Renaissance Croatia was not so different than the rest of the Europe: it was a humanist melting pot of cultures and ideas. We do not have any concrete information about trombone and trombone ensemble in Croatia in the period, but by looking at evidence from Rector’s Chapel in Dubrovnik and trombone players’ nationalities, I suggest that they were present and active. In Europe, the trombone was generally in use from its murky appearance in the 15th century, reaching its high peak in the late Renaissance and early Baroque. Therefore, in the hope of drawing the attention of the global community of medievalists and ottomanists to these documents and archives, I have presented a general description of the existing records, their organization and arrangement, as well a brief assessment of the kind of information that they include.
The greatest obstacle to the full appreciation of their importance has been the obvious language barrier, but a systematic approach to these documents could generate valuable results and further advance our knowledge about the history of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. These rich archival collections contain diverse and valuable facts about the establishment and functioning of Ottoman rule in South-East Europe, but despite of that, the information they give has not yet been fully incorporated into the dominant historical narratives about the rise of the Ottoman Empire. This paper provides an outline and brief summary of the Slavic, Latin and Italian documents from the late Middle Ages which are currently kept in the State Archives of Zadar and Dubrovnik in the Republic of Croatia, highlighting their great potential and possibilities for the research and study of early Ottoman history in the Balkans. Despite the obvious power of social networks, blogs, and the Internet in general, I still could not ever have thought that one of my photographs would become so coveted, especially since I did not intentionally seek the exposure it received. But why could a simple photo of cat paw prints on a medieval manuscript become so popular on the Internet? Do manuscripts and felines make a good combination, or can this popularity be ascribed to the fact that many contemporary cat owners identify themselves with the unfortunate medieval scribe? I cannot give a straightforward answer to these questions because it is clear to me that there is no formula or recipe for determining whether anything on the Internet will become a success or not. It has now been re-blogged, re-tweeted, shared and commented on so many times that I cannot keep track of it all, and the story has been covered in English, Russian, Japanese, Greek, Romanian, French, Hebrew, to name just the ones that I saw. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.It is a pleasant and heartwarming experience to see a photo I took receive so much positive attention from so many people in different parts of the globe. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt.”
Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. “Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. He was forced to leave the rest of the page empty, drew a picture of a cat and cursed the creature with the following words:
A Deventer scribe, writing around 1420, found his manuscript ruined by a urine stain left there by a cat the night before. Cat paws in a fifteenth-century manuscript (photo taken at the Dubrovnik archives by the medieval owner of this manuscript may have been quite annoyed with these paw marks on his otherwise neat manuscript, another fifteenth-century manuscript reveals that he got off lucky.