The first Habsburg estates in Carniola were part of territorial acquisitions in eastern Alpine lands that the ascending dynasty obtained in the war with King Ottokar II of Bohemia towards the end of ...the thirteenth century and then gradually expanded. Even though the Habsburg dynastic territory had by the 1380s covered almost the entire Carniola, the economic base (landed property, which provided the provincial prince with regular income) was considerably limited. A sizeable portion of the territory was burdened by fiefs and pledges. The redemption of one of the vastest sets of pledged estates in the mid-1430s led to the emergence of account books for the following Carniolan fiscal properties: Kamnik, Gamberk, Goričane, Ig, Višnja Gora, Štatenberk, Novo mesto, Kostanjevica with offices Raka and Vivodina, Pazin, Završje, and Vranja. The account books serve as an extraordinary source for the economic history of the late Middle Ages, by also reflecting the turbulent period of the Habsburg European-wide ascendancy and Frederick’s war with the Counts of Celje. The volume constitutes a critical edition of the account books, with the accompanying discussion in the field of property, administrative and political history.
Account books are a late medieval product of disseminating literacy in the administrative spheres of various governmental structures, especially land estates and bodies of city self-administration. ...As documents of financial control over the transactions of some economic-administrative organisation unit, they reach into practically all fields of human activity, thus offering – perhaps more substantially than any other medieval source – an abundance of data from the daily life of the then society. Primitive economy in premodern periods and its exclusive drawing on natural sources (both energy and raw material) is logically reflected in the structure of data revealed by medieval account books. The latter, namely, contain a wide array of news about the use of natural wealth; wood (for construction purposes, as well as for the purposes of heating and obtaining lime and coal); the driving force of watercourses; river deposits of gravel and quarries; minerals; forest and water food sources (hunting, fishing, and grazing). And, furthermore, they point to the success or failure of man’s struggle against natural sources (elimination of the consequences of natural disasters, regulation of river ways).
The paper at hand is an overview of medieval account books in the Slovenian territory and provides a rough evaluation of their significance for the research of various themes in the field of environmental history. Thereby it places its main focus on the types, quality and quantity of information provided by the aforementioned sources.
One of the essential potentials that distinguish account books and related sources from other such documents is the possibility to conduct quantitative research. Although this possibility is rather limited in the case of environmentally-related themes, we may nevertheless conclude that quantitative research may, to a certain extent, be conducted on the basis of certain groups of data (I shall highlight those concerning agriculture, cattle farming, fishing, ironwork industry, construction), while in other instances only qualitative research is feasible. In general, it may be concluded that medieval account books provide, only to a lesser extent, an independent or at least main source for solving problems of environmental history. Their information value may partly be enhanced with a combined use of additional written sources, for the medieval period mostly land registers and documents, but more results may be anticipated from interdisciplinary research.
•Timber from the over 800 years old Castle Pišece was dendrochronologically dated.•Wood preserved in floor and ceiling constructions was felled between 1515 and 1878.•Use of oak, silver fir, sweet ...chestnut, common beech and Norway spruce varied over centuries.•Forestry archives and dendroprovenancing show that the timber was of local origin.•Links between dendrochronological dates and historic documents were however weak.
Castle Pišece, located in SE Slovenia near the border with Croatia, is thought to have been built in the 12th/13th century as one in the line of Salzburg fortresses on the then SE border of the Holy Roman Empire. During thorough restoration that started in 2005, its wooden constructions became accessible for dendrochronological investigations. We collected representative samples from floor or ceiling constructions in most of the rooms in the castle. Dendrochronology helped us to identify felling dates of wood and to propose probable years of reconstructions in 1515, 1578, 1644, 1697, 1752, 1758, 1775 and 1878. The dating showed that the constructions in the presumed Romanesque and Renaissance parts of the building were not as old as expected, whereas those in the supposedly Baroque part of the castle were older than assumed. The selection of wood species used for constructions varied over time. Constructions with end dates 1515–1697 were made of oak (Quercus petraea and Q. robur), those dated to 1752 of silver fir (Abies alba), those dated to 1758 of sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) and those dated to 1878 of common beech (Fagus sylvatica). Comparison of forestry archives and vegetation in the area showed that most of the timber could have originated from nearby forests; only silver fir had to be transported from sites that were at least 20km away from the castle. Cross-dating of tree-ring series of oak elements with two reference chronologies from Slovenia and two from Austria confirmed the great likelihood that the wood used mostly originated from Slovenia. This indicates that dendroprovenancing, not used in the area before, could also be used SE of the Alps. Both the existing archival documents and dendrochronology indicate that woodworks have taken place every few decades in some periods. The dendrochronological dates can be partly linked to reports on earthquakes (especially the devastating one in 1511), rebellions and year marks carved on the stone plaques.
The book is a text-critical edition of Brixen urbaria for the diocesan estates in Upper Carniola (Bled seigniory) with a comprehensive scholarly commentary and concise presentation of the historical ...development of the Bled seigniory throughout the Middle Ages. The published sources, offering a rich insight into the property, economic and social conditions of the Middle Ages, belong to the earliest accounts relating to agrarian economy and land property in the Slovenian territory and have, as such, long attracted the interest of the historian profession. This publication, having already been planned decades ago by renown Slovenian historians such as Milko Kos and Pavle Blaznik, naturally completes a series of publications of urbaria for the complexes of ecclesiastical (diocesan) land estates in the territory of Slovenia.
On 9 November 1456, Ulrich II, the last Count of Celje, was murdered in Belgrade. Not long afterwards, Celje fell under the rule of the Habsburg Emperor Frederick III, who set the new foundations for ...the city’s autonomy. The account book of the city judges of Celje, which is kept in the Styrian Provincial Archives in Graz – the oldest source of this kind from the territory of the present-day Slovenia – documents in detail the first fifty years of operations and transactions conducted by the new city authorities and brings an abundance of interesting features from the late medieval urban daily life. The source is published in its original language and parallel Slovenian translation, with an added scholarly introduction that provides the reader with an insight into Celje’s self-administration, development and medieval accounting systems, as well as presents the manuscript of the published source, together with the measuring and monetary systems used therein.
The text-critical edition Turjaška knjiga listin II Turjak Book of Charters II, containing 436 published documents from the 15th century, completes the medieval corpus of charters from the private ...archives of the Carniolan comital and ducal lines of the Auerspergs. Published in their entirety, the charters are equipped with Slovenian regests and followed in the end by a comprehensive index of names and pictures of seals from the charters.The Auerspergs Turjaški are among the rare noble families in the Slovenian territory with systematically preserved archives that date back to the Middle Ages. Most archival materials of the family, which was largely embedded in the framework of the Province of Carniola until the end of the 15th century, are presently kept in two private family archives: the Turjak Comital Fideicomiss Archives (Gräflich Auersperg'sches Fideikommisarchiv), first kept in the Turjak Castle until 1942 and now in the Carinthian Provincial Archives in Klagenfurt, and the Turjak Ducal Archives (Fürstlich Auersperg'sches Archiv), which were first moved to the Turjak Palace in Ljubljana and the Lower Austrian Lösensteinleiten Castle and finally ended up in the Viennese Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv.
The Auerspergs Turjaški are among the rare noble families in the Slovenian territory with systematically preserved archives that date back to the Middle Ages. Most archival materials of the family, ...which was largely embedded in the framework of the Province of Carniola until the end of the 15th century, are presently kept in two private family archives: the Turjak Comital Fideicomiss Archives (Gräflich Auersperg'sches Fideikommisarchiv), first kept in the Turjak Castle until 1942 and now in the Carinthian Provincial Archives in Klagenfurt, and the Turjak Ducal Archives (Fürstlich Auersperg'sches Archiv), which were first moved to the Turjak Palace in Ljubljana and the Lower Austrian Lösensteinleiten Castle and finally ended up in the Viennese Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv.Turjaška knjiga listin 1 (1218–1400) Turjak Book of Charters I (1218–1400) contains 277 charters from the private archives of the Carniolan comital and ducal lines of the Auerspergs Turjaški. Published in their entirety, the charters are equipped with Slovenian regests and followed in the end by a comprehensive index of names and pictures of seals from the charters. With the publication of the Turjak charters, Slovenian historiography has gained an indispensable aid for the research of Slovenian medieval and modern history.
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