title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile in 1469 laid the foundations of the Monarchy of Spain. In 1492 the Spanish colonization of the Americas began, and political power began to shift away towards Castile. Tensions between Catalan institutions and the Monarchy, alongside the peasants' revolts, provoked the Reapers' War (1640–1659). By the Treaty of the Pyrenees the Roussillon was ceded to France. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the Crown of Aragon supported the Archduke Charles of Habsburg. After the surrender of Barcelona in 1714, king Philip V of Bourbon, inspired by the French model, imposed absolutism and a unifying administration across Spain, and enacted the Nueva Planta decrees for every realm of the Crown of Aragon, which suppressed the main Catalan, Aragonese, Valencian and Majorcan political institutions and rights and merged them into the Crown of Castile as provinces. However, the Principality of Catalonia remained as an administrative unit until the establishment of the Spanish provincial division of 1833, which divided Catalonia into four provinces.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Like much of the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, it was colonized by Ancient Greeks, who chose to settle in Roses. Both Greeks and Carthaginians interacted with the main Iberian population. After the Carthaginian defeat, it became, along with the rest of Hispania, a part of the Roman Empire, Tarraco being one of the main Roman posts in the Iberian Peninsula and the capital of the province of Tarraconensis.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The Visigoths ruled after the Western Roman Empire's collapse near the end of the 5th century. Moorish Al-Andalus gained control in the early 8th century, after conquering the Visigothic kingdom in 711–718. After the defeat of Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqiwas's troops at Tours in 732, the Franks gradually gained control of the former Visigoth territories north of the Pyrenees, which had been captured by the Muslims or had become allied with them, in what is today Catalonia under French administration. In 795, Charlemagne created what came to be known by historiography and some Frankish chronicles as the Marca Hispanica, a buffer zone beyond the province of Septimania, made up of locally administered separate counties which served as a defensive barrier between the Umayyad of Al-Andalus and the Frankish Kingdom.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: A distinctive Catalan culture started to develop in the Middle Ages stemming from a number of these small counties throughout the northernmost part of Catalonia. The counts of Barcelona were Frankish vassals nominated by the Carolingian emperor, then the king of the Franks, to whom they were feudatories (801–988). In 878, Wilfred the Hairy, count of Urgell and Cerdanya, was appointed count of Barcelona, Girona and Osona. Since then, these last three counties were always ruled by the same person, becoming the political core of the future Principality of Catalonia. Upon his death in 897 Wilfred made their titles hereditaries and thus founded the dynasty of the House of Barcelona, which ruled Catalonia until the death of Martin I, its last ruling member, in 1410. Many abbeys were founded between the ninth century and the twelfth century while in the cities the episcopal seats were restored, forming important artistic and intellectual centers. These religious centers contribute to an important diffusion of the Romanesque art in Catalonia (monasteries of Santa Maria de Ripoll and Montserrat, collegiate church of Cardona, cathedral of Girona...) as well as to the maintenance of rich libraries nourished by Classical, Visigothic and Arab works. The scholar and mathematician Gerbert d'Aurillac (future pope under the name of Sylvester II) studied in Vic and Ripoll and knowledge of mathematics and astronomy were introduced from Arabic.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In 988 Count Borrell II did not recognise the Frankish king Hugh Capet and his new dynasty, effectively taking Barcelona out of Frankish rule. From that point on, the counts of Barcelona often referred to themselves as "princeps" (prince), in order to show their preeminence over the other Catalan counts. During the 9th and 10th centuries, the counties increasingly became a society of aloers, peasant proprietors of small, family-based farms, who lived by subsistence agriculture and owed no formal feudal allegiance. At the start of the 11th century the Catalan Counties suffer an important process of feudalisation, as the miles formed links of vassalage over this previously independent peasantry. The middle years of the century were characterized by virulent class warfare. Seigniorial violence was unleashed against the peasants, utilizing new military tactics, based on contracting well armed mercenary soldiers mounted on horses. By the end of the century, most of the aloers had been converted into vassals. During the regency of countess Ermesinde of Carcassonne (1017-1057), which received the government of Barcelona after the death of her husband the count Ramon Borrell, the disintegration of central power was evident. The response of the Catholic Church to the feudal violence was the establishment of the "sagreres" around churches and the movement of Peace and Truce of God. The first assembly of Peace and Truce was presided by Abbot Oliba in Toulouges, Roussillon in 1027. The grandson of Ermesinde, count Ramon Berenguer I, began the codification of Catalan law in the written Usages of Barcelona which was to become the first full compilation of feudal law in Western Europe. Legal codification was part of the count's efforts to forward and somehow control the process of feudalization.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Under count Ramon Berenguer III, the County of Barcelona experienced a new phase of territorial expansion. This included a joint Catalan and Pisan Crusade against the Taifa of Majorca (1114) and the conquest of Tarragona (1116), restoring in the last one the archiepiscopal see of the city (1119), disbanded after the Muslim conquest. That meant the independence of the Catalan Church from the bishopric of Narbonne.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In 1137 Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona married Queen Petronilla of Aragon, establishing the dynastic union of the County of Barcelona and its dominions with the Kingdom of Aragon, which was to create the Crown of Aragon. The reign of Ramon Berenguer IV saw the Catalan conquest of Lleida and Tortosa. Their son, Alfons, was the first king of Aragon who, in turn was the count of Barcelona, titles all the kings of the Crown of Aragon inherited from then on. During the reign of Alfons, in 1173, Catalonia was legally delimited for the first time, while the first compilation of the Usages of Barcelona was made in the process to turn them into the law of Catalonia ("Consuetudinem Cathalonie"). Apart from the Usages, between 1170 and 1195 the "Liber feudorum maior" and the "Gesta Comitum Barchinonensium" were compiled and written, being considered together as the three milestones of Catalan political identity.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: His son, king Peter II of Aragon, faced the defense of the Occitan territories, acquired from the times of Ramon Berenguer I onwards, from the Albigensian Crusade. The Battle of Muret (12 September 1213) and the unexpected defeat of King Peter and his vassals and allies, the counts of Toulouse, Comminges and Foix, against the French-Crusader armies, resulted in the fading of the strong human, cultural and economic ties existing between the ancient territories of Catalonia and the Languedoc.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In the Treaty of Corbeil, 1258, James I of Aragon, descendant of Sunifred and Bello of Carcassonne and therefore heir of the House of Barcelona, relinquished his family rights and dominions in the Languedoc and recognized the Capetian king of France Louis IX as heir of the Carolingian Dynasty. In return, the king of France formally renounced his claims of feudal lordship over all the Catalan counties. This treaty confirmed, from French point of view, the independence of the Catalan counties established and exercised during the previous three centuries, but also meant the irremediable separation between the people of Catalonia and the Languedoc.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: As a coastal territory within the Crown of Aragon and with the increasing importance of the port of Barcelona, Catalonia became the main centre of the Crown's maritime power, promoting and helping to expand its influence and power by conquest and trade into Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia and Sicily.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: At the same time, the Principality of Catalonia developed a complex institutional and political system based on the concept of pact between the estates of the realm and the monarch. The laws (called constitutions) had to be approved in the General Court of Catalonia, one of the first parliamentary bodies of Europe that banned the royal power to create legislation unilaterally, sharing it with the estates represented in the Court (since 1283). The first Catalan constitutions, derived from the Usages of Barcelona, are of the ones from the Catalan Courts ("Corts") of Barcelona from 1283. The last ones were promulgated by the Courts of 1705–1706, presided by the disputed Habsburg king Charles III. The compilations of the Constitutions and other rights of Catalonia followed the Roman tradition of the Codex. This constitutions developed a compilation of rights for the inhabitants of the Principality and limited the power of the kings.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The General Court of Catalonia (or Catalan Courts), with roots dating from the 11th century, is one of the first parliamentary bodies of Europe that, since 1283, obtained the power to create legislation with the monarch. The Courts were composed of the three Estates organized in to "arms" (braços), were presided over by the monarch as count of Barcelona. The current Parliament of Catalonia is considered the symbolic and historic successor of this institution.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In order to recapt the "tax of the General", the Courts of 1359 established a permanent representation of deputies, called Deputation of the General (in Catalan: "Diputació del General") and later usually known as Generalitat, which gained considerable political power over the next centuries.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The Principality saw a prosperous period during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. The population increased; Catalan language and culture expanded into the islands of the Western Mediterranean. The reign of Peter III of Aragon ("the Great") included the conquest of Sicily and the successful defense against a French crusade; his son and successor Alfonso III ("the Generous") conquered Menorca; and Peter's second son James II conquered Sardinia; Catalonia was the center of the empire, expanding and organizing it, establishing institutional systems similar to its own. Barcelona, then the most frequent royal residence, was consolidated as the administrative center of the domains with the establishment of the Royal Archives in 1318. The Catalan Company, mercenaries led by Roger de Flor and formed by Almogavar veterans of the War of the Sicilian Vespers, were hired by the Byzantine Empire to fight the Turks, defeating them in several battles. After the assassination of Roger de Flor by orders of the emperor's son Michael Palaiologos (1305), the Company took revenge sacking Byzantine territory, and they conquered the duchies of Athens and Neopatras in the name of the King of Aragon. Catalan rule over Greek lands lasted until 1390.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: This territorial expansion was accompanied by a great development of the Catalan trade, centered in Barcelona, creating an extensive trade network across the Mediterranean which competed with those of the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice. In this line, institutions were created that would give legal protection to merchants, such as the Consulate of the Sea and the Book of the Consulate of the Sea, one of the first compilations of maritime law.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The second quarter of the 14th century saw crucial changes for Catalonia, marked by a succession of natural catastrophes, demographic crises, stagnation and decline in the Catalan economy, and the rise of social tensions. The year 1333 was known as "Lo mal any primer" (Catalan: "The first bad year") due to poor wheat harvest. The domains of the Aragonese Crown were affected severely by the Black Death pandemic and by later outbreaks of the plague. Between 1347 and 1497 Catalonia lost 37 percent of its population.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In 1410, King Martin I, the last reigning monarch of the House of Barcelona, died without surviving descendants. Under the Compromise of Caspe (1412), Ferdinand from the Castilian House of Trastámara received the Crown of Aragon as Ferdinand I of Aragon. Ferdinand's successor, Alfonso V ("the Magnanimous"), promoted a new stage of Catalan-Aragonese expansion, this time over the Kingdom of Naples, over which he eventually gained rule in 1443. However, he aggravated the social crisis in the Principality of Catalonia, both in the countryside and in the cities. Political conflict in Barcelona arose due to the disputes over the control of the Consell de Cent between two political factions, Biga and Busca looking for a solution to the economic crisis. Meanwhile, the "remença" (serfs') peasants subjected to the feudal abuses known as Evil customs began to organize themselves as a syndicate against seignorial pressures, serching protection from the monarch. Alfonso's brother, John II ("the Unreliable"), was an exceptionally deeply hated and opposed regent and ruler - both in the Basque kingdom of Navarre and in Catalonia.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The opossition of the institutions of Catalonia to the policies of John II resulted in their support to the son of John, Charles, Prince of Viana over his denied dynastic rights. In response of the detention of Charles by his father, the Generalitat established a political body, the Council of the Principality, whith whom, under menace of a conflict, John was forced to negotiate. The Capitulation of Vilafranca (1461) forced to release Charles from prison and appoint him lieutenant of Catalonia, while the king would need permission of the Generalitat to enter the Principality. The content of the Capitulation represented a culmination and consolidation of pactism and the constitutional system of Catalonia. However, the disaggrement of King John, the death of Charles shortly after and the Remença Uprising in 1462 led to the ten-year Catalan Civil War (1462-1472) that left the country exhausted. In 1472, the last separate ruler of Catalonia, the king René of Anjou ("the Good"), lost the war against King John.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: John's son, Ferdinand II ("the Catholic"), recovered without war the northern Catalan counties (1493), which it had occupied during the conflict, and profoundly reformed Catalan institutions. The "Constitució de l'Observança" (1481) was approved, establishing the submission of royal power to the laws approved in the Catalan Courts. After decades of conflict, the peasants of "remença" were liberated from most of feudal abuses by the Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe (1486), in exchange for a payment.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1469) unified two of the three major Christian kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula, while the Kingdom of Navarre was incorporated later following Ferdinand II's 1512 invasion of the Basque kingdom.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: This resulted in the reinforcement of the concept of Spain, which was already present in the mind of these kings, made up by the former Crown of Aragon, Castile, and a Navarre annexed to Castile (1515). In 1492, the last remaining portion of Al-Andalus around Granada was conquered and the Spanish conquest of the Americas began. Political power began to shift away from Aragon toward Castile and, subsequently, from Castile to the Spanish Empire, which engaged in frequent warfare in Europe striving for world domination. In 1516 Charles I of Spain became the first king to rule the Crowns of Castile and Aragon simultaneously by his own right. Following the death of his paternal (House of Habsburg) grandfather, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, he was also elected Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1519. The reign of Charles V was a relative harmonious period, during which Catalonia generally accepted the new structure of Spain, despite its own marginalization.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: For an extended period, Catalonia, as part of the late Crown of Aragon, successfully retained its own institutional system and legislation against the trend observed in southern and central Europe throughout the early modern age, which eroded the importance of representative institutions, until they were finally suppressed as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession defeat at the beginning of the 18th century. The prolonged absence of the monarchs, who resided most of the time in Castile, led to the consolidation of the figure of the viceroy as the representative of the king in the Principality.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Over the next two centuries, Catalonia was generally on the losing side of a series of wars that led steadily to more centralization of power in Spain. Despite this fact, between the 16th and 18th centuries, the role of the political community in local affairs and the general government of the country was increased, while the royal powers remained relatively restricted, specially after the two last Courts (1701–1702 and 1705–1706). Tensions between the constitutional Catalan institutions and the gradually more centralized Monarchy began to arise. In 1626 the Count-Duke of Olivares, minister of Philip IV, tried to establish the military contribution of the states of the Monarchy, the "Unión de Armas" (Union of Arms), but the resistance of Catalonia to the project was strong. This events, alongside other factors such as the economic crisis, the presence of soldiers and the peasants' revolts led to the Reapers' War, also called Catalan Revolt (1640–1652), in the context of the Franco-Spanish War, in which Catalonia, led by the president of the Generalitat, Pau Claris, briefly declared itself as an independent republic under French protection in January 1641, and later joined the Monarchy of France, appointing king Louis XIII as count of Barcelona, but, after the first military successes the Catalans were finally defeated and reincorporated into the Crown of Spain in 1652.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In 1659, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees signed by Philip IV of Spain, the "comarques" (counties) of Roussillon, Conflent, Vallespir and part of la Cerdanya, now known as French Cerdagne, were ceded to France. The town of Llívia remained part of Spain, however, an isolated enclave a mile north of the new border. Catalan institutions were suppressed in this part of the territory and, in 1700, public use of Catalan language was prohibited. In recent times, this ceded area has come to be known by nationalist political parties in Catalonia as Northern Catalonia (Roussillon in French), part of the Catalan-spoken territories known as Catalan Countries. Currently, this region is administratively part of French "Départment" of Pyrénées-Orientales.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: In the last decades of the 17th century during the reign of Spain's last Habsburg king, Charles II, despite intermittent conflict between Spain and France and new internal conflicts like the Revolt of the Barretines (1687-1689), the population increased to approximately 500.000 inhabitants and the Catalan economy recovered. This economic growth was boosted by the export of wine to England and the Dutch Republic, as due to the trade war of French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert against the Dutch and later to the participation of these countries in the Nine Years' War against France were not able to trade with the French. This new situation caused many Catalans to look to England and, especially, the Netherlands as political and economic models for Catalonia.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: At the dawn of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Bourbon Duke of Anjou claimed the throne of Spain as Philip V, and the Principality initially supported his claim. However, repressive mesures of the viceroy Francisco de Velasco and authoritarian decisions of the king (some of them contrary to Catalan legislation), as well the economic policy and distrust to the French absolutism provoked that Catalonia to change sides in 1705, when Habsburg candidate, the Archduke Charles of Austria (as Charles III of Spain) landed in Barcelona. Previously, the same year, the Principality of Catalonia and the Kingdom of England signed the Pact of Genoa, receiving the first one protection to its institutions and liberties, entering in the pro-Habsburg Grand Alliance. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) put end to the war, and the allied armies withdrew from Catalonia which, nonetheless, remained fighting with its own army by decision of the States-General until the fall of Barcelona after a long siege on 11 September 1714. The victorious army of Philip V occupied the capital of Catalonia and (as happened to the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, also loyals to Charles) in 1716 the king enacted the Nueva Planta decrees. The decrees abolished the main Catalan institutions and laws (except the civil and mercantile laws), establishing absolutism as the new political system, and imposed the administrative use of Spanish language, progressively displacing Catalan.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Apart from the abolition of the Catalan institutions, the Nueva Planta decrees ensured the imposition of the new absolutist system by reforming the Royal Audience of Catalonia, making it the highest governmental body of the Principality, absorbing many of the functions of the abolished institutions and becoming the instrument with which the Captain General of Catalonia, the supreme authority of the province (replacing the viceroy), appointed by the king, would govern. The division in "vegueries" was replaced with Castilian "corregimientos". So late as in the 18th and 19th centuries, despite the military occupation, the imposition of high new taxes and the political economy of the House of Bourbon, the Catalonia under Spanish administration (now as a province) continued the process of proto-industrialization, relatively helped at the end of the century from the beginning of open commerce to America and protectionist policies enacted by the Spanish government (although the policy of Spanish government during those times changed many times between free trade and protectionism), consolidating the new economic growth model that was taking place in Catalonia since the end of the 17th century, becoming a center of Spain's industrialization; to this day, it remains one of the more industrialized parts of Spain, along with Madrid and the Basque Country. In 1833, by decree of minister Javier de Burgos, all of Spain was organized into provinces, included Catalonia, which was divided in four provinces without a common administration: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: On several occasions during the first third of the 20th century, Catalonia gained and lost varying degrees of autonomy, recovering the administrative unity in 1914, when the four Catalan provinces were authorized to create a commonwealth (Catalan: "Mancomunitat") and, after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, the Generalitat was restored as an institution of self-government, but as in most regions of Spain, Catalan autonomy and culture were crushed to an unprecedented degree after the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) which brought Francisco Franco to power. Public use of the Catalan language was again banned after a brief period of general recuperation.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The Franco era ended with Franco's death in 1975; in the subsequent Spanish transition to democracy, Catalonia recovered political and cultural autonomy. It became one of the autonomous communities of Spain. In comparison, Northern Catalonia in France has no autonomy.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The counts of Barcelona were commonly considered the "princeps" or "primus inter pares" ("the first among equals") by the other counts of the Spanish March, both because of their military and economic power, and the supremacy of Barcelona over other cities.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Thus, the Count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer I, is called "Prince of Barcelona, Count of Girona and Marchis of Ausona" ("princeps Barchinonensis, comes Gerundensis, marchio Ausonensis") in the Act of Consecration of the Cathedral of Barcelona (1058). There are also several references to the "Prince" in different sections of the Usages of Barcelona, the collection of laws that ruled the county since the early 11th century. Usage #64 calls "principatus" the group of counties of Barcelona, Girona, and Ausona, all of them under the authority of the count of Barcelona.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The first reference to the term "Principat de Cathalunya" is found in the dispute between Peter IV of Aragon and III of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Mallorca in 1343, and it was used again in the convocation of the Catalan Courts in Perpignan in 1350, presided by Peter IV. It was intended to indicate that the territory under the laws produced by those Courts was not a kingdom, but the enlargement of the territory under the authority of the Count of Barcelona, who was also the king of Aragon, as seen in the "Actas de las cortes generales de la Corona de Aragón 1362–1363". However, there is an older reference, in a more informal context, in Bernat Desclot's chronicles, dating from the second half of the 13th century.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: As the Count of Barcelona and the Courts added more counties under his jurisdiction, such as the County of Urgell, the name of Catalonia, which comprised several counties of different names including the County of Barcelona, was used for the whole. The terms Catalonia and Catalans were commonly used to refer to the territory in Northeastern Spain and western Mediterranean France, as well as its inhabitants, and not just the County of Barcelona, at least since the beginnings of the 12th century, as shown in the earliest recordings of these names in the Liber Maiolichinus (around 1117–1125).


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The name "Principality of Catalonia" is abundant in historical documentation that refers to Catalonia between the mid-14th century and early 19th century. According to research carried out in recent decades, is considered to be in the second half of the 12th century when the Catalan counties form a unified and cohesive political entity, -although jurisdictionally divided- called "Catalonia". This happens because the counts of Barcelona became the one hand, the majority of sovereigns Catalan Counties and the other hand kings of Aragon, which helped them prevail in the rest of autonomous Catalan counts (Pallars, Urgell and Empúries) if they were not in their feudal vassals, while also incorporated its extensive domain the Islamic territories of Tortosa and Lleida. The political entity resulting from this process since the 13th century, was repeatedly mentioned the term "kingdom" as a medieval state, i.e. public domain political regime monarchist government.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: However, it consolidated this denomination officially, because, for various historical reasons, the rulers of the Kingdom of Aragon never use the title "King of Catalonia." This is where comes in the use of the term "principality", since at least since the 12th century, the word was synonymous total term "kingdom" which alluded generically political entities which categorize historiographically the expression "Medieval States". Yet it was not until the 14th century -specifically, since 1350- that, greetings to work of Peter III of Aragon, the Principality of Catalonia became an official and popular name. This political entity was part of some composite monarchies or dynastic conglomerates as the Crown of Aragon, the Spanish Monarchy and the Kingdom of France (1641–1652), being on an equal footing with other political communities of the time, or external in relation to such great empires, as were the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Valencia, England, Scotland or the Duchy of Milan, for example.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Following the Nueva Planta decrees of 1716 at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and the subsequent dismantling of Catalan institutional system, the territory being annexed to Castile became a province of the new and more unified Kingdom of Bourbon Spain, but "principality" continued to be the definition of the territory, as witness the Nueva Planta decrees created the Royal Audience of the Principality of Catalonia in 1716. This situation remained until the Kingdom of Spain was transformed permanently, despite several Carlist Wars, into a liberal state in 1833, when Secretary Javier de Burgos eliminated the province of the Principality of Catalonia, dividing the territory in four provinces that still exist. Thus, the term disappeared from the administrative and political reality of the country. In 1931, Republican movements favoured its abandonment because it is historically related to the monarchy.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Neither the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, Spanish Constitution nor French Constitution, mention this denomination, but, despite most of them being republican, it is moderately popular among Catalan nationalists and independentists.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The political system of the Principality of Catalonia and the other realms of the Crown of Aragon has been defined by historiography as "pactism". It designate the explicit or tacit pact between king and kingdom (in its organic and estamental representation), which decisively limited the royal power.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The "vegueria" was a territorial organization of Catalonia headed by a "veguer" (Latin: ). The origins of the vegueria go back to the era of the Carolingian Empire, when vicars (Latin: , singular ) were installed beneath the counts in the Marca Hispanica. The office of a vicar was a vicariate (Latin: ) and his territory was a vicaria. All these Latin terms of Carolingian administration evolved in the Catalan language.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The veguer was appointed by the king and was accountable to him. He was the military commander of his vegueria (and thus keeper of the publicly owned castles), the chief justice of the same district, and the man in charge of the public finances (the fisc) of the region entrusted to him. As time wore on, the functions of the veguer became more and more judicial in nature. He held a "cort" (court) del veguer or de la vegueria with its own seal. The cort had authority in all matter save those relating to the feudal aristocracy. It commonly heard pleas of the crown, civil, and criminal cases. The veguer did, however, retain some military functions as well: he was the commander of the militia and the superintendent of royal castles. His job was law and order and the maintenance of the king's peace: in many respects an office analogous to that of the sheriff in England.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Some of the larger vegueries included one or more sotsvegueries (subvigueries), which had a large degree of autonomy. At the end of the 12th century in Catalonia, there were 12 vegueries. By the end of the reign of Peter the Great (1285) there were 17, and by the time of James the Just, there were 21. After the French annexion of the vegueries of Perpignan and Vilafranca de Conflent in 1659, Catalonia retained a division of 15 vegueries, 9 sotsvegueries and the special district of the Val d'Aran. These administrative divisions remained until 1716 when they were replaced by the Castilian "corregimientos".


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The Usage "Princeps namque", dating from the 11th century, regulated the defense of the prince and the Principality, and became the basis of the organization of self-defense and paramilitary units throughout Catalan history, materialized in mutual-protection agreements known as Sagramental, while the militia corps was known as Sometent. The feudal system allowed to lordships, institutions and corporations to raise its own armies, as well as to be convened by the king due to feudal agreements, alongside to the vassals and subjects of the other realms, however, there was no standing army. Catalan soldiers played an important role in the expansion of the Crown to Valencia, Majorca and the Mediterranean. Catalan Galleys contributed to expand and secure the hegemony along the sea, while the army invested much of its resources in the conquest of Sardinia and in the War of the Sicilian Vespers. After the last one, most of the Almogavers (light infantry) became mercenaries of the Great Catalan Company created by Roger de Flor in 1303.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Due to the outbreak of the Catalan Civil War (1462–1472), the Council of the Principality of Catalonia organised different military forces to fight against the king John II. The Civil War saw one of the first generalised use of firearms in a military conflict of Western Europe. In the Catalan Courts of 1493, king Ferdinand II confirmed the Usage "Princeps namque".


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: After the establishment of the Monarchy of Spain in the 16th century, Catalans were found in Habsburg military, however, the Usage "Princeps namque" and the lack of a large Catalan manpower limited their presence in comparasion to the other polities of the Empire. Some cities like Barcelona gained recognition of self-defense and established urban militias, known as the Coronela. While the military conflicts with France aroused, many Catalan militias took part in the fight, as happened in the siege of Salses, in 1639, alongside the regular army.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: As state under royal sovereignty, Catalonia, like the other political entities of the period, didn't have an own flag or coat of arms in the modern sense. However, a variety of royal and other symbols were used in order to identify the Principality and its institutions.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The Catalan language shares common traits with the Romance languages of Iberia and Gallo-Romance languages of southern France, it is regarded by a minority of linguists as being an Ibero-Romance language (the group that includes Spanish), and by a majority as a Gallo-Romance language, such as French or Occitan from which Catalan diverged between 11th and 14th centuries.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: By the 9th century, Catalan had evolved from Vulgar Latin on both sides of the eastern end of the Pyrenees. From the 8th century, the Catalan counts extended their territory southwards and westwards, conquering territories then occupied by Muslims, bringing their language with them. In the 11th century, feudal documents written in macaronic Latin begin to show Catalan elements. By the end of the 11th century, documents written completely or mostly in Catalan begin to appear, like the Complaints of Guitard Isarn, Lord of Caboet (ca. 1080–1095), or The Oath of peace and truce of count Pere Ramon (1098).


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Catalan lived a golden age during the Late Middle Ages, reaching a peak of maturity and cultural plenitude, and expanded territorially as more lands were added to the dominions of the Crown of Aragon. Examples of this can be seen in the works of Majorcan Ramon Llull (1232–1315), The Four Great Catalan Chronicles (13th-14th centuries), and the Valencian school of poetry which culminated in Ausiàs March (1397–1459). Catalan became the language of the Kingdom of Majorca, as well the main language of the Kingdom of Valencia, particularly in coastal areas. It was also extended to Sardinia and it was used as an administrative language in Sardinia, Sicily and Athens. Between the 13th and 15th centuries this language was present all over the Mediterranean world, and it was one of the first basis of the Lingua Franca


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: The belief that political splendor was correlated with linguistic consolidation was voiced through the Royal Chancery, which promoted a highly standardized language. By the 15th century, the city of Valencia had become the center of social and cultural dynamism. The novel of chivalry "Tirant lo Blanc" (1490), by Joanot Martorell, shows the transition from medieval to Renaissance values, something than can also be seen in the works of Bernat Metge and Andreu Febrer. During this period, Catalan remained as one of the 'great languages' of medieval Europe. The first book produced with movable type in the Iberian Peninsula was printed in Catalan.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: With the union of the crowns of Castille and Aragon (1479), the use of Castilian (Spanish) gradually became more prestigious and marked the start of the relative decline of the Catalan. Along the 16th and 17th centuries, Catalan literature came under the influence of Spanish, and the urban and literary classes became largely bilingual. After the defeat of the pro-Habsburg coalition in the War of Spanish Succession (1714) Spanish replaced Catalan in legal documentation, becoming the administrative and political language in the Principality of Catalonia and the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca.


title: Principality of Catalonia

text: Today, Catalan is one of the three official languages of autonomous community of Catalonia, as stated in the Catalan Statute of Autonomy; the other two are Spanish, and Occitan in its Aranese variety. Catalan has no official recognition in "Northern Catalonia". Catalan has official status alongside Spanish in the Balearic Islands and in the Land of Valencia (where it is called "Valencian"), as well as Algherese Catalan alongside Italian in the city of Alghero and in Andorra as the sole official language.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: G. Satheesh Reddy is the Scientific Adviser to Raksha Mantri, which spearheads India's indigenous development of defence systems and technologies. He guides the development of major programmes on missiles and strategic systems, fighter aircraft and unmanned aerial defence systems, underwater systems, radar systems, strategic materials, armaments, and futuristic technologies.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: He is also the Chairman, Governing Body of the Aeronautical Development Agency that has developed the 4th Generation Light Combat Aircraft Tejas, which is being inducted into active service.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: He graduated in Electronics and Communication Engineering from JNTU, Anantapur and received his M.S & PhD from JNTU Hyderabad. He joined Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), Hyderabad in the year 1986 and subsequently joined Research Centre Imarat (RCI), the brain child of Dr Kalam, after its formation. From a young navigation scientist and System Manager he rose steadily and after his multiple significant appointments and decades of sustained contributions to Defence R&D, was elevated as Distinguished Scientist in Sep 2014 and was appointed as Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister in May 2015 and Secretary DDR&D and Chairman DRDO in Aug 2018.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: Many navigation technologies and systems which form the core of defence assets have been designed and developed by him.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: As Director, RCI, he led the development of critical technologies for IIR seekers, RF seekers, integrated avionics modules and many such innovative systems for onboard applications. As Director General of Missiles and Strategic Systems he spearheaded the development of missile systems like BMD, Nag, QRSAM, Rudram, Long Range Guided Bomb etc.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: India's maiden successful test of Anti-Satellite (ASAT) missile Mission Shakti was successfully executed under his watch. He was involved in the development of Air defence systems BVRAM Astra, Akash, MRSAM, LRSAM, QRSAM, The world's longest-range gun ATAGS, anti-radiation missile, smart air field weapons, smart bombs, and missile assisted torpedo release systems.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: Dr Reddy also pioneered in quickly diversifying DRDO's talent to effectively develop required technologies in the ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Under his guidance, nearly 50 technologies for combating COVID have been developed and about 75 products have been transferred to 100 industries.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: He is the first Indian in over 100 years to be conferred with the Honorary Fellowship and silver medal by the Royal Aeronautical Society, London. The Royal Aeronautical Society recognised contributions of Dr Reddy towards indigenous design, development and deployment of diversified missile systems, aerospace vehicles, guided weapons and avionics technologies in India.


title: G. Satheesh Reddy

text: He has received numerous other awards including American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Missile Systems Award. Other awards conferred on Dr Satheesh Reddy include the Aeronautical Prize, National Systems Gold Medal, National Design Award, IEI-IEEE (USA) Award for Engineering Excellence and the Homi J Bhabha Gold Medal.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Non-linear editing is a form of offline editing for audio, video, and image editing. In offline editing, the original content is not modified in the course of editing. In non-linear editing, edits are specified and modified by specialized software. A pointer-based playlist, effectively an edit decision list (EDL), for video and audio, or a directed acyclic graph for still images, is used to keep track of edits. Each time the edited audio, video, or image is rendered, played back, or accessed, it is reconstructed from the original source and the specified editing steps. Although this process is more computationally intensive than directly modifying the original content, changing the edits themselves can be almost instantaneous, and it prevents further generation loss as the audio, video, or image is edited.


title: Non-linear editing

text: A non-linear editing system (NLE) is a video editing (NLVE) program or application, or an audio editing (NLAE) digital audio workstation (DAW) system. These perform non-destructive editing on source material. The name is in contrast to 20th century methods of linear video editing and film editing.


title: Non-linear editing

text: In linear video editing, the product is assembled from beginning to end, in that order. One can replace or overwrite sections of material, but never cut something out or insert extra material. Non-linear editing removes this restriction. Conventional film editing is a destructive process because the original film must be physically cut to perform an edit.


title: Non-linear editing

text: A non-linear editing approach may be used when all assets are available as files on video servers, or on local solid-state drives or hard disks, rather than recordings on reels or tapes. While linear editing is tied to the need to sequentially view film or hear tape, non-linear editing enables direct access to any video frame in a digital video clip, without having to play or scrub/shuttle through adjacent footage to reach it, as is necessary with video tape linear editing systems.


title: Non-linear editing

text: When ingesting audio or video feeds, metadata are attached to the clip. Those metadata can be attached automatically (timecode, localization, take number, name of the clip) or manually (players names, characters, in sports). It is then possible to access any frame by entering directly the timecode or the descriptive metadata. An editor can, for example at the end of the day in the Olympic Games, easily retrieve all the clips related to the players who received a gold medal.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The non-linear editing method is similar in concept to the cut and paste techniques used in IT. However, with the use of non-linear editing systems, the destructive act of cutting of film negatives is eliminated. It can also be viewed as the audio/video equivalent of word processing, which is why it is called desktop video editing in the consumer space.


title: Non-linear editing

text: In broadcasting applications, video and audio data are first captured to hard disk-based systems or other digital storage devices. The data are then imported into servers employing any necessary transcoding, digitizing or transfer). Once imported, the source material can be edited on a computer using any of a wide range of video editing software.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The end product of the offline non-linear editing process is a frame-accurate edit decision list (EDL) which can be taken, together with the source tapes, to an online quality tape or film editing suite. The EDL is then read into an edit controller and used to create a replica of the offline edit by playing portions of the source tapes back at full quality and recording them to a master as per the exact edit points of the EDL.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Editing software records the editor's decisions in an EDL that is exportable to other editing tools. Many generations and variations of the EDL can exist without storing many different copies, allowing for very flexible editing. It also makes it easy to change cuts and undo previous decisions simply by editing the EDL (without having to have the actual film data duplicated). Generation loss is also controlled, due to not having to repeatedly re-encode the data when different effects are applied. Generation loss can still occur in digital video or audio when using lossy video or audio compression algorithms as these introduce artifacts into the source material with each encoding or reencoding. Lossy compression algorithms (codecs) such as Apple ProRes, Advanced Video Coding and mp3 are very widely used as they allow for dramatic reductions on file size while often being indistinguishable from the uncompressed or losslessly compressed original.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Compared to the linear method of tape-to-tape editing, non-linear editing offers the flexibility of film editing, with random access and easy project organization. In non-linear editing, the original source files are not lost or modified during editing. This is one of the biggest advantages of non-linear editing compared to linear editing. With the EDLs, the editor can work on low-resolution copies of the video. This makes it possible to edit both standard-definition broadcast quality and high definition broadcast quality very quickly on desktop computers that may not have the power to process huge full-quality high-resolution data in real-time.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The costs of editing systems have dropped such that non-linear editing tools are now within the reach of home users. Some editing software can now be accessed free as web applications; some, like Cinelerra (focused on the professional market) and Blender, can be downloaded as free software; and some, like Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker or Apple Inc.'s iMovie, come included with the appropriate operating system.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The non-linear editing retrieves video media for editing. Because these media exist on the video server or other mass storage that stores the video feeds in a given codec, the editing system can use several methods to access the material:


title: Non-linear editing

text: The leading professional non-linear editing software for many years has been Avid Media Composer. This software is likely to be present in almost all post-production houses globally, and it is used for feature films, television programmes, advertising and corporate editing. In 2011, reports indicated, "Avid is still the most-used NLE on prime-time TV productions, being employed on up to 90 percent of evening broadcast shows."


title: Non-linear editing

text: Since then the rise in semi-professional and domestic users of editing software has seen a large rise in other titles becoming very popular in these areas. Other significant software used by many editors is Adobe Premiere (part of Adobe Creative Cloud), Apple Final Cut X, DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks. The take-up of these software titles is to an extent dictated by cost and subscription licence arrangements, as well as the rise in mobile apps and free software. , Davinci Resolve has risen in popularity within professional users and others alike - it had a user base of more than 2 million using the free version alone. This is a comparable user base to Apple's Final Cut Pro X, which also had 2 million users .


title: Non-linear editing

text: Early consumer applications using a multimedia computer for non-linear editing of video may have a video capture card to capture analog video or a FireWire connection to capture digital video from a DV camera, with its video editing software. Various editing tasks could then be performed on the imported video before export to another medium, or MPEG encoded for transfer to a DVD.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Modern web-based editing systems can take video directly from a camera phone over a GPRS or 3G mobile connection, and editing can take place through a web browser interface, so, strictly speaking, a computer for video editing does not require any installed hardware or software beyond a web browser and an internet connection.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Nowadays there is a huge amount of home editing which takes place both on desktop and tablet/phones. The social media revolution has brought about a significant change in access to powerful editing tools or apps, at everyone's disposal.


title: Non-linear editing

text: When videotapes were first developed in the 1950s, the only way to edit was to physically cut the tape with a razor blade and splice segments together. While the footage excised in this process was not technically destroyed, continuity was lost and the footage was generally discarded. In 1963, with the introduction of the Ampex Editec, video tape could be edited electronically with a process known as linear video editing by selectively copying the original footage to another tape called a "master". The original recordings are not destroyed or altered in this process. However, since the final product is a copy of the original, there is a generation loss of quality.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The first truly non-linear editor, the CMX 600, was introduced in 1971 by CMX Systems, a joint venture between CBS and Memorex. It recorded and played back black-and-white analog video recorded in "skip-field" mode on modified disk pack drives the size of washing machines. These were commonly used to store about half an hour of data digitally on mainframe computers of the time. The 600 had a console with two monitors built in. The right monitor, which played the preview video, was used by the editor to make cuts and edit decisions using a light pen. The editor selected from options superimposed as text over the preview video. The left monitor was used to display the edited video. A DEC PDP-11 computer served as a controller for the whole system. Because the video edited on the 600 was in low-resolution black and white, the 600 was suitable only for offline editing.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Non-linear editing systems were built in the 1980s using computers coordinating multiple LaserDiscs or banks of VCRs. One example of these tape and disc-based systems was Lucasfilm's EditDroid, which used several LaserDiscs of the same raw footage to simulate random-access editing. EditDroid was demonstrated at NAB in 1984. EditDroid was the first system to introduce modern concepts in non-linear editing such as timeline editing and clip bins.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The LA-based post house Laser Edit also had an in-house system using recordable random-access LaserDiscs.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The most popular non-linear system in the 1980s was Ediflex, which used a bank of Sony JVC VCRs for offline editing. Ediflex was introduced in 1983 on the Universal series "Still the Beaver". By 1985 it was used on over 80% of filmed network programs. In 1985 Ediflex maker, Cinedco was awarded the Technical Emmy for "Design and Implementation of Non-Linear Editing for Filmed Programs."


title: Non-linear editing

text: In 1984, Montage Picture Processor was demonstrated at NAB. Montage used 17 identical copies of a set of film rushes on modified consumer Betamax VCRs. A custom circuit board was added to each deck that enabled frame-accurate switching and playback using vertical interval timecode. Intelligent positioning and sequencing of the source decks provided a simulation of random-access playback of a lengthy edited sequence without any rerecording. The theory was that with so many copies of the rushes, there could always be one machine cued up to replay the next shot in real time. Changing the EDL could be done easily, and the results seen immediately.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The first feature edited on the Montage was Sidney Lumet's "Power". Notably, Francis Coppola edited "The Godfather Part III" on the system, and Stanley Kubrick used it for "Full Metal Jacket". It was used on several episodic TV shows ("Knots Landing", for one) and on hundreds of commercials and music videos.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The original Montage system won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1988. Montage was reincarnated as Montage II in 1987, and Montage III appeared at NAB in 1991, using digital disk technology, which should prove to be considerably less cumbersome than the Betamax system.


title: Non-linear editing

text: All of these original systems were slow, cumbersome, and had problems with the limited computer horsepower of the time, but the mid-to-late-1980s saw a trend towards non-linear editing, moving away from film editing on Moviolas and the linear videotape method using U-matic VCRs. Computer processing advanced sufficiently by the end of the '80s to enable true digital imagery, and has progressed today to provide this capability in personal desktop computers.


title: Non-linear editing

text: An example of computing power progressing to make non-linear editing possible was demonstrated in the first all-digital non-linear editing system, the "Harry" effects compositing system manufactured by Quantel in 1985. Although it was more of a video effects system, it had some non-linear editing capabilities. Most importantly, it could record (and apply effects to) 80 seconds (due to hard disk space limitations) of broadcast-quality uncompressed digital video encoded in 8-bit CCIR 601 format on its built-in hard disk array.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The term "nonlinear editing" was formalized in 1991 with the publication of Michael Rubin's "Nonlinear: A Guide to Digital Film and Video Editing" (Triad, 1991)—which popularized this terminology over other terminology common at the time, including "real-time" editing, "random-access" or "RA" editing, "virtual" editing, "electronic film" editing, and so on.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Non-linear editing with computers as it is known today was first introduced by Editing Machines Corp. in 1989 with the EMC2 editor, a PC-based non-linear off-line editing system that utilized magneto-optical disks for storage and playback of video, using half-screen-resolution video at 15 frames per second. A couple of weeks later that same year, Avid introduced the Avid/1, the first in the line of their Media Composer systems. It was based on the Apple Macintosh computer platform (Macintosh II systems were used) with special hardware and software developed and installed by Avid.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The video quality of the Avid/1 (and later Media Composer systems from the late 1980s) was somewhat low (about VHS quality), due to the use of a very early version of a Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) codec. It was sufficient, however, to provide a versatile system for offline editing. "Lost in Yonkers" (1993) was the first film edited with Avid Media Composer, and the first long-form documentary so edited was the HBO program "Earth and the American Dream", which won a National Primetime Emmy Award for Editing in 1993.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The NewTek Video Toaster Flyer for the Amiga included non-linear editing capabilities in addition to processing live video signals. The Flyer used hard drives to store video clips and audio, and supported complex scripted playback. The Flyer provided simultaneous dual-channel playback, which let the Toaster's video switcher perform transitions and other effects on video clips without additional rendering. The Flyer portion of the Video Toaster/Flyer combination was a complete computer of its own, having its own microprocessor and embedded software. Its hardware included three embedded SCSI controllers. Two of these SCSI buses were used to store video data, and the third to store audio. The Flyer used a proprietary wavelet compression algorithm known as VTASC, which was well regarded at the time for offering better visual quality than comparable non-linear editing systems using motion JPEG.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Until 1993, the Avid Media Composer was most often used for editing commercials or other small-content and high-value projects. This was primarily because the purchase cost of the system was very high, especially in comparison to the offline tape-based systems that were then in general use. Hard disk storage was also expensive enough to be a limiting factor on the quality of footage that most editors could work with or the amount of material that could be held digitized at any one time.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Up until 1992, the Apple Macintosh computers could access only 50 gigabytes of storage at once. This limitation was overcome by a digital video R&D team at the Disney Channel led by Rick Eye. By February 1993, this team had integrated a long-form system that let the Avid Media Composer running on the Apple Macintosh access over seven terabytes of digital video data. With instant access to the shot footage of an entire movie, long-form non-linear editing was now possible. The system made its debut at the NAB conference in 1993 in the booths of the three primary sub-system manufacturers, Avid, Silicon Graphics and Sony. Within a year, thousands of these systems had replaced 35mm film editing equipment in major motion picture studios and TV stations worldwide.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Although M-JPEG became the standard codec for NLE during the early 1990s, it had drawbacks. Its high computational requirements ruled out software implementations imposing extra cost and complexity of hardware compression/playback cards. More importantly, the traditional tape workflow had involved editing from videotape, often in a rented facility. When the editor left the edit suite, they could securely take their tapes with them. But the M-JPEG data rate was too high for systems like Avid/1 on the Mac and Lightworks on PC to store the video on removable storage. The content needed to be stored on fixed hard disks instead. The secure tape paradigm of keeping your content with you was not possible with these fixed disks. Editing machines were often rented from facilities houses on a per-hour basis, and some productions chose to delete their material after each edit session, and then ingest it again the next day to guarantee the security of their content. In addition, each NLE system had storage limited by its fixed disk capacity.


title: Non-linear editing

text: These issues were addressed by a small UK company, Eidos Interactive. Eidos chose the new ARM-based computers from the UK and implemented an editing system, launched in Europe in 1990 at the International Broadcasting Convention. Because it implemented its own compression software designed specifically for non-linear editing, the Eidos system had no requirement for JPEG hardware and was cheap to produce. The software could decode multiple video and audio streams at once for real-time effects at no extra cost. But most significantly, for the first time, it supported unlimited cheap removable storage. The Eidos Edit 1, Edit 2, and later Optima systems let the editor use "any" Eidos system, rather than being tied down to a particular one, and still keep his data secure. The Optima software editing system was closely tied to Acorn hardware, so when Acorn stopped manufacturing the Risc PC in the late 1990s, Eidos discontinued the Optima system.


title: Non-linear editing

text: In the early 1990s, a small American company called Data Translation took what it knew about coding and decoding pictures for the US military and large corporate clients and spent $12 million developing a desktop editor based on its proprietary compression algorithms and off-the-shelf parts. Their aim was to democratize the desktop and take some of Avid's market. In August 1993, Media 100 entered the market, providing would-be editors with a low-cost, high-quality platform.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Around the same period, two other competitors provided non-linear systems that required special hardware—typically cards added to the computer system. Fast Video Machine was a PC-based system that first came out as an offline system, and later became more online editing capable. The Imix video cube was also a contender for media production companies. The Imix Video Cube had a control surface with faders to allow mixing and shuttle control. Data Translation's Media 100 came with three different JPEG codecs for different types of graphics and many resolutions. These other companies caused tremendous downward market pressure on Avid. Avid was forced to continually offer lower-priced systems to compete with the Media 100 and other systems.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Inspired by the success of Media 100, members of the Premiere development team left Adobe to start a project called "Keygrip" for Macromedia. Difficulty raising support and money for development led the team to take their non-linear editor to the NAB Show. After various companies made offers, Keygrip was purchased by Apple as Steve Jobs wanted a product to compete with Adobe Premiere in the desktop video market. At around the same time, Avid—now with Windows versions of its editing software—was considering abandoning the Macintosh platform. Apple released Final Cut Pro in 1999, and despite not being taken seriously at first by professionals, it has evolved into a serious competitor to entry level's Avid's systems.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Another leap came in the late 1990s with the launch of DV-based video formats for consumer and professional use. With DV came IEEE 1394 (FireWire/iLink), a simple and inexpensive way of getting video into and out of computers. Users no longer had to convert video from analog to digital—it was recorded as digital to start with—and FireWire offered a straightforward way to transfer video data without additional hardware. With this innovation, editing became a more realistic proposition for software running on standard computers. It enabled desktop editing producing high-quality results at a fraction of the cost of earlier systems.


title: Non-linear editing

text: In early 2000, the introduction of highly compressed HD formats such as HDV has continued this trend, making it possible to edit HD material on a standard computer running a software-only editing system.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Avid is an industry standard used for major feature films, television programs, and commercials. Final Cut Pro received a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in 2002.


title: Non-linear editing

text: Since 2000, many personal computers include basic non-linear video editing software free of charge. This is the case of Apple iMovie for the Macintosh platform, various open-source programs like Kdenlive, Cinelerra-GG Infinity and PiTiVi for the Linux platform, and Windows Movie Maker for the Windows platform. This phenomenon has brought low-cost non-linear editing to consumers.


title: Non-linear editing

text: The demands of video editing in terms of the volumes of data involved means the proximity of the stored footage being edited to the NLE system doing the editing is governed partly by the capacity of the data connection between the two. The increasing availability of broadband internet combined with the use of lower-resolution copies of original material provides an opportunity to not just review and edit material remotely but also open up access to far more people to the same content at the same time. In 2004 the first cloud-based video editor, known as Blackbird and based on technology invented by Stephen Streater, was demonstrated at IBC and recognised by the RTS the following year. Since that time a number of other cloud-based editors have become available including systems from Avid, WeVideo and Grabyo. Despite their reliance on a network connection, the need to ingest material before editing can take place, and the use of lower-resolution "video proxies", their adoption has grown. Their popularity has been driven largely by efficiencies arising from opportunities for greater collaboration and the potential for cost savings derived from using a shared platform, hiring rather than buying infrastructure, and the use of conventional IT equipment over hardware specifically designed for video editing.


title: Non-linear editing

text: , 4K Video in NLE was fairly new, but it was being used in the creation of many movies throughout the world, due to the increased use of advanced 4K cameras such as the Red Camera. Examples of software for this task include Avid Media Composer, Apple's Final Cut Pro X, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Edius, and Cinelerra-GG Infinity for Linux.


title: Non-linear editing

text: 8K video was relatively new. 8K video editing requires advanced hardware and software capable of handling the standard.


title: Non-linear editing

text: For imaging software, early works such as HSC Software's Live Picture brought non-destructive editing to the professional market and current efforts such as GEGL provide an implementation being used in open-source image editing software.


title: Non-linear editing

text: An early concern with non-linear editing had been picture and sound quality available to editors. Storage limitations at the time required that all material undergo lossy compression techniques to reduce the amount of memory occupied. Improvements in compression techniques and disk storage capacity have mitigated these concerns, and the migration to high-definition video and audio has virtually removed this concern completely. Most professional NLEs are also able to edit uncompressed video with the appropriate hardware.


title: Badges of the United States Marine Corps

text: Insignia and badges of the United States Marine Corps are military "badges" issued by the United States Department of the Navy to Marines who achieve certain qualifications and accomplishments while serving on both active and reserve duty in the United States Marine Corps.


text: As described in Chapters 4 and 5 of Marine Corps Uniform Regulations, "badges" are categorized as "breast insignia" (worn immediately above ribbons/medals), "identification badges" (usually worn at breast pocket level), and "marksmanship badges" (worn immediately below ribbons).


text: For the purpose of this article, the term "badge" shall be used exclusively to describe "identification badges" and "marksmanship badges", and the term "insignia" shall be used for other worn accoutrements, according to the language in Marine Corps Uniform Regulations.


text: The modern-day United States Marine Corps currently maintains the following breast insignia and identification badges:


text: As per Marine Corps Assignment, Classification and Travel Systems Manual (ACTS MANUAL) MCO P1000.6, Marines wear the appropriate breast insignia for qualification or designation in aviation, parachutist, explosive ordnance disposal, and diving.


text: Authorized breast insignia are worn on the left breast of all service and dress coats. They may optionally be worn on khaki shirts when the shirt is the outermost garment, utility coats or maternity work uniform coats. Miniature versions exist for evening dress jackets.


text: When worn alone, it is worn in the same position a single ribbon would be worn. When worn with ribbons, medals, or marksmanship badges, it is positioned above such awards. On combat utility uniform coats with slanted pockets, it is worn above a horizontal line tangent to the highest point of the pocket or "U.S. MARINES" service tape.


text: No more than two USMC-approved breast insignia shall be worn at any one time. When two insignia are worn they are ordered from top to bottom in the following order with separation in between: diver, EOD, parachutist, aviation. A Marine with more than one insignia within the parachutist, EOD and diver groups may only wear the senior insignia of the group. Marines may wear two insignia from the aviation group.


text: "Aviation Insignia" are breast insignia that are issued to Marines who are qualified or designated to perform duties related to operation and support of Marine aircraft.


text: Officer insignia include the Naval Aviator insignia and Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Officer insignia for pilots and the Naval Flight Officer (NFO) insignia for non-piloting officers. There is also an astronaut version of the aviator and NFO Insignia, known as the Naval Astronaut and Naval Astronaut (NFO), respectively.


text: The Marine Aerial Navigator insignia is issued to enlisted personnel qualified to act as navigators aboard Marine aircraft; the Naval Aviation Observer insignia is issued to flight support personnel; and the Aircrew insignia and UAS Operator insignia are issued to enlisted personnel designated to operate equipment aboard aircraft.


text: The "Parachutist Insignia", also known as "lead sleds" or "lead wings", is awarded to personnel upon successful completion of the Basic Airborne Course at the Army Airborne School. The silver Basic Parachutist Insignia is issued for completion of basic parachutist training, five qualifying jumps. The gold Navy and Marine Corps Parachutist Insignia (first authorized for Marines in 1963 and Navy Parachute Riggers in 1941) are issued after five additional qualifying jumps. Graduation of US Navy Parachute Rigger school is no longer mandatory to earn the device.


text: The "Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Breast Insignia", also known as the "Crab", is awarded to personnel who have successfully completed training at the Naval School Explosive Ordnance Disposal (NAVSCOLEOD), Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Personnel are trained to deal with the render-safe and disposal of conventional and unconventional munitions ranging from unserviceable small arms ammunition, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), to chemical/biological and nuclear munitions.


text: "Diver Insignia" are issued to personnel who are qualified divers and is given in several degrees. The first degree of diver insignia is SCUBA Diver. The remaining insignia are awarded for deep sea dive qualifications and are issued in the degrees of Second Class, First Class, Master Diver, and Diving Medical Technician for medical personnel who have qualified as both divers and medical response personnel to medical emergencies underwater.


text: Combatant diver insignia is issued to graduates of the Combatant Diver Course, who are typically in the recon community. This badge features a Dräger LAR-V rebreather and low-profile diving mask.


text: In August 2016, the Marine Corps approved a new "Marine Special Operator Insignia" for wear by graduates of the five-phase Individual Training Course (ITC).


text: The pin device will first be issued to the next ITC graduating class of critical skills operators. Critical skills operators and special operations officers already in the field will receive their pins later.


text: Marine Corps "marksmanship qualification badges" are suspended beneath a bar reading the type of weapon and qualification received. The badge is also different in appearance, depending on which weapon qualification has been obtained. For a marksmanship qualification badge to be obtained, a service member must obtain a passing score and will receive a qualification level depending on the score obtained. Once a qualification has been obtained, and the marksmanship badge issued, the badge may be worn for the remainder of a military career, or until a different level of qualification (higher or lower) is achieved.


text: In addition to the standard marksmanship badges, the Marine Corps has numerous "marksmanship competition badges" that are authorized for wear on the Marine Corps uniform as permanent awards. These badges are awarded alongside trophies that are present to the top-performing Marines at Marine Corps sponsored marksmanship competitions. The following marksmanship competition badges are authorized for wear on Marine Corps service uniforms and are listed in order of precedence:


title: İznik

text: Iznik (Turkish: İznik) () is a town and an administrative district in the province of Bursa, Turkey. It used to be known as Nicaea (, "Níkaia"), from which its modern name derives. The town lies in a fertile basin at the eastern end of Lake İznik, with ranges of hills to the north and south. As the crow flies, the town is only southeast of Istanbul but by road it is around the Gulf of İzmit. It is by road from Bursa.


title: İznik

text: İznik has a population of about 15,000. It has been a district centre of the province of Bursa since 1930 but belonged to the district of Kocaeli between 1923 and 1927. It was a township of Yenişehir (connected to Bilecik before 1926) district between 1927 and 1930.


title: İznik

text: Ancient Nicaea was ringed with walls that still survive to this day despite having been pierced in many places for roads. Inside the walls stands the Ayasofya Mosque where the First Council of Nicaea was held in A.D. 325.


title: İznik

text: İznik derives from the Ancient Greek name of the city, Nicaea (), prefixed with εἰς, meaning 'to' or 'into'.


title: İznik

text: In 1331, Sultan Orhan captured the city from the Byzantines and for a short period the town became the capital of the expanding Ottoman emirate. The large church of Hagia Sophia in the centre of the town was converted into the Orhan Mosque and a "medrese" (theological school) and hamam (bathhouse) were built nearby. In 1334 Orhan built another mosque and an "imaret" (soup kitchen) just outside the Yenisehir gate (Yenişeh Kapısı) on the south side of the town.


title: İznik

text: The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta stayed in Iznik at the end of 1331 soon after the capture of the town by Orhan. According to Ibn Battuta, the town was in ruins and only inhabited by a small number of people in the service of the sultan. Within the city walls were gardens and cultivated plots with each house surrounded by an orchard. The town produced fruit, walnuts, chestnuts and large sweet grapes.


title: İznik

text: A census in 1520 recorded 379 Muslim and 23 Christian households while another one taken a century later in 1624 recorded 351 Muslim and 10 Christian households. Assuming five members for each household, these figures suggest that the population was around 2,000. Estimates made in the 18th and 19th centuries arrived at similar numbers. The town was poor and the population small even when ceramic production was at its peak during the second half of the 16th century.


title: İznik

text: The Byzantine city is estimated to have had a population of 20,000–30,000 but in the Ottoman period the town was never prosperous and occupied only a small fraction of the walled area. It was, however, a centre for the production of highly decorated fritware vessels and what are known as İznik tiles during the 16th and 17th centuries.


title: İznik

text: In 1677 the English clergyman John Covel visited Iznik and found only a third of the town occupied. In 1745 the English traveller Richard Pococke reported that Iznik was no more than a village. A succession of visitors described the town in unflattering terms. For example in 1779, the Italian archaeologist Domenico Sestini wrote that Iznik was nothing but an abandoned town with no life, no noise and no movement. In 1797 James Dallaway described Iznik as "a wretched village of long lanes and mud walls...".


title: İznik

text: The town was seriously damaged in 1921 during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922); the population became refugees and many historical buildings were damaged or destroyed.


title: İznik

text: Iznik's main period of importance came in the 16th century with the development a pottery and tile making industry. Iznik ceramic tiles (Turkish: "İznik Çini".) were used to decorate many of the mosques designed by Mimar Sinan in Istanbul. However, the ceramics industry declined in the 17th century and İznik was reduced to a minor agricultural settlement when it was bypassed by the railway in the 19th century.


title: İznik

text: A number of monuments were erected by the early Ottomans in the period between the conquest in 1331 and 1402 when the town was sacked by Timur. Among those that have survived are:


title: İznik

text: Several monuments survived into the 20th century but were destroyed during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). These include:


title: İznik

text: The İznik Ultramarathon is a endurance running event that has taken place around Lake İznik every April since 2012. It ss the country's longest single-stage athletics competition.


title: Maya religion

text: The traditional Maya or Mayan religion of the extant Maya peoples of Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and the Tabasco, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Campeche and Yucatán states of Mexico is part of the wider frame of Mesoamerican religion. As is the case with many other contemporary Mesoamerican religions, it results from centuries of symbiosis with Roman Catholicism. When its pre-Hispanic antecedents are taken into account, however, traditional Maya religion has already existed for more than two and a half millennia as a recognizably distinct phenomenon. Before the advent of Christianity, it was spread over many indigenous kingdoms, all with their own local traditions. Today, it coexists and interacts with pan-Mayan syncretism, the 're-invention of tradition' by the Pan-Maya movement, and Christianity in its various denominations.


title: Maya religion

text: The most important source on traditional Maya religion is the Mayas themselves: the incumbents of positions within the religious hierarchy, diviners, and tellers of tales.


title: Maya religion

text: More generally, all those persons who shared their knowledge with outsiders in the past, as well as anthropologists and history people who studied them and continue to do so.


title: Maya religion

text: What is known of pre-Hispanic Maya religion stems from heterogeneous sources (the primary ones being of Maya origin):


title: Maya religion

text: Traditional Maya religion, though also representing a belief system, is often referred to as "costumbre", the 'custom' or habitual religious practice, in contradistinction to orthodox Roman Catholic ritual. To a large extent, Maya religion is indeed a complex of ritual practices; and it is, therefore, fitting that the indigenous Yucatec village priest is simply called "jmen" ("practitioner"). Among the main concepts relating to Maya ritual are the following ones.


title: Maya religion

text: The Maya landscape is a ritual topography, with landmarks such as mountains, wells and caves being assigned to specific ancestors and deities (see also Maya cave sites). Thus, the Tzotzil town of Zinacantan is surrounded by seven 'bathing places' of mountain-dwelling ancestors, with one of these sacred waterholes serving as the residence of the ancestors' 'nursemaids and laundresses'. As in the Pre-Hispanic past, an important part of ritual behavior takes place in or near such landmarks, in Yucatán also around karstic sinkholes (cenotes).


title: Maya religion

text: Ritual was governed not only by the geographical lay-out of shrines and temples (see also Maya architecture), but also by the projection of calendrical models onto the landscape. In contemporary Quichean Momostenango, for example, specific combinations of day-names and numbers are ascribed to specialized shrines in the mountains, signalling the appropriate times for their ritual use. In the northwestern Maya highlands, the four days, or 'Day Lords', that can start a year are assigned to four mountains. In early colonial Yucatán, the thirteen Katun periods and their deities, mapped onto a landscape conceived as a 'wheel', are said to be successively 'established' in specific towns.


title: Maya religion

text: Through pilgrimages, which create networks connecting places regionally as well as over larger distances, Maya religion transcends the limits of the local community. Nowadays, pilgrimages often involve reciprocal visits of the village saints (as represented by their statues), but also visits to farther-removed sanctuaries, as exemplified by the Q'eqchi' pilgrimages to their thirteen sacred mountains. Around 1500, Chichen Itza used to attract pilgrims from all the surrounding kingdoms to its large cenote; other pilgrims visited local shrines, such as those of Ix Chel and other goddesses on the islands off Yucatán's east coast. Eight centuries earlier, noblemen from sundry Classic kingdoms went on pilgrimage to the caves of Naj Tunich and had their visits recorded on the sanctuary's walls.


title: Maya religion

text: Offerings serve to establish and renew relations ('contracts', 'pacts', or 'covenants') with the other world, and the choice, number, preparation, and arrangement of the offered items (such as special maize breads, maize and cacao drinks and honey liquor, flowers, incense nodules, rubber figures, and also, cigars) obey to stringent rules. In the same way, a drink made of exactly 415 grains of parched maize was to be offered to participants in a pre-Hispanic New Year ritual, and on another occasion, the precise number of 49 grains of maize mixed with copal (incense) was to be burnt. A well-known example of a ritual meal is the "Holy Mass of the maize farmer" ("misa milpera") celebrated at an improvised altar for the Yucatec rain deities. Particularly Lacandon ritual was entirely focused on the 'feeding' of the deities, as represented by their incense burners.


title: Maya religion

text: In the ancient Maya cities, all sorts of offertory items (including sacrificial implements) were also stored and buried in deposits (caches) below architectural features such as floors, stelae, and altars; in these cases, the intention may often have been a dedication to a specific religious purpose, rather than an offering to a divine recipient.


title: Maya religion

text: The forms of sacrifice might take vary considerably. In contemporary sacrificial rites, there is an overall emphasis on the sprinkling of blood, especially that of turkeys. In the pre-Hispanic past, sacrifice usually consisted of animals such as deer, dog, quail, turkey, and fish, but on exceptional occasions (such as accession to the throne, severe illness of the ruler, royal burial, or drought and famine) also came to include human beings, adults as well as children. The sacrificed child may have served as a 'substitute', a concept known from curing ritual. Partaking of the sacrifice was common, but ritual cannibalism appears to have been exceedingly rare. A characteristic feature of ancient Mayan ritual (though not exclusive to the Mayas) were the "bloodletting" sessions held by high officials and members of the royal families, during which the earlobes, tongues, and foreskins were cut with razor-sharp small knives and stingray spines; the blood fell on paper strips that were possibly burnt afterwards.


title: Maya religion

text: Purificatory measures such as fasting, sexual abstention, bathing, and (especially in the pre-Hispanic past) confession generally precede major ritual events. In 16th-century Yucatán, purification (exorcism of evil spirits) often represented a ritual's initial phase. The bloodletting-rituals (see below) may also have had a purificatory function. More generally, purification is needed before entering areas inhabited by deities. In present-day Yucatán, for example, it is customary to drink standing water from a rock depression at the first opportunity upon entering the forest. The water is then spat on the ground, and thus renders the individual 'virginal', free to carry out the business of humankind in the sacred forest.


title: Maya religion

text: Maya prayer almost invariably accompanies acts of offering and sacrifice. It often takes the form of long litanies, in which the names of personified days, saints, angels (rain and lightning deities), features of the landscape connected with historical or mythical events, and mountains are particularly prominent. Its importance is highlighted by the fact that Maya communities in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala have a specialized group of 'Prayermakers'. Prayers, with their hypnotizing scansion, often show a parallel (dyadic) couplet structure which has also been recognized in Classic period texts. The earliest prayers recorded in European script are in Quiché, and are embedded in the creation myths of the Popol Vuh.


title: Maya religion

text: The traditional Maya have their own religious functionaries, often hierarchically organized, and charged with the duties of praying and sacrificing on behalf of lineages, local groups, or the entire community. In many places, they operate within the Catholic brotherhoods (or 'cofradías') and the so-called civil-religious hierarchy (or 'cargo system'), organizations which have played a crucial role in the preservation of pre-Spanish religious traditions. The two most important male deities (Martín and Maximón) of the Tz'utujil Mayas of Santiago Atitlán, for example, have their own brotherhoods and priests. Public ritual focusing on agriculture and rain is led by the 'godfathers of the wet season' ("padrinos del invierno") among the Ch'orti's – in a particularly rich and complex system – and by the village priests ("jmenob") in Yucatán. In the private realm, nearly everywhere diviners ('seers', 'daykeepers') are active, together with curers. The performance of many of the indigenous priests, but especially of the curers, shows features also associated with shamanism.


title: Maya religion

text: Knowledge of the earlier Maya priesthood is almost entirely based on what their Spanish missionary colleagues have to say about them (Landa for Yucatán, Las Casas and others for the Guatemalan Highlands). The upper echelon of the priesthood was a repository of learning, also in the field of history and genealogical knowledge. Around 1500, the Yucatec priesthood was hierarchically organized, from the high priest living at the court down to the priests in the towns, and the priestly books were distributed along these lines. The role model for the high priest is likely to have been the upper god Itzamna, first priest and inventor of the art of writing. The most general word for priest, including the Yucatec high priest, appears to have been "ah k'in" 'calendrical priest'. Some priests were ordinary diviners, while others had specialized knowledge of the kingly "katun" cycle. Aside from calendrical learning, however, priests had multiple tasks, running from performing life crisis rituals to managing the monthly feast cycle, and held special offices, such as that of oracle ("chilan"), astrologer, and sacrificer of human beings ("nacom"). In the K'iche' Kingdom of Q'umarkaj, the most important deities (Tohil, Awilix, Jacawitz and Gukumatz) had their own high priests. At all levels, access to late Postclassic priesthood seems to have been restricted to the nobility.


title: Maya religion

text: Little is known with certainty concerning the Classic Maya priesthood. Iconographically, there can be no serious doubt but that the aged, ascetic figures depicted as writing and reading books, aspersing and inaugurating dignitaries and kings, and overseeing human sacrifice, represent professional priests and high priests at court. Certain hieroglyphic titles of noblemen have been interpreted as priestly ones (e.g., "ajk'uhuun", possibly 'worshipper', "yajaw k'ahk" 'master of fire'). The king ("k'uhul ajaw" or 'holy lord'), too, acted "ex officio" as a priest.


title: Maya religion

text: In recent times, feasts are usually organized by religious brotherhoods, with the greatest expenses being for the higher charges. Similarly, in the pre-Hispanic kingdom of Maní, some religious feasts seem to have been sponsored by wealthy and preeminent men, perhaps reflecting a general practice in Postclassic and earlier kingdoms. Through the feasts, capital could be redistributed in food and drink. The continual and obligatory drinking, negatively commented on by early as well as contemporary outsiders, establishes community, not only among the human participants, but also between these and the deities.


title: Maya religion

text: Both in recent times and in the Classic period, more complex rituals would include music and dance, processions, and theatrical play. Nowadays, the performance of important dances and dance dramas (not always religious ones) often takes place on the feast of the patron saint of the village and on certain set occasions dictated by the Catholic calendar (such as Corpus Christi and the 'May Cross'). For the late Postclassic period, Landa mentions specific dances executed during either the New Year rituals (e.g., the "Xibalba okot" 'dance of Xibalba') or the monthly feasts (e.g., the "holkan okot" 'dance of the war chiefs'). The god most often shown dancing during the Classic period is the Tonsured Maize God, a patron of feasting.


title: Maya religion

text: The theatrical impersonation of deities and animals, a general Mesoamerican practice, also characterized pre-Hispanic Mayan performances and included the "wayob" (were-animals). Ritual humor (a vehicle for social criticism) could be part of these events, involving such actors as opossums, spider monkeys, and the aged Bacabs, with women sometimes being cast in erotic roles. Often, impersonation meant ritual representation on a state level, particularly as depicted on stelae and ball game panels. On the royal stelae – that is, at five-tun or k'atun celebrations – the king wears the heads of important deities and forces of nature for a headdress or a mask, while carrying a sceptre in the form of the lightning deity. The heads are frequently those of the rain deity (Chaac) and of an aquatic serpent. On the other hand, the reigning queen, or queen consort, usually represents the principal maize goddess, that is, a female Tonsured Maize God. Young men, perhaps princes, can impersonate the four deities carrying the earth (Bacabs) while holding the four associated Year Bearer days in their hands or carrying a throne; they may also substitute for the principal rain deity (Chaac). Hieroglyphic expressions of the concept of impersonation involve many other deities as well. In some cases, impersonation may relate to the individual's identity with, or transformation into, a phenomenon of nature.


title: Maya religion

text: The only extensive treatment of pre-Hispanic Maya ritual by a near-contemporary concerns Yucatán, particularly the kingdom of Mani, and was written by friar Diego de Landa (ca. 1566). However, major ritual domains, such as those of agriculture and kingship, are hardly touched upon by Landa.


title: Maya religion

text: The Maya calendar, connected to networks of sacrificial shrines, is fundamental for ritual life. The rites of the 260-day cycle are treated below ('Sciences of Destiny'). Among the highland Maya, the calendrical rites of the community as a whole relate to the succession of the 365-day years, and to the so-called 'Year Bearers' in particular, that is, the four named days that can serve as new year days. Conceived as divine lords, these Year Bearers were welcomed on the mountain (one of four) which was to be their seat of power, and worshipped at each recurrence of their day in the course of the year.


title: Maya religion

text: The calendrical rites include the five-day marginal period at the end of the year. In 16th-century Yucatán, a straw puppet called 'grandfather' ("mam") was set up and venerated, only to be discarded at the end of the marginal period, or "Uayeb" (Cogolludo). In this same interval, the incoming patron deity of the year was installed and the outgoing one removed. Through annually shifting procession routes, the calendrical model of the four 'Year Bearers' (New Year days) was projected onto the four quarters of the town. Landa's detailed treatment of the New Year rites – the most important description of a pre-Hispanic Maya ritual complex to have come down to us – corresponds on essential points to the schematic depiction of these rites in the much earlier Dresden Codex.


title: Maya religion

text: Like the Year Bearers, the thirteen twenty-year periods (katuns) of the Short Count were viewed as divine lords in their own right and worshipped accordingly. The katuns had specific divine patrons (as mentioned in the Chilam Balam books) and their own priests.


title: Maya religion

text: The 18 months had festivals, dedicated to specific deities, which were largely celebrated by occupational groups (in particular hunters and fishermen, bee-keepers, cacao planters, curers, and warriors). It is not known if and to what extent this festival cycle of the kingdom of Maní was shared by the other Yucatec kingdoms, and if it was also valid for the earlier Mayan kingdoms, both in Yucatán and elsewhere.


title: Maya religion

text: Life cycle rituals (or rites of passage) demarcate the various stages of life. Landa details one of these rituals, destined for making young boys and girls marriageable ("caput sihil" 'second birth'). The Yucatec Maya continue the ritual ("Hetz mek") which marks a child's movement from cradling or carrying to the mother's hip. It is performed at about three months and has godparents of the ceremony. The child is offered implements appropriate to its gender, tools for boys and cloth or thread for girls. If the children grasp them, this is considered a foretelling. All children are offered pencils and paper.


title: Maya religion

text: Contemporary healing rituals focus on the retrieval and reincorporation of the lost souls or soul particles imprisoned somewhere by specific deities or ancestors. The procedures can include the sacrifice of fowl treated as the patient's 'substitute' (Tzotzil "k'exolil-helolil"). The main collection of ancient Yucatec curing rituals is the so-called "Ritual of the Bacabs". In these texts, the world with its four trees and four carriers of earth and sky (Bacabs) located at the corners is the theatre of shamanic curing sessions, during which "the four Bacabs" are often addressed to assist the curer in his struggle with disease-causing agents. Many of the features of shamanic curing found in the 'Ritual of the Bacabs' still characterize contemporary curing ritual. Not represented amongst these early ritual texts is black sorcery.


title: Maya religion

text: Influencing the weather is the main purpose of the rain-making rituals – sometimes of a secretive character – that are found all over the Maya area and also of such rituals as 'Imprisoning the winds' and 'Sealing the frost' just before the sowing season. The officiating priests of the rain-making rituals are sometimes believed to ascend into the clouds and there to act like rain deities themselves. Influencing the weather can also mean deflecting the rain clouds from neighboring areas, and thus imply black sorcery.


title: Maya religion

text: The principal focus of the agricultural rites is the sowing and harvesting of the maize. Particularly the rituals of the Yucatec and Ch'orti' Mayas have been described in great detail. For eastern Yucatán, a whole taxonomy of ritual sequences has been established, including variable rituals for protecting an area against evil influences ("loh"), thanksgiving ("uhanlikol" 'dinner of the maize field'), and imploring the rain deities ("ch'a cháak").


title: Maya religion

text: An important sanctuary for Terminal Classic rain and maize rituals was the large cave of Balankanche near Chichén Itzá, with its numerous Tlaloc censers and miniature metates.


title: Maya religion

text: In one of the 16th-century Yucatec month feasts, hunters danced with arrows and deer skulls painted blue. The focus on animal skulls is significant, since even today, traditional Maya hunters have the duty to preserve the skulls and bones of their booty, deposit these periodically in hunting shrines, and thus restore them to their supernatural Owners for regeneration. They should also respect certain hunting taboos, such as those on adultery and unnecessarily wounding the game, on penalty of supernatural sanction; for this same reason, in another month of the 16th-century Yucatec feast cycle, a rite of contrition was held by the hunters.


title: Maya religion

text: The claims on territory by social groups of varying dimensions were expressed in rituals such as those for the waterholes, ancestral lands, and the boundaries of the entire community. The focus of these rituals were often crosses, or rather, 'cross shrines', and prayers were directed at rain and earth deities. For earlier periods, such crosses and shrines can, perhaps, be thought of as being connected to the central 'cross', or world tree of the center, best exemplified by the arboreal crosses in the temple shrines of the Cross Group in Palenque. The king was the prime embodiment of the central cross or world tree.