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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is an introduction to the forum that compares Austria and today's Czech Republic as immigration countries.

Foreign workers were a common feature in the economy of postwar Czechoslovakia in various periods of the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on foreign labor practices during the first economic plans, namely the two-year plan and the first five-year plan between 1947 and 1950. The number of foreign workers at this time didn't exceed twenty thousand persons and their stays in the country were, with only individual exceptions, short. Workers, who found employment in Czechoslovak agriculture and industry in this period, came from different countries including neighboring Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, but also from Italy. Recruitment of other groups such as workers from Hungary, the Netherlands, or even China is also considered by the article. These foreign laborers worked in Czechoslovakia under various conditions depending on their methods of recruitment and contracting, the duration of their employment, and other important factors. The basic question this article aims to answer is what the role of Gastarbeit was in Czechoslovakia's communist economic policy. It also examines the motivations of countries that sent workers as well as those of the workers themselves. Finally, the article also attempts to analyze the opportunities and limits of these workers’ strategies in the Czechoslovak labor market.

This article studies the development of antisemitism in Austria in the late nineteenth century through the example of Josef Deckert. The priest is depicted in historiography as one of the most prominent anti-Jewish agitators of that period, but his path to antisemitism has not been explored. This research indicates that Deckert's adoption of antisemitic ideology happened abruptly and was not guided by ecclesiastical or lay authorities. The article, therefore, invites us to look more at individual actors and local cultures and less on strategies from above when studying the spread of populist movements. At the same time, the analysis draws attention to two aspects that have been studied little in connection to the diffusion of antisemitism in the modern period, the cult of Saint Joseph and the remembrance of the Turkish siege of Vienna. Deckert was deeply devoted to Saint Joseph and invoked the patron saint of the Habsburg monarchy, not only as protector of Catholic Austria at the time of the Ottoman wars, but as patron of the workers and defender against the contemporary Austrian Jews.

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 article explores the consequences of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's end through the tumultuous biography of a philanthropic entrepreneur and quasi-consul community leader known today for assisting thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II. Focusing on Paul Komor (1886–1973) and the migrant community of Shanghai Hungarians, the article contends that postimperial diasporas preserved a piece of empire in their commitment to Jewish emancipation, imperialist nationalism, multiple loyalties, and political nostalgia. It also argues that diasporic networks and charitable actions communicated political and national loyalties while creating and defining the boundaries of the community. Presenting original research involving sources in multiple languages from China, Hungary, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands, the article traces the fortunes of a Jewish Hungarian family in colonial Shanghai, shows the limits of its son's charity-rooted advancement in community leadership, sheds light on the seemingly contradictory political ideas of a postimperial expatriate to explain his complicated relationship with his kinstate, and analyzes the institutionalization of communal charity and the competing prerequisite definitions of postimperial national belonging.

While gender history has developed into a powerful branch of premodern history, we still know little about gender relations around Maximilian I. One reason is that research concentrated for a long time on the individual personality of the emperor without paying much attention to the manifold relations among men and women that in fact contributed to establishing his rule. Another reason is the specific constellations of Maximilian's relationships with his wives Mary of Burgundy and Bianca Maria Sforza, with his daughter Margaret of Austria and grand-daughter Mary of Hungary, which have been mostly discussed in the framework of their personal courts and regional politics and less in a wider comparative perspective. Against the backdrop of recent approaches to dynastic politics, role models, and agency, I will, first, discuss the gendered dimensions of Maximilian's dynastic politics in their wider geo-political and socio-cultural context. I will, second, move beyond a focus on key dynastic actors to take into account personal networks as fundamental for any type of premodern rule. Following court ladies and female servants and the social networks they were part of I will outline the interrelations between social ascent, office, and the politics of kinship and gender at court.

This paper investigates the events and lessons from the 1848–49 cholera epidemic in Hungary. For contemporaries, the ongoing revolution and civil war pushed the devastation of the cholera epidemic into the background, even though the death rate was similar to that of the earlier 1831 infection. The epidemic hit the country in a period when the revolutionary Hungarian state was waging a war of self-defense. This article strives to refute the historiographic view that the movements of the different armies had a considerable influence on the development of the epidemic. Instead, this article argues that the cholera epidemic was a demographic crisis unfolding in the background of war, but for the most part independently of it. It mattered that most people of that time had already directly experienced cholera and that the Hungarian government did not want to cause panic with restrictive measures. In 1848, cholera was not a “mobilizing factor,” but in 1849 it contributed to the demoralization of the hinterland and frequently appeared in the political propaganda of the civil war.

This article deals with the goals, practices, and transformations of collaborative research that emerged between and within bureaucratic and bourgeois models of science organization in the late Habsburg monarchy. It offers novel insights into the political, social, and epistemic dimensions of public engagement in research, and evaluates the frameworks, profit expectations, and challenges involved. As will be exemplified by joint undertakings in the High Alps, the “Orient,” and the Adriatic Sea, private-public partnerships in the form of scientific societies or institutional alliances assumed vital functions. Their stakeholders volunteered for large-scale research projects, coordinated and funded infrastructure such as field stations, research vessels, or collecting expeditions, and became driving forces in establishing new forms of intra-imperial and cross-border collaboration. As such, scientific societies are useful indicators for understanding science-related developments and for illuminating the tensions between imperialism, (inter)national aspirations, and civil-society building. Based on sources from the archives of the k.k. Meteorological Society, the Natural Scientific Oriental Society, and the Adriatic Society, this article will analyze scientific collaboration as a purposeful and power-related interaction process, oriented toward mutual benefits, that took place on three levels: between state-owned research facilities and private societies, between bureaucrats and bourgeois, and between scientists and “non-professionals.”

The new states that were established in the autumn of 1918 presented themselves as something new and better. Not only were they supposed to be the embodiment of the “national yearnings” of the formerly “oppressed nations” of the Habsburg Empire, but they were also meant to be more democratic and it was promised that their administrations would work better and their economies would flourish. In short, they were to be a decisive break with the imperial past. However, the new nation-states often could not deliver on these lofty promises, and, as a result, their legitimacy began to erode rather rapidly. In this context, the inability to quickly improve the food supply played an important role. In the Slovene part of Yugoslavia, the inadequate supply of basic foodstuffs, rationing, and increasing prices made the already volatile situation worse, as parts of the population began to grumble, protest, and yearn for the Habsburgs, looking across their northern and western borders. Police and court files, district captains’ reports, and various other sources indicate that after the proclamation of independence the mood of the population quickly soured, and that the legitimacy of the new state was often questioned.

This article introduces the forum on food shortages during the post-Habsburg transition in the Bohemian Lands and Slovenia. Using examples from these regions, it first outlines the food crisis that developed during World War I and contributed to the internal disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. The article then turns to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, successor states which, despite their victorious status and optimistic prospects for the future, had to contend with food shortages that lasted well beyond 1918. Shortages remained one of the main challenges to the consolidation of these newly formed states. Finally, and most importantly, the article provides an overview of the state of the art in Czech, Slovene, and international historiography, identifies gaps in knowledge, and presents our approach to the topic.

In the Austrian province of Moravia, Jews, most of whom spoke German, continued to participate in and support the German political community until the end of the Habsburg monarchy. Unlike in nearby Bohemia, German liberals in Moravia did not abandon the Jews as the franchise expanded and antisemitism grew. Indeed, the German Progressive Party continued to attract voters in the cities of the province and did not resort to antisemitism in order to do so. Although there were only a small number of Jews in the province—just over 40,000—they played a large role among the voters in the urban curia. After the Moravian Compromise of 1905, when German parties no longer had to compete with Czech parties, Jews often formed the majority of all voters for German parties in the small market towns of the largely Czech-speaking south and central part of the province. The perception of the need for Jewish support in elections created a situation in which the German liberals did not turn to antisemitic politics and the Jewish/German liberal alliance remained strong.

In March 1674, Hungary's Lutheran and Calvinist clergy stood collectively accused of fomenting rebellion against the Habsburgs and seeking protection from the Ottomans. A widely publicized tribunal in Pozsony (Bratislava, Pressburg) resulted in systematic expulsions, incarcerations, and the sale of forty-two pastors as galley slaves. A voluminous body of historiography has been dedicated to the victims of the tribunal and their tribulations. It is commonly assumed that the accusations against the Protestant clergy were fabricated. This article shifts the focus from martyrologies, sermons, and narratives written after the year 1674 to eyewitness accounts in inquisitorial records, letters, petitions, official reports, and military dispatches from the years leading up to the Pozsony Tribunal. These unstudied testimonies in the Hungarian and Austrian archives reveal that a significant number of pastors participated in popular resistance and revolt against a brutal Habsburg Counter Reformation. Many put their hopes in the Ottomans whom they considered protectors against the destruction of their religion. These little-known developments shed light on important larger historical realities that have been eclipsed by Habsburg and Central European historians, namely, Hungarian popular hopes for liberation from the Habsburgs by the Ottomans which culminated in two major revolts in 1670 and 1672.