Papers by Žiga Oman
Austrian History Yearbook, 2025
This article investigates the lexicon of dispute settlement in early modern Inner Austria, explor... more This article investigates the lexicon of dispute settlement in early modern Inner Austria, exploring the broadest legal, social, and emotional dimensions of the concept of "enmity" to better understand the nature of dispute settlement and social relations in coeval Central Europe. In particular, the article examines how litigants and courts understood and used "enmity" and its cognates, and how changes in criminal law impacted its usage. The article focuses on interpersonal conflicts and violence among nonnobles, who constituted the vast majority of Inner Austria's population. It demonstrates that well into the 1700s among local urbanites and peasants, "enmity" and its key synonyms expressing ill-will, discord, or hatred-as opposites of love, concord, and friendship-signified a social state of mutual hostility closely related to violent retribution rather than unrestrained feeling.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223)', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-3.
Acta Histriae, 2023
Centring on non-nobles in the Duchies of Styria, Carniola and Carinthia, this paper addresses dis... more Centring on non-nobles in the Duchies of Styria, Carniola and Carinthia, this paper addresses dispute settlement in Inner Austria, following the Imperial prohibition of feud in 1495 and the Habsburgs’ local consolidation of power earlier in the century. These developments are said to have brought about an end to feuding in the duchies in the 1500s, but by focusing on the concept of enmity, which articulated the same state of social relations, this article presents ample evidence that among all social classes dispute settlement retained much of the traditional practices well into the 1700s. Their survival was instrumentally underpinned by various courts of law and local authorities, regarding them as an indispensable element of keeping social cohesion and peace.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223)', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-3.
Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia, 2023
FOR A FISTFUL OF CHERRIES – VENGEANCE FOR THE OCCUPATION OF PLUMBERK. THE CASE OF AN INTER-ESTATE... more FOR A FISTFUL OF CHERRIES – VENGEANCE FOR THE OCCUPATION OF PLUMBERK. THE CASE OF AN INTER-ESTATE ENMITY IN LATE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY STYRIA
In the Autumn of 1681, towards the close of the worst plague epidemic to hit early modern Lower Styria, a dispute between the Žalec market-town councillor Johann Christoph Pilpach and Ferdinand Baron Miglio from the nearby Plumberk manor erupted into violence. With the help of soldiers whom Pilpach acquired from the Counts of Strassoldo from Krško in Carniola, he raided Miglio’s manor during his absence, threatening to serve him lead ‘cherries’ (bullets), for which the nobleman avenged himself by ransacking the market-burgher’s house in Žalec. This paper analyses the rather unusual, active enmity between two socially unequal adversaries through traditional practices of conducting and settling disputes, which also enables a look at other social relations among this conflict’s main actors. Due to very fragmentary sources, it is unknown what set it off, although Pilpach’s ransacking of the manor suggests that it might have been due to Miglio’s debts to the affluent market-burgher. Perhaps their dispute was connected to the one between the baron and the Fraziolis, the former administrators of his manor, or to a dispute the Fraziolis or Pilpachs might have had with the Žalec market-burgher family Galič (Galitsch), the new administrators of Plumberk. The ensuing violence is better documented. Pilpach’s raid on Plumberk manor was co-organised by his son-in-law, Gregor Rozman, who sought help from the Strassoldos. While the exact nature of their relationship with the counts is obscure, it had to be close for an important noble family to lend its soldiers to two market-burghers. Maybe the Strassoldos’ help was also related to disputes they themselves might have had with Miglio. Pilpach’s social capital was quite possibly further predicated on the marriage of a lesser line of the Valvasor noble family to the Pilpachs from Žalec in early 1680. These connections most likely levelled the field once the market-burgher’s dispute with the baron broke out into violence. Miglio’s response in September 1681 essentially mirrored Pilpach’s actions: ransacking his home under arms, threats with violence and death, stealing his horses, killing his poultry, etc. Maybe the equal response was completely by chance, but, conceivably, the expected reciprocity of violence in enmities also played a role. In the end, Miglio had to justify his actions in court as a measured response to an affront. The violence was exacerbated when Pilpach opted for a recourse to law, after failing to obtain satisfaction (restitution of honour and damages) from Miglio for the attack. Pilpach’s attempt to serve a writ to the baron ended with Miglio almost cudgelling the messenger to death, rejecting the attempt as insolence. Despite going to court, the settlement of their dispute or at least the violence seems to have been extra-curial, as was common in enmities among the elite. Likewise, the only intervention by princely authorities seems to have been a demand that Miglio accept the writ, even though violent enmities or feuds broke the provincial (and Imperial) peace and, which was even more critical, attacks on the socially superior upset the social order. There were certainly no grave consequences for Pilpach, who is attested as the Žalec market-town judge in 1684. All of this suggests that the social differences between him and Miglio were formal rather than factual, underpinned by Pilpach’s close connections to influential noble families and, probably, also by the fact that the Miglios’ rise to nobility was rather recent. His ‘equality’ with the baron in their enmity probably also helped Pilpach to improve his social standing. Although it is unknown when exactly peace between the baron and Pilpach was made, the plague that decimated Žalec in 1683 seems as a plausible mitigating factor. In any case, in early 1684, Pilpach’s wife Ursula Elisabeth and his former enemy Jakob Galič, Miglio’s administrator of Plumberk, became godparents to a child of one of their market-town neighbours. This indicates that their enmity was over, most likely following or as part of the peace made between Pilpach and Miglio, since settlement generally included ‘all the people’ of the conflicting parties.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-23.
Acta Histriae, 2022
NEIGHBOURS AND ENEMIES: DISPUTE SETTLEMENT BEFORE THE LJUBLJANA TOWN COUNCIL IN THE EARLY MODERN ... more NEIGHBOURS AND ENEMIES: DISPUTE SETTLEMENT BEFORE THE LJUBLJANA TOWN COUNCIL IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD (1521–1671)
This paper addresses enmities between burghers and other inhabitants of early modern Ljubljana, documented in town council records from 1521 to 1671. In traditional dispute settlement, the concept of enmity was closely related to violent retribution, which was antithetical to the ideals of urban communities, which since the Middle Ages had been established upon the renunciation of the right to feud. Focused on the conception of enmity in the Carniolan capital following the general prohibition of feuding in 1495, the paper analyses the role, language and emotional dimension of traditional practices of dispute settlement, their intertwinement with court proceedings and coexistence with criminal law. While town council records cannot provide a complete picture of the attitude towards enmity or feud in early modern Ljubljana, as no criminal court records survive, they are an important source for understanding social relations more broadly and, in particular, the manner in which everyday enmities that undermined ideals of neighbourliness were mediated by the secular authorities. The analysis shows that in Ljubljana the traditional conception of enmity as a public expression of hostility and discord – the opposite of the urban values of peace, concord and good neighbourliness – remained in use well into the seventeenth century, despite its normative prohibition, as did the traditional terms and emotions expressing this relationship, especially ‘resentment’, ‘bitterness’ and (just) ‘anger’, while ‘rage’ seems to have still been used very rarely to justify transgressions of social norms. Although physical violence did not always erupt in the investigated cases, and remained limited when it did, it was a viable threat in enmities, even when they were largely carried out before the town council or court. These were the central fora for both conducting and settling enmities among burghers, as well as other lay non-noble inhabitants of early modern Ljubljana. Underpinned by community mediation in disputes, the burgomaster, town judge and councillors principally acted as mediators and arbiters, attempting to lead conflicting parties to settlement before enmity was exacerbated into violence – in particularly bitter cases by forcing them to settle ex officio under threat of sanctions (heavy fines, prison sentences) or even ‘harsher’, i.e. corporal punishment. The council and court also retained traditional expressions of renewed friendship and neighbourliness, (mutual) public apologies and handshakes to demonstrate reconciliation between the parties. Consequently, the autonomous town authorities were instrumental for the long perseverance of traditional practices of dispute settlement in Ljubljana, which is comparable to findings elsewhere in Europe.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223), funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) in 2021-23.
Kronika, 2022
VMB SÖLICHEN MÜTWILLEN – SIGMUND VON WEIßPRIACH’S DECLARATION OF ENMITY TO SAINT PAUL’S ABBEY IN ... more VMB SÖLICHEN MÜTWILLEN – SIGMUND VON WEIßPRIACH’S DECLARATION OF ENMITY TO SAINT PAUL’S ABBEY IN LAVANTTAL. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE RESEARCH ON FEUD AND ON THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY DRAVA RIVER VALLEY
In early October 1440, a quarrel broke out between Sigmund von Weißpriach, Duke Albrecht VI of the Habsburgs’ castellan of Muta (Hohenmauten) in Styria, and the Benedictine Saint Paul’s Abbey in Lavanttal, Carinthia. It originated in an alleged breach of Muta’s jurisdiction by Stephan Prüschenk, Abbot Johannes I’s castellan of Marenberg in Styria. Weißpriach demanded appropriate satisfaction for what he regarded as an injury to himself and his lord, threatening that he would attain justice by himself, i.e. with violence, if his demand went unanswered. This was in accordance with the custom of vengeance or feud (Fehde), by then already long codified in Imperial and provincial legislation. However, as the abbot remained adamant that there was no breach of jurisdiction and offered to settle the matter through counsel or royal mediation, Sigmund issued a declaration of enmity (Absage) to Johannes and “all his people” in order to keep his honour. Little is known about the course of this feud in the Styrian-Carinthian border region, save that Weißpriach at least once lay siege to Marenberg castle and the abbey, as well as pillaged its estates and subjects. By the time of a brief truce in January 1442, Prüschenk and the abbot had fallen out, and both Stephan and Sigmund seem to have lost or left their positions as castellans of Marenberg and Muta. Weißpriach’s feud with the abbey has thus far been regarded as an integral part of the wider Cilli-Habsburg conflict and Sigmund as a man of the Counts. Yet the start of hostilities in the fall of 1440, almost two months after a year-long truce was made between the Counts of Cilli and the King of the Romans, shows that Weißpriach’s enmity became part of the larger one only after the prolonged truce expired in late spring of 1442 and an alliance had been made between the Counts and King Frederick IV’s brother, Duke Albrecht. Likewise, no direct links between Sigmund and the Counts are attested in pertinent sources, which, along with his later career, seems to demonstrate that he was (foremost) the Duke’s man.
Apart from the chronology of the feud and alliances therein, this paper also addresses the language of enmity and the role of emotions in feuds, applying a close reading and the methodology of the history of emotions to analyse the correspondence leading up to the nobleman’s Absage to the abbey. This approach shows that Sigmund chiefly used two words to express the injustice, thus demanding appropriate satisfaction: mütwille and vnpilleich, ostensibly as cognates of the Latin legal term iniuria. While the quite formal correspondence of the analysed sources is devoid of emotion-talk, understanding the rituals and language of vengeance nonetheless allows us to ascertain the main underlying emotion of Weißpriach’s response: anger or wrath (ira). Even when they are balanced and formalised as ira iusta or even omitted from the sources, as in the investigated case, emotions that express anger are always to be expected as an integral element in the communication of injustice, and thus also of feud.
ERRATA: podnapis k bakrorezu na str. 278: nastal je poltretje stoletje po fajdi, ne že poldrugo.
Acta Histriae, 2021
TRUE LANGUAGE AND FALSE RELIGION: THE SLOVENE REFORMATION IN SCHOOL HISTORY TEXTBOOKS PRIOR TO TH... more TRUE LANGUAGE AND FALSE RELIGION: THE SLOVENE REFORMATION IN SCHOOL HISTORY TEXTBOOKS PRIOR TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Due to their role in the establishment of standard Slovene, the Reformation in the Slovene lands and its most prominent actors (Primož Trubar, Jurij Dalmatin, Adam Bohorič, Sebastijan Krelj) both were and remain among the key elements of Slovene nation- and state-building. In their reception among an almost exclusively Catholic population, history textbooks played an important role, beginning in the nineteenth century, as tools of official knowledge that helped incorporate each new generation into the national or state community according to dominant interpretations of the past. This paper analyses the treatment of Slovene Protestant reformers and the Reformation in Slovene history textbooks prior to the Second World War, especially after 1881, in one of the key periods of the establishment of the Slovene nation and statehood. The analysis shows that the main goal of teaching history in Austrian-era primary and secondary schools was to strengthen the loyalty towards the monarchy and dynasty, hence themes from Slovene national(ised) history were very rare in textbooks. Yet, already since the early 1800s Slovene Protestant literature had been one of those themes, which reflected its early importance in Slovene cultural memory. Apart from stressing the importance of Protestant writers for the standardisation of the Slovene language and concurrent mentions of their ‘false religion’, until the First World War textbooks assessed the Reformation in the Slovene lands rather neutrally. This approach continued in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918–29). Only after 1929 was more space allocated to the Reformation in Slovene history textbooks, including for the first time the Reformation in Prekmurje, the region with by far the largest Slovene Protestant community, both then and now. It was also in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–41) that history textbooks for the first time more critically assessed Slovene Protestant reformers and the local Reformation, either as a very positive event, e.g. for Yugoslav national unity, or more negatively, e.g. as a corruptive foreign idea, although all agreed on the importance of Protestant literature in the establishment of standard Slovene. Thus, the old polemic on the Reformation between Slovene liberals and conservatives, which started in the late 1800s, also continued in school textbooks until the Second World War.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the research project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State Building (ARRS, J6-9354) funded (2018-21) by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
ERRATA: manjka zahvala pri prvi opombi: "Za komentar besedila se zahvaljujem Gregorju Antoličiču, Marku Kerševanu in Urški Lampe ter anonimnim recenzentom."
Acta Histriae, 2021
THE KOSEZI BETWEEN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL MEMORY:(RE)CONSTRUCTION, RECEPTION AND (RE)INTERPR... more THE KOSEZI BETWEEN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL MEMORY:(RE)CONSTRUCTION, RECEPTION AND (RE)INTERPRETATIONS
For well over a century now, the enigmatic kosezi (in Slovene), or Edlinge (in German), continue to excite the imagination and create agitation in Slovene and Austrian national histories and cultural memories. While Austrian historiography largely advocates for a Germanic origin of this free medieval social stratum, in the Slovene they are established as an integral part of Carantanian society, said to have persevered until the sixteenth and, to a degree, even the nineteenth century. Hence, in the Slovene national imagination, the kosezi provide an important continuity with the ‘first Slovene state’, as Carantania is erroneously regarded in the cultural memory. This paper focuses on the (re)construction and reception of the word kosez (singular) and the social stratum it allegedly designated in Slovene science and cultural memory, while also surveying Austrian interpretations. The analysis shows that the kosezi entered the Slovene national imagination especially due to their key role in the enthronement of the dukes of Carinthia. The role of free Slovene peasants in the medieval enthronement ritual was discovered only two decades before the (re)construction of the word kosez in 1912/13 from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century toponyms and surnames, as the supposed old Slovene or Carantanian original for the German word Edlinger (singular), attested in earlier sources. The word kosez was unknown in folk memory and its (re)construction was too late to be included in nineteenth-century nation-building, which was the most prolific time for the construction of national myths. Thus, it was only in the interwar period that Slovene historiography and philology made the kosezi, through their role in the enthronement ritual supposedly originating in Carantania, an integral part of one of the key elements of Slovene nation and state-building. After World War Two, the kosezi were further established in Slovene cultural memory, particularly through the reception of popular-scientific works and school textbooks, predicated mainly on the interpretations of the leading post-war Slovene medievalist Bogo Grafenauer.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the research project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State Building (ARRS, J6-9354) funded (2018-21) by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
Acta Histriae, 2019
Following the stages of the custom of vengeance, this paper reconstructs conflict resolution amon... more Following the stages of the custom of vengeance, this paper reconstructs conflict resolution among commoners in the Habsburg Duchy of Carniola in early modernity, focusing on the subjects of the Upper Carniolan Lordship of Bled in the first half of the seventeenth century. Disparate cases show that in the Eastern Alpine countryside the rites of enmity and peace had changed little since the Late Middle Ages. Despite the gradual implementation of early modern criminal legislation and growing state interference in the local judiciary, the latter continued to resolve conflicts, including homicide, in cooperation with the community. Remnants of traditional conflict resolution can still be found in the late nineteenth century.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Errata:
P. 681: Andreas Trost, not Tros.
Studia Historica Slovenica: časopis za humanistične in družboslovne študije = Humanities and Social Studies Review, 2019
THE TOTTINGS OF PTUJ AND MAJŠPERK: THE RISE AND DEMISE OF A BURGHER FAMILY IN EARLY MODERNITY
... more THE TOTTINGS OF PTUJ AND MAJŠPERK: THE RISE AND DEMISE OF A BURGHER FAMILY IN EARLY MODERNITY
The Totting family from the Lower Styrian town of Ptuj and nearby Majšperk castle is not unknown to Slovene and Austrian historiography, yet knowledge of the family has until now been very fragmentary. Only known were the head of the family, Benedict Totting, a Protestant and wealthy Ptuj burgher, who in the late sixteenth century rose to lower nobility and acquired the Lordship of Majšperk, and his widow Anna Strusniger, who in the early seventeenth century ran a clandestine Protestant school for girls. Recent research on Medieval and early modern Ptuj burghers by Dejan Zadravec has expanded on this, introducing to us Benedict's position as Ptuj town judge, his father Hans and first wife Ursula Fintz, as well as some of Benedict's purchases and leases of various smaller estates: vineyards, fishing ponds, etc. Children were only speculated to have been born in either marriage. New research by the author of this paper not only fills many gaps of the Totting family history, which is generally only of interest to local historians, but also sheds more light on the survival strategies of early modern burgher families, both economic and social. While the Tottings' origins remain unknown, Benedict's social ascent may have started in 1556 at the latest, when the merchant was already married to the daughter of the burgher Blasius Fintz from the Upper Styrian market town of Eisenerz. The exact details of Benedict's early rise as a Ptuj burgher are obscure due to the lack of documents, yet when he emerges again in 1572, he does so as the town judge, i.e. holding the highest office of the autonomous town authorities in the Princely town. The social prestige required to be a part of and to rise within the burgher elite was generally predicated on one's ability to make profit. While Benedict had plenty of this, it was not enough; his family needed a stronger social safety net in order to make it through life's incertitude; he needed staunch allies. Ensuring the social (and physical) survival of any premodern family was best secured by diversifying income and by multiplying alliances, especially by wedlock. Benedict made sure that his and Ursula's daughters were married to rich and influential men: Anna in 1575 to the Ptuj burgher and merchant Hieronymus Zunggo, who later became town judge, grew very rich by leasing one of the largest European copper mines near the Croatian town of Samobor for two decades and consequently managed to rise to lower nobility; Margaretha in 1585 to the lawyer Magister Ulrich Holzer from a (presumably) Graz burgher family and (later) an official of the Styrian court for nobility or Landschrannengericht; and Katharina in 1588 to the affluent and influential Carinthian Toman Zipnikh, the chief toll collector in Croatia and Slavonia and well connected to the Styrian Land Estates. Aside from social and economic, Benedict's family alliances were also inter-confessional: Zunggo was a Catholic and Holzer a Protestant as was his father-in-law, at least by the time of Katharina's wedding. Following Ursula's death, Benedict wed Anna Strusniger, most likely from the Carinthian town of Wolfsberg and with relatives in the Carniolan capital Ljubljana and the town Novo mesto. If not before, Benedict certainly accepted the "Pure Gospel" from Anna. She bore him the sons Andreas and Adam, on whom Benedict began to focus his inheritance strategies; the lease of the valuable Lordship of (Upper) Majšperk and the request for a title of nobility to the Hungarian King Rudolph II (also Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia), which he was granted in 1590 (but remained a burgher in the Empire), are to be regarded within this context. However, turning the focus to his sons, especially as he may have already had a grandson by Hieronymus and Anna Zunggo, appears to have led to intrafamilial conflict, which erupted following Anna Totting's death. Andreas and Adam were still minors when their father died on 24 June 1591. It seems that thereafter the Catholic Zunggo became the head of the family and, following his own rise to Hungarian lower nobility in 1599 (he remained a burgher in the Empire), helped Anna Totting secure Majšperk as a fief. Furthermore, it was certainly the inter-confessional familial as well as neighbourly solidarity that enabled Anna to run a not-so-secret Protestant school in Ptuj, even under the pressure and scrutiny of the Princely Counter-Reformation in the early seventeenth century. However, both Andreas, once a student at the University of Tübingen, and Adam died without heirs, although Adam, born in 1589, managed to get married before his death in 1614. Some rift must have erupted within the extended family following Hieronymus' death, sometime between 1612 and 1617, since in her will Anna left everything to her sister Maria Gritscher from Novo mesto and niece Susanna Grübner, leaving nothing to Benedict's grandsons, mostly Zunggos, when she died in 1617. Due to her sister's disinterest in Majšperk, in 1624 the castle and estate were sold to an old ally of the Tottings, Maximillian von Plösch, an erstwhile Ptuj burgher.
http://shs.zgodovinsko-drustvo-kovacic.si/
Errata:
P. 659, N. 33 & P. 691: Andrej Hozjan in Tone Ravnikar, "Deželni knez notranje Avstrije Karel II. Habsburžan na Ptuju poleti 1578", Acta Histriae 26, št. 1 (2018), str. 86–87.
P. 667: Ti imaſh tvojga blishniga lubiti, kakòr ſam ſebe (Mr 12,31).
P. 677, N. 127: /.../ vnd vest herr Benedic Thoting ƨg welic /.../ ewigen gedachtnvs ƨg.
Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia, 2018
The renowned late Slovene legal historian Sergij Vilfan mentioned a 'peculiarity' among sixteenth... more The renowned late Slovene legal historian Sergij Vilfan mentioned a 'peculiarity' among sixteenth-century Carniolan peasants, referred to as grundstöer (devastation) in the sources, which was used to avenge homicide by destroying the perpetrator's property instead of killing him as in blood feud. Throughout his career, Vilfan remained somewhat unsure about whether grundstöer was distinct from the 'German(ic)' legal institution of Wüstung (devastation), used to sanction homicide the same way. The analysis presented in this paper, predicated on recent research on vengeance, establishes that they were essentially the same institution, a part of and originating from the legal custom of (blood) feud as an ancient system of conflict resolution.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Kronika, 2018
REFORMATION IN PTUJ. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN PROTESTANT COMMUNITIES IN THE ... more REFORMATION IN PTUJ. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN PROTESTANT COMMUNITIES IN THE SLOVENIAN DRAVA REGION. This article sheds light on the Reformation period and the early modern Protestant community in Ptuj (Pettau), although the insight it provides is rather cursory due to the highly fragmented archival sources. Nonetheless, even the scant sources attest to the fact that the Ptuj community of the Augsburg Confession was not insignificant, at least not during the final decades of the sixteenth century. The community also managed to withstand the Counter-Reformation well into the first decades of the seventeenth century, despite Ptuj being the first Styrian town targeted by it in 1587. Furthermore, several town councillors and other town officials, as well as a number of students enrolled at Protestant universities, came from the community’s ranks. Concurrently, the community’s spiritual needs were provided for by the Lords of Stubenberg from Vurberk (Wurmberg) or, rather, at least by their final preacher Georg Lautenschlager.
Studia Historica Slovenica: časopis za humanistične in družboslovne študije = Humanities and Social Studies Review, 2018
IN LANDT HOCHVERBOTTEN – ENMITIES AMONG NOBILITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY STYRIA, CARNIOLA AND ISTR... more IN LANDT HOCHVERBOTTEN – ENMITIES AMONG NOBILITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY STYRIA, CARNIOLA AND ISTRIA OR ON CONFLICT RESOLUTION BETWEEN THE CUSTOM OF VENGEANCE AND EARLY MODERN CRIMINAL LAW
Conflict resolution among nobility in historically Slovene lands, including Carniola, Styria, and Istria, remained much the same in the seventeenth century as it had during the previous centuries. Notwithstanding the increased monopolisation of law and violence by the early modern State, the strengthened implementation of Roman law and the publishing of new criminal codes, social and legal practice was, until the end of the Ancien Régime, permeated by the ancient and universal social norm or customary system of conflict resolution: vengeance. Following the social principle of exchange, vengeance demanded satisfaction (countergift) for a suffered injustice (gift). If satisfaction was not acquired peacefully, according to the culture of honour injury could be requited by violent retaliation. Violence was envisioned as the sanction for those refusing peaceful conflict resolution. In the Medieval, and even in the early modern, period, it was deemed equally inappropriate to respond to injustice with either violence or lawsuit without previously exhausting all means of peaceful settlement. In customary conflict resolution, the stage that allowed for the use of limited retaliatory violence was enmity or, originating from an Old Germanic word for it, feud. Enmity had to be declared publicly and appropriately (i.e. in time), so that the threat of violence could already force the offending party to give satisfaction. Satisfaction settled the conflict by allowing truce and lasting peace to be made. As was the objective of the custom of vengeance, lasting peace (re-)established concord and peace among parties to the conflict, and restored social equilibrium in the community. Appropriate retaliation meant that violence in vengeance was, as a rule (and ideally), limited. Medieval limitations of violence in enmity, which for the most part persevered into the early modern period, were dictated by the culture of honour, the Church, and customary law, and this created temporal, spatial, and personal immunities. Hostilities were to be suspended on Sundays and the most important Church holidays, and the custom was always adverse to violent retaliation in sacred spaces (e.g. churches) and areas of certain sacral value, such as homes, settlements, fora, and residences of authority. Moreover, communal production facilities and agricultural means of production were not to be damaged. Vengeance upon women, children, the elderly, the ordained, and other segments of society generally prohibited from carrying arms, was also highly inappropriate and dishonourable. Except in blood feud (for homicide, grave insults or severe wounds) the killing of an enemy was also generally inappropriate. Violence upon an enemy's property, mostly by raiding or robbery and arson, was always appropriate. Lawsuits were also an instrument of enmity, especially in the early modern period, even though the judicial path was regarded as less honourable. While customary limitations of enmity were already partially codified in the Early Middle Ages, the codification of the custom of vengeance into law was concluded in the High Middle Ages, especially its key rituals of truce and peace. In the Holy Roman Empire the codification included the declaration of enmity as a distinctive feature of the Imperial and Provincial peace legislation, which at the same time codified limitations of enmity in more detail than the legislation in the rest of Europe. Due to these features, historiography often interpreted the German word for enmity or feud, Fehde, as a distinctive "German" custom of vengeance. A few conflicts among nobility in seventeenth-century Slovene lands also attest to the survival of the custom of vengeance and role of enmity therein. The conflicts of the Lordship of Radovljica with those of Škofja Loka and Bled in (Upper) Carniola, as well as the conflicts of the Styrian Lordships of Slivnica and Vurberk with those of Fram and Ravno polje respectively, attest to the custom's adaptation to social, political, and legal changes in the early modern period. Despite the implementation of criminal codes based on Roman law, the cases presented in this article are proof of the custom's survival into early modernity in Slovene lands. While public declarations of enmity disappeared, the use of limited violence for the defence of one's rights or the acquisition of new ones had, to a degree, remained legitimate. Likewise, so too did blood feud, as is attested by the conflicts between the Moscons and Qualandros in Ptuj, and of the del Taccos with the del Bellos and the marquis Gravisis in Koper/Capodistria. The reactions of the Habsburg princely and the Venetian highest legal authorities show that enmity had remained part of social practice, while only regarded as legal when proven to be a case of self-defence. Although authorities in the seventeenth century still strived for conflict resolution based on the custom of vengeance and the culture of honour on the local level, the State's new attitude towards conflict resolution was already visible on the horizon. As indicated in the case from Koper/Capodistria, by the end of the early modern period the State had established itself as the only avenger or punisher of injustice.
http://shs.zgodovinsko-drustvo-kovacic.si/
Errata:
- Roman law instead of Roman canon law on pp. 119-120
DAROVEC, Darko, ERGAVER, Angelika & OMAN, Žiga. The Language of Vengeance: A Glossary of Enmity and Peace. Acta Histriae, ISSN 1318-0185, 2017, year 25, n.o 2, pp. 391-432 (AHCI, SSCI) Acta Histriae, 2017
Based on a conceptual historiographic and semantic analysis of the fundamental terminology of the... more Based on a conceptual historiographic and semantic analysis of the fundamental terminology of the ritual of vengeance, this paper presents an attempt to provide researchers with a linguistic, conceptual, and methodological framework for the study of vengeance as the customary system of conflict resolution in premodern Europe. For this purpose the key terminology, which also has abundant synonyms, has been collected in the accompanying septalingual glossary. While predicated on, foremost, European Medieval sources and studies thereof, the dissemination and interrelation of the universal human custom make the paper applicable for other areas and periods.
Acta Histriae, 2017
The paper analyses blood feud as a legal custom of the system of conflict resolution in Inner Aus... more The paper analyses blood feud as a legal custom of the system of conflict resolution in Inner Austria during the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the early modern period. Based on legal customs, statutory law, and early modern criminal law the analysis is applied to a case of blood (homicide) settlement in Upper Carniola (Gorenjska) in the 17th century. Two things in particular emerge: the long survival of this legal custom and the tendency of blood feud for peace. Both put Inner Austria in these matters firmly within the broader European legal context.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Errata:
- statutory law instead of common law on pp. 153, 155–156, 158, 162, 167.
Acta Histriae, 2016
In the autumn of 1654 a Fehde (feud) broke out in the Styrian town of Ptuj between the Moscon and... more In the autumn of 1654 a Fehde (feud) broke out in the Styrian town of Ptuj between the Moscon and Qualandro noble families. With the killing of one of Simon Moscon’s subjects, the Fehde acquired another twist, the threat of blood vengeance. The Qualandros, the perpetrator and his son fled the vengeance into monastic asylum and into the burgher estate respectively. The Ptuj town authorities assumed the role of the mediator, in accordance with legal customs, with almost no interference from the princely (state) authorities. With the town’s mediation, peace was made in the summer of 1655; also by monetary restitution (composition) to the killed subject’s family.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Slovenski jezik - Slovene Lingustic Studies, 2015
Until recently we were sure that the Reformation in the Northeast of Slovene Styria was exclusive... more Until recently we were sure that the Reformation in the Northeast of Slovene Styria was exclusively »German«, but modern methodological approaches have lately helped with revising this view. It has been shown, that, although the district of the Augsburg Confession officially and ecclesiastically functioned in German, the Slovene speaking population from all social classes participated in the Reformation in the Dravsko polje region. It can also be shown that Slovene Protestant literature was simultaniously circulating at the local level. / Čeprav smo bili še donedavna prepričani, da je bila reformacija na severovzhodu današnje slovenske Štajerske izključno »nemška«, lahko to ovržemo z modernimi metodološkimi pristopi. Pri reformaciji na Dravskem polju je bilo udeleženo tudi slovensko oziroma slovensko govoreče prebivalstvo vseh družbenih slojev, čeprav je liturgično in upravno tukajšnja občina augsburške veroizpovedi delovala pretežno oziroma izključno v nemškem jeziku. Obenem je tukaj krožila tudi slovenska protestantika.
Book Chapters by Žiga Oman
The Thirty Years’ War and the Slovenians: The European Conflict and Slovenian Territory in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, 2020
PROTESTANT COMMUNITIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PODRAVJE THROUGH THE PROBLEM OF INTERCONFESSION... more PROTESTANT COMMUNITIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PODRAVJE THROUGH THE PROBLEM OF INTERCONFESSIONAL COEXISTENCE: THE CASE OF MARIBOR AND PTUJ
Predicated on recent research on confessional coexistence in Reformation and Post-Reformation Europe, this article argues that familial, neighbourly, class, and economic relations also enabled peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Lower-Styrian Podravje region. The article focuses on the princely towns of Maribor and Ptuj, establishing that despite the confessional rift and state persecution, the burghers in both towns in general maintained peaceful relations with their ‘heretic’ neighbours well into the first half of the seventeenth century. During much of the second half of the sixteenth century, when its burgher elite was predominately Protestant, the Maribor parish church seems to have been a simultaneum. In neighbouring Ptuj, the burghers were more equally divided between the confessions, a fact that seems to have been echoed in the town council, with seats allocated among Catholics and Protestants according to 'parity'. By the end of the sixteenth century, confessional coexistence in both towns came under threat from the princely Counter-Reformation, although it was only under the greatest pressure of the state’s confessionalisation efforts that the local authorities joined in the persecution and proselytisation of their Protestant neighbours. However, as the Archduke was primarily engaged in the political subordination of the Inner-Austrian Protestant opposition, his recatholicisation policies soon lost momentum, especially at the local level. Struggling to maintain their autonomy and authority, which were under threat from princely policies, the autonomous town authorities sought to keep their 'sectarian' neighbours 'secret' to prevent further interventions. The policy in Maribor and Ptuj also stemmed from the tolerance, or at least indifference, of most Catholics towards their Protestant neighbours, predicated on the various social relations bridging the confessional gulf between the burghers, especially their elite. Thus, the local clergy was largely unable to confront the town councils in religious matters, which impeded the fruition of counter-reformatory ordinances even before the Archduke’s and Holy Roman Emperor’s attention shifted to the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War. Hence, even the expulsion of publicly declared Protestants could take years. The survival of seventeenth-century Protestant communities in Maribor and Ptuj was further facilitated by religious services and schools in neighbouring Hungary as well as clandestine ones organised by the local Protestant nobility, which were an open secret in both towns. While all of the above slowed the disappearance of Protestants from Maribor and Ptuj at least until the early 1630s, it could not prevent it in the long run. There are only two indirect mentions of Protestants in Ptuj after the princely Counter-Reformation gained impetus following the Peace of Westphalia.
Full edited monograph in open access at: https://omp.zrc-sazu.si/zalozba/catalog/book/2057
Protestantism Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 2015
THE MARIBOR PROTESTANT COMMUNITY UNTIL 1587: FROM THE FIRST MENTIONS OF REFORMATION IDEAS TO THE ... more THE MARIBOR PROTESTANT COMMUNITY UNTIL 1587: FROM THE FIRST MENTIONS OF REFORMATION IDEAS TO THE EXPULSION FROM THE STRUCTURES OF THE TOWN PARISH
The development of the Protestant religious community in Maribor largely followed the development of Reformation in Styria. The new ideas were first attested in the
princely visitation protocol of 1528. A part of Maribor burghers and the local clergy showed at least an interest in them. A decade later, Protestants, as it seems,
already had the majority in town authorities, as the town judge of Maribor – together with the Land Estates – petitioned the prince for freedom of religion. More than the Land Estates' declaration of Styria for a Land of the Augsburg Confession, it was the new vicar Georg Siechel who enabled the rise of the Maribor Protestants and strenghtened the community from the mid-16th century . During his thirty-year period as vicar, the Maribor Protestants were thoroughly integrated into the town Catholic parish; therefore, they had no interest to establish their own church organization. The supremacy of the Protestants in town authorities reflected the development at the Land level. In the run-up to the Land Estates in Graz in 1572, the town authorities declared Maribor a town of the Augsburg Confession. Six years later, at the General Estates in Bruck an der Mur, the Maribor town judge signed the “Brucker-Libell” as the second representative from among Styrian towns. The following princely (and church) countermeasures failed to bring any real changes in Maribor. These started to occur only following the vicar’s death and the changes at the Land level in the late 1580s.
The Reformation in the Croatian Historical Lands: Research Results, Challenges, Perspectives, 2015
The analysis of archived and published historical documents, as well as of pertaining literature,... more The analysis of archived and published historical documents, as well as of pertaining literature, has brought several results in the case of direct connections between the Dravsko Polje micro-Reformation, which was but a small part of the Reformation in Styria, and the Reformation in the neighboring Croatian lands. These connections were found to be based either on noble families with lands or lines on both sides of the border (von Kollonitsch, Székely, Tahy), on personal connections (Totting), or on the links made with the establishment of the military frontier. As to the latter, three important Protestants of the Dravsko Polje district of the Augsburg Confession had some connection to it: its main benefactor, Wolf Wilhelm Baron von Herberstein, as well as both of its preachers, Sigmund Lierzer and Georg Lautenschlager. The scarceness of links found in the herein used historical documents and literature should not allude to a non-existence of them in general, whether between Protestant nobility or the townspeople on either side of this section of the Styrian-Croatian border connected through trade and personal connections. Further research on Reformation in the Dravsko Polje area will undoubtedly shed more light on this matter. Discussion on direct religious connections will require more than just circumstantial proof and this remains the work of possible future research.
Book Reviews by Žiga Oman
Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia, 2020
Prevajalci/Traduttori/Translators: Gorazd Bajc (it.) Oblikovalec/Progetto grafico/ Graphic design... more Prevajalci/Traduttori/Translators: Gorazd Bajc (it.) Oblikovalec/Progetto grafico/ Graphic design: Dušan Podgornik , Darko Darovec Tisk/Stampa/Print: Založništvo PADRE d.o.o. Založnika/Editori/Published by: Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko -Koper / Società storica del Litorale -Capodistria© / Inštitut IRRIS za raziskave, razvoj in strategije družbe, kulture in okolja / Institute IRRIS for Research, Development and Strategies of Society, Culture and Environment / Istituto IRRIS di ricerca, sviluppo e strategie della società, cultura e ambiente© Sedež uredništva/Sede della redazione/
Uploads
Papers by Žiga Oman
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223)', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-3.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223)', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-3.
In the Autumn of 1681, towards the close of the worst plague epidemic to hit early modern Lower Styria, a dispute between the Žalec market-town councillor Johann Christoph Pilpach and Ferdinand Baron Miglio from the nearby Plumberk manor erupted into violence. With the help of soldiers whom Pilpach acquired from the Counts of Strassoldo from Krško in Carniola, he raided Miglio’s manor during his absence, threatening to serve him lead ‘cherries’ (bullets), for which the nobleman avenged himself by ransacking the market-burgher’s house in Žalec. This paper analyses the rather unusual, active enmity between two socially unequal adversaries through traditional practices of conducting and settling disputes, which also enables a look at other social relations among this conflict’s main actors. Due to very fragmentary sources, it is unknown what set it off, although Pilpach’s ransacking of the manor suggests that it might have been due to Miglio’s debts to the affluent market-burgher. Perhaps their dispute was connected to the one between the baron and the Fraziolis, the former administrators of his manor, or to a dispute the Fraziolis or Pilpachs might have had with the Žalec market-burgher family Galič (Galitsch), the new administrators of Plumberk. The ensuing violence is better documented. Pilpach’s raid on Plumberk manor was co-organised by his son-in-law, Gregor Rozman, who sought help from the Strassoldos. While the exact nature of their relationship with the counts is obscure, it had to be close for an important noble family to lend its soldiers to two market-burghers. Maybe the Strassoldos’ help was also related to disputes they themselves might have had with Miglio. Pilpach’s social capital was quite possibly further predicated on the marriage of a lesser line of the Valvasor noble family to the Pilpachs from Žalec in early 1680. These connections most likely levelled the field once the market-burgher’s dispute with the baron broke out into violence. Miglio’s response in September 1681 essentially mirrored Pilpach’s actions: ransacking his home under arms, threats with violence and death, stealing his horses, killing his poultry, etc. Maybe the equal response was completely by chance, but, conceivably, the expected reciprocity of violence in enmities also played a role. In the end, Miglio had to justify his actions in court as a measured response to an affront. The violence was exacerbated when Pilpach opted for a recourse to law, after failing to obtain satisfaction (restitution of honour and damages) from Miglio for the attack. Pilpach’s attempt to serve a writ to the baron ended with Miglio almost cudgelling the messenger to death, rejecting the attempt as insolence. Despite going to court, the settlement of their dispute or at least the violence seems to have been extra-curial, as was common in enmities among the elite. Likewise, the only intervention by princely authorities seems to have been a demand that Miglio accept the writ, even though violent enmities or feuds broke the provincial (and Imperial) peace and, which was even more critical, attacks on the socially superior upset the social order. There were certainly no grave consequences for Pilpach, who is attested as the Žalec market-town judge in 1684. All of this suggests that the social differences between him and Miglio were formal rather than factual, underpinned by Pilpach’s close connections to influential noble families and, probably, also by the fact that the Miglios’ rise to nobility was rather recent. His ‘equality’ with the baron in their enmity probably also helped Pilpach to improve his social standing. Although it is unknown when exactly peace between the baron and Pilpach was made, the plague that decimated Žalec in 1683 seems as a plausible mitigating factor. In any case, in early 1684, Pilpach’s wife Ursula Elisabeth and his former enemy Jakob Galič, Miglio’s administrator of Plumberk, became godparents to a child of one of their market-town neighbours. This indicates that their enmity was over, most likely following or as part of the peace made between Pilpach and Miglio, since settlement generally included ‘all the people’ of the conflicting parties.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-23.
This paper addresses enmities between burghers and other inhabitants of early modern Ljubljana, documented in town council records from 1521 to 1671. In traditional dispute settlement, the concept of enmity was closely related to violent retribution, which was antithetical to the ideals of urban communities, which since the Middle Ages had been established upon the renunciation of the right to feud. Focused on the conception of enmity in the Carniolan capital following the general prohibition of feuding in 1495, the paper analyses the role, language and emotional dimension of traditional practices of dispute settlement, their intertwinement with court proceedings and coexistence with criminal law. While town council records cannot provide a complete picture of the attitude towards enmity or feud in early modern Ljubljana, as no criminal court records survive, they are an important source for understanding social relations more broadly and, in particular, the manner in which everyday enmities that undermined ideals of neighbourliness were mediated by the secular authorities. The analysis shows that in Ljubljana the traditional conception of enmity as a public expression of hostility and discord – the opposite of the urban values of peace, concord and good neighbourliness – remained in use well into the seventeenth century, despite its normative prohibition, as did the traditional terms and emotions expressing this relationship, especially ‘resentment’, ‘bitterness’ and (just) ‘anger’, while ‘rage’ seems to have still been used very rarely to justify transgressions of social norms. Although physical violence did not always erupt in the investigated cases, and remained limited when it did, it was a viable threat in enmities, even when they were largely carried out before the town council or court. These were the central fora for both conducting and settling enmities among burghers, as well as other lay non-noble inhabitants of early modern Ljubljana. Underpinned by community mediation in disputes, the burgomaster, town judge and councillors principally acted as mediators and arbiters, attempting to lead conflicting parties to settlement before enmity was exacerbated into violence – in particularly bitter cases by forcing them to settle ex officio under threat of sanctions (heavy fines, prison sentences) or even ‘harsher’, i.e. corporal punishment. The council and court also retained traditional expressions of renewed friendship and neighbourliness, (mutual) public apologies and handshakes to demonstrate reconciliation between the parties. Consequently, the autonomous town authorities were instrumental for the long perseverance of traditional practices of dispute settlement in Ljubljana, which is comparable to findings elsewhere in Europe.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223), funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) in 2021-23.
In early October 1440, a quarrel broke out between Sigmund von Weißpriach, Duke Albrecht VI of the Habsburgs’ castellan of Muta (Hohenmauten) in Styria, and the Benedictine Saint Paul’s Abbey in Lavanttal, Carinthia. It originated in an alleged breach of Muta’s jurisdiction by Stephan Prüschenk, Abbot Johannes I’s castellan of Marenberg in Styria. Weißpriach demanded appropriate satisfaction for what he regarded as an injury to himself and his lord, threatening that he would attain justice by himself, i.e. with violence, if his demand went unanswered. This was in accordance with the custom of vengeance or feud (Fehde), by then already long codified in Imperial and provincial legislation. However, as the abbot remained adamant that there was no breach of jurisdiction and offered to settle the matter through counsel or royal mediation, Sigmund issued a declaration of enmity (Absage) to Johannes and “all his people” in order to keep his honour. Little is known about the course of this feud in the Styrian-Carinthian border region, save that Weißpriach at least once lay siege to Marenberg castle and the abbey, as well as pillaged its estates and subjects. By the time of a brief truce in January 1442, Prüschenk and the abbot had fallen out, and both Stephan and Sigmund seem to have lost or left their positions as castellans of Marenberg and Muta. Weißpriach’s feud with the abbey has thus far been regarded as an integral part of the wider Cilli-Habsburg conflict and Sigmund as a man of the Counts. Yet the start of hostilities in the fall of 1440, almost two months after a year-long truce was made between the Counts of Cilli and the King of the Romans, shows that Weißpriach’s enmity became part of the larger one only after the prolonged truce expired in late spring of 1442 and an alliance had been made between the Counts and King Frederick IV’s brother, Duke Albrecht. Likewise, no direct links between Sigmund and the Counts are attested in pertinent sources, which, along with his later career, seems to demonstrate that he was (foremost) the Duke’s man.
Apart from the chronology of the feud and alliances therein, this paper also addresses the language of enmity and the role of emotions in feuds, applying a close reading and the methodology of the history of emotions to analyse the correspondence leading up to the nobleman’s Absage to the abbey. This approach shows that Sigmund chiefly used two words to express the injustice, thus demanding appropriate satisfaction: mütwille and vnpilleich, ostensibly as cognates of the Latin legal term iniuria. While the quite formal correspondence of the analysed sources is devoid of emotion-talk, understanding the rituals and language of vengeance nonetheless allows us to ascertain the main underlying emotion of Weißpriach’s response: anger or wrath (ira). Even when they are balanced and formalised as ira iusta or even omitted from the sources, as in the investigated case, emotions that express anger are always to be expected as an integral element in the communication of injustice, and thus also of feud.
ERRATA: podnapis k bakrorezu na str. 278: nastal je poltretje stoletje po fajdi, ne že poldrugo.
Due to their role in the establishment of standard Slovene, the Reformation in the Slovene lands and its most prominent actors (Primož Trubar, Jurij Dalmatin, Adam Bohorič, Sebastijan Krelj) both were and remain among the key elements of Slovene nation- and state-building. In their reception among an almost exclusively Catholic population, history textbooks played an important role, beginning in the nineteenth century, as tools of official knowledge that helped incorporate each new generation into the national or state community according to dominant interpretations of the past. This paper analyses the treatment of Slovene Protestant reformers and the Reformation in Slovene history textbooks prior to the Second World War, especially after 1881, in one of the key periods of the establishment of the Slovene nation and statehood. The analysis shows that the main goal of teaching history in Austrian-era primary and secondary schools was to strengthen the loyalty towards the monarchy and dynasty, hence themes from Slovene national(ised) history were very rare in textbooks. Yet, already since the early 1800s Slovene Protestant literature had been one of those themes, which reflected its early importance in Slovene cultural memory. Apart from stressing the importance of Protestant writers for the standardisation of the Slovene language and concurrent mentions of their ‘false religion’, until the First World War textbooks assessed the Reformation in the Slovene lands rather neutrally. This approach continued in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918–29). Only after 1929 was more space allocated to the Reformation in Slovene history textbooks, including for the first time the Reformation in Prekmurje, the region with by far the largest Slovene Protestant community, both then and now. It was also in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–41) that history textbooks for the first time more critically assessed Slovene Protestant reformers and the local Reformation, either as a very positive event, e.g. for Yugoslav national unity, or more negatively, e.g. as a corruptive foreign idea, although all agreed on the importance of Protestant literature in the establishment of standard Slovene. Thus, the old polemic on the Reformation between Slovene liberals and conservatives, which started in the late 1800s, also continued in school textbooks until the Second World War.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the research project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State Building (ARRS, J6-9354) funded (2018-21) by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
ERRATA: manjka zahvala pri prvi opombi: "Za komentar besedila se zahvaljujem Gregorju Antoličiču, Marku Kerševanu in Urški Lampe ter anonimnim recenzentom."
For well over a century now, the enigmatic kosezi (in Slovene), or Edlinge (in German), continue to excite the imagination and create agitation in Slovene and Austrian national histories and cultural memories. While Austrian historiography largely advocates for a Germanic origin of this free medieval social stratum, in the Slovene they are established as an integral part of Carantanian society, said to have persevered until the sixteenth and, to a degree, even the nineteenth century. Hence, in the Slovene national imagination, the kosezi provide an important continuity with the ‘first Slovene state’, as Carantania is erroneously regarded in the cultural memory. This paper focuses on the (re)construction and reception of the word kosez (singular) and the social stratum it allegedly designated in Slovene science and cultural memory, while also surveying Austrian interpretations. The analysis shows that the kosezi entered the Slovene national imagination especially due to their key role in the enthronement of the dukes of Carinthia. The role of free Slovene peasants in the medieval enthronement ritual was discovered only two decades before the (re)construction of the word kosez in 1912/13 from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century toponyms and surnames, as the supposed old Slovene or Carantanian original for the German word Edlinger (singular), attested in earlier sources. The word kosez was unknown in folk memory and its (re)construction was too late to be included in nineteenth-century nation-building, which was the most prolific time for the construction of national myths. Thus, it was only in the interwar period that Slovene historiography and philology made the kosezi, through their role in the enthronement ritual supposedly originating in Carantania, an integral part of one of the key elements of Slovene nation and state-building. After World War Two, the kosezi were further established in Slovene cultural memory, particularly through the reception of popular-scientific works and school textbooks, predicated mainly on the interpretations of the leading post-war Slovene medievalist Bogo Grafenauer.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the research project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State Building (ARRS, J6-9354) funded (2018-21) by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
http://zdjp.si/en/
Errata:
P. 681: Andreas Trost, not Tros.
The Totting family from the Lower Styrian town of Ptuj and nearby Majšperk castle is not unknown to Slovene and Austrian historiography, yet knowledge of the family has until now been very fragmentary. Only known were the head of the family, Benedict Totting, a Protestant and wealthy Ptuj burgher, who in the late sixteenth century rose to lower nobility and acquired the Lordship of Majšperk, and his widow Anna Strusniger, who in the early seventeenth century ran a clandestine Protestant school for girls. Recent research on Medieval and early modern Ptuj burghers by Dejan Zadravec has expanded on this, introducing to us Benedict's position as Ptuj town judge, his father Hans and first wife Ursula Fintz, as well as some of Benedict's purchases and leases of various smaller estates: vineyards, fishing ponds, etc. Children were only speculated to have been born in either marriage. New research by the author of this paper not only fills many gaps of the Totting family history, which is generally only of interest to local historians, but also sheds more light on the survival strategies of early modern burgher families, both economic and social. While the Tottings' origins remain unknown, Benedict's social ascent may have started in 1556 at the latest, when the merchant was already married to the daughter of the burgher Blasius Fintz from the Upper Styrian market town of Eisenerz. The exact details of Benedict's early rise as a Ptuj burgher are obscure due to the lack of documents, yet when he emerges again in 1572, he does so as the town judge, i.e. holding the highest office of the autonomous town authorities in the Princely town. The social prestige required to be a part of and to rise within the burgher elite was generally predicated on one's ability to make profit. While Benedict had plenty of this, it was not enough; his family needed a stronger social safety net in order to make it through life's incertitude; he needed staunch allies. Ensuring the social (and physical) survival of any premodern family was best secured by diversifying income and by multiplying alliances, especially by wedlock. Benedict made sure that his and Ursula's daughters were married to rich and influential men: Anna in 1575 to the Ptuj burgher and merchant Hieronymus Zunggo, who later became town judge, grew very rich by leasing one of the largest European copper mines near the Croatian town of Samobor for two decades and consequently managed to rise to lower nobility; Margaretha in 1585 to the lawyer Magister Ulrich Holzer from a (presumably) Graz burgher family and (later) an official of the Styrian court for nobility or Landschrannengericht; and Katharina in 1588 to the affluent and influential Carinthian Toman Zipnikh, the chief toll collector in Croatia and Slavonia and well connected to the Styrian Land Estates. Aside from social and economic, Benedict's family alliances were also inter-confessional: Zunggo was a Catholic and Holzer a Protestant as was his father-in-law, at least by the time of Katharina's wedding. Following Ursula's death, Benedict wed Anna Strusniger, most likely from the Carinthian town of Wolfsberg and with relatives in the Carniolan capital Ljubljana and the town Novo mesto. If not before, Benedict certainly accepted the "Pure Gospel" from Anna. She bore him the sons Andreas and Adam, on whom Benedict began to focus his inheritance strategies; the lease of the valuable Lordship of (Upper) Majšperk and the request for a title of nobility to the Hungarian King Rudolph II (also Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia), which he was granted in 1590 (but remained a burgher in the Empire), are to be regarded within this context. However, turning the focus to his sons, especially as he may have already had a grandson by Hieronymus and Anna Zunggo, appears to have led to intrafamilial conflict, which erupted following Anna Totting's death. Andreas and Adam were still minors when their father died on 24 June 1591. It seems that thereafter the Catholic Zunggo became the head of the family and, following his own rise to Hungarian lower nobility in 1599 (he remained a burgher in the Empire), helped Anna Totting secure Majšperk as a fief. Furthermore, it was certainly the inter-confessional familial as well as neighbourly solidarity that enabled Anna to run a not-so-secret Protestant school in Ptuj, even under the pressure and scrutiny of the Princely Counter-Reformation in the early seventeenth century. However, both Andreas, once a student at the University of Tübingen, and Adam died without heirs, although Adam, born in 1589, managed to get married before his death in 1614. Some rift must have erupted within the extended family following Hieronymus' death, sometime between 1612 and 1617, since in her will Anna left everything to her sister Maria Gritscher from Novo mesto and niece Susanna Grübner, leaving nothing to Benedict's grandsons, mostly Zunggos, when she died in 1617. Due to her sister's disinterest in Majšperk, in 1624 the castle and estate were sold to an old ally of the Tottings, Maximillian von Plösch, an erstwhile Ptuj burgher.
http://shs.zgodovinsko-drustvo-kovacic.si/
Errata:
P. 659, N. 33 & P. 691: Andrej Hozjan in Tone Ravnikar, "Deželni knez notranje Avstrije Karel II. Habsburžan na Ptuju poleti 1578", Acta Histriae 26, št. 1 (2018), str. 86–87.
P. 667: Ti imaſh tvojga blishniga lubiti, kakòr ſam ſebe (Mr 12,31).
P. 677, N. 127: /.../ vnd vest herr Benedic Thoting ƨg welic /.../ ewigen gedachtnvs ƨg.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Conflict resolution among nobility in historically Slovene lands, including Carniola, Styria, and Istria, remained much the same in the seventeenth century as it had during the previous centuries. Notwithstanding the increased monopolisation of law and violence by the early modern State, the strengthened implementation of Roman law and the publishing of new criminal codes, social and legal practice was, until the end of the Ancien Régime, permeated by the ancient and universal social norm or customary system of conflict resolution: vengeance. Following the social principle of exchange, vengeance demanded satisfaction (countergift) for a suffered injustice (gift). If satisfaction was not acquired peacefully, according to the culture of honour injury could be requited by violent retaliation. Violence was envisioned as the sanction for those refusing peaceful conflict resolution. In the Medieval, and even in the early modern, period, it was deemed equally inappropriate to respond to injustice with either violence or lawsuit without previously exhausting all means of peaceful settlement. In customary conflict resolution, the stage that allowed for the use of limited retaliatory violence was enmity or, originating from an Old Germanic word for it, feud. Enmity had to be declared publicly and appropriately (i.e. in time), so that the threat of violence could already force the offending party to give satisfaction. Satisfaction settled the conflict by allowing truce and lasting peace to be made. As was the objective of the custom of vengeance, lasting peace (re-)established concord and peace among parties to the conflict, and restored social equilibrium in the community. Appropriate retaliation meant that violence in vengeance was, as a rule (and ideally), limited. Medieval limitations of violence in enmity, which for the most part persevered into the early modern period, were dictated by the culture of honour, the Church, and customary law, and this created temporal, spatial, and personal immunities. Hostilities were to be suspended on Sundays and the most important Church holidays, and the custom was always adverse to violent retaliation in sacred spaces (e.g. churches) and areas of certain sacral value, such as homes, settlements, fora, and residences of authority. Moreover, communal production facilities and agricultural means of production were not to be damaged. Vengeance upon women, children, the elderly, the ordained, and other segments of society generally prohibited from carrying arms, was also highly inappropriate and dishonourable. Except in blood feud (for homicide, grave insults or severe wounds) the killing of an enemy was also generally inappropriate. Violence upon an enemy's property, mostly by raiding or robbery and arson, was always appropriate. Lawsuits were also an instrument of enmity, especially in the early modern period, even though the judicial path was regarded as less honourable. While customary limitations of enmity were already partially codified in the Early Middle Ages, the codification of the custom of vengeance into law was concluded in the High Middle Ages, especially its key rituals of truce and peace. In the Holy Roman Empire the codification included the declaration of enmity as a distinctive feature of the Imperial and Provincial peace legislation, which at the same time codified limitations of enmity in more detail than the legislation in the rest of Europe. Due to these features, historiography often interpreted the German word for enmity or feud, Fehde, as a distinctive "German" custom of vengeance. A few conflicts among nobility in seventeenth-century Slovene lands also attest to the survival of the custom of vengeance and role of enmity therein. The conflicts of the Lordship of Radovljica with those of Škofja Loka and Bled in (Upper) Carniola, as well as the conflicts of the Styrian Lordships of Slivnica and Vurberk with those of Fram and Ravno polje respectively, attest to the custom's adaptation to social, political, and legal changes in the early modern period. Despite the implementation of criminal codes based on Roman law, the cases presented in this article are proof of the custom's survival into early modernity in Slovene lands. While public declarations of enmity disappeared, the use of limited violence for the defence of one's rights or the acquisition of new ones had, to a degree, remained legitimate. Likewise, so too did blood feud, as is attested by the conflicts between the Moscons and Qualandros in Ptuj, and of the del Taccos with the del Bellos and the marquis Gravisis in Koper/Capodistria. The reactions of the Habsburg princely and the Venetian highest legal authorities show that enmity had remained part of social practice, while only regarded as legal when proven to be a case of self-defence. Although authorities in the seventeenth century still strived for conflict resolution based on the custom of vengeance and the culture of honour on the local level, the State's new attitude towards conflict resolution was already visible on the horizon. As indicated in the case from Koper/Capodistria, by the end of the early modern period the State had established itself as the only avenger or punisher of injustice.
http://shs.zgodovinsko-drustvo-kovacic.si/
Errata:
- Roman law instead of Roman canon law on pp. 119-120
http://zdjp.si/en/
Errata:
- statutory law instead of common law on pp. 153, 155–156, 158, 162, 167.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Book Chapters by Žiga Oman
Predicated on recent research on confessional coexistence in Reformation and Post-Reformation Europe, this article argues that familial, neighbourly, class, and economic relations also enabled peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Lower-Styrian Podravje region. The article focuses on the princely towns of Maribor and Ptuj, establishing that despite the confessional rift and state persecution, the burghers in both towns in general maintained peaceful relations with their ‘heretic’ neighbours well into the first half of the seventeenth century. During much of the second half of the sixteenth century, when its burgher elite was predominately Protestant, the Maribor parish church seems to have been a simultaneum. In neighbouring Ptuj, the burghers were more equally divided between the confessions, a fact that seems to have been echoed in the town council, with seats allocated among Catholics and Protestants according to 'parity'. By the end of the sixteenth century, confessional coexistence in both towns came under threat from the princely Counter-Reformation, although it was only under the greatest pressure of the state’s confessionalisation efforts that the local authorities joined in the persecution and proselytisation of their Protestant neighbours. However, as the Archduke was primarily engaged in the political subordination of the Inner-Austrian Protestant opposition, his recatholicisation policies soon lost momentum, especially at the local level. Struggling to maintain their autonomy and authority, which were under threat from princely policies, the autonomous town authorities sought to keep their 'sectarian' neighbours 'secret' to prevent further interventions. The policy in Maribor and Ptuj also stemmed from the tolerance, or at least indifference, of most Catholics towards their Protestant neighbours, predicated on the various social relations bridging the confessional gulf between the burghers, especially their elite. Thus, the local clergy was largely unable to confront the town councils in religious matters, which impeded the fruition of counter-reformatory ordinances even before the Archduke’s and Holy Roman Emperor’s attention shifted to the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War. Hence, even the expulsion of publicly declared Protestants could take years. The survival of seventeenth-century Protestant communities in Maribor and Ptuj was further facilitated by religious services and schools in neighbouring Hungary as well as clandestine ones organised by the local Protestant nobility, which were an open secret in both towns. While all of the above slowed the disappearance of Protestants from Maribor and Ptuj at least until the early 1630s, it could not prevent it in the long run. There are only two indirect mentions of Protestants in Ptuj after the princely Counter-Reformation gained impetus following the Peace of Westphalia.
Full edited monograph in open access at: https://omp.zrc-sazu.si/zalozba/catalog/book/2057
The development of the Protestant religious community in Maribor largely followed the development of Reformation in Styria. The new ideas were first attested in the
princely visitation protocol of 1528. A part of Maribor burghers and the local clergy showed at least an interest in them. A decade later, Protestants, as it seems,
already had the majority in town authorities, as the town judge of Maribor – together with the Land Estates – petitioned the prince for freedom of religion. More than the Land Estates' declaration of Styria for a Land of the Augsburg Confession, it was the new vicar Georg Siechel who enabled the rise of the Maribor Protestants and strenghtened the community from the mid-16th century . During his thirty-year period as vicar, the Maribor Protestants were thoroughly integrated into the town Catholic parish; therefore, they had no interest to establish their own church organization. The supremacy of the Protestants in town authorities reflected the development at the Land level. In the run-up to the Land Estates in Graz in 1572, the town authorities declared Maribor a town of the Augsburg Confession. Six years later, at the General Estates in Bruck an der Mur, the Maribor town judge signed the “Brucker-Libell” as the second representative from among Styrian towns. The following princely (and church) countermeasures failed to bring any real changes in Maribor. These started to occur only following the vicar’s death and the changes at the Land level in the late 1580s.
Book Reviews by Žiga Oman
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223)', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-3.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223)', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-3.
In the Autumn of 1681, towards the close of the worst plague epidemic to hit early modern Lower Styria, a dispute between the Žalec market-town councillor Johann Christoph Pilpach and Ferdinand Baron Miglio from the nearby Plumberk manor erupted into violence. With the help of soldiers whom Pilpach acquired from the Counts of Strassoldo from Krško in Carniola, he raided Miglio’s manor during his absence, threatening to serve him lead ‘cherries’ (bullets), for which the nobleman avenged himself by ransacking the market-burgher’s house in Žalec. This paper analyses the rather unusual, active enmity between two socially unequal adversaries through traditional practices of conducting and settling disputes, which also enables a look at other social relations among this conflict’s main actors. Due to very fragmentary sources, it is unknown what set it off, although Pilpach’s ransacking of the manor suggests that it might have been due to Miglio’s debts to the affluent market-burgher. Perhaps their dispute was connected to the one between the baron and the Fraziolis, the former administrators of his manor, or to a dispute the Fraziolis or Pilpachs might have had with the Žalec market-burgher family Galič (Galitsch), the new administrators of Plumberk. The ensuing violence is better documented. Pilpach’s raid on Plumberk manor was co-organised by his son-in-law, Gregor Rozman, who sought help from the Strassoldos. While the exact nature of their relationship with the counts is obscure, it had to be close for an important noble family to lend its soldiers to two market-burghers. Maybe the Strassoldos’ help was also related to disputes they themselves might have had with Miglio. Pilpach’s social capital was quite possibly further predicated on the marriage of a lesser line of the Valvasor noble family to the Pilpachs from Žalec in early 1680. These connections most likely levelled the field once the market-burgher’s dispute with the baron broke out into violence. Miglio’s response in September 1681 essentially mirrored Pilpach’s actions: ransacking his home under arms, threats with violence and death, stealing his horses, killing his poultry, etc. Maybe the equal response was completely by chance, but, conceivably, the expected reciprocity of violence in enmities also played a role. In the end, Miglio had to justify his actions in court as a measured response to an affront. The violence was exacerbated when Pilpach opted for a recourse to law, after failing to obtain satisfaction (restitution of honour and damages) from Miglio for the attack. Pilpach’s attempt to serve a writ to the baron ended with Miglio almost cudgelling the messenger to death, rejecting the attempt as insolence. Despite going to court, the settlement of their dispute or at least the violence seems to have been extra-curial, as was common in enmities among the elite. Likewise, the only intervention by princely authorities seems to have been a demand that Miglio accept the writ, even though violent enmities or feuds broke the provincial (and Imperial) peace and, which was even more critical, attacks on the socially superior upset the social order. There were certainly no grave consequences for Pilpach, who is attested as the Žalec market-town judge in 1684. All of this suggests that the social differences between him and Miglio were formal rather than factual, underpinned by Pilpach’s close connections to influential noble families and, probably, also by the fact that the Miglios’ rise to nobility was rather recent. His ‘equality’ with the baron in their enmity probably also helped Pilpach to improve his social standing. Although it is unknown when exactly peace between the baron and Pilpach was made, the plague that decimated Žalec in 1683 seems as a plausible mitigating factor. In any case, in early 1684, Pilpach’s wife Ursula Elisabeth and his former enemy Jakob Galič, Miglio’s administrator of Plumberk, became godparents to a child of one of their market-town neighbours. This indicates that their enmity was over, most likely following or as part of the peace made between Pilpach and Miglio, since settlement generally included ‘all the people’ of the conflicting parties.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) in 2021-23.
This paper addresses enmities between burghers and other inhabitants of early modern Ljubljana, documented in town council records from 1521 to 1671. In traditional dispute settlement, the concept of enmity was closely related to violent retribution, which was antithetical to the ideals of urban communities, which since the Middle Ages had been established upon the renunciation of the right to feud. Focused on the conception of enmity in the Carniolan capital following the general prohibition of feuding in 1495, the paper analyses the role, language and emotional dimension of traditional practices of dispute settlement, their intertwinement with court proceedings and coexistence with criminal law. While town council records cannot provide a complete picture of the attitude towards enmity or feud in early modern Ljubljana, as no criminal court records survive, they are an important source for understanding social relations more broadly and, in particular, the manner in which everyday enmities that undermined ideals of neighbourliness were mediated by the secular authorities. The analysis shows that in Ljubljana the traditional conception of enmity as a public expression of hostility and discord – the opposite of the urban values of peace, concord and good neighbourliness – remained in use well into the seventeenth century, despite its normative prohibition, as did the traditional terms and emotions expressing this relationship, especially ‘resentment’, ‘bitterness’ and (just) ‘anger’, while ‘rage’ seems to have still been used very rarely to justify transgressions of social norms. Although physical violence did not always erupt in the investigated cases, and remained limited when it did, it was a viable threat in enmities, even when they were largely carried out before the town council or court. These were the central fora for both conducting and settling enmities among burghers, as well as other lay non-noble inhabitants of early modern Ljubljana. Underpinned by community mediation in disputes, the burgomaster, town judge and councillors principally acted as mediators and arbiters, attempting to lead conflicting parties to settlement before enmity was exacerbated into violence – in particularly bitter cases by forcing them to settle ex officio under threat of sanctions (heavy fines, prison sentences) or even ‘harsher’, i.e. corporal punishment. The council and court also retained traditional expressions of renewed friendship and neighbourliness, (mutual) public apologies and handshakes to demonstrate reconciliation between the parties. Consequently, the autonomous town authorities were instrumental for the long perseverance of traditional practices of dispute settlement in Ljubljana, which is comparable to findings elsewhere in Europe.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the postdoctoral research project Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law (Z6-3223), funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) in 2021-23.
In early October 1440, a quarrel broke out between Sigmund von Weißpriach, Duke Albrecht VI of the Habsburgs’ castellan of Muta (Hohenmauten) in Styria, and the Benedictine Saint Paul’s Abbey in Lavanttal, Carinthia. It originated in an alleged breach of Muta’s jurisdiction by Stephan Prüschenk, Abbot Johannes I’s castellan of Marenberg in Styria. Weißpriach demanded appropriate satisfaction for what he regarded as an injury to himself and his lord, threatening that he would attain justice by himself, i.e. with violence, if his demand went unanswered. This was in accordance with the custom of vengeance or feud (Fehde), by then already long codified in Imperial and provincial legislation. However, as the abbot remained adamant that there was no breach of jurisdiction and offered to settle the matter through counsel or royal mediation, Sigmund issued a declaration of enmity (Absage) to Johannes and “all his people” in order to keep his honour. Little is known about the course of this feud in the Styrian-Carinthian border region, save that Weißpriach at least once lay siege to Marenberg castle and the abbey, as well as pillaged its estates and subjects. By the time of a brief truce in January 1442, Prüschenk and the abbot had fallen out, and both Stephan and Sigmund seem to have lost or left their positions as castellans of Marenberg and Muta. Weißpriach’s feud with the abbey has thus far been regarded as an integral part of the wider Cilli-Habsburg conflict and Sigmund as a man of the Counts. Yet the start of hostilities in the fall of 1440, almost two months after a year-long truce was made between the Counts of Cilli and the King of the Romans, shows that Weißpriach’s enmity became part of the larger one only after the prolonged truce expired in late spring of 1442 and an alliance had been made between the Counts and King Frederick IV’s brother, Duke Albrecht. Likewise, no direct links between Sigmund and the Counts are attested in pertinent sources, which, along with his later career, seems to demonstrate that he was (foremost) the Duke’s man.
Apart from the chronology of the feud and alliances therein, this paper also addresses the language of enmity and the role of emotions in feuds, applying a close reading and the methodology of the history of emotions to analyse the correspondence leading up to the nobleman’s Absage to the abbey. This approach shows that Sigmund chiefly used two words to express the injustice, thus demanding appropriate satisfaction: mütwille and vnpilleich, ostensibly as cognates of the Latin legal term iniuria. While the quite formal correspondence of the analysed sources is devoid of emotion-talk, understanding the rituals and language of vengeance nonetheless allows us to ascertain the main underlying emotion of Weißpriach’s response: anger or wrath (ira). Even when they are balanced and formalised as ira iusta or even omitted from the sources, as in the investigated case, emotions that express anger are always to be expected as an integral element in the communication of injustice, and thus also of feud.
ERRATA: podnapis k bakrorezu na str. 278: nastal je poltretje stoletje po fajdi, ne že poldrugo.
Due to their role in the establishment of standard Slovene, the Reformation in the Slovene lands and its most prominent actors (Primož Trubar, Jurij Dalmatin, Adam Bohorič, Sebastijan Krelj) both were and remain among the key elements of Slovene nation- and state-building. In their reception among an almost exclusively Catholic population, history textbooks played an important role, beginning in the nineteenth century, as tools of official knowledge that helped incorporate each new generation into the national or state community according to dominant interpretations of the past. This paper analyses the treatment of Slovene Protestant reformers and the Reformation in Slovene history textbooks prior to the Second World War, especially after 1881, in one of the key periods of the establishment of the Slovene nation and statehood. The analysis shows that the main goal of teaching history in Austrian-era primary and secondary schools was to strengthen the loyalty towards the monarchy and dynasty, hence themes from Slovene national(ised) history were very rare in textbooks. Yet, already since the early 1800s Slovene Protestant literature had been one of those themes, which reflected its early importance in Slovene cultural memory. Apart from stressing the importance of Protestant writers for the standardisation of the Slovene language and concurrent mentions of their ‘false religion’, until the First World War textbooks assessed the Reformation in the Slovene lands rather neutrally. This approach continued in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918–29). Only after 1929 was more space allocated to the Reformation in Slovene history textbooks, including for the first time the Reformation in Prekmurje, the region with by far the largest Slovene Protestant community, both then and now. It was also in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–41) that history textbooks for the first time more critically assessed Slovene Protestant reformers and the local Reformation, either as a very positive event, e.g. for Yugoslav national unity, or more negatively, e.g. as a corruptive foreign idea, although all agreed on the importance of Protestant literature in the establishment of standard Slovene. Thus, the old polemic on the Reformation between Slovene liberals and conservatives, which started in the late 1800s, also continued in school textbooks until the Second World War.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the research project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State Building (ARRS, J6-9354) funded (2018-21) by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
ERRATA: manjka zahvala pri prvi opombi: "Za komentar besedila se zahvaljujem Gregorju Antoličiču, Marku Kerševanu in Urški Lampe ter anonimnim recenzentom."
For well over a century now, the enigmatic kosezi (in Slovene), or Edlinge (in German), continue to excite the imagination and create agitation in Slovene and Austrian national histories and cultural memories. While Austrian historiography largely advocates for a Germanic origin of this free medieval social stratum, in the Slovene they are established as an integral part of Carantanian society, said to have persevered until the sixteenth and, to a degree, even the nineteenth century. Hence, in the Slovene national imagination, the kosezi provide an important continuity with the ‘first Slovene state’, as Carantania is erroneously regarded in the cultural memory. This paper focuses on the (re)construction and reception of the word kosez (singular) and the social stratum it allegedly designated in Slovene science and cultural memory, while also surveying Austrian interpretations. The analysis shows that the kosezi entered the Slovene national imagination especially due to their key role in the enthronement of the dukes of Carinthia. The role of free Slovene peasants in the medieval enthronement ritual was discovered only two decades before the (re)construction of the word kosez in 1912/13 from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century toponyms and surnames, as the supposed old Slovene or Carantanian original for the German word Edlinger (singular), attested in earlier sources. The word kosez was unknown in folk memory and its (re)construction was too late to be included in nineteenth-century nation-building, which was the most prolific time for the construction of national myths. Thus, it was only in the interwar period that Slovene historiography and philology made the kosezi, through their role in the enthronement ritual supposedly originating in Carantania, an integral part of one of the key elements of Slovene nation and state-building. After World War Two, the kosezi were further established in Slovene cultural memory, particularly through the reception of popular-scientific works and school textbooks, predicated mainly on the interpretations of the leading post-war Slovene medievalist Bogo Grafenauer.
http://zdjp.si/en/
This paper is the result of research carried out in the research project Cultural Memory of Slovene Nation and State Building (ARRS, J6-9354) funded (2018-21) by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).
http://zdjp.si/en/
Errata:
P. 681: Andreas Trost, not Tros.
The Totting family from the Lower Styrian town of Ptuj and nearby Majšperk castle is not unknown to Slovene and Austrian historiography, yet knowledge of the family has until now been very fragmentary. Only known were the head of the family, Benedict Totting, a Protestant and wealthy Ptuj burgher, who in the late sixteenth century rose to lower nobility and acquired the Lordship of Majšperk, and his widow Anna Strusniger, who in the early seventeenth century ran a clandestine Protestant school for girls. Recent research on Medieval and early modern Ptuj burghers by Dejan Zadravec has expanded on this, introducing to us Benedict's position as Ptuj town judge, his father Hans and first wife Ursula Fintz, as well as some of Benedict's purchases and leases of various smaller estates: vineyards, fishing ponds, etc. Children were only speculated to have been born in either marriage. New research by the author of this paper not only fills many gaps of the Totting family history, which is generally only of interest to local historians, but also sheds more light on the survival strategies of early modern burgher families, both economic and social. While the Tottings' origins remain unknown, Benedict's social ascent may have started in 1556 at the latest, when the merchant was already married to the daughter of the burgher Blasius Fintz from the Upper Styrian market town of Eisenerz. The exact details of Benedict's early rise as a Ptuj burgher are obscure due to the lack of documents, yet when he emerges again in 1572, he does so as the town judge, i.e. holding the highest office of the autonomous town authorities in the Princely town. The social prestige required to be a part of and to rise within the burgher elite was generally predicated on one's ability to make profit. While Benedict had plenty of this, it was not enough; his family needed a stronger social safety net in order to make it through life's incertitude; he needed staunch allies. Ensuring the social (and physical) survival of any premodern family was best secured by diversifying income and by multiplying alliances, especially by wedlock. Benedict made sure that his and Ursula's daughters were married to rich and influential men: Anna in 1575 to the Ptuj burgher and merchant Hieronymus Zunggo, who later became town judge, grew very rich by leasing one of the largest European copper mines near the Croatian town of Samobor for two decades and consequently managed to rise to lower nobility; Margaretha in 1585 to the lawyer Magister Ulrich Holzer from a (presumably) Graz burgher family and (later) an official of the Styrian court for nobility or Landschrannengericht; and Katharina in 1588 to the affluent and influential Carinthian Toman Zipnikh, the chief toll collector in Croatia and Slavonia and well connected to the Styrian Land Estates. Aside from social and economic, Benedict's family alliances were also inter-confessional: Zunggo was a Catholic and Holzer a Protestant as was his father-in-law, at least by the time of Katharina's wedding. Following Ursula's death, Benedict wed Anna Strusniger, most likely from the Carinthian town of Wolfsberg and with relatives in the Carniolan capital Ljubljana and the town Novo mesto. If not before, Benedict certainly accepted the "Pure Gospel" from Anna. She bore him the sons Andreas and Adam, on whom Benedict began to focus his inheritance strategies; the lease of the valuable Lordship of (Upper) Majšperk and the request for a title of nobility to the Hungarian King Rudolph II (also Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia), which he was granted in 1590 (but remained a burgher in the Empire), are to be regarded within this context. However, turning the focus to his sons, especially as he may have already had a grandson by Hieronymus and Anna Zunggo, appears to have led to intrafamilial conflict, which erupted following Anna Totting's death. Andreas and Adam were still minors when their father died on 24 June 1591. It seems that thereafter the Catholic Zunggo became the head of the family and, following his own rise to Hungarian lower nobility in 1599 (he remained a burgher in the Empire), helped Anna Totting secure Majšperk as a fief. Furthermore, it was certainly the inter-confessional familial as well as neighbourly solidarity that enabled Anna to run a not-so-secret Protestant school in Ptuj, even under the pressure and scrutiny of the Princely Counter-Reformation in the early seventeenth century. However, both Andreas, once a student at the University of Tübingen, and Adam died without heirs, although Adam, born in 1589, managed to get married before his death in 1614. Some rift must have erupted within the extended family following Hieronymus' death, sometime between 1612 and 1617, since in her will Anna left everything to her sister Maria Gritscher from Novo mesto and niece Susanna Grübner, leaving nothing to Benedict's grandsons, mostly Zunggos, when she died in 1617. Due to her sister's disinterest in Majšperk, in 1624 the castle and estate were sold to an old ally of the Tottings, Maximillian von Plösch, an erstwhile Ptuj burgher.
http://shs.zgodovinsko-drustvo-kovacic.si/
Errata:
P. 659, N. 33 & P. 691: Andrej Hozjan in Tone Ravnikar, "Deželni knez notranje Avstrije Karel II. Habsburžan na Ptuju poleti 1578", Acta Histriae 26, št. 1 (2018), str. 86–87.
P. 667: Ti imaſh tvojga blishniga lubiti, kakòr ſam ſebe (Mr 12,31).
P. 677, N. 127: /.../ vnd vest herr Benedic Thoting ƨg welic /.../ ewigen gedachtnvs ƨg.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Conflict resolution among nobility in historically Slovene lands, including Carniola, Styria, and Istria, remained much the same in the seventeenth century as it had during the previous centuries. Notwithstanding the increased monopolisation of law and violence by the early modern State, the strengthened implementation of Roman law and the publishing of new criminal codes, social and legal practice was, until the end of the Ancien Régime, permeated by the ancient and universal social norm or customary system of conflict resolution: vengeance. Following the social principle of exchange, vengeance demanded satisfaction (countergift) for a suffered injustice (gift). If satisfaction was not acquired peacefully, according to the culture of honour injury could be requited by violent retaliation. Violence was envisioned as the sanction for those refusing peaceful conflict resolution. In the Medieval, and even in the early modern, period, it was deemed equally inappropriate to respond to injustice with either violence or lawsuit without previously exhausting all means of peaceful settlement. In customary conflict resolution, the stage that allowed for the use of limited retaliatory violence was enmity or, originating from an Old Germanic word for it, feud. Enmity had to be declared publicly and appropriately (i.e. in time), so that the threat of violence could already force the offending party to give satisfaction. Satisfaction settled the conflict by allowing truce and lasting peace to be made. As was the objective of the custom of vengeance, lasting peace (re-)established concord and peace among parties to the conflict, and restored social equilibrium in the community. Appropriate retaliation meant that violence in vengeance was, as a rule (and ideally), limited. Medieval limitations of violence in enmity, which for the most part persevered into the early modern period, were dictated by the culture of honour, the Church, and customary law, and this created temporal, spatial, and personal immunities. Hostilities were to be suspended on Sundays and the most important Church holidays, and the custom was always adverse to violent retaliation in sacred spaces (e.g. churches) and areas of certain sacral value, such as homes, settlements, fora, and residences of authority. Moreover, communal production facilities and agricultural means of production were not to be damaged. Vengeance upon women, children, the elderly, the ordained, and other segments of society generally prohibited from carrying arms, was also highly inappropriate and dishonourable. Except in blood feud (for homicide, grave insults or severe wounds) the killing of an enemy was also generally inappropriate. Violence upon an enemy's property, mostly by raiding or robbery and arson, was always appropriate. Lawsuits were also an instrument of enmity, especially in the early modern period, even though the judicial path was regarded as less honourable. While customary limitations of enmity were already partially codified in the Early Middle Ages, the codification of the custom of vengeance into law was concluded in the High Middle Ages, especially its key rituals of truce and peace. In the Holy Roman Empire the codification included the declaration of enmity as a distinctive feature of the Imperial and Provincial peace legislation, which at the same time codified limitations of enmity in more detail than the legislation in the rest of Europe. Due to these features, historiography often interpreted the German word for enmity or feud, Fehde, as a distinctive "German" custom of vengeance. A few conflicts among nobility in seventeenth-century Slovene lands also attest to the survival of the custom of vengeance and role of enmity therein. The conflicts of the Lordship of Radovljica with those of Škofja Loka and Bled in (Upper) Carniola, as well as the conflicts of the Styrian Lordships of Slivnica and Vurberk with those of Fram and Ravno polje respectively, attest to the custom's adaptation to social, political, and legal changes in the early modern period. Despite the implementation of criminal codes based on Roman law, the cases presented in this article are proof of the custom's survival into early modernity in Slovene lands. While public declarations of enmity disappeared, the use of limited violence for the defence of one's rights or the acquisition of new ones had, to a degree, remained legitimate. Likewise, so too did blood feud, as is attested by the conflicts between the Moscons and Qualandros in Ptuj, and of the del Taccos with the del Bellos and the marquis Gravisis in Koper/Capodistria. The reactions of the Habsburg princely and the Venetian highest legal authorities show that enmity had remained part of social practice, while only regarded as legal when proven to be a case of self-defence. Although authorities in the seventeenth century still strived for conflict resolution based on the custom of vengeance and the culture of honour on the local level, the State's new attitude towards conflict resolution was already visible on the horizon. As indicated in the case from Koper/Capodistria, by the end of the early modern period the State had established itself as the only avenger or punisher of injustice.
http://shs.zgodovinsko-drustvo-kovacic.si/
Errata:
- Roman law instead of Roman canon law on pp. 119-120
http://zdjp.si/en/
Errata:
- statutory law instead of common law on pp. 153, 155–156, 158, 162, 167.
http://zdjp.si/en/
Predicated on recent research on confessional coexistence in Reformation and Post-Reformation Europe, this article argues that familial, neighbourly, class, and economic relations also enabled peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Lower-Styrian Podravje region. The article focuses on the princely towns of Maribor and Ptuj, establishing that despite the confessional rift and state persecution, the burghers in both towns in general maintained peaceful relations with their ‘heretic’ neighbours well into the first half of the seventeenth century. During much of the second half of the sixteenth century, when its burgher elite was predominately Protestant, the Maribor parish church seems to have been a simultaneum. In neighbouring Ptuj, the burghers were more equally divided between the confessions, a fact that seems to have been echoed in the town council, with seats allocated among Catholics and Protestants according to 'parity'. By the end of the sixteenth century, confessional coexistence in both towns came under threat from the princely Counter-Reformation, although it was only under the greatest pressure of the state’s confessionalisation efforts that the local authorities joined in the persecution and proselytisation of their Protestant neighbours. However, as the Archduke was primarily engaged in the political subordination of the Inner-Austrian Protestant opposition, his recatholicisation policies soon lost momentum, especially at the local level. Struggling to maintain their autonomy and authority, which were under threat from princely policies, the autonomous town authorities sought to keep their 'sectarian' neighbours 'secret' to prevent further interventions. The policy in Maribor and Ptuj also stemmed from the tolerance, or at least indifference, of most Catholics towards their Protestant neighbours, predicated on the various social relations bridging the confessional gulf between the burghers, especially their elite. Thus, the local clergy was largely unable to confront the town councils in religious matters, which impeded the fruition of counter-reformatory ordinances even before the Archduke’s and Holy Roman Emperor’s attention shifted to the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War. Hence, even the expulsion of publicly declared Protestants could take years. The survival of seventeenth-century Protestant communities in Maribor and Ptuj was further facilitated by religious services and schools in neighbouring Hungary as well as clandestine ones organised by the local Protestant nobility, which were an open secret in both towns. While all of the above slowed the disappearance of Protestants from Maribor and Ptuj at least until the early 1630s, it could not prevent it in the long run. There are only two indirect mentions of Protestants in Ptuj after the princely Counter-Reformation gained impetus following the Peace of Westphalia.
Full edited monograph in open access at: https://omp.zrc-sazu.si/zalozba/catalog/book/2057
The development of the Protestant religious community in Maribor largely followed the development of Reformation in Styria. The new ideas were first attested in the
princely visitation protocol of 1528. A part of Maribor burghers and the local clergy showed at least an interest in them. A decade later, Protestants, as it seems,
already had the majority in town authorities, as the town judge of Maribor – together with the Land Estates – petitioned the prince for freedom of religion. More than the Land Estates' declaration of Styria for a Land of the Augsburg Confession, it was the new vicar Georg Siechel who enabled the rise of the Maribor Protestants and strenghtened the community from the mid-16th century . During his thirty-year period as vicar, the Maribor Protestants were thoroughly integrated into the town Catholic parish; therefore, they had no interest to establish their own church organization. The supremacy of the Protestants in town authorities reflected the development at the Land level. In the run-up to the Land Estates in Graz in 1572, the town authorities declared Maribor a town of the Augsburg Confession. Six years later, at the General Estates in Bruck an der Mur, the Maribor town judge signed the “Brucker-Libell” as the second representative from among Styrian towns. The following princely (and church) countermeasures failed to bring any real changes in Maribor. These started to occur only following the vicar’s death and the changes at the Land level in the late 1580s.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/violence-and-its-control-in-early-modern-europe-tickets-646908158717
Zoom links:
4 July: https://york-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95639127688
5 July: https://york-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/96596007168
No registration is required.
This conference is part of the post-doctoral research project Z6-3223 (B) 'Plebeian Dispute Settlement in Baroque Inner Austria: Between Feud and Criminal Law', funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS), and the research programme P6-0435 (A) 'Practices of Conflict Resolution Between Customary and Statutory Law in the Area of Today’s Slovenia and Its Neighbouring Lands', co-funded by ARIS.