Abstract

"The Late Medieval Feud as Entrepreneurial Endeavor "

Tristan Sharp, University of Chicago (tsharp2@uchicago.edu)

In this paper, I will analyze the late medieval German feud as an economic endeavor. By drawing attention to how feuding extracted resources vertically from rural communities to noble and urban feuding elites through plundering, tribute taking, and ransoming, I argue for understanding feuding as an entrepreneurial activity. In so doing, I seek to better understand the place of the feud more broadly in the late medieval economy as a whole and its more specific role in the socio-economic structures of lordly domination (lordship). I also draw upon the idea of “markets of violence” as an analytical frame to understand the behavior of feuders and their economic motivations. I thus suggest a way for scholars to transcend the dominant framework for analyzing the feud’s legal dimensions — returning to Gadi Algazi’s thesis that feuding was central to the socio-economic edifice of lordly domination from a new angle. To corroborate my reinterpretation of feuding as a form of enterprise, I examine the career of the great feud entrepreneur Hans von Rechberg (1410-1464) and utilize a set of neglected forms of evidence, namely the so-called damage registers (Schadensverzeichnisse) and protection treaties. Damage registers are highly detailed catalogues of damages composed by seigneurial, ecclesiastical, and urban lordships to record monetarily the losses that their holdings and dependents suffered in the course of a feud. Protection treaties were just that and like damage registers provide useful quantitative data on the flow of wealth and who was acquiring it during feuds.