KRÓL I PIENIĄDZE. ZASTAWY DÓBR I DOCHODÓW KRÓLEWSKICH DO 1504 ROKU
THE KING AND MONEY. PLEDGES OF ROYAL PROPERTY AND INCOME UNTIL 1504

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the economic issues of Poland under the rule of the first Jagiellons and the financial relations between rulers and their subjects. The main aim is to draw attention to the fiscal and economic context, a distinctive feature of which, according to the sources, was the pledging of royal estates as security for the king's obligations towards his subjects. These were the result of a custom whereby members of the ruling elite and other subjects covered the current costs of public and military activities from their own resources, which were later reimbursed from state revenues, or arose because of the king's credit needs. However, royal obligations were secured or repaid to a similar extent and on the same terms not only from land but also from other sources of income: customs duties, regular and extraordinary taxes, mines and salt works, municipal rents, mills, stations, etc. Since a large part of these liabilities were not repaid, and usufructuary pledges excluded the possibility of obtaining at least part of the income from them, further debts were incurred either through subsequent pledges on the same components of royal property and income, or methods were used to reduce the debt through settlements between the king and the pledgees, usually favorable to the monarch, which could include: a change in the terms of tenure, a waiver of part of the pledged sums, or the acceptance of the transfer of liabilities to other leased tenures. The estates were released in this way, as well as through repayments, not for the purpose of transferring them to the royal administration (to hold in trust or for lease), but to obtain the possibility of securing further, larger loans. The assumption that tenures were always a source of high income for pledgees does not always correspond to reality. The amounts pledged were often unreasonably high in relation to the income potential of the tenancy. This highlights the understandable fact that the financial relations between the subjects and the king had a very important non-economic aspect. The costs of loans secured on land were not excessively high and, paradoxically, decreased over time as the mortgage sums increased. They certainly fall within the lower limits of the income generated from the purchase of an annuity. In any case, we can speak of a rational, in the context of all the conditions and limitations, as well as a dynamic and complex pledge policy of the first Jagiellons' state, in terms of techniques and methods not differing from those used by the treasury in the 16th century.

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