To many foreigners, fifteenth-century Germany seemed a land of bandits and robber barons. The conventional historical wisdom is that this only changed when the Holy Roman Empire, and its component princely territories, imposed order after banning all feuds in the eternal public peace of 1495. Hillay Zmora departs considerably from this standard emphasis on centralized authority, modern judicial systems, and written law, and instead argues for a tight correlation between princely state building and noble feuding. Princes encouraged nobles to feud with their rivals, while nobles holding posts in the territorial administrations frequently launched feuds of their own. Zmora has already developed these arguments in his earlier book, State and Nobility in Early Modern Germany: The Knightly Feud in Franconia 1440–1567 (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Inevitably, there is some overlap with the new work that draws substantially on the same data, though now much augmented and extended. The additional data allows Zmora to plot the incidence of feuding more clearly, identifying 278 feuds in Franconia between 1440 and 1570. After a sharp rise, feuding peaked in 1460–79, before a lesser peak in 1490–1509 followed by a dramatic decline in the 1520s to dissipate by 1570.

This data is exploited more systematically to explain why nobles feuded. The old cliché of impoverished minor nobles or wayward young bucks is swiftly demolished. The principal instigators were middle-aged family men from the upper stratum of untitled nobility, generally holding the best land and jurisdictions in fee from a neighboring prince. The growth in the size of this elite across the fifteenth century outstripped the increase in choice fiefs and administrative posts. Given that elite nobles also had larger families, competition for wealth and influence clearly increased; however, this alone cannot explain why many feuds were launched against relations, allies, or princely employers. Zmora's answer is his concept of “inimical intimacy” and his argument that the impetus for feuding and the cause of its decline both lie in the culture of cooperation among nobles and between them and princes. Nobles and princes were bound within multiple webs of kinship, vassalage, service, patronage, and credit. Feuds resulted when these ties were ruptured, particularly where default or some other failure by one party endangered the standing of the other among his peers. For example, a prince who failed to repay a loan not only harmed his creditor's finances, but made it harder for him to repay his own debts. In a highly competitive social environment, such slights had to be addressed. Feuds offered a legally recognized means not just to defend status, but also to signal to others that it would be defended in the future. Few questioned the legality of feuding, even after 1495. What mattered were the particulars of each case. Thus, for contemporaries (but not many later historians), these were not “private wars,” but accepted means of obtaining redress when negotiation failed. Feuds with princes or their officials fitted this scheme as long as contemporaries did not recognize princely institutions and staff as “public.” Fines or punishments imposed by district officials were still generally perceived as arbitrary exactions that infringed customary rights, rather than a rational, orderly application of state policy. For Zmora, the decline of feuding lies not in a gradual acceptance of the state, but in the nobles' recognition of the corrosive impact of repeated feuds on their own networks. Beginning in the 1470s, various noble leagues forswore feuding among their members and tried to divert competition into less dangerous outlets, notably tournaments. Self-regulation increased as nobles responded to the Empire's greater cohesion around 1495 and to the growing capacity of princely governments. Nobles were obliged to extend and consolidate their cooperation within more stable frameworks, culminating in the establishment of themselves as a distinct estate of imperial knights (Reichsritterschaft) by 1532. This enabled them to loosen dependency on local princes through establishing direct ties to the emperor who protected their autonomy in return for new taxes paid by their tenants.

These arguments are expressed crisply and are illustrated by some well-chosen, concise examples. Zmora acknowledges that they may fall short of an all-encompassing explanation for both the motivation for feuding and its eventual decline. Feuding's ambivalent relationship to state building emerges much more clearly in this discussion than in the earlier book. Though acknowledged by Zmora, the impact of imperial institutions and the changes in the decade or so after 1495 could be emphasized further. Collective action by princes, cities, and nobles, notably through the Swabian League, was far more extensive and effective than anything undertaken before. This relates to the characterization of violence. Zmora rightly notes that feuds rarely involved fatalities and were mostly restricted to arson, seizure of movable property, and kidnapping; however, it seems wrong to distinguish them from wars purely on the basis of scale (pp. 47–9). The moral and legal basis was essentially the same for both while the Empire never developed mechanisms or arguments for offensive wars and continued to mount its military actions within the framework of the public peace for the next three centuries. Moreover, changes in military technology and organization around 1500 increased the destructive potential of feuds, as those of Franz von Sickingen and other exceptional but nonetheless significant cases demonstrated. Concerted action through the Swabian League against such offenders sent clear signals by 1523, accelerating the disinclination to feud.

Zmora acknowledges the impact of Christine Reichle's work on Bavarian peasant feuds, but his focus remains firmly on the nobles. He convincingly dismisses arguments by those who have sought to cast nobles as mafia-style racketeers whose victims were primarily helpless peasants. Yet, it would have been good to know how far other social groups were involved in feuding in Franconia.