Research on road tolls is one of the marginal themes in Slovak historiography. Toll payments included dry tolls payable on roads and bridge or wet tolls payable on bridges, ferries and rivers. Payments were originally part of the royal prerogative. The paper is devoted to the problem of road tolls using the example of two neighbouring regions around the rivers Hron and Žitava, through which some important roads went in the middle ages. The author has succeeded in identifying a dense network of toll points on the basis of the written sources. The majority of them are recorded in written sources only from the 14th and 15th centuries. Perhaps we can suppose that some of them already existed in earlier periods. The size of toll payments is only occasionally mentioned. There were long-lasting disputes about the ownership of some important toll points, for example, Starý Tekov.
The work is an attempt for a new interpretation of the 14th-century charter that quotes the main localities on the road from Buda to the Czech lands up to the Hungarian border on the Morava River. Apart from the document, the road has been named as the Czech Road. The Charter is one of the bases of the overall solution, but the survey of the area of interest from Holice to the eastern foothills of the Little Carpathians became equivalently important. Landline remnants have been precisely located and connected to other communication directions. For the first time, it has been proven that the document does not have the function of the itinerary, but merely quotes localities with the collection of charges on the road with the starting points of the Buda-Czech (surrounding) countries.
The paper presents the possibility of using county roads of lesser strategic importance (others) for sustainable development of the entire area. That possibility was presented as the concept of 'Warmia Landscape Road' based on the example of Olsztyn Rural County. It includes the roads planned during the 18th C. that are currently in operation connecting rural locations, residences or monumental objects (mansions-palaces-parks), lined with trees and forming avenues. Roads-avenues, as the elements of technical infrastructure are authentic elements of the landscape of Warmia (and some parts of Mazury). They may form a complementary esthetic-cultural-landscape component for visitors and represent a means for activation, and as a consequence sustainable development of rural areas.
The study maps the development of road transport of Slovakia in 1940s. It traces the construction of the road infrastructure, legislative changes concerning transport and their impact on motorists. The government regulated transport by means of various licences. The paper analyses the development of the car industry, exports, prices and the accessibility of the cars for the general public. It considers safety and accident prevention. In many parts of the study, the author attempts to compare the road transport in Slovakia and in the Czech Lands. In this way, he gives a more realistic and comprehensive picture of the state of motorization in this period.
Studied area around the Pustý hrad with forests and two antecedent valleys belongs to the most valuable sites in the Zvolen cadastral area. The castle had important role to keep watch on the entrance routes to the rich mining towns during the medieval ages. Antecedent valleys with steep slopes and rocky cliffs create natural conditions of defence. The castle was particularly vulnerable from the forests to the South, where historic access roads are situated. The main aim of the research is identification of the medieval settlements and historic roads dependence to the selected natural factors and conditions. Relations of the historic settlements to the natural environment are observed in the wider region and historic roads are studied in the closer area, in the forests around the Pustý hrad. They are identified by global position and navigation system in the field. We present location and routing of the roads in relation to the relief attributes (slope, meso-forms configuration) and to the geological substrate, where we indicate resistance to weathering of the rocks, in the small spatial segment. We define in the results the complex of important natural factors as: geological substrate, groundwater and springs, specific attributes of relief which limited location of the settlements and related access roads during the medieval ages.
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