This article aims to analyse the finances of the Coimbra city council from 1557 to 1836. Our objective is to examine the causes of long-term changes in municipal revenue and expenditure, particularly during the extended period of decline that occurred between the mid-17th century and the late 18th century. This study will focus on the composition of revenue and expenditure, as well as on revenue collection mechanisms. We aim to present the empirical data on the revenue and expenditure components that allow us to understand the changes that took place. Finally, we hope to be able to explain the causes that led to significant variations in revenue and expenditure in a dialogue with existing literature. The primary sources used correspond to municipal revenue and expenditure books, supplemented by other sources such as legislation, correspondence and auction books.

The fifth season of excavations of Oponice Castle in 2020 was located in the lower castle’s courtyard. The research led to discovery of an original clay floor being heavily burned with charred plank and a rectangular stone-brick construction. The construction has collapsed upper part with a fallen low brick arch. The whole area was covered with numerous stove tiles and one clay mold for the production of stove tiles. The construction was identified as a pottery kiln dated to the second half of the 16th until the first half of the 17th century AD by the findings from excavated layer identified to the kiln destruction. Also, written sources mention a large fire in 1645 which destroyed the castle. The aim of this article is to use different methods of dating and refine the chronology of the context through microarchaeology and Bayesian modeling. For these purposes different types of samples were collected. The sampling focused on site formation process determination of pottery kiln use and the way of its destruction. Applying Bayesian analysis improved overall dating, through modeled time interval of the three individual sequences and helped recreated historical events during the period, when the calibration curve fluctuates.

This article examines a case study of profound agricultural transformations along the Early Modern Age. Around the protoindustrial town of Alcoi there was an intense process of substitution of cultivations that altered the physiognomy of the rural activities of an area traditionally considered as poor from the agrarian point of view. The catalogue of these changes is substantial: the substitution of wheat for barley, the early introduction of corn and its strong spread, the advance of the cultivation of vine, and, finally, the adoption of crop rotations in the irrigable area that was part of a limited extension of land, though significant for a mountainous area. Throughout the text these changes are described and explained, keeping in mind the proto-industrial framework in which they appear, as well as their context in the Valencián and Spanish environment.

During Miguel de Cervantes' lifetime, the Mediterranean World was suffering a transformation in the internal distribution of power, both political and economic. Although the Ottoman fleet was defeated, which established the limits of dominance between the two empires, this did not prevent the entry in this space of the new commercial powers from northern Europe, which changed the trade in the Mediterranean. This article tries to provide a synthesis of this process, of which Cervantes was a direct witness both in his personal life and through the works which have survived to our time.