Klaus Lohrmann. Babenberger und Traungauer. Landesherrschaft und Ökonomie (1150–1250) . Böhlau, Vienna 2025. 345 pp. Ill. Maps. € 60.00.
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Lohrmann's study of territorial lordship in Styria through the prism of economic governance is a substantial, carefully documented contribution to medieval Central European history.Set between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and tracking the passage of power from the Traungau counts to the Babenberg dukes of Styria, the book advances a clear central claim: the consolidation of princely authority cannot be understood apart from the deliberate structuring of markets, money, tolls, and manorial rights.Rather than surveying these domains in the abstract, Lohrmann anchors his analysis in a single, economically consequential document -the market privilege for Enns on the Danube issued in 1191.That charter becomes the study's hinge: the author returns to it repeatedly, using it to illuminate how rulers intervened in trade, calibrated legal protections and exactions, and transformed commercial practices into stable streams of lordly income.This organizing choice pays dividends.Enns emerges not merely as a local market town, but as a node embedded in long-distance exchange.Lohrmann underscores the presence of Regensburg merchants in the 1191 privilege and reconstructs the town's position within west-east circuits that linked Styrian outlets to Flemish cloth on one side and to wax and timber from the Rus on the other.The close reading of the charter's clauses on staple obligations and toll collection shows how territorial rulers could, through a handful of targeted instruments, channel traffic, concentrate transactions within their jurisdiction, and thereby secure predictable revenues.By setting Enns alongside other market privileges -carefully compared even when treated briefly -Lohrmann identifies common legal formulae while clarifying the specific ways Styrian rulers adapted known tools to local conditions.The book proceeds in a positivist, Landesgeschichte manner, taking up the component parts of territorial lordship one after another.Chapters survey market rights, minting and coin circulation, toll regimes and exemptions, the architecture of seigneurial landholding, and the assertion of dominion over woods and forests.The analysis remains grounded in the author's chosen documentary base, relying primarily on charter editions, published urbaria, and carefully selected narrative sources.One of the study's distinctive strengths lies in the way it keeps legal prerogatives connected to social actors.Lohrmann does not treat market privileges or toll lists as disembodied texts.He repeatedly integrates the agency of ministeriales and of merchant groups.This attention to personnel and practice makes the governance of markets and resources concrete.The chapters on coinage and tolls offer some of the clearest evidence for Lohrmann's broader thesis about monetized lordship.Mint rights are reconstructed geographically
Author: Julia Bruch
Institution: University of Mannheim
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417261989
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