Famine, bad weather and political alliances: Siena and Manfredi of Sicily between 1257 and 1260
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The famine that plagued Europe in the period 1257-1260, caused by the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Samalas, is analyzed in this contribution from the point of view of Sienese public sources. What emerges is that the Tuscan city, in comparison to other northern Italian communes, proved readier to manage this emergency because of the measures it had put in place to combat and prevent food crises during a previous famine, which had affected Tuscany in the period 1248-1256. Siena also managed to turn this emergency to its favor in the context of foreign policy, using the necessity to buy wheat from southern Italy as a pretext to get politically closer to the Ghibelline Manfred of Sicily, without having to break relations with its Guelph ally Florence. This observation shows how the study of environmental history can be useful not only for socio-economic analyses, but it can also have implications for the history of political events in past societies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".