Lohrmann’s study of territorial lordship in Styria through the prism of economic governance is a substantial, carefully documented contribution to medieval Central European history. Set between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and tracking the passage of power from the Traungau counts to the Babenberg dukes of Styria, the book advances a clear central claim: the consolidation of princely authority cannot be understood apart from the deliberate structuring of markets, money, tolls, and manorial rights. Rather than surveying these domains in the abstract, Lohrmann anchors his analysis in a single, economically consequential document – the market privilege for Enns on the Danube issued in 1191. That charter becomes the study’s hinge: the author returns to it repeatedly, using it to illuminate how rulers intervened in trade, calibrated legal protections and exactions, and transformed commercial practices into stable streams of lordly income.
This organizing choice pays dividends. Enns emerges not merely as a local market town, but as a node embedded in long-distance exchange. Lohrmann underscores the presence of Regensburg merchants in the 1191 privilege and reconstructs the town’s position within west–east circuits that linked Styrian outlets to Flemish cloth on one side and to wax and timber from the Rus on the other. The close reading of the charter’s clauses on staple obligations and toll collection shows how territorial rulers could, through a handful of targeted instruments, channel traffic, concentrate transactions within their jurisdiction, and thereby secure predictable revenues. By setting Enns alongside other market privileges – carefully compared even when treated briefly – Lohrmann identifies common legal formulae while clarifying the specific ways Styrian rulers adapted known tools to local conditions.
The book proceeds in a positivist, Landesgeschichte manner, taking up the component parts of territorial lordship one after another. Chapters survey market rights, minting and coin circulation, toll regimes and exemptions, the architecture of seigneurial landholding, and the assertion of dominion over woods and forests. The analysis remains grounded in the author’s chosen documentary base, relying primarily on charter editions, published urbaria, and carefully selected narrative sources.
One of the study’s distinctive strengths lies in the way it keeps legal prerogatives connected to social actors. Lohrmann does not treat market privileges or toll lists as disembodied texts. He repeatedly integrates the agency of ministeriales and of merchant groups. This attention to personnel and practice makes the governance of markets and resources concrete.
The chapters on coinage and tolls offer some of the clearest evidence for Lohrmann’s broader thesis about monetized lordship. Mint rights are reconstructed geographically and temporally, and the argument patiently shows how the definition of lawful coin and its surveillance underwrote not only transactional confidence but also the regular collection of fees and fines. Tolls, in turn, are presented not as random exactions but as calibrated policies. Schedules and exemptions steer merchants along preferred routes, privilege certain towns, and create predictable encounters with the fiscal apparatus. The cumulative effect is to demonstrate how rulers used the legal levers at their disposal to turn mobility and exchange into revenue without necessarily stifling the very traffic they wished to tax.
Beyond markets and money, the book widens its scope to consider landholding and forest rights as economic bases of power. Regulation of access, fees for usage, and claims over forest products are read as part of the same logic that governed markets and tolls: the conversion of resource control into stable, administrable revenues. This is not a story of extraction alone; it is a story of assertive governance that sought to balance attraction and control, and to bind producers and traders to a territorial core without choking off the flows that made taxation possible.
Methodologically, Lohrmann demonstrates mastery of the political history of Styria and situates his case within broader political frames in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. Comparative glances over neighbouring territories help to prevent parochialism: readers come away with a sense of what is distinctive in the Styrian configuration and what belongs to a more general repertoire of princely governance in the High Middle Ages.
And yet the very features that lend the study its solidity also define its limits. The most striking reservation concerns the handling of the 1191 Enns market privilege, the documentary centrepiece of the argument. Lohrmann relies on editions rather than consulting the original. That choice is surprising given that the charter includes a portion that has been struck through and is no longer legible. With today’s imaging techniques, it is possible that at least part of the erased text could be recovered. Because the book’s interpretive weight rests so heavily on the exact wording and internal logic of this document, the decision not to pursue a fresh autopsy – especially in a work so proudly attentive to detail – stands out as a missed opportunity.
A second methodological problem arises from the handling of narrative sources. Travel accounts, saints’ lives, and chronicles are mined for the history of the Styrian counts and dukes. While this can be heuristic, it is also risky. Such narratives were shaped by rhetorical conventions and moral agendas that complicate their use as repositories of straightforward “facts”. In a few places, the book treats them as a quarry for event history without consistently pausing to weigh genre, audience, or authorial intent.
The engagement with recent economic historiography is similarly uneven. Lohrmann is comprehensive and up-to-date on Landesgeschichte for Styria and adjacent territories; the regional and comparative political-historical literature is thoroughly integrated. But for a study that explicitly claims the nexus of lordship and economy as its object, the dialogue with newer work on monetization, fiscal capacity, and institutional change is thinner than it might be. At a minimum, the analysis should have engaged more explicitly with research such as Andreas Büttner’s on the monetarization of political order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Footnote 1 Such work would have provided conceptual scaffolding, clarified what is at stake in the Styrian case, and helped connect Lohrmann’s empirical findings to ongoing debates about the emergence of market governance and the fiscalization of princely power.
The book’s presentation and apparatus also reduce its accessibility. The prose is dense, and chapters are punctuated by frequent excursuses that, while often informative, can blur the main line of argument. A particularly puzzling editorial decision is the omission of subheadings within chapters, despite the presence of a secondary table of contents that lists them. Without these navigational aids, readers struggle to locate discussions or to retrace the argument’s branching paths. Internal cross-references tend to be vague, lacking chapter titles or page numbers. The volume includes twenty-one illustrations, but most serve decorative rather than analytical purposes; they rarely carry interpretive weight. The mixing of the abbreviations list with the bibliography is not reader friendly and will frustrate those trying to track down references. By contrast, the index is well constructed and genuinely useful; many readers will rely on it to pinpoint topics across the dense text.
The study’s core contribution is to demonstrate that economic governance was not an adjunct to political lordship but one of its primary media. Market privileges, understood as policy instruments rather than mere favours, regulated entry, protected transactions, and defined fee schedules that made revenue predictable. Mint rights underwrote a monetary environment in which tolls, fines, and seigneurial dues could be assessed and collected with fewer frictions. Forestry and land rights secured monopolies over key resources and provided additional levers of control. Taken together, these domains reveal a pattern: rulers built fiscal capacity not only by taxing what existed but also by shaping the conditions under which exchange and extraction could occur.
If the study remains largely empirical and cautious in its theoretical reach, that stance is itself an invitation. The materials assembled here would support more explicit reflections on how regional polities moved toward monetized governance and what market instruments played in knitting together disparate local economies. Future work might pair Lohrmann’s documentary rigour with digital diplomatics to revisit key charters – not least the 1191 Enns privilege – and with conceptual frameworks drawn from recent economic history. Such a synthesis could map the Styrian findings onto broader European debates and test how robustly the book’s conclusions travel across regions and regimes.
For now, specialists in medieval Austrian history, in the institutional mechanics of medieval economies, and in the history of territorialization will find this volume an essential reference. Students and nonspecialists may find the density and the navigational hurdles challenging, and readers seeking theoretical framing may wish for more engagement with current economic historiography. But the trade-off for these limitations is a study of unusual documentary depth and argumentative clarity about its central claim. By showing how markets, coinage, tolls, and resource rights were mobilized to build and sustain princely authority, Lohrmann provides a concrete, persuasive account of governance at work in the High Middle Ages.
In sum, this is a rigorous, detail-rich book that re-centres the economy within the story of territorial lordship in Styria. Its empirical thoroughness yields robust findings: that rulers acted not merely as arbiters of legal privilege but also as architects of commercial space; that fiscal needs were not an afterthought but a driving force in policy; and that social groups – ministeriales and merchants foremost among them – were indispensable partners in the translation of text into practice. Though the study’s apparatus and historiographical positioning may be imperfect, its core insights and evidentiary base will be helpful for further studies.
