Luca Scholz's fine study uses the copious diplomatic correspondence and bureaucratic ephemera generated by the territorities and cities of early modern Central Europe to document the relative unimportance of borders and the attenuated nature of freedom of movement along the region's roads and rivers. Instead of controlling and monitoring traffic flow along and across territorial boundaries, princes and cities sought to enclose and channel movement along arteries and through nodes where tolls could be extracted and sovereignty rights ritually acknowledged. Moreover, as Scholz notes, the Holy Roman Empire's “polycentric, fragmented, and multilayered” structure (37) was not unique in the early modern period, however much teleological models of state development have emphasized territorial cohesion as an inescapable component of state building. Eschewing such a convenient, but misleading, modernizing overlay, Scholz convincingly explains the structures and logic that defined rulers’ interest in mobility and the responses – compliant and defiant – of those subject to them.
Chapter 1, “The Ordering of Movement” analyzes how facilitating mobility acted as an instrument of rule in the Holy Roman Empire. The authorities’ responsibility to provide access and safety to travelers was enshrined in the Empire's guarantee of “freedom of movement” and the legal framework of “safe conduct.” Elaborate structures were erected on these foundations: “safe conduct evolved from a primarily protective service into a broad set of administrative and political instruments, symbolic practices, and a conceptual framework, used by authorities and mobile populations to negotiate the protection, promotion, and regulation of different forms of inter-polity movement” (1).
The next four chapters use case studies to illuminate different features of mobility systems and practices. Chapter 2, “Theatres of Transit” takes the vantage point of the County of Wertheim along the Main River to examine safe-conduct processions and disputes, while chapter 3, “Boundaries” uses the extensive documentation around the disputed boundary of Mühldorf, a city-exclave of the Bishopric of Salzburg, to delineate the different ways in which boundaries could be identified and defended. The maps that accompanied this legal dispute were arguments in themselves, as Scholz skillfully shows, drawn to highlight or downplay landscape features, architecture, and people, as needed, to support a particular vision of what the boundary looked like.
In chapter 4, “Channeling Movement,” Scholz visits Thuringia to examine rulers’ (frequently unsuccessful) efforts to direct traffic by issuing letters of passage, requiring goods and people to travel by “ordinary” rather than “forbidden” roads, and employing toll-keepers, guards, and safe-conduct officials. Travel along the Lower Weser River is the focus of chapter 5's argument that “Protection” for travelers and their property was not always forthcoming in practice, but “the language of security” nevertheless “provided strategic arguments for justifying territorial expansion and the basis for a selective conception of free movement” (174).
The last, sixth chapter reviews the similarly fragmented landscape of legal treatises on “Freedom of Movement” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Noting that such freedoms did not only pertain to emigration and immigration, Scholz considers debates around ownership and use of public roads, transit rights, and princely prerogative. That this chapter comes last rather than first is part of Scholz's argument: these treatises do not establish a common conceptual framework for the regulation of movement to which the actors in the previous chapters referred, but instead “reveal the extent to which the theoretical underpinnings of the politics of mobility were ridden with contradictions and conflicts” (210).
Boundaries and Freedom of Movement provides clarity through complexity. Scholz's case studies render untenable the historical consideration of travel and mobility as abstract phenomena: who traveled (troops? Jews? foreign dignitaries?) and what traveled (foodstuffs? bulk goods? foreign luxuries or manufactures?) mattered. Scholz's argument that political authority concentrated around arteries and nodes rather than borders is borne out by the voluminous archival records around roads, rivers, toll gates, and towns, and the lack of official concern around border patrols and protection. His close attention to the dynamics between rulers and subjects and between officials and merchants reveals that state formation was situationally specific, as sovereignty and control had to be asserted where local conditions created sites of conflict.
Luca Scholz's conclusions reach well beyond the borders of early modern Central Europe. His analysis of embodied and material movement as a critical venue for contestations and theatrics of power is original and important, and scholars studying mobility and state control in the modern period will find much to consider in the alternative landscapes Scholz's subjects inhabited and the meanings they ascribed to them.
