A regional history touching upon much wider significance in Central European economic and political history, Klaus Lohmann’s new book concentrates on the territories of Austria and Styria in the titular period. With assistance from Regensburg merchants, Styrian Margrave Ottokar III’s founding of a fair in the mid-twelfth century in Enns serves as the point of departure for a sweeping tour of rulers’ roles in developing trade networks and legal frameworks to regulate them. In documentary terms, the point of departure is an 1,191 charter establishing market privileges in Enns, around which a strong case is made throughout connecting legal documents, economic actors (e.g., merchants and ministeriales), and governmental actors as forces of power consolidation and transfer.

Organizationally, the book includes a foreword, 14 chapters, summarizing conclusions, and back matter. A secondary, thorough table of contents found after the primary list divides chapters into fine granularity, but the chapters themselves do not contain subtitles or clear divisions indicating this breakdown from this table while reading; instead, only a few of the subheadings appear. In the back matter, the list of abbreviations has been merged into the bibliography in alphabetical order, rendering a confusing organizational choice at least functional, but the index of people, places, and things is comprehensive and beneficial. While acknowledging that the scholarship is of high quality on the whole, the relatively dense prose and frequent excursuses would be more easily navigable with full subchapter headings (e.g., the second chapter, pp. 25–52, contains 15 subsections on the secondary table of contents on everything from topography to bureaucracy to expenditures and income of the market at Enns). Earlier chapters explicate a chronological narrative history of the Austrian margraviate’s economic holdings and developments, while later chapters move between periods topically.

In summary, Lohrmann investigates the consolidation of princely authority in Styria between 1150 and 1250, specifically tracking the transition of power from the Traungau counts to the Babenberg dukes, utilizing the market privilege for Enns on the Danube as the chief analytical object to illustrate how rulers employed targeted legal instruments to channel trade and secure stable streams of lordly income. A characteristic example of the Landesgeschichte genre, the book surveys market rights, minting and coin circulation, toll regimes, seigneurial landholding, the assertion of dominion over forests, and trade between other polities and the farther reaches of the empire. The analysis integrates the agency of ministeriales and merchant groups, demonstrating how legal prerogatives were translated into concrete governance through specific social actors and arguing that the definition and surveillance of lawful coinage and the calibration of tolls were deliberate policies used to turn mobility and exchange into predictable revenue for the strengthening of territorial lordship.

An illustrative example of the breadth and depth of information leveraged in service of Lohrmann’s arguments, chapter 13 “Landesherrschaft, Markt und Münze,” covers the relationship between tariffs and coinage, the increasing importance of the Pfennig, the foundation of mints prior the establishment of the market, revenues from minting, the wealth of the Babenberg dynasty, the ransom money from Richard the Lionheart’s captivity in Vienna, dowry incomes from Hungary and Constantinople, political and financial sovereignty, the governmental purchasing of silver, the mint of Krems, the stronghold inventory of the Falkenstein ministerial family, the Krems master of the mint Eberger (late twelfth century) and his successors, the mint at Enns, the influence of the Passau mint on it, the Enns master of the mint Riwin, the purchase of silver at that location, the mints of Neunkirchen and Fischau south of Vienna in the Industrieviertel, dynastic and family politics in minting (e.g., the Traungauer versus Vornbacher), the first documentation of the mint in Neunkirchen, the role of Vornbacher abbots as masters of the mint, the characteristics of Vornbacher lordship in the county of Pitten, notes on the design of the Neunkirchen Pfennig (which resembles those minted in Regensburg), the relationship of the Styrian margravine regent Sofia von Bayern to Duke Ekbert II von Formbach-Pitten, margraviate bureaucrats in Neunkirchen, the relocation of the mint to Fischau (ca. 14 km to the northeast), the beginnings of the Viennese mint, the role of the Jewish mintmaster Schlom von Regensburg in Vienna with regard to silver coinage, subsequent controllers of the mint, and finally summarizing notes on the place of Lower Austrian coinage and political power vis-à-vis neighboring polities, competing coinage, and shifting, contingent acceptance of them. This chapter, pp. 227–56, consults charters, privileges, and other documentary evidence alongside images of coins minted at the various centers that reveal the iconographic relationship between foundational and secondary mint models. Given the breadth of coverage, however, more up-to-date scholarship on medieval economic historiography and metallurgy and minting would be beneficial.

Despite this critique of the organization of the chapters and at times rather unbridled expansion of coverage, Lohrmann has succeeded in writing a cogent, carefully researched, and detailed Landesgeschichte that maintains a central focus on the regional territory in its wider context, rendering the book useful to historians of medieval Europe more widely, as well as those interested in economic history, monetization, the consolidation of political power, and trade networks. Böhlau’s commitment to publishing monographs on medieval Austrian history has brought another worthy project to fruition, particularly in conjunction with previous books by this author (e.g., Lohrmann, Die Babenberger und ihre Nachbarn, 2020).