. After the match he fell into a coma and died nine hours later. He had no heirs.
Charles' young queen, now widow Anne of Brittany, as heir to the recovered state of Brittany, was suddenly left without a clear line to maintain her power at court, except through some new marriage. Charles' dear older sister Anne de Beaujeu had been his regent when he was a minor, and she might have answers. But she had retreated to administer Bourbon lands since 1491, and could only suggest to Charles' widow that she had better find a Valois close enough in the lineage of that same illustrious family. And he better be close enough to Charles if she hoped to stay in orbit. The young widow was 21 years old.
Amazingly she did, and by August 19, of 1498, she agreed to marry this Valois, the Duke of Orleans, if he could get his prior engagement to Joan (the true sister of both Charles and Anne Beaujeu) annulled. This involved petitioning the pope, Roderigo de Borgia. And so it was. In the same month, letters went out to the various sovereigns including those of Spain and England looking for peace treaties. Spain and England had been working thru the intermediary, the protonotary Ayala and was securing greater and greater security with each other. Henry VII in England wanted assurances that France would not help Scotland, and from Scotland that they would not receive help from France. A peaceful region would be necessary if King Henry VII of England wanted to grow trade and the tarriffs found in that activity.
In Paris, this Louis d'Orleans was eight years older than the just deceased King, but had come from a lesser line of the Valois family. He himself had tried to unseat Charles VIII during his regency, an uprising harnessing energies of other notables which was later termed 'The Mad War'. But that had been quashed by Charles' big sister Anne Beaujeu. Louis was captured, 'tried' and imprisoned until his wife, Joan of Berry, sister to Anne, who, loyal to Louis and her vows to him, faithful in her Christian love of Christ and Mary, and well-educated, if physically deformed, pled her case to let Louis go. Here's a link to wikipedia links on these sisters. And so he was. In time, Louis later served well under Charles on his invasion to Italy, and among many things, had seen at close hand the weaknesses of the forces, if not the states of Italy. Their soldiers could die and get tired just like French ones.
Anne of Brittany and Louis d'Orleans would marry and have nine children. Only two of these would survive birth. The first one, Claude, became the wife of Francis I: she would become the next Queen consort for France. But Anne, despite leaving to pick the administrators who would take charge of Brittany in her absence, and despite all the other changes (she had lost six pregnancies while married to Charles, in less than six years), she would not be crowned with a ceremony to Louis as queen until 1504. Louis and Anne would be buried together at Basilique Saint-Denis.
Crucially, Louis d'Orleans, though of a 'lesser line', could rightly claim an inheritance of suzerainty over Milan through his grandmother Valentina Visconti.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Friday, August 24, 2018
news August 2018
Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald J Trump, in his first of two trials, this one held in US District Criminal Court in Alexandria, VA, was found guilty of numerous charges.
Meanwhile this still happens, even in Israel as elsewhere.
For those who would contain them, another migrant crisis spills out into the international news.
____________________________________________________
The latest cover of Time magazine.
But, the cover of the 'paper of record' next day prioritized the other big story of that day:#Breaking: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been found guilty of 8 of the 18 charges he faced in his tax and bank fraud trial. https://t.co/EUnPep31Xj pic.twitter.com/r36e8uuKNJ— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) August 21, 2018
The front page of the New York Times. pic.twitter.com/WBdN5WLJWg— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 22, 2018
Still after another particularly explosive day in very damaging revelations for the Trump Administration, Michael Cohen's own lawyer underscores just how defiantly his client has turned.The president of the United States was implicated in a federal crime today, which is the same day his Supreme Court nominee made the rounds. The GOP is acting like it's OK for a president who may have committed high crimes and misdemeanors to make such a lifetime appointment.— John Stoehr (@johnastoehr) August 22, 2018
And the next day, with the announcement that the CEO of the National Enquirer's parent company David Pecker has secret tapes and paperwork detailing past 'deals' with Donald J Trump & associates, the news all morning was splattered with bad dick jokes.Michael Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, tells NPR that Cohen considers President Trump "to be both corrupt and a dangerous person in the Oval Office." https://t.co/64iDAqm9Bj pic.twitter.com/WVkSyXXbFF— NPR (@NPR) August 22, 2018
So many people are scratching their heads wondering just what is going on?Ut oh. DOJ immunized Donald Trump's Pecker. https://t.co/wstFEotIo3— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 23, 2018
Numerous unnecessary tragedies grip the country's conscience.Breaking News: Russian hackers appear to have a new target: conservative U.S. think tanks that have broken with President Trump, a report by Microsoft found https://t.co/FsgygaRoqm— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 21, 2018
While still, some maintain there is a better way to run government.To date, no one in the Trump Administration has been held accountable for its family-separation policy, even after evidence has steadily mounted as to its immense human costs and administrative failures. https://t.co/lxYhQ4LWpN— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) August 23, 2018
________________________________________________________Elizabeth Warren unveils sweeping reforms that would heavily restrict and expose corporate lobbying, upending the political economy of Washington. https://t.co/eOxPMbGLBW by @ryangrim— The Intercept (@theintercept) August 21, 2018
Meanwhile this still happens, even in Israel as elsewhere.
Worst floods in a century in the Indian State of Kerala.Israeli forces arrest, detain Palestine TV reporter in West Bankhttps://t.co/RYs0P8S73c— Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom) August 21, 2018
The worst floods in a century have devastated the Indian state of Kerala — in pictures https://t.co/mKOv2SgbXO pic.twitter.com/pnE0HXL3Lp— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 23, 2018
For those who would contain them, another migrant crisis spills out into the international news.
More than 100 migrants storm border of North African Spanish enclave https://t.co/8j9NTPbuWX— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) August 22, 2018
____________________________________________________
The latest cover of Time magazine.
The latest cover of TIME. pic.twitter.com/b7yoIGz7Cv— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) August 23, 2018
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Early days of Luca Pacioli: 1445-1486
Luca Pacioli came from Sansepolcro, in central Italy. Lying in the uplands of the Tiber River, this little town was founded by pilgrims bringing back fragments from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A dream told them to build a church on the very spot in order to house the relics they'd stolen. And so it was, and by 1012 a new abbey was built on the site. The town over centuries grew up around this, and nestled in gentler flanks of the Appenines, this little gorgeous space also found itself a prize of strategic importance.
To the west was Arezzo, and farther was Florence. To the north across the back ridge of Appenine mountains lay the route to Rimini and Ravenna which were very often held thru medieval times as papal holdings. The fifteenth century was no different. Behind that lay Venice in its lagoon. To the south lay Perugia and past that Rome herself.
Five years before Pacioli was born, in 1442, armed papal forces of Eugenius IV, in the battle of Anghieri, beat those of Milan. Thereupon this pope sold Sansepolcro to Florence. Ten years before (1427), a previous pope had purchased the town by legitimising a couple illegitimate sons of the Malatesta family. Just thirty years before that still another pope had sold the place to an earlier Malatesta generation who were then the rulers in Rimini. Thus, years later, by selling Florence the town, a favor was seen as being granted in the additional security this gave to Florence, and to its Medici rulers, by this pope.
It must be hard to remember that math didn't really arrive in Europe outside a few elite purveyors, until the fifteenth century. That widespread dispersal came with the printing press. Merchants used such systems, tax-collectors too, and certainly the good bankers. But it was a specialist's game, fixed in abstract terms like 'figures' and 'sums' - things that may have well been foreign commodities. Scarce and widely prized, yet misunderstood. Luca Pacioli is remembered these days as one of the earliest to make a book for humanists in the vernacular about maths. He did that in Venice as his time dictated and, appropriately as well, he gave us the first real tract on financial accounting.
There were earlier examples as Jane Gleeson-White tells us in her monograph Double-Entry (published in 2011 by WW Norton & Co. for the English language). For example, she spends a few paragraphs on the nature of typical (but, and also, crucially well-documented) examples of actual accounting records as these were used and kept in Venice by one Jacomo Badoer. He used Hindu-Arabic numerals, as well as the ledger style of rows of lists of goods and prices, investments and returns.
All we know of Luca Pacioli's earliest beginnings is that the young Luca was taken in probably around 1460 by a local merchant in Sansepolcro who was named Folco de' Belfolci. A new math had been promoted in Italy from the thirteenth century, with the adaptation and teaching of Fibonacci's Arab-Hindu math lettering and systems. Merchants picked up these methods, and a hundred years before Pacioli there were six schools of this math in Florence alone. But lucky (and unlucky) for him, when Luca Pacioli came of age, the leading name about town was none other than Piero della Francesco, known for his painting, but also his understanding of math and other things like optics. By 1464 the young Pacioli left Sansepolcro to teach abbaco math in the big city of Venice, the nearest world entrepot. Here he went to school and taught and studied finance and accounting.
Quickly, Pacioli devoloped a system for accounting that was modeled on these years of study and practice in Venice. This system, also lucky for him, became the European model of accountancy, and specifically, double-entry book-keeping, upon which all others since have been built. But unluckily, he wouldn't gain credit for all this til rather recently. This was because Piero della Francesco far outshone messer Pacioli in mere repute over the subsequent generations. More on that later. It must have been in these years that Pacioli had found a copy of Fibonacci's Liber Abaci and at some point translated big chunks of it into Italian for his students.
Yet it was this same Pacioli who set in motion here in Venice his 'editions' of tutorials for mathematics. By 1470 he was acting as an agent and teacher in math to the sons of Antonio Rompiasi. That was the year he also went with Leon Battista Alberti to Rome. When this great humanist and teacher died two years later, Pacioli went on to Naples. After another stay here, he caught a job in Perugia teaching math again. In the meantime he had become a travelling monk with the Franciscans and in 1475 took vows as a Conventual, with some of their rules relaxed for itinerant friars.
In Perugia he began not only teaching but writing books and textbooks for his students. When the city gave him a position as a teacher they hoped to enhance their own prestige and that of their sons. Classes for him could be as many as 150 students at a time. In a way, Pacioli could feel like he had made it, yet his ambition grew. In 1478 he produced another book on math and in 1481 went to Zara, the Venetian capital of their Dalmatian province in Croatia. But he also spent time looking at the huge collections of manuscripts made publicly available by the Medici in Florence. By 1482 the Elements of Euclid - the first math text of any kind - had been published in Venice and for Pacioli, he could see the future. The following year, Pacioli's printer would open a shop. Pacioli's own text of Fibonacci, then Euclid, then a great Summation of these, plus a section on accounting, had been growing.
In 1486 he returned to Perugia to teach there again. He could put the final touches on his masterwork surrounded by familiar mountains. In the search for something more permanent in a rapidly changing world, he sought a way to set down the summation of what he had learned for a wider audience. And this was to show a more accountable method of record-keeping that cold hold even business and markets accountable.
To the west was Arezzo, and farther was Florence. To the north across the back ridge of Appenine mountains lay the route to Rimini and Ravenna which were very often held thru medieval times as papal holdings. The fifteenth century was no different. Behind that lay Venice in its lagoon. To the south lay Perugia and past that Rome herself.
Five years before Pacioli was born, in 1442, armed papal forces of Eugenius IV, in the battle of Anghieri, beat those of Milan. Thereupon this pope sold Sansepolcro to Florence. Ten years before (1427), a previous pope had purchased the town by legitimising a couple illegitimate sons of the Malatesta family. Just thirty years before that still another pope had sold the place to an earlier Malatesta generation who were then the rulers in Rimini. Thus, years later, by selling Florence the town, a favor was seen as being granted in the additional security this gave to Florence, and to its Medici rulers, by this pope.
It must be hard to remember that math didn't really arrive in Europe outside a few elite purveyors, until the fifteenth century. That widespread dispersal came with the printing press. Merchants used such systems, tax-collectors too, and certainly the good bankers. But it was a specialist's game, fixed in abstract terms like 'figures' and 'sums' - things that may have well been foreign commodities. Scarce and widely prized, yet misunderstood. Luca Pacioli is remembered these days as one of the earliest to make a book for humanists in the vernacular about maths. He did that in Venice as his time dictated and, appropriately as well, he gave us the first real tract on financial accounting.
There were earlier examples as Jane Gleeson-White tells us in her monograph Double-Entry (published in 2011 by WW Norton & Co. for the English language). For example, she spends a few paragraphs on the nature of typical (but, and also, crucially well-documented) examples of actual accounting records as these were used and kept in Venice by one Jacomo Badoer. He used Hindu-Arabic numerals, as well as the ledger style of rows of lists of goods and prices, investments and returns.
"Badoer was a nobleman who for over three years ran a commercial venture in Constantinople, the meeting place of the trade routes of Europe and Asia, trading for himself and as an agent for Venetian merchants.... The dangers of sea travel ... led to the development of maritime insurance, an industry new in Badoer's day and one into which he ventured. Charging a premium of 3 to 19 percent (depending on the risk factor), Badoer suffered only one insurance loss over three years, a testament to the protection provided by the Venetian navy to its merchants."Badoer's record was written from 1436 - 1439 but gives example of the various kinds of goods, capital and credit, and their accounting. Pacioli would improve on these and publish it in a book on math for a wider audience.
All we know of Luca Pacioli's earliest beginnings is that the young Luca was taken in probably around 1460 by a local merchant in Sansepolcro who was named Folco de' Belfolci. A new math had been promoted in Italy from the thirteenth century, with the adaptation and teaching of Fibonacci's Arab-Hindu math lettering and systems. Merchants picked up these methods, and a hundred years before Pacioli there were six schools of this math in Florence alone. But lucky (and unlucky) for him, when Luca Pacioli came of age, the leading name about town was none other than Piero della Francesco, known for his painting, but also his understanding of math and other things like optics. By 1464 the young Pacioli left Sansepolcro to teach abbaco math in the big city of Venice, the nearest world entrepot. Here he went to school and taught and studied finance and accounting.
Quickly, Pacioli devoloped a system for accounting that was modeled on these years of study and practice in Venice. This system, also lucky for him, became the European model of accountancy, and specifically, double-entry book-keeping, upon which all others since have been built. But unluckily, he wouldn't gain credit for all this til rather recently. This was because Piero della Francesco far outshone messer Pacioli in mere repute over the subsequent generations. More on that later. It must have been in these years that Pacioli had found a copy of Fibonacci's Liber Abaci and at some point translated big chunks of it into Italian for his students.
Yet it was this same Pacioli who set in motion here in Venice his 'editions' of tutorials for mathematics. By 1470 he was acting as an agent and teacher in math to the sons of Antonio Rompiasi. That was the year he also went with Leon Battista Alberti to Rome. When this great humanist and teacher died two years later, Pacioli went on to Naples. After another stay here, he caught a job in Perugia teaching math again. In the meantime he had become a travelling monk with the Franciscans and in 1475 took vows as a Conventual, with some of their rules relaxed for itinerant friars.
In Perugia he began not only teaching but writing books and textbooks for his students. When the city gave him a position as a teacher they hoped to enhance their own prestige and that of their sons. Classes for him could be as many as 150 students at a time. In a way, Pacioli could feel like he had made it, yet his ambition grew. In 1478 he produced another book on math and in 1481 went to Zara, the Venetian capital of their Dalmatian province in Croatia. But he also spent time looking at the huge collections of manuscripts made publicly available by the Medici in Florence. By 1482 the Elements of Euclid - the first math text of any kind - had been published in Venice and for Pacioli, he could see the future. The following year, Pacioli's printer would open a shop. Pacioli's own text of Fibonacci, then Euclid, then a great Summation of these, plus a section on accounting, had been growing.
In 1486 he returned to Perugia to teach there again. He could put the final touches on his masterwork surrounded by familiar mountains. In the search for something more permanent in a rapidly changing world, he sought a way to set down the summation of what he had learned for a wider audience. And this was to show a more accountable method of record-keeping that cold hold even business and markets accountable.
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