title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Relatively little was known about Vermeer's life until recently. He seems to have been devoted exclusively to his art, living out his life in the city of Delft. Until the 19th century, the only sources of information were a few registers, official documents, and comments by other artists; for this reason, Thoré-Bürger named him "The Sphinx of Delft". John Michael Montias added details on the family from the city archives of Delft in his "Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century" (1982).


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Johannes Vermeer was baptized within the Reformed Church on 31 October 1632. His mother, Digna Baltens (c. 1596–1670) was from Antwerp. Digna's father, Balthasar Geerts, or Gerrits, (born in Antwerp in or around 1573) led an enterprising life in metalworking, and was arrested for counterfeiting. Vermeer's father, named Reijnier Janszoon, was a middle-class worker of silk or caffa (a mixture of silk and cotton or wool). He was the son of Jan Reyersz and Cornelia (Neeltge) Goris. As an apprentice in Amsterdam, Reijnier lived on fashionable Sint Antoniesbreestraat, a street with many resident painters at the time. In 1615, Reijnier married Digna. The couple moved to Delft and had a daughter named Gertruy who was baptized in 1620. In 1625, Reijnier was involved in a fight with a soldier named Willem van Bylandt who died from his wounds five months later. Around this time, Reijnier began dealing in paintings. In 1631, he leased an inn, which he called "The Flying Fox". In 1635, he lived on Voldersgracht 25 or 26. In 1641, he bought a larger inn on the market square, named after the Flemish town "Mechelen". The acquisition of the inn constituted a considerable financial burden. When Reijnier died in October 1652, Vermeer took over the operation of the family's art business.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: In April 1653, Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer married a Catholic woman, Catharina Bolenes (Bolnes). The blessing took place in the quiet nearby village of Schipluiden. Vermeer's new mother-in-law Maria Thins, was initially opposed to the marriage as she was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who insisted that Vermeer convert to Catholicism before the marriage on 5 April. The fact that Vermeer's father was in considerable debt also did not help in discussions on the marriage. Leonaert Bramer, who was Catholic himself, put in a good word for Vermeer and it was this that led Maria to drop her oppositions. According to art historian Walter Liedtke, Vermeer's conversion seems to have been made with conviction. His painting "The Allegory of Faith", made between 1670 and 1672, placed less emphasis on the artists' usual naturalistic concerns and more on symbolic religious applications, including the sacrament of the Eucharist. Walter Liedtke in "Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" suggests that it was made for a learned and devout Catholic patron, perhaps for his "schuilkerk", or "hidden church". At some point, the couple moved in with Catharina's mother, who lived in a rather spacious house at Oude Langendijk, almost next to a hidden Jesuit church. Here Vermeer lived for the rest of his life, producing paintings in the front room on the second floor. His wife gave birth to 15 children, four of whom were buried before being baptized, but were registered as "child of Johan Vermeer". The names of 10 of Vermeer's children are known from wills written by relatives: Maertge, Elisabeth, Cornelia, Aleydis, Beatrix, Johannes, Gertruyd, Franciscus, Catharina, and Ignatius. Several of these names carry a religious connotation, and the youngest (Ignatius) was likely named after the founder of the Jesuit order.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: It is unclear where and with whom Vermeer apprenticed as a painter. There is some speculation that Carel Fabritius may have been his teacher, based upon a controversial interpretation of a text written in 1668 by printer Arnold Bon. Art historians have found no hard evidence to support this. Local authority Leonaert Bramer acted as a friend, but their style of painting is rather different. Liedtke suggests that Vermeer taught himself using information from one of his father's connections. Some scholars think that Vermeer was trained under Catholic painter Abraham Bloemaert. Vermeer's style is similar to that of some of the Utrecht Caravaggists, whose works are depicted as paintings-within-paintings in the backgrounds of several of his compositions.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: On 29 December 1653, Vermeer became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke, a trade association for painters. The guild's records make clear that Vermeer did not pay the usual admission fee. It was a year of plague, war, and economic crisis; Vermeer was not alone in experiencing difficult financial circumstances. In 1654, the city suffered the terrible explosion known as the Delft Thunderclap, which destroyed a large section of the city. In 1657, he might have found a patron in local art collector Pieter van Ruijven, who lent him some money. It seems that Vermeer turned for inspiration to the art of the fijnschilders from Leiden. Vermeer was responding to the market of Gerard Dou's paintings, who sold his paintings for exorbitant prices. Dou may have influenced Pieter de Hooch and Gabriel Metsu, too. Vermeer also charged higher than average prices for his work, most of which were purchased by an unknown collector.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: The influence of Johannes Vermeer on Metsu is unmistakable: the light from the left, the marble floor. (A. Waiboer, however, suggests that Metsu requires more emotional involvement of the viewer.) Vermeer probably competed also with Nicolaes Maes, who produced genre works in a similar style. In 1662, Vermeer was elected head of the guild and was reelected in 1663, 1670, and 1671, evidence that he (like Bramer) was considered an established craftsman among his peers. Vermeer worked slowly, probably producing three paintings a year on order. Balthasar de Monconys visited him in 1663 to see some of his work, but Vermeer had no paintings to show. The diplomat and the two French clergymen who accompanied him were sent to Hendrick van Buyten, a baker who had a couple of his paintings as collateral.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: In 1671, Gerrit van Uylenburgh organised the auction of Gerrit Reynst's collection and offered 13 paintings and some sculptures to Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg. Frederick accused them of being counterfeits and had sent 12 back on the advice of Hendrick Fromantiou. Van Uylenburg then organized a counter-assessment, asking a total of 35 painters to pronounce on their authenticity, including Jan Lievens, Melchior de Hondecoeter, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, and Johannes Vermeer.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: In 1672, a severe economic downturn (the "Year of Disaster") struck the Netherlands, after Louis XIV and a French army invaded the Dutch Republic from the south (known as the Franco-Dutch War). During the Third Anglo-Dutch War, an English fleet and two allied German bishops attacked the country from the east, causing more destruction. Many people panicked; courts, theaters, shops and schools were closed. Five years passed before circumstances improved. In 1674, Vermeer was listed as a member of the civic guards. In the summer of 1675, Vermeer borrowed 1,000 guilders in Amsterdam from Jacob Romboutsz (grandfather of Hendrick Sorgh), an Amsterdam silk trader, using his mother-in-law's property as a surety.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: On 15 December 1675, Vermeer died after a short illness aged 43. He was buried in the Protestant Old Church on 15 December 1675. In a petition to her creditors, his wife later described his death as follows:


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: ...during the ruinous war with France he not only was unable to sell any of his art but also, to his great detriment, was left sitting with the paintings of other masters that he was dealing in. As a result and owing to the great burden of his children having no means of his own, he lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Catharina Bolnes attributed her husband's death to the stress of financial pressures. The collapse of the art market damaged Vermeer's business as both a painter and an art dealer. She had to raise 11 children and therefore asked the High Court to relieve her of debts owed to Vermeer's creditors. After 1672, Vermeer did not manage to sell any more paintings. Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who worked for the city council as a surveyor, was appointed trustee. The house had eight rooms on the first floor, the contents of which were listed in an inventory taken a few months after Vermeer's death. In his studio, there were two chairs, two painter's easels, three palettes, 10 canvases, a desk, an oak pull table, a small wooden cupboard with drawers, and "rummage not worthy being itemized". Nineteen of Vermeer's paintings were bequeathed to Catharina and her mother. The widow sold two more paintings to Hendrick van Buyten to pay off a substantial debt.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer had been a respected artist in Delft, but he was almost unknown outside his hometown. A local patron named Pieter van Ruijven had purchased much of his output, which reduced the possibility of his fame spreading. Several factors contributed to his limited body of work. Vermeer never had any pupils, though one scholar has suggested that Vermeer taught his eldest daughter Maria to paint. Additionally, his family obligations with so many children may have taken up much of his time, as would acting as both an art dealer and inn-keeper in running the family businesses. His time spent serving as head of the guild and his extraordinary precision as a painter may have also limited his output.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer may have first executed his paintings tonally like most painters of his time, using either monochrome shades of grey ("grisaille") or a limited palette of browns and greys ("dead coloring"), over which he would apply more saturated colors (reds, yellows and blues) in the form of transparent glazes. No drawings have been positively attributed to Vermeer, and his paintings offer few clues to preparatory methods.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: There is no other 17th-century artist who employed the exorbitantly expensive pigment lapis lazuli (natural ultramarine) either so lavishly or so early in his career. Vermeer used this in not just elements that are naturally of this colour; the earth colours umber and ochre should be understood as warm light within a painting's strongly lit interior, which reflects its multiple colours onto the wall. In this way, he created a world more perfect than any he had witnessed. This working method most probably was inspired by Vermeer's understanding of Leonardo's observations that the surface of every object partakes of the colour of the adjacent object. This means that no object is ever seen entirely in its natural colour.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: A comparable but even more remarkable, yet effectual, use of natural ultramarine is in "The Girl with the Wine Glass". The shadows of the red satin dress are underpainted in natural ultramarine, and, owing to this underlying blue paint layer, the red lake and vermilion mixture applied over it acquires a slightly purple, cool and crisp appearance that is most powerful.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Even after Vermeer's supposed financial breakdown following the so-called rampjaar (year of disaster) in 1672, he continued to employ natural ultramarine generously, such as in "Lady Seated at a Virginal". This could suggest that Vermeer was supplied with materials by a collector, and would coincide with John Michael Montias' theory that Pieter van Ruijven was Vermeer's patron.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer's works are largely genre pieces and portraits, with the exception of two cityscapes and two allegories. His subjects offer a cross-section of seventeenth-century Dutch society, ranging from the portrayal of a simple milkmaid at work, to the luxury and splendour of rich notables and merchantmen in their roomy houses. Besides these subjects, religious, poetical, musical, and scientific comments can also be found in his work.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: One aspect of his meticulous painting technique was Vermeer's choice of pigments. He is best known for his frequent use of the very expensive ultramarine ("The Milkmaid"), and also lead-tin-yellow ("A Lady Writing a Letter"), madder lake ("Christ in the House of Martha and Mary"), and vermilion. He also painted with ochres, bone black and azurite. The claim that he used Indian yellow in "Woman Holding a Balance" has been disproven by pigment analysis.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: In Vermeer's oeuvre, only about 20 pigments have been detected. Of these, seven principal pigments that Vermeer commonly employed are lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, madder lake, green earth, raw umber, and ivory or bone black.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer's painting techniques have long been a source of debate, given their almost photorealistic attention to detail, despite Vermeer's having had no formal training, and despite only limited evidence that Vermeer had created any preparatory sketches or traces for his paintings.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: In 2001, British artist David Hockney published the book "Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters", in which he argued that Vermeer (among other Renaissance and Baroque artists including Hans Holbein and Diego Velázquez) used optics to achieve precise positioning in their compositions, and specifically some combination of curved mirrors, camera obscura, and camera lucida. This became known as the Hockney–Falco thesis, named after Hockney and Charles M. Falco, another proponent of the theory.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Philip Steadman published the book "Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces" in 2001 which specifically claimed that Vermeer had used a camera obscura to create his paintings. Steadman noted that many of Vermeer's paintings had been painted in the same room, and he found six of his paintings that are precisely the right size if they had been painted from inside a camera obscura in the room's back wall.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Supporters of these theories have pointed to evidence in some of Vermeer's paintings, such as the often-discussed sparkling pearly highlights in Vermeer's paintings, which they argue are the result of the primitive lens of a camera obscura producing halation. It was also postulated that a camera obscura was the mechanical cause of the "exaggerated" perspective seen in "The Music Lesson" (London, Royal Collection).


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: In 2008, American entrepreneur and inventor Tim Jenison developed the theory that Vermeer had used a camera obscura along with a "comparator mirror", which is similar in concept to a camera lucida but much simpler and makes it easy to match colour values. He later modified the theory to simply involve a concave mirror and a comparator mirror. He spent the next five years testing his theory by attempting to re-create "The Music Lesson" himself using these tools, a process captured in the 2013 documentary film "Tim's Vermeer".


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Several points were brought out by Jenison in support of this technique: first was Vermeer's hyper-accurate rendition of light falloff along the wall. Neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, in an interview with Jenison, notes that human vision cannot process information about the absolute brightness of a scene. Another was the addition of several highlights and outlines consistent with matching the effects of chromatic aberration, particularly noticeable in primitive optics. Last, and perhaps most telling, is a noticeable curvature in the original painting's rendition of the scrollwork on the virginal. This effect matched Jenison's technique precisely, caused by exactly duplicating the view as seen from a curved mirror.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: This theory remains disputed. There is no historical evidence regarding Vermeer's interest in optics, aside from the accurately observed mirror reflection above the lady at the virginals in "The Music Lesson". The detailed inventory of the artist's belongings drawn up after his death does not include a camera obscura or any similar device. However, Vermeer was in close connection with pioneer lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and Leeuwenhoek was his executor after death.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer produced a total of fewer than 50 paintings, of which 34 have survived. Only three Vermeer paintings were dated by the artist: "The Procuress" (1656; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden); "The Astronomer" (1668; Musée du Louvre, Paris); and "The Geographer" (1669; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt).


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer's mother-in-law Maria Thins owned Dirck van Baburen's 1622 oil on canvas "The Procuress" (or a copy of it), which appears in the background of two of Vermeer's paintings. The same subject was also painted by Vermeer. Almost all of Vermeer's paintings are of contemporary subjects in a smaller format, with a cooler palette dominated by blues, yellows, and grays. Practically all of his surviving works belong to this period, usually domestic interiors with one or two figures lit by a window on the left. They are characterized by a sense of compositional balance and spatial order, unified by a pearly light. Mundane domestic or recreational activities are imbued with a poetic timelessness (e.g., "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window", Dresden, Gemäldegalerie). Vermeer's two townscapes have also been attributed to this period: "View of Delft" (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and ""A street in Delft"" (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: A few of his paintings show a certain hardening of manner and are generally thought to represent his late works. From this period come "The Allegory of Faith" (c. 1670; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and "The Love Letter" (c. 1670; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Originally, Vermeer's works were largely overlooked by art historians for two centuries after his death. A select number of connoisseurs in the Netherlands did appreciate his work, yet even so, many of his works were attributed to better-known artists such as Metsu or Mieris. The Delft master's modern rediscovery began about 1860, when German museum director Gustav Waagen saw "The Art of Painting" in the Czernin gallery in Vienna and recognized the work as a Vermeer, though it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch at that time. Research by Théophile Thoré-Bürger culminated in the publication of his catalogue raisonné of Vermeer's works in the "Gazette des Beaux-Arts" in 1866. Thoré-Bürger's catalogue drew international attention to Vermeer and listed more than 70 works by him, including many that he regarded as uncertain.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Upon the rediscovery of Vermeer's work, several prominent Dutch artists modelled their style on his work, including Simon Duiker. Other artists who were inspired by Vermeer include Danish painter Wilhelm Hammershoi and American Thomas Wilmer Dewing. In the 20th century, Vermeer's admirers included Salvador Dalí, who painted his own version of "The Lacemaker" (on commission from collector Robert Lehman) and pitted large copies of the original against a rhinoceros in some surrealist experiments. Dali also celebrated the master in "The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table", 1934.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Han van Meegeren was a 20th-century Dutch painter who worked in the classical tradition. He became a master forger, motivated by a blend of aesthetic and financial reasons, creating and selling many new "Vermeers" before turning himself in for forgery to avoid being charged with capital treason for collaboration with the Nazis, specifically, in selling what had been believed to be original artwork to the Nazis.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: On the evening of 23 September 1971, a 21-year-old hotel waiter, Mario Pierre Roymans, stole Vermeer's "Love Letter" from the Fine Arts Palace in Brussels where it was on loan from the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition "Rembrandt and his Age".


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: To mark the 26th anniversary of the opening of an exhibition at Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art featuring his work, Google honored Vermeer with a Google Doodle on 12 November 2021.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Vermeer's reputation and works have been featured in both literature and in films. Tracy Chevalier's novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (1999), and the 2003 film of the same name, present a fictional account of Vermeer's creation of the famous painting and his relationship with the equally fictional model.


title: Johannes Vermeer

text: Many artists are inspired by the famous painter, for example, culinary photographer Aimee Twigger draws on Vermeer's chiaroscuro for her gustatory journeys through recipes.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Pamela Dawber (born October 18, 1951) is an American actress best known for her lead television sitcom roles as Mindy McConnell in "Mork & Mindy" (1978–1982) and Samantha Russell in "My Sister Sam" (1986–1988).


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber was born in Detroit, the older of two daughters of Thelma M. (née Fisher) and Eugene E. Dawber, a commercial artist. She went to Reid Elementary School in Goodrich and attended North Farmington High School and Oakland Community College (OCC), with the intention of transferring to a four-year college. She deferred her studies at OCC to do some modeling work and eventually dropped out after deciding to go into modeling full-time.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber moved to New York City and was initially a fashion model with Wilhelmina Models before switching to acting. She appeared in several television commercials during the 1970s (Fotomat, Noxzema, Neet, Underalls, etc.).


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber screen-tested for the title role in "Tabitha," a 1977–1978 situation comedy spun off from "Bewitched", but the role instead went to Lisa Hartman. However, ABC executives were impressed enough with her to enroll her in its "talent development" program, which paid its participants until they could find appropriate roles. Garry K. Marshall recruited her from this program.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber's professional breakthrough came when Marshall chose her, despite her having relatively little acting experience and not having auditioned for the part, as one of the two title characters of the ABC sitcom "Mork & Mindy," which ran from 1978 to 1982. She portrayed Mindy McConnell, the comedic foil and eventual love interest for the extraterrestrial Mork from the planet Ork, played by a then-unknown Robin Williams. The show was extremely popular in its debut season, when it averaged at number three in the Nielsen ratings for the year. The only major difficulty for her on set was that she often found it impossible to maintain the proper composure in character in the face of her co-star's comedic talent. Also, pressure came from the TV network to sexualize her character as the series progressed, which Dawber successfully resisted, with Williams' support.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber sang in a 1980s Los Angeles Civic Light Opera production of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance," based on the Joseph Papp/New York Shakespeare Festival production. Her role, as Mabel, had been played by Linda Ronstadt in the New York run of the show.


title: Pam Dawber

text: From 1986 to 1988, Dawber again had the title role in a television series, playing Samantha Russell in the CBS sitcom "My Sister Sam," co-starring Rebecca Schaeffer. The series was a success in its first season, but it suffered a massive ratings drop in its second after moving to Saturday night. "My Sister Sam" was cancelled in April 1988, with half of the second season's episodes never shown on CBS, but eventually broadcast (along with all previous episodes) on USA Network.


title: Pam Dawber

text: In July 1989, over a year after the show's cancellation, Schaeffer was shot and killed in front of her apartment in Los Angeles by Robert John Bardo, a man who had stalked her for three years. Dawber was reportedly "devastated" by her former co-star's death. Dawber and her other surviving "My Sister Sam" co-stars, Joel Brooks, David Naughton and Jenny O'Hara, all participated in a filmed public service announcement about gun violence prevention, and Dawber herself became a gun control advocate. With the birth of her second child, she largely retired from the entertainment industry for family reasons, acting sporadically during the 1990s.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Although mostly known for her television work, Dawber has starred in several films, including the comedy movie "Stay Tuned" (1992) with John Ritter and the period movie "I'll Remember April" (1999), alongside husband Mark Harmon.


title: Pam Dawber

text: In 2014, she reunited with Robin Williams on his comedy series "The Crazy Ones" as a love interest of Williams's character. But the reunion failed to boost the show's ratings, and it was cancelled shortly afterwards. Williams, already suffering from Lewy body disease by this time, died by suicide later that year.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber is a national spokeswoman for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Garry K. Marshall, the film-and-television comedy writer-producer-director who enabled Dawber's professional breakthrough, died in 2016. That year, Dawber made a guest appearance on "The Odd Couple" in a tribute episode to Marshall, along with other Marshall alumni Ron Howard, Garry's sister Penny Marshall, Cindy Williams, Anson Williams, Don Most and Marion Ross.


title: Pam Dawber

text: For the first time in her career, she appeared with her husband and fellow actor, Mark Harmon on CBS' "NCIS" in 2021 for seven episodes as '"seasoned investigative journalist" Marcie Warren.


title: Pam Dawber

text: Dawber married actor Mark Harmon on March 21, 1987, in a private ceremony. They have two sons: Sean Thomas Harmon (born April 25, 1988), also an actor, and Ty Christian Harmon (born June 25, 1992). The couple maintains a private family life and rarely appear in public with their children, or speak about one another in interviews.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland (, abbreviated "SZ RP"; popularly called "Wojsko Polskie" in Poland, abbreviated "WP"—roughly, the "Polish Military") are the national armed forces of the Republic of Poland. The name has been used since the early 19th century, but can also be applied to earlier periods.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland are the Wojska Lądowe (Polish Land Forces), Marynarka Wojenna (Polish Navy), Siły Powietrzne (Polish Air Forces), Wojska Specjalne (Polish Special Forces) and Wojska Obrony Terytorialnej (Polish Territorial Defence Force) which are under the command of the Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (Ministry of National Defence of Poland).


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: With a budget of over US$14 billion in 2022, Poland is ranked 20th in the world in terms of military expenditures and is among the nine NATO member states that have maintained their military spending above the required 2% of annual GDP.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Pursuant to the national security strategy of Poland, the supreme strategic goal of Poland's military forces is to ensure favourable and secure conditions for the realization of national interests by eliminating external and internal threats, reducing risks, rightly assessing undertaken challenges, and ably using existing opportunities. The Republic of Poland's


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The List of Polish wars chronicles Polish military involvements since the year 972. The present armed forces trace their roots to the early 20th century, yet the history of Polish armed forces in their broadest sense stretches back much further. After the partitions of Poland, during the period from 1795 until 1918, Polish military was recreated several times during national insurrections that included the November Uprising of 1830, and the January Uprising in 1863, and the Napoleonic Wars that saw the formation of the Polish Legions in Italy. The Congress Poland, being part of the Russian Empire with a certain degree of autonomy, had a separate Polish army in the years 1815–1830, which was disbanded after the unsuccessful November Uprising. Large numbers of Poles also served in the armies of the partitioning powers, Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary and German Empire.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: During World War I, the Polish Legions were set up in Galicia, the southern part of Poland under Austrian occupation. They were both disbanded after the Central Powers failed to provide guarantees of Polish independence after the war. General Józef Haller, the commander of the Second Brigade of the Polish Legion, switched sides in late 1917, and via Murmansk took part of his troops to France, where he created the Blue Army. It was joined by several thousand Polish volunteers from the United States. It fought on the French front in 1917 and 1918.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The Polish Army was recreated in 1918 from elements of the three separate Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German armies, and armed with equipment left following World War I. The force expanded during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1922 to nearly 800,000 men, but then were reduced after peace was reestablished.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: At the onset of World War II, on 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Polish forces were overwhelmed by the German attack in September 1939, which was followed on 17 September 1939 by an invasion by the Soviet Union. Some Polish forces escaped from the occupied country and joined Allied forces fighting in other theaters while those that remained in Poland splintered into guerilla units of the "Armia Krajowa" ("Home Army") and other partisan groups which fought in clandestine ways against the foreign occupiers. Thus, there were three threads to Polish armed forces from 1939; the Polish Armed Forces in the West, the "Armia Krajowa" and other resistance organizations fighting the Germans in Poland, and the Polish Armed Forces in the East, which later became the post-war communist Polish People's Army (LWP).


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Until the fall of communism, the army's prestige under communist rule continued to fall, as it was used by the government to resettle ethnic minorities immediately after the war (Operation Vistula), and to violently suppress opposition several times, during the 1956 Poznań protests, the 1970 Polish protests, and during martial law in Poland in 1981–1983. The LWP also took part in the suppressing of the 1968 democratization process of Czechoslovakia, commonly known as the Prague Spring. That same year Marshal of Poland Marian Spychalski was asked to replace Edward Ochab as chairman of the Council of State, and General Wojciech Jaruzelski, at that time the Chief of the General Staff, was named to replace him. Jaruzelski, a known Soviet loyalist, was put in place by the Soviets in order to ensure that a trusted group of officers was in control of one of the least trusted armies in the Warsaw Pact.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: After January 1990 and the collapse of the communist block, the name of the armed forces was changed to "Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland" to accord with the Polish State's new official name. Following the subsequent disbandment of the Warsaw Pact, Poland was admitted into NATO on 12 March 1999 and the Polish armed forces began a major reorganization effort in order to conform to the new western standards.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: From 2002 until 2014, Polish military forces were part of the Coalition Forces that participated in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan led by NATO. Poland's contribution to ISAF was the country's largest since its entrance into NATO. Polish forces also took part in the Iraq War. From 2003 to 2008, Polish military forces commanded the Multinational Division (MND-CS) located in the South-Central Occupation Zone of Iraq. The division was made up of troops from 23 nations and totaled as many as 8,500 soldiers.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: In March 2003, the Polish Armed Forces took part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, deploying special forces and a support ship. Following the destruction of Saddam's regime the Polish Land Forces supplied a brigade and a division headquarters for the 17-nation Multinational Division Central-South, part of the U.S.-led Multi-National Force – Iraq. At its peak Poland had 2,500 soldiers in the south of the country.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Other completed operations include 2005 'Swift Relief' in Pakistan, in which NATO Response Force-allocated personnel were despatched. Polish Land Forces personnel sent to Pakistan included a military engineers company, a platoon of the 1st Special Commando Regiment, and a logistics component from the 10th Logistics Brigade. Elsewhere, Polish forces were sent to MINURCAT in Chad and the Central African Republic (2007–2010).


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: As of 2008, Poland had deployed 985 personnel in eight separarate UN peacekeeping operations (the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, MINURSO, MONUC, UNOCI, UNIFIL, UNMEE, UNMIK, UNMIL, and UNOMIG).


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Formerly set up according to Warsaw Pact standards, the Polish armed forces are now fully organized according to NATO requirements. Poland is also playing an increasingly larger role as a major European peacekeeping power in the world through various UN peacekeeping actions, and cooperation with neighboring nations through multinational formations and units such as the Multinational Corps Northeast and POLUKRBAT. As of 1 January 2010, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland have transitioned to a completely contract-based manpower supply system.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: On 10 April 2010, a Polish Air Force Tu-154M crashed near Smolensk, Russia while in transit to a ceremony commemorating the Katyn massacre. On board the plane were the President (Commander-in-Chief), the Chief of Staff, all four Branch Commanders of the Polish Military, and a number of other military officials; all were killed.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: In 2014–2015, the Armed Forces General Command and Armed Forces Operational Command were both established, superseding the previous individual service branch command structures.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Prompted in part by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. the Polish government announced plans in March 2022 to roughly double the size of the armed forces to 300,000 personnel, and to spend at least 3% of GDP on defence. This includes increasing the size of the tank fleet by adding approximately 1,000 new tanks and adding 600 new howitzers to Poland's ground forces. Poland's Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said that it is Poland's goal to build the strongest ground forces of all the North Atlantic Treaty Organization members in Europe.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Since 2011, the Armed Forces are in the middle of a long-term modernization program. Plans involve new anti-aircraft missile systems, ballistic missile defense systems, a Lead-In Fighter Trainer (LIFT) aircraft, medium transport and combat helicopters, submarines, unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as self-propelled howitzers. Technical modernization plans for the years 2013 through to 2022 have been put in place. During the 2013 to 2016 period of the plan, 37.8 billion PLN, or 27.8% of the period's military budget of 135.5 billion PLN was invested into technical modernisation.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Significant military equipment acquisitions are also planned for through the 2022 period, with the Ministry of Defense outlying 61 billion złoty to be spent on further modernization. A major feature of the program is the acquisition of around 1,200 unmanned aerial vehicles, including at least 1,000 with combat capabilities.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: Additionally, new helicopters and air defense systems are to be procured along with five light vessels for the navy. A new submarine force is to be jointly operated with a NATO partner, and general upgrade and modernization efforts are aimed at the country's air defenses, naval forces, cyber warfare capabilities, armored forces, and territorial defense forces (to have 50,000 volunteer members).


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The Polish Armed Forces consist of 114,050 active duty personnel. In 2020, troop strength in the five different branches was as follows:


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The Polish armed forces has consistently held two yearly military parades () on Armed Forces Day and National Independence Day. These parades take place on Ujazdów Avenue and near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Piłsudski Square respectively. The Armed Forces Day Parade was introduced in 2007 and 2008 as first grand military parades since the holiday was reinstated and have been held yearly since 2013. The first Polish military parade took place on 17 January 1945 and as of 2019, the 3 May Constitution Day parade was officially reinstated.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: "Marsz Generalski" and "Warszawianka (1831)" are the main military musical pieces performed at ceremonial events. While the former is a solemn march used during inspections and the march on of the Polish flag, the latter is a march strictly used for march pasts, military parades and other processions.


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: The Polish Armed Forces are the only military entity in the world to use a two-finger salute which is only used while wearing a hat (it refers to the fact that the salute is given to the emblem itself) with the emblem of the Polish eagle, such as military hat rogatywka. The salute is performed with the middle and index fingers extended and touching each other, while the ring and little fingers are bent and touched by the thumb. The tips of the middle and index fingers touch the peak of the cap, two fingers supposedly meaning Honour and Fatherland (Honor i Ojczyzna).


title: Polish Armed Forces

text: "Czołem Żołnierze" (the Polish language version of "Greetings Soldiers") is the official military greeting of the armed forces, usually given by the members of the government or military establishment as well as visiting dignitaries during ceremonial occasions. The soldiers will usually respond with "Czołem (States title/rank of dignitary)".


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: Courtney Thorne-Smith (born November 8, 1967) is an American actress. She is known for her starring roles as Alison Parker on "Melrose Place", Georgia Thomas on "Ally McBeal", Cheryl Mabel in "According to Jim" and her recurring role on "Two and a Half Men" as Lyndsey McElroy.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: Thorne-Smith was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in Menlo Park, a suburb south of San Francisco. Her father, Walter Smith, was a computer market researcher, and her mother, Lora Thorne, was a therapist. They divorced when Courtney was seven years old and she lived with both parents at different stages. She has an older sister, Jennifer, who is an advertising executive. She attended Menlo-Atherton High School, in Atherton, California, and graduated from Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California, in 1985. She also performed with the Ensemble Theater Company in Mill Valley while attending high school.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: Thorne-Smith made her first film appearance in the 1986 feature film drama "Lucas", alongside Winona Ryder, Corey Haim, and Charlie Sheen. She was also involved in a number of movies in the late 1980s, such as "Welcome to 18" (1986), "" (1987), "Summer School" (1987), and "Side Out" (1990). In 1998, she starred in the box office flop "Chairman of the Board" with Carrot Top. In 2009, she appeared in "Sorority Wars".


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: She appeared on a few mid-1980s television series such as "Growing Pains" and the short-lived "Fast Times", as well as made-for-television movies including "The Thanksgiving Promise" and "Infidelity" before landing a regular role in the short-lived sitcom "Day by Day" with Douglas Sheehan, Linda Kelsey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. In 1990, she was featured in six episodes of "L.A. Law" as Laker Girl Kimberly Dugan.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: Her first notable starring television role was as Alison Parker on "Melrose Place" from 1992 to 1997. During this time, in 1995, she starred in a made-for-television movie "Beauty's Revenge" which was also marketed in CD and DVD form as "Midwest Obsession". Following this, she went on to play Georgia Thomas on "Ally McBeal" from 1997 to 2000. Thorne-Smith originally auditioned for the title role in the show, which ultimately went to Calista Flockhart. Her character was written out of "Ally McBeal" at the beginning of season four in 2000, though she returned for occasional guest appearances afterwards. She later said that she left the show in part because of the pressure to stay thin. "I started undereating, overexercising, pushing myself too hard and brutalizing my immune system," she told "US Weekly". "The amount of time I spent thinking about food and being upset about my body was insane."


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: From 2001 to 2009, she starred as Cheryl on "According to Jim". In 2007, her real-life pregnancy was hidden on the show at first, but was then written into the plot. On February 18, 2010, she signed on to play Alan Harper (Jon Cryer)'s girlfriend, Lyndsey McElroy, in season seven of "Two and a Half Men". She appeared in 52 episodes from season seven through twelve.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: Starting in 2017, Thorne-Smith has starred in a series of television films, the "Emma Fielding Mysteries" based on the novels by Dana Cameron. Three entries have been telecast on the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel as of 2019.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: On September 18, 2007, Thorne-Smith's novel, "Outside In", was published by Broadway Books in New York.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: In 1997, she became a spokeswoman for Almay cosmetics, being the face of their new "Skin Stays Clean" line of make-up. She is also a spokeswoman for the Atkins diet.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: In the early 1990s, Thorne-Smith dated Andrew Shue, her on-screen lover from "Melrose Place". In June 2000, the actress married geneticist Andrew Conrad; the couple divorced in January 2001.


title: Courtney Thorne-Smith

text: On January 1, 2007, she married Roger Fishman, president of the marketing firm the Zizo Group and author of the book "What I Know". On January 11, 2008, at age 40, she gave birth to their son, Jacob Emerson Fishman.


title: The

text: The () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. "The" is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers.


title: The

text: In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun "thee") when followed by a vowel sound or used as an emphatic form.


title: The

text: Modern American and New Zealand English have an increasing tendency to limit usage of pronunciation and use , even before a vowel.


title: The

text: Sometimes the word "the" is pronounced , with stress, to emphasise that something is unique: "he is the expert", not just "an" expert in a field.


title: The

text: Definite article principles in English are described under "Use of articles". "The", as in phrases like "the more the better", has a distinct origin and etymology and by chance has evolved to be identical to the definite article.


title: The

text: "The" and "that" are common developments from the same Old English system. Old English had a definite article "se" (in the masculine gender), "sēo" (feminine), and "þæt" (neuter). In Middle English, these had all merged into "þe", the ancestor of the Modern English word "the".


title: The

text: Countries and territorial regions are notably mixed, most exclude "the" but there are some that adhere to secondary rules:


title: The

text: In Middle English, "the" (þe) was frequently abbreviated as a "þ" with a small "e" above it, similar to the abbreviation for "that", which was a "þ" with a small "t" above it. During the latter Middle English and Early Modern English periods, the letter thorn (þ) in its common script, or cursive, form came to resemble a "y" shape. With the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of for became ubiquitous, leading to the common ""ye"", as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that existed in the printer's types that William Caxton and his contemporaries imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while did not. As a result, the use of a "y" with an "e" above it () as an abbreviation became common. It can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as Romans 15:29 or in the Mayflower Compact. Historically, the article was never pronounced with a "y" sound even when it was so written.


title: The

text: Ohio State University registered a trademark allowing the university to use "THE" on casual and athletic clothing. The university, often referred to as "The Ohio State University", had used "THE" on clothing since 2005, but took steps to register the trademark in August 2019 after the Marc Jacobs company attempted to do the same. In August 2021 Ohio State and Marc Jacobs agreed the high-end fashion retailer could use "THE" on its merchandise, which was different from what the university would sell. Still, the university took almost an additional year to convince the United States Patent and Trademark Office that the use of "the" was "more than ... ornamental".


title: The

text: Since "the" is one of the most frequently used words in English, at various times short abbreviations for it have been found:


title: The

text: Occasional proposals have been made by individuals for an abbreviation. In 1916, Legros & Grant included in their classic printers' handbook "Typographical Printing-Surfaces", a proposal for a letter similar to Ħ to represent "Th", thus abbreviating "the" to ħe.


title: The

text: In Middle English, "the" (þe) was frequently abbreviated as a "þ" with a small "e" above it, similar to the abbreviation for "that", which was a "þ" with a small "t" above it. During the latter Middle English and Early Modern English periods, the letter thorn (þ) in its common script, or cursive form, came to resemble a "y" shape. As a result, the use of a "y" with an "e" above it () as an abbreviation became common. This can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as Romans 15:29, or in the Mayflower Compact. Historically, the article was never pronounced with a "y" sound, even when so written.


title: The

text: The word "The" itself, capitalised, is used as an abbreviation in Commonwealth countries for the honorific title "The Right Honourable", as in e.g. "The Earl Mountbatten of Burma", short for "The Right Honourable Earl Mountbatten of Burma", or "The Prince Charles".


title: Hanseatic League

text: The Hanseatic League (; , , ; ) was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 12th century, the League ultimately encompassed nearly 200 settlements across seven modern-day countries; at its height between the 13th and 15th centuries, it stretched from the Netherlands in the west to Russia in the east, and from Estonia in the north to Kraków, Poland in the south.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The League originated from various loose associations of German traders and towns formed to advance mutual commercial interests, such as protection against piracy and banditry. These arrangements gradually coalesced into the Hanseatic League, whose traders enjoyed duty-free treatment, protection, and diplomatic privileges in affiliated communities and their trade routes. Hanseatic Cities gradually developed a common legal system governing their merchants and goods, even operating their own armies for mutual defense and aid. Reduced barriers to trade resulted in mutual prosperity, which fostered economic interdependence, kinship ties between merchant families, and deeper political integration; these factors solidified the League into a cohesive political organization by the end of the 13th century.


title: Hanseatic League

text: During the peak of its power, the Hanseatic League had a virtual monopoly over maritime trade in the North and Baltic seas. Its commercial reach extended as far as the Kingdom of Portugal to the west, the Kingdom of England to the north, the Republic of Novgorod to the east, and the Republic of Venice to the south, with trading posts, factories, and mercantile "branches" established in numerous towns and cities across Europe. Hanseatic merchants were widely renowned for their access to a variety of commodities and manufactured goods, subsequently gaining privileges and protections abroad, including extraterritorial districts in foreign realms that operated almost exclusively under Hanseatic law. This collective economic influence made the League a powerful force, capable of imposing blockades and even waging war against kingdoms and principalities.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Even at its zenith, the Hanseatic League was never more than a loosely aligned confederation of city-states. It lacked a permanent administrative body, treasury, and standing military force; only a very small number of members enjoyed autonomy and liberties comparable to those of neighbouring free imperial cities. By the mid-16th century, these tenuous connections left the Hanseatic League vulnerable to rising competitors such as England, the Netherlands, and Russia. External pressures steadily eroded the confederation's unity, while rising local parochialism and political disputes from within frustrated the League's foundational principles of common purpose and mutuality. The League gradually unraveled as members departed or became consolidated into other realms, ultimately disintegrating in 1669.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Despite its inherent structural weaknesses, the Hanseatic League managed to endure and thrive for centuries under a quasi-legislative "diet" that operated on deliberation and consensus. Members united on the basis of mutual interest and comity, working together to pool resources, raise levies, and amicably resolve disputes to further common goals. The League's long-lived success and unity during a period of political upheaval and fragmentation has led to it being described as the most successful trade alliance in history, while its unique governance structure has been identified as a precursor to the supranational model of the European Union.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Although some historians identify as originally meaning "An-See", or "on the sea", it is the Old High German word for a band or troop. This word was applied to bands of merchants traveling between the Hanseatic cities — whether by land or by sea. in Middle Low German came to mean a society of merchants or a trader guild.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Exploratory trading adventures, raids, and piracy occurred early throughout the Baltic Sea; the sailors of Gotland sailed up rivers as far away as Novgorod. Scandinavians led international trade in the Baltic area before the Hanseatic League, establishing major trading hubs at Birka, Haithabu, and Schleswig by the 9th century CE. The later Hanseatic ports between Mecklenburg and Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) originally formed part of the Scandinavian-led Baltic trade-system.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Historians generally trace the origins of the Hanseatic League to the rebuilding of the north German town of Lübeck in 1159 by the powerful Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, after he had captured the area from Adolf II, Count of Schauenburg and Holstein. More recent scholarship has deemphasized the focus on Lübeck due to its having been designed as one of several regional trading centers.


title: Hanseatic League

text: German cities achieved domination of trade in the Baltic with striking speed during the 13th century, and Lübeck became a central node in the seaborne trade that linked the areas around the North and Baltic seas. The hegemony of Lübeck peaked during the 15th century.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Lübeck became a base for merchants from Saxony and Westphalia trading eastward and northward. Well before the term "Hanse" appeared in a document in 1267,


title: Hanseatic League

text: merchants in different cities began to form guilds, or "Hansa", with the intention of trading with towns overseas, especially in the economically less-developed eastern Baltic. This area could supply timber, wax, amber, resins, and furs, along with rye and wheat brought down on barges from the hinterland to port markets. The towns raised their own armies, with each guild required to provide levies when needed. The Hanseatic cities came to the aid of one another, and commercial ships often had to be used to carry soldiers and their arms.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Visby (on the island of Gotland) functioned as the leading centre in the Baltic before the Hansa. Sailing east, Visby merchants established a trading post at Novgorod called "Gutagard" (also known as "Gotenhof") in 1080. Merchants from northern Germany also stayed there in the early period of the Gotlander settlement. Later, in the first half of the 13th century, they established their own trading station in Novgorod, known as , further up the river Volkhov. In 1229 the ruler of Novgorod, the Rus' prince Michael of Chernigov, granted German merchants at Novgorod certain privileges that made their position more secure.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Hansa societies worked to remove restrictions on trade for their members. The earliest extant documentary mention (although without a name) of a specific German commercial federation dates from 1157 in London. That year, the merchants of the Hansa in Cologne convinced King Henry II of England to exempt them from all tolls in London


title: Hanseatic League

text: and to allow them to trade at fairs throughout England. The "Queen of the Hansa", Lübeck, where traders were required to trans-ship goods between the North Sea and the Baltic, gained imperial privileges to become a free imperial city in 1226, as had Hamburg in 1189.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In 1241 Lübeck, which had access to the Baltic and North seas' fishing grounds, formed an alliance—a precursor to the League—with Hamburg, another trading city, which controlled access to salt-trade routes from Lüneburg. The allied cities gained control over most of the salt-fish trade, especially the Scania Market; Cologne joined them in the Diet of 1260.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In 1266 King Henry III of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa a charter for operations in England, and the Cologne Hansa joined them in 1282 to form the most powerful Hanseatic colony in London. Much of the drive for this co-operation came from the fragmented nature of existing territorial governments, which failed to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years, the Hansa solidified with formal agreements for confederation and co-operation covering the west and east trade routes. The principal city and linchpin remained Lübeck; with the first general diet of the Hansa held there in 1356, the Hanseatic League acquired an official structure.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Lübeck's location on the Baltic provided access for trade with Scandinavia and Kievan Rus' (with its sea-trade center, Veliky Novgorod), putting it in direct competition with the Scandinavians who had previously controlled most of the Baltic trade-routes. A treaty with the Visby Hansa put an end to this competition: through this treaty the Lübeck merchants gained access to the inland Russian port of Novgorod, where they built a trading post or "Kontor" (literally: "office"). Although such alliances formed throughout the Holy Roman Empire, the league never became a closely managed formal organisation. Assemblies of the Hanseatic towns met irregularly in Lübeck for a "Hansetag" (Hanseatic Diet) from 1356 onwards, but many towns chose not to attend nor to send representatives, and decisions were not binding on individual cities. Over the period, a network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The league succeeded in establishing additional "Kontors" in Bruges (Flanders), Bergen (Norway), and London (England). These trading posts became significant enclaves. The London "Kontor" is first alluded to in the "De itinere navali", an account of crusaders from Lübeck for whom the Kontor arranged the purchase of a replacement cog in the summer of 1189. It was formally established in 1320, stood west of London Bridge near Upper Thames Street, on the site now occupied by Cannon Street station. It grew into a significant walled community with its own warehouses, weighhouse, church, offices and houses, reflecting the importance and scale of trading activity on the premises. The first reference to it as the Steelyard ("der Stahlhof") occurs in 1422.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Starting with trade in coarse woollen fabrics, the Hanseatic League had the effect of bringing both commerce and industry to northern Germany. As trade increased, newer and finer woollen and linen fabrics, and even silks, were manufactured in northern Germany. The same refinement of products out of cottage industry occurred in other fields, e.g. etching, wood carving, armour production, engraving of metals, and wood-turning. The century-long monopolization of sea navigation and trade by the Hanseatic League ensured that the Renaissance arrived in northern Germany long before it did in the rest of Europe. A legacy of the period is a regional style of architecture known the Weser Renaissance, typified by the embellished facade added to the Bremen Rathaus in 1612.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In addition to the major "Kontors", individual Hanseatic ports had a representative merchant and warehouse. In England this happened in Boston, Bristol, Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn, which features the sole remaining Hanseatic warehouse in England), Hull, Ipswich, Norwich, Yarmouth (now Great Yarmouth), and York.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The league primarily traded timber, furs, resin (or tar), flax, honey, wheat, and rye from the east to Flanders and England with cloth (and, increasingly, manufactured goods) going in the other direction. Metal ore (principally copper and iron) and herring came southwards from Sweden.


title: Hanseatic League

text: German colonists in the 12th and 13th centuries settled in numerous cities on and near the east Baltic coast, such as Elbing (Elbląg), Thorn (Toruń), Reval (Tallinn), Riga, and Dorpat (Tartu), which became members of the Hanseatic League, and some of which still retain many Hansa buildings and bear the style of their Hanseatic days. Most were granted Lübeck law ("Lübisches Recht"), after the league's most prominent town. The law provided that they had to appeal in all legal matters to Lübeck's city council. The Livonian Confederation of 1435 to incorporated modern-day Estonia and parts of Latvia and had its own Hanseatic parliament (diet); all of its major towns became members of the Hanseatic League. The dominant language of trade was Middle Low German, a dialect with significant impact for countries involved in the trade, particularly the larger Scandinavian languages, Estonian, and Latvian.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The league had a fluid structure, but its members shared some characteristics; most of the Hansa cities either started as independent cities or gained independence through the collective bargaining power of the league, though such independence remained limited. The Hanseatic free cities owed allegiance directly to the Holy Roman Emperor, without any intermediate family tie of obligation to the local nobility.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Another similarity involved the cities' strategic locations along trade routes. At the height of their power in the late-14th century, the merchants of the Hanseatic League succeeded in using their economic power and, sometimes, their military might—trade routes required protection and the league's ships sailed well-armed—to influence imperial policy.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The league also wielded power abroad. Between 1361 and 1370 it waged war against Denmark. Initially unsuccessful, Hanseatic towns in 1368 allied in the Confederation of Cologne, sacked Copenhagen and Helsingborg, and forced Valdemar IV, King of Denmark, and his son-in-law Haakon VI, King of Norway, to grant the league 15% of the profits from Danish trade in the subsequent peace treaty of Stralsund in 1370, thus gaining an effective trade and economic monopoly in Scandinavia. This favourable treaty marked the height of Hanseatic power. After the Danish-Hanseatic War and the Bombardment of Copenhagen, the Treaty of Vordingborg renewed the commercial privileges in 1435.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The Hansa also waged a vigorous campaign against pirates. Between 1392 and 1440 maritime trade of the league faced danger from raids of the Victual Brothers and their descendants, privateers hired in 1392 by Albert of Mecklenburg, King of Sweden, against Margaret I, Queen of Denmark. In the Dutch–Hanseatic War (1438–1441), the merchants of Amsterdam sought and eventually won free access to the Baltic and broke the Hanseatic monopoly. As an essential part of protecting their investment in ships and their cargoes, the League trained pilots and erected lighthouses.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Most foreign cities confined the Hanseatic traders to certain trading areas and to their own trading posts. They seldom interacted with the local inhabitants, except when doing business. Many locals, merchant and noble alike, envied the power of the League and tried to diminish it. For example, in London, the local merchants exerted continuing pressure for the revocation of privileges. The refusal of the Hansa to offer reciprocal arrangements to their English counterparts exacerbated the tension.


title: Hanseatic League

text: King Edward IV of England reconfirmed the league's privileges in the Treaty of Utrecht despite the latent hostility, in part thanks to the significant financial contribution the League made to the Yorkist side during the Wars of the Roses of 1455–1487. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth of England expelled the League from London, and the Steelyard closed the following year. Tsar Ivan III of Russia closed the Hanseatic "Kontor" at Novgorod in 1494. The very existence of the League and its privileges and monopolies created economic and social tensions that often crept over into rivalries between League members.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The economic crises of the late 15th century did not spare the Hansa. Nevertheless, its eventual rivals emerged in the form of the territorial states, whether new or revived, and not just in the west: Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, ended the entrepreneurial independence of Hansa's Novgorod "Kontor" in 1478—it closed completely and finally in 1494. New vehicles of credit were imported from Italy, where double-entry book-keeping was popularly formalized in 1494, and outpaced the Hansa economy, in which silver coins changed hands rather than bills of exchange.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In the 15th century, tensions between the Prussian region and the "Wendish" cities (Lübeck and its eastern neighbours) increased. Lübeck was dependent on its role as centre of the Hansa, being on the shore of the sea without a major river. It was on the entrance of the land route to Hamburg, but this land route could be bypassed by sea travel around Denmark and through the Kattegat. Prussia's main interest, on the other hand, was the export of bulk products like grain and timber, which were very important for England, the Low Countries, and, later on, also for Spain and Italy.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In 1454, the year of the marriage of Elisabeth of Austria to King-Grand Duke Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland-Lithuania, the towns of the Prussian Confederation rose up against the dominance of the Teutonic Order and asked Casimir IV for help. Gdańsk (Danzig), Thorn and Elbing became part of the Kingdom of Poland, (from 1466 to 1569 referred to as Royal Prussia, region of Poland) by the Second Peace of Thorn.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Poland in turn was heavily supported by the Holy Roman Empire through family connections and by military assistance under the Habsburgs. Kraków, then the capital of Poland, had a loose association with the Hansa. The lack of customs borders on the River Vistula after 1466 helped to gradually increase Polish grain exports, transported to the sea down the Vistula, from per year, in the late 15th century, to over in the 17th century. The Hansa-dominated maritime grain trade made Poland one of the main areas of its activity, helping Danzig to become the Hansa's largest city.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The member cities took responsibility for their own protection. In 1567, a Hanseatic League agreement reconfirmed previous obligations and rights of league members, such as common protection and defense against enemies. The Prussian Quartier cities of Thorn, Elbing, Königsberg and Riga and Dorpat also signed. When pressed by the King of Poland–Lithuania, Danzig remained neutral and would not allow ships running for Poland into its territory. They had to anchor somewhere else, such as at Pautzke (Puck).


title: Hanseatic League

text: A major economic advantage for the Hansa was its control of the shipbuilding market, mainly in Lübeck and in Danzig. The Hansa sold ships everywhere in Europe, including Italy. They drove out the Dutch, because Holland wanted to favour Bruges as a huge staple market at the end of a trade route. When the Dutch started to become competitors of the Hansa in shipbuilding, the Hansa tried to stop the flow of shipbuilding technology from Hanseatic towns to Holland. Danzig, a trading partner of Amsterdam, attempted to forestall the decision. Dutch ships sailed to Danzig to take grain from the city directly, to the dismay of Lübeck. Hollanders also circumvented the Hanseatic towns by trading directly with north German princes in non-Hanseatic towns. Dutch freight costs were much lower than those of the Hansa, and the Hansa were excluded as middlemen.


title: Hanseatic League

text: When Bruges, Antwerp and Holland all became part of the Duchy of Burgundy they actively tried to take over the monopoly of trade from the Hansa, and the staples market from Bruges was transferred to Amsterdam. The Dutch merchants aggressively challenged the Hansa and met with much success. Hanseatic cities in Prussia, Livonia, supported the Dutch against the core cities of the Hansa in northern Germany. After several naval wars between Burgundy and the Hanseatic fleets, Amsterdam gained the position of leading port for Polish and Baltic grain from the late 15th century onwards. The Dutch regarded Amsterdam's grain trade as the ("").


title: Hanseatic League

text: Nuremberg in Franconia developed an overland route to sell formerly Hansa-monopolised products from Frankfurt via Nuremberg and Leipzig to Poland and Russia, trading Flemish cloth and French wine in exchange for grain and furs from the east. The Hansa profited from the Nuremberg trade by allowing Nurembergers to settle in Hanseatic towns, which the Franconians exploited by taking over trade with Sweden as well. The Nuremberger merchant Albrecht Moldenhauer was influential in developing the trade with Sweden and Norway, and his sons Wolf Moldenhauer and Burghard Moldenhauer established themselves in Bergen and Stockholm, becoming leaders of the local Hanseatic activities.


title: Hanseatic League

text: At the start of the 16th century, the Hanseatic League found itself in a weaker position than it had known for many years.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In the Swedish War of Liberation 1521-1523 the Hanseatic League was successful in opposition in an economic conflict it had over the trade, mining and metal industry in Bergslagen (the main mining area of Sweden in the 16th century) with Jakob Fugger (early extremely rich industrialist in the mining and metal industry on the continent) and his unfriendly business take-over attempt. Fugger allied with his financially dependent pope Leo X, Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Christian II of Denmark/Norway. Both sides made huge costly investments in support of larger amounts of expensive hired mercenaries to win the war. The Hanseatic League fully restored its power in Gustav Vasa's Sweden and Frederick I's Denmark, 1523 after the war.


title: Hanseatic League

text: However the Hanseatic League ended up on the wrong side 1536, after Christian III's victory in the Count's Feud in Scania and Denmark, with Sweden as his ally, money was gone, the Hanseatic League's influence in the Nordic countries was over. After that the Hanseatic League was only seen as an unwanted competitor by Denmark-Norway and Sweden.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Later in the 16th century, Denmark-Norway took control of much of the Baltic Sea. Sweden had regained control over its own trade, the "Kontor" in Novgorod had closed, and the "Kontor" in Bruges had become effectively moribund. The individual cities making up the league had also started to put self-interest before their common Hanseatic interests. Finally, the political authority of the German princes had started to grow, constraining the independence of the merchants and Hanseatic towns.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The league attempted to deal with some of these issues: it created the post of Syndic in 1556 and elected Heinrich Sudermann as a permanent official with legal training, who worked to protect and extend the diplomatic agreements of the member towns. In 1557 and 1579 revised agreements spelled out the duties of towns and some progress was made. The Bruges "Kontor" moved to Antwerp and the Hansa attempted to pioneer new routes. However the league proved unable to prevent the growing mercantile competition, and so a long decline commenced. The Antwerp "Kontor" closed in 1593, followed by the London "Kontor" in 1598. The Bergen "Kontor" continued until 1754; of all the "Kontore", only its buildings, the "Bryggen", survive.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The gigantic warship "Adler von Lübeck" was constructed for military use against Sweden during the Northern Seven Years' War (1563–70) but was never put to military use, epitomizing the vain attempts of Lübeck to uphold its long-privileged commercial position in a changing economic and political climate.


title: Hanseatic League

text: By the late 17th century, the league had imploded and could no longer deal with its own internal struggles. The social and political changes that accompanied the Protestant Reformation included the rise of Dutch and English merchants and the pressure of the Ottoman Empire upon the Holy Roman Empire and its trade routes.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In 1666, the Hanseatic Steelyard in London was burned down by the Great Fire of London. The Kontor-manager sent a letter to Lübeck appealing for immediate financial assistance for a reconstruction. Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck called for a Hanseatic Day in 1669. Only a few cities participated and those who came were very reluctant to contribute financially to the reconstruction. It was the last formal meeting.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Nonetheless, the Hanseatic Republics were able to jointly perform some diplomacy, such as a joint delegation to the United States in 1827, led by Vincent Rumpff; later the U.S. established a consulate to the "Hanseatic and Free Cities" from 1857 to 1862. Britain maintained diplomats to the "Hanseatic Cities" until the unification of Germany in 1871.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck remained as the only members until the League's demise in 1862, on the eve of the 1867 founding of the North German Confederation and the 1871 founding of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I. Until German reunification, these three cities were the only ones that retained the words "Hanseatic City" in their official German names. Since 1990, 24 other German cities have adopted this title.


title: Hanseatic League

text: After the disbandment of the Hanseatic League, the still significant trading cities of Hamburg and Bremen would be admitted to the German Customs Union (Zollverein) in 1888.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The members of the Hanseatic League were Low German merchants, whose towns were, with the exception of Dinant, where these merchants held citizenship. Not all towns with Low German merchant communities were members of the league (e.g., Emden, Memel (today Klaipėda), Viborg (today Vyborg) and Narva never joined). However, Hanseatic merchants could also come from settlements without German town law—the premise for league membership was birth to German parents, subjection to German law, and a commercial education. The league served to advance and defend the common interests of its heterogeneous members: commercial ambitions such as enhancement of trade, and political ambitions such as ensuring maximum independence from the noble territorial rulers.The Hanseatic League was by no means a monolithic organization or a 'state within a state' but rather a complex and loose-jointed confederation of protagonists pursuing their own interests, which coincided in a shared program of economic domination in the Baltic region.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Decisions and actions of the Hanseatic League were the consequence of a consensus-based procedure. If an issue arose, the league's members were invited to participate in a central meeting, the "Tagfahrt" ("meeting ride", sometimes also referred to as "Hansetag", since 1358). The member communities then chose envoys ("Ratssendeboten") to represent their local consensus on the issue at the "Tagfahrt". Not every community sent an envoy; delegates were often entitled to represent a set of communities. Consensus-building on local and "Tagfahrt" levels followed the Low Saxon tradition of "Einung", where consensus was defined as absence of protest: after a discussion, the proposals which gained sufficient support were dictated aloud to the scribe and passed as binding "Rezess" if the attendees did not object; those favouring alternative proposals unlikely to get sufficient support were obliged to remain silent during this procedure. If consensus could not be established on a certain issue, it was found instead in the appointment of a number of league members who were then empowered to work out a compromise.


title: Hanseatic League

text: each had their own treasury, court and seal. Like the guilds, the "Kontore" were led by "Ältermänner" ("eldermen", or English aldermen). The Stalhof "Kontor", as a special case, had a Hanseatic and an English "Ältermann". In 1347 the "Kontor" of Brussels modified its statute to ensure an equal representation of the league's members. To that end, member communities from different regions were pooled into three circles ("Drittel" ("third [part]"): the Wendish and Saxon Drittel, the Westphalian and Prussian Drittel as well as the Gothlandian, Livonian and Swedish Drittel). The merchants from their respective "Drittel" would then each choose two "Ältermänner" and six members of the Eighteen Men's Council ("Achtzehnmännerrat") to administer the "Kontor" for a set period of time. In 1356, during a Hanseatic meeting in preparation of the first "Tagfahrt", the league confirmed this statute. The league in general gradually adopted and institutionalized the division into "Drittel" (see table).


title: Hanseatic League

text: The "Tagfahrt" or "Hansetag" was the only central institution of the Hanseatic League. However, with the division into "Drittel" (= "Thirds"), the members of the respective subdivisions frequently held a "Dritteltage" (""Drittel" meeting") to work out common positions which could then be presented at a "Tagfahrt". On a more local level, league members also met, and while such regional meetings were never formalized into a Hanseatic institution, they gradually gained importance in the process of preparing and implementing "Tagfahrt" decisions.


title: Hanseatic League

text: From 1554, the division into "Drittel" was modified to reduce the circles' heterogeneity, to enhance the collaboration of the members on a local level and thus to make the league's decision-making process more efficient. The number of circles rose to four, so they were called "Quartiere" (quarters):


title: Hanseatic League

text: This division was however not adopted by the "Kontore", who, for their purposes (like "Ältermänner" elections), grouped the league members in different ways (e.g., the division adopted by the Stahlhof in London in 1554 grouped the league members into "Dritteln", whereby Lübeck merchants represented the Wendish, Pomeranian Saxon and several Westphalian towns, Cologne merchants represented the Cleves, Mark, Berg and Dutch towns, while Danzig merchants represented the Prussian and Livonian towns).


title: Hanseatic League

text: Kontor: The "Kontore" were foreign trading posts of the League, not cities that were Hanseatic members, and are set apart in a separate table below.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Despite its collapse, several cities still maintained the link to the Hanseatic League. Dutch cities including Groningen, Deventer, Kampen, Zutphen and Zwolle, and a number of German cities including Bremen, Buxtehude, Demmin, Greifswald, Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Stade, Stralsund, Uelzen and Wismar still call themselves "Hanse" cities (their car license plates are prefixed "H", e.g. –"HB"– for "Hansestadt Bremen"). Hamburg and Bremen continue to style themselves officially as "free Hanseatic cities", with Lübeck named "Hanseatic City" (Rostock's football team is named F.C. Hansa Rostock in memory of the city's trading past). For Lübeck in particular, this anachronistic tie to a glorious past remained especially important in the 20th century. In 1937, the Nazi Party removed this privilege through the Greater Hamburg Act possibly because the "Senat" of Lübeck did not permit Adolf Hitler to speak in Lübeck during his 1932 election campaign. He held the speech in Bad Schwartau, a small village on the outskirts of Lübeck. Subsequently, he referred to Lübeck as "the small city close to Bad Schwartau."


title: Hanseatic League

text: After the EU enlargement to the East in May 2004 there were some experts who wrote about the resurrection of the Baltic Hansa.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The legacy of the Hansa is remembered today in several names: the German airline Lufthansa (lit. "Air Hansa"); F.C. Hansa Rostock; Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, Netherlands; Hanze oil production platform, Netherlands; the Hansa Brewery in Bergen and the Hanse Sail in Rostock; DDG Hansa, which was a major German shipping company from 1881 until its bankruptcy and takeover by Hapag-Lloyd in 1980; Hansabank in Estonia, which has been rebranded into Swedbank; and Hansa-Park, one of the biggest theme parks in Germany.


title: Hanseatic League

text: There are two museums in Europe dedicated specifically to the history of the Hanseatic League: the European Hansemuseum in Lübeck and the Hanseatic Museum and Schøtstuene in Bergen.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In 1980, former Hanseatic League members established a "new Hanse" in Zwolle. This league is open to all former Hanseatic League members and cities that share a Hanseatic Heritage. In 2012 the New Hanseatic league had 187 members. This includes twelve Russian cities, most notably Novgorod, which was a major Russian trade partner of the Hansa in the Middle Ages. The "new Hanse" fosters and develops business links, tourism and cultural exchange.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The headquarters of the New Hansa is in Lübeck, Germany. The current President of the Hanseatic League of New Time is Jan Lindenau, Mayor of Lübeck.


title: Hanseatic League

text: Each year one of the member cities of the New Hansa hosts the Hanseatic Days of New Time international festival.


title: Hanseatic League

text: In 2006, King's Lynn became the first English member of the newly formed new Hanseatic League. It was joined by Hull in 2012 and Boston in 2016.


title: Hanseatic League

text: The "New Hanseatic League" was established in February 2018 by finance ministers from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden through the signing of a foundational document which set out the countries' "shared views and values in the discussion on the architecture of the EMU".


title: Stargate (film)

text: Stargate is a 1994 science fiction adventure film directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich. The film is the first entry in the "Stargate" media franchise and stars Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Alexis Cruz, Mili Avital, and Viveca Lindfors. The plot centers on the premise of a "Stargate", an ancient ring-shaped device that creates a wormhole, enabling travel to a similar device elsewhere in the universe. The film's central plot explores the theory of extraterrestrial beings having an influence upon human civilization.


title: Stargate (film)

text: Originally theatrically released on October 28, 1994, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), the film received mixed reviews, with its atmosphere, story, characters, and graphic content both praised and criticized. The film grossed $196.6 million worldwide against a production budget of $55 million.


title: Stargate (film)

text: In 1928 in Giza, Egypt, Catherine Langford's father unearthed cover stones (also called cap stones) engraved with Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1994, she invites Egyptologist and linguist Daniel Jackson, Ph.D. to translate the hieroglyphs. The stones are now part of a U.S. Air Force classified project overseen by Special Operations Colonel Jack O'Neil. Jackson determines that the hieroglyphs refer to a "stargate" which uses constellations as spatial coordinates. He is then shown the Stargate, which was also discovered by Langford's father, and they use his coordinates to align the Stargate's metal ring with markings along its outside. When all seven are locked in, a wormhole opens, connecting the Stargate with a distant planet. Jackson joins O'Neil and his team (Reilly, Porro, Freeman, Brown, Ferretti, and Kawalsky) as they pass through the wormhole.


title: Stargate (film)

text: They arrive in a pyramid on the arid desert planet of Abydos. Jackson locates the Stargate's controls, but does not find all of the symbols for the return coordinates. O'Neil orders Reilly, Porro, Freeman, and Ferretti to stay behind to guard the Stargate. Jackson sees a large animal with a harness, which drags him off when he approaches it to investigate. O'Neil's group follows and they discover a tribe of humans working to mine a strange mineral. Jackson realizes that they speak a variant of Ancient Egyptian and is able to communicate with them. He learns that the tribe sees him and his comrades as emissaries of their god Ra. The tribe's chieftain Kasuf presents Jackson with his daughter Sha'uri as a gift, and although Jackson initially refuses her, he later becomes romantically attached to her. O'Neil befriends Kasuf's teenaged son Skaara and his friends. Through hidden markings and discussions with the tribe, Jackson learns that Ra is an alien being who came to Earth during the Ancient Egyptian period to possess human bodies to extend his own life. Ra enslaved these humans and used the Stargate to bring some of them to Abydos to mine the mineral that is used in the alien technology. Humans on Earth revolted, overthrew Ra's overseers, and buried the Stargate to prevent its use. During this investigation, Jackson comes across a cartouche containing six of the seven symbols for the Stargate, but the seventh has been broken off.


title: Stargate (film)

text: That night, Ra's ship lands atop the pyramid structure, and his soldiers capture Ferretti and Freeman while killing Porro and Reilly. When Jackson, O'Neil, Brown, and Kawalsky return, there is a firefight against Ra's soldiers. Jackson and O'Neil are captured and brought before Ra and his guards, who are revealed to be humanoids when they retract their armored head-pieces. A firefight ensues, Jackson is killed, and the others are captured. Ra places Jackson's body in a sarcophagus-like device that regenerates him. Ra tells Jackson that he has found a nuclear bomb O'Neil secretly brought and has used his alien technology to increase its explosive power a hundred-fold, threatening to send it back through the Stargate to Earth. Ra orders the human tribe to watch as he prepares to force Jackson to execute the others to demonstrate his power, but Skaara and his friends create a diversion that allows Jackson, O'Neil, Kawalsky, and Ferretti to escape, while Freeman is killed. They flee to nearby caves to hide from Ra. Skaara and his friends celebrate, and Skaara draws a sign of victory on a wall, which Jackson recognizes as the final symbol.


title: Stargate (film)

text: O'Neil and his remaining men aid Skaara in overthrowing the remaining overseers and then launch an attack on Ra, who sends out fighter ships against the humans while he orders his ship to depart. The humans outside run out of ammunition and are forced to surrender to the fighter ships' pilots, but the rest of the tribe, seeing that their false gods are only humanoid, rebel against the pilots and overthrow them. Sha'uri is killed, but Jackson takes her body and sneaks aboard Ra's ship using a teleportation system, leaving O'Neil to fight Ra's guard captain, Anubis. Jackson places Sha'uri in the regeneration device, and she recovers, but Ra discovers them and attempts to kill Jackson. O'Neil activates the teleportation system, killing Anubis and allowing Jackson and Sha'uri to escape the ship. O'Neil and Jackson teleport the bomb to Ra's ship, destroying the ship and killing Ra. With the humans freed, the remaining team — O’Neil, Kawalsky, and Ferretti — return to Earth while Jackson chooses to stay behind with Sha'uri and the others.


title: Stargate (film)

text: The film in its original cut plays out in chronological order, as well as in the director's cut. When Devlin and Emmerich edited the film in the director's cut to tighten the narrative, they decided to add a scene at the very beginning of the film to show who the human host of Ra was before the aliens took him. Only Davidson's upper torso was filmed. The first scene was a combination of model shots and a set in Yuma, Arizona where "Rambo III" had been filmed. The scene of the excavation of the Stargate was also filmed in three days in Arizona. A golden look was achieved by filming near the time of sunset. To keep within the limit of the budget, the producers put stick figures with cloth in the distant desert to appear as humans. The original Stargate was painted black, but it looked like a giant tire so it was repainted silver at the last moment.


title: Stargate (film)

text: Daniel Jackson's lecture on his theories was filmed in a hotel in Los Angeles. The scene was originally much longer and delved more into the theories that aliens had built the Egyptian pyramids, but it was trimmed for time concerns for the release. The scenes with O'Neil at his house were the first ones filmed with Kurt Russell; his hair was cut short afterwards. Russell requested his hair color to be brightened a little for the film. The fictional facility housing the Stargate was the largest set for the film, the former Spruce Goose Dome located in Long Beach, California. Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith joined the production to make all Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and spoken language as accurate as possible.


title: Stargate (film)

text: The mask of the pharaoh in the opening credits was made out of fiberglass and modeled in the workshop. The sequence used a motion-control camera to give better depth of field. The score of "Stargate" was composer David Arnold's first work on an American feature film. When Devlin and Emmerich first flew to London to meet with Arnold, they had not yet heard the score; hearing it, they felt "he had elevated the film to a whole other level". Arnold later interviewed the actors during principal photography, using the information to improve his score.


title: Stargate (film)

text: Jeff Kleiser and Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co.'s visual effects team of 40 people created the look of the Stargate. They used self-written image-creation and compositing software, as well as commercial digital packages to create the Stargate, the morphing helmets worn by Ra and the Horus guards, and the cityscape of Nagada. The morphing helmets were not true 3D but 2D elements, as Kleiser explained: “You shoot the character without the headdress, you shoot the character with a headdress. And then you have to go in and, and create all these little sections that you would then wipe off to reveal – and it had to match up, the two things had to match up. I think the cameras were moving as well.”


title: Stargate (film)

text: Footprints in the sand were often digitally removed. The creation of the wormhole, which was fully digital, was one of the biggest challenges in the making of the film. The ripples had to be digitally composited to appear accurate and realistic. Scanning lasers were lined up parallel to the gate to illustrate the amount of body that passed the surface of the Stargate plane. Afterwards, the parts of the body that had or had not yet gone through the gate (depending on the side of filming) were obliterated with a digital matte, a process that removes unwanted components from an individual frame or sequence of frames. The funnel of water that precedes the Stargate opening was filmed by discharging an air cannon into a water tank, as Jeff Kleiser explained: "“We didn’t know how much air pressure to set the cannon on but it went from one to 500lbs, so we said ‘Let’s try 100 – start the camera rolling and hit the thing.’ It evacuated all the water out of the tank and onto the camera and everybody. It turned out that 1lb was about the right amount.”


title: Stargate (film)

text: The use of computers generating a big 3D storyboard allowed Emmerich to try out different shooting angles before settling on one angle.


title: Stargate (film)

text: The film's score was composed by David Arnold, played by the Sinfonia of London and conducted by Nicholas Dodd. It was the second motion picture score that Arnold had composed and his first major one. At the time of production, Arnold had recently started to work in a local video store in London. Once hired, he spent several months in a hotel room working on the soundtrack, spending more time rewriting the music and improving it, during delays due to film companies trying to get the rights to distribution. According to Arnold, "when I first read the script for Stargate, I knew what approach to take, which was to be as big and bold as possible," saying: "Every time there was an amazing sight, the characters would stand back and say, 'Oh my God!' But James would just smile and walk towards it. That was the basis for the Stargate score, moving forward with a sense of majesty instead of being frightened by what's around the corner."


title: Stargate (film)

text: "Stargate" was released in the United States on October 28, 1994, and released internationally in December of the same year.


title: Stargate (film)

text: In 1995, the film was released on VHS and as a Dolby Digital-encoded laserdisc spanning two discs (three sides). The first DVD release was on June 18, 1997. The DVD format was re-released in October 1999 under the title "Stargate Special Edition", and again in 2003 on VHS and a 2-disc DVD set with remastered theatrical and extended editions. The film was released on Blu-ray format on August 29, 2006.


title: Stargate (film)

text: In 1996, Omar Zuhdi, a Shawnee high school teacher, filed a lawsuit against the makers and originators of the original movie, claiming that they stole the plot and story of his 1984 film script "Egyptscape", as the basis of the film "Stargate" (and thus the "Stargate" franchise).


title: Stargate (film)

text: The director's cut had several scenes which were cut from the theatrical release. The first such scene took place immediately after the excavation of the Stargate in 1928 and showed a petrified Anubis guard underneath a broken cover stone. With this scene, the producers had tried to introduce the idea that beings had attempted to come through the Stargate after its burial but the scene was ultimately cut for time concerns.


title: Stargate (film)

text: The film received a warm reception from the public, grossing $71,567,262 at the United States box office and $125 million internationally for a worldwide total of $196,567,262. At the time, the film set a record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for a film released in the month of October. It would hold this record for four years until 1998 when "Antz" took it.


title: Stargate (film)

text: In its first run, "Stargate" made more money than film industry insiders predicted, considering the lukewarm reviews. Some regard it as Emmerich's breakthrough film. "Stargate" grossed over $16,651,000 in the United States during its opening week in October 1994. It was the 35th-highest-grossing film opening in the U.S. in October. From November 4–6, the film grossed around $12,368,700, declining 25%. The film would continue this decline until the end of November, when the film garnered $4,777,198, or an 8.2% rise. The week before that the film garnered around $4,413,420, a 45.6% decline. In its last week playing theatrically, the film garnered around $1,170,500 in the U.S.


title: Stargate (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 52% based on 48 reviews, and an average rating of 5.4/10. The site's critics consensus states: ""Stargate" has splashy visuals and James Spader to recommend it, but corny characterization and a clunky script makes this a portal to ho-hum." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 42 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". At Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE), which assigns a normalized rating to mainstream critics, the film holds a score of 64 out of 100 based on 95 reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Stargate (film)

text: Most of the negativity focused on what was criticized as overuse of special effects, thinness of plot, and excessive use of clichés. Roger Ebert went so far as to say, "The movie "Ed Wood", about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for "Stargate"". Ebert awarded the film one out of four stars and, even over ten years later, "Stargate" remained on his list of most-hated films. Mike DiBella from Allmovie said, "There simply isn't enough spectacle in "Stargate" to make up for its many flaws." The film peaked at number one on the "Billboard" chart "Top Video Rentals" on April 29, 1995.


title: Stargate (film)

text: The positive reviews stated that it was an "instant camp classic" and praised the film for its special effects and entertainment value, with Chris Hicks of the "Deseret News" calling it ""Star Wars" meets "Ben Hur"". Scott McKenzie from DVDactive said, "It's a shame because the world created around the "Stargate" is compelling and detailed. It's almost enough to make me want to watch the TV series, but not quite."


title: Stargate (film)

text: In January 1995, Emmerich and Devlin were sued by an Egyptology student who claimed that he had written the story and given them the idea. The suit was later settled out of court.


title: Stargate (film)

text: In 1995, "Stargate" was considered for various film awards worldwide. It won six of the ten awards it was nominated for.


title: Stargate (film)

text: Devlin and Emmerich always envisioned "Stargate" as the first part of a trilogy of films, but Parts 2 and 3 were never developed. At Comic-Con 2006, twelve years after the original film was released, Devlin stated that he was in early discussions with rights-holders MGM about finally bringing the final two parts to the screen.


title: Stargate (film)

text: According to Devlin, the second film is intended to be set around twelve years after the original, with Jackson making a discovery that leads him back to Earth and to the uncovering of a new Stargate. The second entry would supposedly use a different mythology from the Egyptian one which formed the background to the original film, with the third installment tying these together to reveal that "all mythologies are actually tied together with a common thread that we haven't recognized before." Devlin stated that he hoped to enlist original stars Kurt Russell (Col. Jack O'Neil) and James Spader (Dr. Daniel Jackson) for the sequels. The actors have reportedly expressed an interest in participating in the project.