Review of Kaar, Wirtschaft, Krieg und Seelenheil
Aaron Vanides2021, Mediävistik
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Abstract
In this thought-provoking study, Alexandra Kaar assembles an impressive dossier of diplomatic and other archival sources mentioning economic activity between Hussites and non-Hussites (referred to throughout as Catholics) to understand better the political and cultural dynamics of trade restrictions in the later Middle Ages. Not a work of economic history in a traditional sense, her story spans some sixteen years, beginning in 1420 with Pope Martin V's call to crusade against the Bohemian dissidents and ending around 1436, when the compacts were reached in the Moravian city of Jihlava. Kaar's main argument is that the embargo practices of the papacy and the empire against the Hussites took many different forms. These corresponded in turn to a vast array of strategic ends, not all of which necessarily had anything to do with moveable goods. To be sure, wares of all types feature heavily in the sources. But those wares, the author argues, are better understood as part of a larger cultural and political discourse that drew on the language of economics and trade. To what degree and in what form could one interact with those identified as Hussites, and who was responsible for articulating and regulating those strictures? Undergirding the story of trade relations with the Hussites is a great deal of complicated legal history. Kaar shows how certain aspects of civil law in late antiquity were transformed in the canon law of the high Middle Ages, when popes and legal commentators began asking what the consequences of keeping the company of the heterodox should be. Here, Kaar draws on Stefan Stantchev's important work on the development of the papal embargo as a novel legal discourse extending beyond consumable goods to include, and even primarily be concerned with, pastoral care and salvation. This is followed by a substantial, nearly one-hundred-page overview of the history of research on the Hussite wars and the political economy of Bohemia in the fifteenth century, followed by a discussion of how the transmission of textual sources in the archives around Bohemia can, when used with great care, help us see regional conflicts and stories as part of a broader cultural phenomenon. The core of this study, however, consists of three thematic blocks. In the first, Kaar focuses on trade restrictions and the regulation of commerce as a strategy of warfare in and around the Kingdom of Bohemia. Specific 'things' seem to have been targeted by non-Hussites as products of concern. Salt, wine, and other consumable goods can be found throughout the diplomatic correspondence from the registers of King Sigismund, for example, where the items are often mentioned in connection with the regulation of transportation routes-that is, with street traffic. But there were also items of relative luxury, like textiles that seem to have caught the attention of non-Hussites, as did ironware, horses, and other strategic military objects. The extent to which these regulations were actually regulated is unclear, but the lack of judicial records concerning these blockades suggests that, as in the logic of the papal embargo, the mechanism of punishment would most likely play out in the economy of the soul. Kaar dedicates a second thematic strand to symbolic communication, a conceptual apparatus that has reached the status of canon among German-speaking scholars of the premodern. Various figures involved in the Hussite conflict not only invoked trade res
