Introduction: Medieval Finance in Central European Historiography

Abstract

The economic history in the first two decades after World War II belonged, without exaggeration, to the most dynamically developing branch of historiography, which is in stark contrast to the situation at the end of the 20th century. In particular two factors had influence on it: threat of the 1930s economic crisis, which forced scholars to the historical reflection of capitalism and the nature of its crises, and a massive penetration of Marxism into historiography in general. The works of Marxist historians produced the greatest responses and polemics. The question of the so-called first crisis of feudalism in the 14th and 15th centuries was one of the key topics. The point was to distinguish economic crises from depressions and to differentiate the crises that define feudalism from those that are typical for capitalism. In the context of these questions, the late-medieval crisis was perceived as more or less transitional, caused either by the limits of technical development in the feudal economy and by restricted investment possibilities (Rodney Hilton), by population growth (Michael Postan), or population decline (Wilhelm Abel), or by expansion of the money form of feudal rent (František Graus). A new impulse to this debate was introduced by Robert Brenner who adopted a critical attitude both to the demographic transition theory and the ‘commercialization model’ of capitalism’s origins.