Thomas Ertl

Silkworms, Capital and Merchant Ships: European Silk Industry in the Medieval World Economy

Silk represented a bridge connecting East Asia, the Middle East and the Occident in the exchange of art forms between A.D. 1000 and 1500. The study of medieval production, trade, and use of silk, therefore, provided the opportunity to examine the complex dependencies between the artistic mind, technical skills, entrepreneurial options and political conditions in different areas of Eurasia. The aim of this article is not only to explain the overwhelming rise of the late medieval Italian silk industry, but to show the pace of regional developments in Eurasia, at times diverging, at times in unison.

Literary Conduits for ‘Consent’: Cultural Groundwork of the Mughal State in the Fifteenth Century

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.

Rule by Consensus Forms and Concepts of Political Order in the European Middle Ages

This article analyses specific characteristics of pre-modern rule in medieval central Europe. It becomes clear from the analysis that although the notion of monarchy implies a single ruler (mon-archia), it was actually the case, however, that in political practice, the kings and rulers of the Holy Roman Empire had to come to an arrangement with the elites and nobles. Therefore, the famous model developed by Max Weber regarding the three types of legitimate rule: legal, traditional and charismatic, fall short of encompassing the alterity and plurality of politics in the Middle Ages. Here, the concept of consensual rule is conceptualised through the use of additional case studies. These case studies more appropriately capture the fluid decision-making process in the Middle Ages through ongoing negotiation. Thus, the kings and emperors are clearly integrated into the framework of pre-modern oligarchies and therefore offer a counter-outline to the doctrine of divine right.

Governing Agrarian Diversities The State and the Making of an Early Modern Economy in Sixteenth-century Northern India

In a country as large and diverse as India, governance meant a welter of institutional and customary arrangements, particularly in the agrarian sector. Globally, the early modern state’s fiscal well being depended on agriculture. In India, the demands of an expanding maritime commerce made this more complex. Contrary to prevalent views of the state as an economic predator, this article shows how the sixteenth-century initiated novel and creative techniques of agrarian governance, which enabled it to consolidate power, extract revenue and protect diversities at the same time. This was a new dispensation, which cannot be explained by seamless notions of the ‘medieval’. These new strategies of governance can only be understood in the frame of an early modernity, which was a shared global experience. For India, agrarian governance involved, inter alia—the consolidation of private property and transactions based on contractual obligations. These were some of the important ways in which the state facilitated the making of an early modern economy in sixteenth-century India.

Court and Country: Discourses of Socio-political Collaboration in Northern and Southern Song China

The Northern Song Empire (960–1127) was the most spatially integrated and bureaucratically centralized polity in the late medieval world, and its rulers articulated ideological claims to unitary and universal sovereignty. Both its monarchs and ministers shared a discourse of authority that postulated the throne as the only legitimate source of authority, which was not openly challenged by organized blocs of aristocratic, religious, or urban elites. Yet, the Northern Song Empire was much less autocratic in practice than in theory, since monarchs chose to delegate the making of state policy and the civil and military administration of the empire to a hierarchy of central, regional, and local officials, so that intra-bureaucratic dynamics limited arbitrary monarchical action. Using a micro-level case study of the abolition of the Green Sprouts rural credit policy (qingmiao fa 青苗法) in 1085–1086, this article analyzes the debates within the Northern Song imperial bureaucracy about the reach of state power. The court’s anti-reformist high officials were united in their opposition to the policy, and individual ministers used a court-centered discourse of authority to denounce it for undermining the public good of the polity. Yet, its abolition required mobilizing extensive bureaucratic support within the central government and in local administration. By paying closer attention to the contexts and generic constraints of political rhetoric, and the intricacies of bureaucratic dynamics, it is possible to demonstrate more subtle fluctuations within the force fields of socio-political authority at court and in the country.

The Tsar Gave the Order and the Boyars Assented

It is argued that the political institutions of Muscovite Russia (Tsarstvo, adequately translated as kingdom in the early-modern times)—the meeting of the sobor (land) with its three voting bodies and the council of boyars (Duma) on the level of the Tsardom of Russia. As a whole, they were instruments of finding consensus between the Tsar and the powerful and rich groups of the ‘country’ (Zemlja) such as Church, nobility and big merchants. On the local level, autonomy and cooperation with the center in Moscow was established in the self-government (Mir) of villages and town-quarters (Sloboda), which also organised tax raising and other services for the government as quartering troops. Institutions of local law-enforcement (Guba) cooperated with the Ministry for law enforcement (razbojnik prikaz) in Moscow. Peter I (in the French way, by not convoking the sobor, ending the boyars’ council and founding new institutions in a new capital) established absolutism and Empire in Russia. As Putin said, ‘Historiography should neither date that change back nor render an image of Russia as immobile and centralistic by nature nor idealize the pre-Petrine system rendering an image of a ‘real Russia’ back in times.’

Command versus Consent: Representation and Interpretation of Power in the Late Medieval Eurasian World

In the period between 500 and 1500 AD, discussions on the best form of government took place in many regions and empires of the Eurasian world.1 A central element of this discourse was the tension between the authority of the individual and the consent of the many. This tension between command and consent has continued throughout the entire history of politics of all Eurasian regions and is closely related to other issues, such as state sovereignty,2 the emergence of the Estates of the Realm,3 the beginning of parliamentarianism and the general character of pre-modern polities.4 In this collection of essays, based on the papers of ‘The Medieval History Seminar’, held on 5 November 2014 at Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, we would like to continue this debate from a comparative perspective by examining the tension between command and consent in different parts

Das Seidennetzwerk. Zur Organisation des Seidenhandels in Europa im späten Mittelalter

Der Humanist und Historiograph Niccolò Tegrini (1448–1527) gab für die Ausbreitung der Seidenherstellung im westlichen Europa eine einfache Erklärung. In seiner um 1500 verfassten Lebensbeschreibung des Castruccio Castracani schrieb der Luccheser Gelehrte über die Eroberung seiner Heimatstadt im Jahr 1314: »Im ersten Gefecht trieb er, eben jener Castruccio, 300 Familien mit allen ihren Anhängern ins Exil, als er gemeinsam mit Uguccione della Faggiuola auch die Familie Obisi vertrieb. Und wir stellen fest, dass sie in sehr großer Zahl – manche aus Angst, manche aus Argwohn – von Lucca weggingen, um sich zunächst in nahe gelegene Orte zurückzuziehen – mit der Hoffnung, bald heimkehren zu dürfen. Doch gezwungen von den Umständen und erkennend, dass ihre Wünsche in weite Ferne rückten, gingen manche nach Venedig, manche nach Florenz, andere nach Mailand und Bologna, ein Teil nach Deutschland, ein anderer Teil nach Frankreich und England. Auf diese Weise begann man das Seidengeschäft (il mestiero de’ drappi di seta), durch das zuvor allein die Lucchesen in Italien sehr reich und berühmt geworden waren, überall auszuüben«.1) Seit der Antike war die Diffusion der Seidenherstellung, insbesondere die geheimnisumwobene Aufzucht der Seidenraupen, mit literarischen Erzählmotiven beschrieben worden. Im östlichen Turkmenistan, das heute als autonome Provinz Xingjiang zu China gehört, erzählte man sich von einer chinesischen Prinzessin, welche die Eier der Seiden-

Medieval Studies in Austria: Research Infrastructure and Resources

The purpose of this paper is to provide a short overview of Austrian institutions and associations related to research in Medieval history and a guide to the opportunities offered by Austrian scientific and academic research.

Money Topples Borders Economy and Diversity in Pre-modern Europe

In the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period, the European continent was characterised by a vast mobility of skilled and unskilled labour: Italian merchants established themselves in Bruges and in other commercial centres, German soldiers and craftsmen intermittently lived in Italy, merchants from many different nations met at trade fairs which regularly took place in Frankfurt am Main and in other cities and countless journeymen went on the road before they established themselves as master craftsmen somewhere. This migration was accompanied by an exchange of commodities, technologies and ideas across all political borders. One may think that these different exchange processes would have led to an economic convergence on the European continent. Why this was not, or was only to a certain extent the case, will be discussed in the second section of this essay.