This is the first comprehensive study of loans and debts in Central European countries in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. It outlines the issues of debts and loans in the Czech lands, Poland and Hungary, with respect to the influence of Austria and Germany. It focuses on the role of loans and debts in medieval and early modern society, credit markets in these countries, the mechanism of lending and borrowing, forms of credit, availability of loans, frequency of credits dealings, range of lending business, and last, but not least, the financial relationships inside the social classes and between them.
The research presented in the book is based on a wide range of resources including credit contracts and agreements, evidence of loans and debts of courts, accounting of nobility, towns, churches and guilds, merchant diaries and Jewish registers, as well as other financial records. It covers a wide range of historical disciplines including economic and financial history, social history, the history of economic thought as well as the history of everyday life. It also contains a wealth of case studies, which offer, for the first time in English, a comprehensive and representative sample of the most up-to-date Central European research on the history of loans and debts and serves as a basis for a comparison with the other parts of Europe during the same period.
The book is designed primarily for postgraduates, researchers and academics in financial, economic and historical sciences but will also be a valuable resource for students of business schools.
Introduction: credit in Central European historiography PART 1 Loans and debts as a part of royal finances 1 Loan transactions in the Kingdom of Hungary up to the end of the 14th century 2 Loans and debts of the Bohemian kings in the Middle Ages: from the last Přemyslids until the end of the pre-Hussite period (1262–1419) 3 Income and expenditures of the Hungarian Royal Chamber during the first ruling years of King Vladislaus Jagiellon: analysis of an accounting register from the years 1494–1495 4 The beginnings of royal pledging in the Kingdom of Hungary 5 King’s debts and king’s creditors in Poland in the first half of the 15th century 6 The political and economic relevance of Jewish loans for the dukes of Austria during the late Middle Ages PART 2 Credit market in medieval and early modern towns 7 Written sources concerning debts and loans in late medieval Czech towns 8 Monetary credit market in the cities of the southern Baltic coast in the late Middle Ages (Greifswald, Gdańsk, Elbląg, Toruń, Rewel) 9 Rural credit and monetarisation of the peasantry in the late Middle Ages: the Eger city state c. 1450 10 The credit market in Old Warsaw in the late Middle Ages 11 Credit and finance in Rudolphine Prague 12 The credit market of a small peripheral Polish town in the early modern period 13 Jewish credit business in the urban context of late medieval Austria PART 3 Economic, political, legal and other consequences of debts and loans 14 Economical and political consequences of the limiting of the statutory maximum interest rate in Central Europe from 10% to 6% since 1543 15 Legal regulation of the credit market in Bohemia and Moravia 16 The trade in farm money in rural areas in the 16th and 17th centuries (using the example of small towns on the Pardubice estate) 17 Investments of a south Bohemian ‘banker’ in the first half of the 16th century: the credit operations of Knight Petr Doudlebský of Doudleby 18 The Lithuanian Evangelical Reformed Church as a credit institution in the 17th century 19 Debts and claims as a part of administration and everyday life of Bohemian chamber estates in the early modern period 20 Financial aspects of the property transactions of rural subjects in Moravia in the 16th and 17th centuries 21 Debt in the life of a Gdansk merchant Index
Pavla Slavíčková is an assistant professor at the Palacky University in Olomouc, the Czech Republic.
