Divided Spaces of Authority: Civic Power and Urban Property in Pre-Modern Western Pannonia
Divided Spaces of Authority: Civic Power and Urban Property in Pre-Modern Western Pannonia

Author(s): Károly Goda
Subject(s): History of Church(es), Regional Geography, Historical Geography, Civil Society, Social history, Environmental and Energy policy, Rural and urban sociology, 15th Century
Published by: Hrvatski institut za povijest
Keywords: Western Pannonia; urban space; civic power;
Summary/Abstract: The late medieval Pannonian territory along the borders of the Austrian lands as well as the Moravian and the Hungarian regions embraced a number of towns with different internal power and property structures. This paper investigates on a macro-level the closely interwoven dynamics between the authorities in urban spaces and their changing impact on property systems through examining the thirteenth- and seventeenth–century transformation of ownership relations in six neighbouring Austrian (Wiener Neustadt and Linz), Moravian (Olomouc and Jihlava) and Hungarian (Trnava and Sopron) towns. According to general master narratives, the (quasi-)independent towns in this region gradually lost their dominantly civic character and became – both in legal and spatial sense – realms of secular and ecclesiastical landlords. Challenging these concepts, this macro-analysis intends to show the much more complex and diverse phenomena produced by the conflicts of civic communities, territorial (secular and/or ecclesiastical) landlords and the nobility. Through a comparative spatial approach the presentation of ownership changes is to highlight the interplay between structures of power and property and to provide a better understanding of urban continuity and change in pre-modern western Pannonia.

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