One of the dominant themes in early modern history has been the tripartite domestic struggle for resources between the sovereign, the invariably downtrodden peasants, and those landholding elites that were caught in between. This was especially the case within the central European dominions of the Habsburgs, who faced fiscal-military challenges that informed their transformation from a disparate collection of feudal entities into a truly great power.

Inspired by Charles Tilly’s model of “state formation” and John Brewer’s paradigm of eighteenth-century Great Britain as the most efficient fiscal-military state, Stephan Sander-Faes devotes his attention to the Bohemian lands during the six-decade conjuncture when the Habsburg monarchy faced existential threats from the Ottoman Turks and the France of Louis XIV. Whereas many scholars have tread this path and become particularly interested in intermediary administrative bodies managed by the feudal estates, the author points to a missing link in the power chain between R.J.W. Evans’s ruling triarchy of crown, church, and nobility above and the tax-paying masses below: the patrimonial officials and village subalterns who actually interpreted their orders, interacted with individual tax payers even to the point of adjusting the size of their payments. To do this, Sander-Faes focuses his archival research on the extensive southern Bohemian patrimony of the Austrian Eggenbergs, who had acquired 390 square kilometers of largely contiguous farmland that the crown had reallocated after the Battle of White Mountain (1620). Located in the family seat of Krumlov castle, the archive constitutes a well-organized and largely intact terra incognita.

As elsewhere in the Habsburg Erblande, peasant exploitation mostly stemmed from two prerogatives: (1) typically three days per week in compulsory labor service (robot) performed on the feudal lord’s demesne land, and (2) crown taxes approved by compliant diets that were divided in turn between monthly extraordinary taxes (Contributio) intended for the military and a bevy of cameral taxes (Terminsteuer) levied irregularly and often paid by all subjects. The author’s metrics parallel those of other modern scholars. Following the Peace of Westphalia, tax receipts declined to a nadir in 1660 when the monarchy was at its greatest vulnerability before rising incrementally during fiscal-military crises brought by Turkish assaults in 1663–64 and 1682–83, and Louis XIV’s intervention in early 1690s, 1702–3 and 1705–6. By the end of the century, the Contributio had quadrupled and the ever-expanding number of cameral taxes rose from a fifth to half the size of the extraordinary levies. Among the latter was a wealth tax (1695), while the wealthiest aristocrats were compelled to provide forced loans directly to the crown. Despite peace treaties ending both the Turkish and French conflicts, the almost immediately ensuing contest over the Spanish succession hiked war taxes by an additional 15% by 1702.

It is at this point that Sander-Faes questions the accuracy of the amounts recorded and the precise means by which they were actually collected at the local level, reproaching contemporary scholars for their smug, top-down approach. Hence, his deep dive into the avalanche of paperwork generated among patrimonial officials as they frantically adjusted to the plethora of Terminsteuer and other levies generated after 1690. Among other things, he finds that the physical presence of the Eggenbergs helped bring order and procedural conformity to the process of separating peasants from their meager means. He points, for example, to the superior skills and character of the top patrimonial officials whose work successive Eggenbergs oversaw, as well as the growing numbers of subalterns who interacted with the peasants. Even then, he finds that there was very little procedural uniformity among officials as the monarchy, like its rivals, was still learning on the fly; each Landesherr improvised, as did everyone else in the process, including local agents whom he judges prone to fuzzy record-keeping and instances of outright forgery. Moreover, he laments that much of the “informal communication” between seigneurial agents, village officials, and illiterate taxpayers is irretrievable.

None of these administrative deficiencies deter Sander-Faes from identifying the War of the Spanish Succession as Bohemia’s greatest fiscal and political crisis—especially after the accession of the energetic Joseph I (1705–11), who boldly forced its elites to bear much heavier burdens, confiscating church silver, imposing assorted wealth taxes, and compelling a deeply reluctant diet to underwrite a 1.34 million florin subsidy. While noting Joseph’s unprecedented tyranny, he credits the diet for creating a fund leveraged by German bank loans that issued shares to subscribing aristocrats who were eventually repaid over time by money extracted from commoners—with interest.

The author deserves enormous credit for his new approach and research acumen. Readers will also be impressed by the granular examination of the means by which Bohemia’s elites exploited their subjects, as well as by his command of English, with complex sentences that betray his familiarity with academic German syntax.