The nine articles in this collection are the product of two workshops hosted at the University of Chicago in 2022 and 2023 in affiliation with the University of Vienna. They build on recent work that has called attention to the extraordinary political and religious diversity in the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, and Central Europe more broadly. Pushing back against older historiography, in which this period was frequently overlooked or framed by uncritical use of such broad categories as the “state,” the “territory,” the “estates,” and the “feud,” this collection recognizes the polycentric nature of the fifteenth century's structures and institutions. Specifically, these articles return to the sources, especially documents of practice rather than normative texts, to open the door to a new understanding of conflicts and negotiations. They illuminate the patterns of conflict and negotiation evident in specific historical contexts by examining actors, networks, and practices of community building—as well as the processes through which conflicts emerged, evolved, and were negotiated and settled. Rather than relying on time-honored categories and meta-narratives, the contributors embrace the messiness of social and political relations and of the extant source material to shine new light on key themes in the fifteenth century's history.

While the Europe-wide cultural impact of the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmed II is well known, its political reverberations in the Holy Roman Empire have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that the events of 1453 inaugurated a new dynamic in the empire that facilitated the polity's consolidation and the creation of new collective institutions within it long before Maximilian I (1486–1519), whose reign is often presented as a constitutional turning point. Some prince-electors had been calling for more effective peace-keeping and judicial institutions for decades before 1453 but lacked the leverage to compel kings and emperors of the Romans to accept political change on their terms. The fall of Constantinople provided a focal point for these negotiations: in return for promising to support an anti-Ottoman crusade, the reformists were able to force a compromise on new peace-keeping legislation at the diets of the 1450s and 1460s. This compromise was catalyzed by public pressure. There was a widely held expectation that leading imperial protagonists should fulfill this mission to defend Christendom, manifested in orations, diplomatic missives, poetry and songs, plays, and early printed pamphlets produced within and for a range of German-speaking public spheres.

The Dominican friar Johannes Nider (1380–1438), known today as the father of witchcraft literature, played an important role at the Council of Basel (1431–49) on the Council's delegation to the Hussites and its deputation on religious reform. Despite Nider's reputation as a reformer of religious communities, his approach to communal liturgy has not attracted close attention. This article focuses on his broad theoretical treatise, De reformatione religiosorum or De reformatione status cenobitici (On the Reform of the Religious State), in which Nider articulates a philosophical concept of reform as the restoration of beauty, manifested in well-ordered and balanced proportion. In the interest of universal applicability, the treatise remains abstract. However, biographical descriptions of Nider from his contemporaries and the visitation letters he wrote to women's convents show Nider as an engaged liturgical leader, a talented singer with a robust voice, and a zealous expert in the legal particulars of Dominican liturgical regulations. In light of these contexts, De reformatione's sweeping laments over liturgical neglect and academic metaphors of well-disposed proportion are not just rule-hammering and scholastic fancy but rather universalized expressions of Nider's lived commitment to Dominican musical and ritual practice.

Leonardo Bruni (1377–1444), chancellor of Florence, is today more famous as an initiator of civic humanism and a proponent of early modern republicanism than as a historian of medieval Florence. He owes this position most of all to Hans Baron, who argued that Florentine civic humanism—an exemplary mode of communal existence dedicated to the active life—as found particularly in Bruni's writings, stemmed from the resurgence of interest in antiquity, which pointed forward to a liberating, civilizing, and progressive modernity. Though James Hankins has recently argued that the dual theses of civic humanism and republicanism are mischaracterizations of the larger thrust of Italian Renaissance political thought, the scholarly literature overwhelmingly portrays Leonardo Bruni as incipiently modern and, by definition, un-medieval. But in emphasizing the role of antiquity in Bruni's “modern” thought, scholars have overlooked the importance of medieval history in the formulation and the content of Bruni's arguments. This article seeks to rectify this misappreciation by demonstrating how that quintessential medieval struggle, the conflict between popes and emperors, plays a central role in Bruni's political thought as it is found in the History of the Florentine People, written from 1415/16 to 1444.

This article focuses on the involvement of Viennese elites in wide-reaching political conflicts around 1400. Central European princes often held positions as city lords, which resulted in ambivalent relations between them and urban elites, as well as with their kin residing in the countryside. Setting aside grand categories of institutional history in favor of the interactions and relations of concrete actors, their social networks, and their involvement in shaping politics, the article follows six urban actors through a major conflict that involved the city lords, urban authorities, and individual actors and eventually resulted in the beheading of three of them. The article adopts a prosopographical approach to find out more about patterns of social costs and benefits in these conflicts. It argues that considering polyvalent and relational dimensions of belonging can help us better understand constellations of conflict and alliance and the modes and mechanisms of late medieval politics. It eventually establishes the boundaries of social network approaches when it comes to assessing individual motives and their alleged resonance in contemporary narratives of community.

This article examines the involvement and interactions of Vienna's urban elites in the conflict of the early 1460s that marked the climax of the power struggle between the Habsburg brothers Emperor Frederick III and Duke Albert VI over rule in the Duchy of Austria. Vienna's role is addressed in two aspects: first, as a central stage for the conflict, and second, as an active participant as a political community that became increasingly integrated into the broader political networks of the duchy during the fifteenth century. Following an actor-centered approach and based on prosopographical groundwork, the study focuses on the actions of individual protagonists and various factions within Vienna's political elites. During the violent events, the urban representatives did not form a cohesive entity but interacted and allied in changing constellations with leading noble, courtly, and clerical actors in the duchy. Factors and conditions contributing to the formation of diverse interest groups among urban actors are closely examined, aiming to give a deeper insight into the dynamics and patterns of the entangled conflict.

This article examines the various modes of conflict management used by the free city of Regensburg and the local nobleman Hans I Staufer of Ehrenfels during a prolonged dispute over revenues from 1413 to 1418. In the early years of this feud, both parties utilized nonviolent methods such as legal action and arbitration, which were occasionally accompanied by minor military interventions. In April 1417, however, the Regensburg councilors broke with convention and decided to escalate the conflict with their feud opponent by capturing his ancestral castle, Ehrenfels, near Beratzhausen in the Upper Palatinate region. Using both urban account books and documentary evidence, the case study investigates the reasons behind the councilors' decision to launch this ostentatious military attack, their objectives in seizing Ehrenfels castle, and the impact of their show of force on the ongoing conflict. It portrays late medieval Central European towns as potent military actors and argues for a more systematic integration of economic considerations and cost-benefit calculations into our picture of late medieval feuding.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a period of rising expenses and mounting debt for Holy Roman emperors and other German lords. Rulers frequently sought to pay off these debts by pledging rights and properties to their creditors, who would then collect the income from those rights and properties over several years as a means of recuperating the money they were owed. However, this practice could generate tensions as well as cycles of conflict and negotiation at the local level, because pledge-holders often recovered their money by extracting as much income as possible from those communities impacted by the pledge. This article provides a general overview of the phenomenon of the pledging of lordly rights before turning to a case study, the pledging of the court at Hoym to the town of Quedlinburg in the mid-fifteenth century, to investigate more closely the local impact of the pledge.

This paper explains how a sanitized image of the late medieval German feud has come to predominate in contemporary German scholarship and explores its consequences for understanding the social implications of feuding violence. By tracing out the reception of Otto Brunner's seminal Land and Lordship (1939) in post-WWII German feud research, this paper shows how a complex interplay between democratic-liberal sensibilities, Brunner's feud as legal institution model, and his own historical vision of violence resulted in the sanitized model of feuding violence. This model divides feuding violence into categories of rational–functional violence and dysfunctional violence, which, as this article argues, do not map onto the empirical evidence for feuding violence. A series of case studies elucidates the limitations of this model, providing a de-sanitized and de-domesticated image of feuding by vividly demonstrating some overlooked realities of feuding violence: from high rates of interpersonal violence between elites to sexual violence against female non-combatants among others. On the basis of these case studies, this article argues for a fundamental revision of how medieval historians have hitherto approached the topic of violence more broadly.

“Later” crusading has become a vibrant field in recent years, with a concern for our core theme, “patterns of conflict and negotiation,” at its center. Often, and rightly enough, those patterns have been focused on matters of high politics and diplomacy, military affairs, papal propaganda, and more. The approach adopted here complements these efforts by modulating their perspectives. This article explores patterns of conflict and negotiation as they played out in the realms of crusading experience, culture, and memory in the wake of the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the siege of Belgrade (1456). It does so through the lens of those particularly rich, but also challenging, fifteenth-century manuscript sources known as “miscellanies.”