8 - Town and country in the Austrian and Czech lands, 1450–1800

Summary

Introduction

Town-country relations in the Austrian and Czech lands offer a study in contrasts. Urban densities in most regions were high, but towns were on the whole rather small. The legal status of towns was of the utmost importance. Princely towns usually enjoyed a set of privileges vis-à-vis the countryside, which they tried to defend against the growing competition of feudal towns and markets. Political and jurisdictional differences mattered. They determined not only the absolute and relative levels of taxation across towns and between town and country, but also the towns’ powers over the countryside, including their marketing rights and industrial monopolies, the extent of commercial integration within and between regions, and the central state's ability to negotiate reductions in local privileges. This chapter therefore focuses on the economic consequences of political and institutional relations between towns, feudal lords and the central state from a regional perspective under three headings.

After an introductory section describing urban size and networks in the area, the first main part discusses the long-term characteristics of town–country relations in the context of the struggle between feudal lords and the expansionary state, in which town and countryside participated as secondary actors. The second section examines the long period of demographic and economic expansion between the late medieval and seventeenth-century crises. The most salient feature of the period was the growth of industrial activities, particularly in the textile and mining sectors, in which both town and country played active roles.