Gottschee 1406–1627: Feudal Domain on the Frontier of Empire

Copyright © 2001 by Gottscheer Heritage and Genealogy Association.

ISBN:                  Softcover                          978-1-4990-5753-9

                  eBook                                978-1-4990-5752-2

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This book was first published in 2001 by Gottscheer Heritage and Genealogy Association.

Rev. date: 09/25/2014

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Part I The Domain of Gottschee: Historical Introduction

1 Owners and Leaseholders of the Domain of Gottschee

2 Legal and Economic Position of the Peasants

Part II Documents (1406–1627)

3 1406–1573 The Earliest Years

4 1574 Activities of the Royal Leaseholds Reform Commission

I. Petitions of the Leaseholder

II. Petitions of the Subjects

III. Decisions of the Commission

IV. Reports of the Commission

5 1574–1577 Resistance Against the 10th and 20th Pfennig Tax

6 1580–1592 Repair of the Castle in Gottschee

7 1580–1589 Count Franz’s Heirs

8 1592–1597 The Struggle Against Count Stefan II

9 1598–1607 Niklas, the Spendthrift Count

101613–1617 Revolt Against the New Impositions

11 1613–1614 The Zieglfest Commission

I. Reports of the Commission Petitions Submitted to it or Forwarded to the Governing Authorities

II. Decisions by the Commission (Zieglfest Decrees)

III. Pastoral Petitions

IV. Reaction to the Commission

V. The Reringer Investigation

VI. Reaudit of the Revenues of Gottschee

12 1614–1627 The Khisl Years

Afterword

A. Maps

B Monetary System in Carniola

C Rulers of Gottschee

D Sources Cited

About the Author, Translator, and Gottscheer Heritage and Genealogy Association

Gottschee, the Main Town in the Domain of Gottschee

Without a doubt, your Excellencies well know how the archenemy of all of Christendom, if he invades this Principality of Carniola, will do at no other place or spot, not even on the Croatian ridges, as much as he will do to us in the little frontier town of Gottschee.

–Subjects’ Petition of 28 January 1574

The statements made by the subjects correspond to the truth. It is well known that this domain of Gottschee is a dangerous, rough, and hardscrabble place, as demonstrated by the fact that in the summer of 1614, the precious grain crop was ruined practically throughout the domain … the subjects will barely be able to recoup their losses in three years … thus [with the new taxes], they are struck by two rods at once.

–Baron Hans Jakob Khisl, 1616

Foreword

Georg Widmer’s Urkundliche Beiträge zur Geschichte des Gottscheer Ländchens 1406–1627,1 gives us the original words of the Gottscheer farmer, his lords, and his imperial masters concerning life in the frontier feudal domain of Gottschee. Gottschee was founded at the end of the 13th century, carved out of the uninhabited mountain forests in what is today the south central part of Slovenia. It was colonized by the Counts of Ortenburg with settlers from Carinthia and Tyrol, and in the late 1300s by 300 more families from Franconia, in Bavaria, who were made available for colonization by the emperor. The latter were probably being banished for some act of rebellion. This would not be surprising. Acts of rebellion and repeated, feisty petitions for redress of grievances characterize the Gottscheer farmers throughout the period covered by this book.

Gottschee was a unique frontier domain. Its southern boundary was at the Kulpa River. That river served simultaneously as the frontier of the Duchy of Carniola, the Inner Austrian crown lands of the Habsburg monarchs, and the Holy Roman Empire itself.

As Archdukes of Austria, the Habsburgs acquired the duchies Carinthia (Kärnten), Styria (Steiermark), and Carniola (Krain) in the 12th and 13th centuries. Gottschee was a domain in the Duchy of Carniola, the southernmost of these lands.

Carniola during this period was governed by a Viztum, or viceroy, and a Landeshauptmann, or governor-general. There was also a Landesverweser, or provincial administrator. The Carniolan government sat at Laibach, now Ljubljana. Because these three duchies were crown lands, tax collection for the Inner Austrian duchies was centralized in a Kammer, known during this period as the Treasury of Lower Austria. It sat at Graz, the ducal capital of Styria, and was subordinate to the imperial treasury in Vienna.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, continuous war was fought against an aggressive Ottoman Empire. Gottschee alone was invaded 12 times. The great nobles of Austria negotiated inheritance agreements amongst themselves in case they died without heirs. Gottschee’s original owners, the Counts of Ortenburg, had such an agreement with the Counts of Cilli. When the last Ortenburg died in the year 1420, the Counts of Cilli inherited the Domain of Gottschee as their personal property. Likewise, in 1457, when the last Count of Cilli fell in battle against the Turks at Belgrade, the extensive Cilli estates in Carnolia fell by agreement to the Habsburg archdukes. The archduke of Austria was, therefore, the largest landowner in the Duchy of Carniola, of which he was also the ruling duke. One of his personally owned domains was Gottschee.

The viceroy of Carniola looked after the Habsburgs’ personal land possessions, their incomes, and relations with the various lords who ruled the domains by way of leasehold from the Habsburg owner, as Widmer well explains. The Landeshauptmann and the Landesverweser, on the other hand, provided general government, which included military defense. The latter was an urgent requirement in the continuing struggle between the Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires. Later, there was also a Landstände, or estates-general, a crown lands’ diet of sorts consisting of the landed nobility, the higher clergy, and government officials. It met on the archduke’s call and at whatever place the archduke directed. Still later, a Landtag, a more formal parliament of notables, met in a more organized fashion, mostly at Graz.

As Widmer explains in chapters 1 and 2, the Habsburgs eventually leased out the Domain of Gottschee to lesser nobles in exchange for a loan of money, which the leaseholders recouped from the annual revenues of the fief. Much in this book deals with relations between the subjects and the lord leaseholders, and between the leaseholder and the Habsburg rulers regarding revenues and leasehold fees, and who got how much of what was able to be wrung from the subjects.

Faced with foreign counts after 1457, the Gottscheer subjects confronted their local lords whenever they tried to impose new and different ideas regarding taxation and subjugation. For the Gottscheer farmer, the law was the Waldordnung (Forest Laws and Privileges) of 1406 and the Urbar (Land Register) of 1498 that codified their taxes, service duties, and privileges. Each count in Gottschee swore upon taking up the leasehold that he would not change the laws or privileges of the subjects, nor add to their burdens. When the leaseholder nonetheless tried to increase the burdens on the Gottscheer subjects, the subjects went over his head and directly petitioned the Habsburg landowner, even though the latter might at the time be the Holy Roman Emperor himself.

In the first two chapters, author Georg Widmer sets the stage wonderfully for understanding the political and economic situation in this unique feudal domain on the frontier of Austria. In part II, we read the actual words of the participants from original source documents. One can almost feel the anxiety of the subjects, the aggravation of the local lords, and the frustration, annoyance—as well as the professional governing skills—of the higher officials serving as viceroy, governor-general, and treasurer of Lower Austria as they seek to raise revenues and labor for the defense of the empire while also having to deal with the archduke’s domain of Gottschee and its persistent subjects with their ancient privileges held from time immemorial from which they refused to deviate.

This translation edition of Widmer’s book has been retitled Gottschee 1406–1627: Feudal Domain on the Frontier of Empire as more descriptive of its contents. The original book was organized only by a few section headings, which we modernized and converted into numbered chapters. Finally, Widmer continued his research into original documents while the book was being typeset. He found over 25 additional significant documents that he included in an addendum to the book. We have taken the liberty of integrating the added documents into their proper sequence in the main part of the book. These documents are noted with guillemets: «and». Otherwise, the book is as Widmer wrote it, and except for the documents inserted from the addendum, all documents here are in the order in which Widmer presented them. Some footnotes in the original work have been deleted in this edition. These notes dealt mainly with translation questions; that is, where Widmer gives a modern German word for an archaic one in an original document, and these notes would have been useless in an English translation. Colonel Skender did, however, add occasional explanatory footnotes that are clearly marked as having been inserted by the editor.

Many had a hand in making possible this work in English. The book was brought to our attention by Gottscheer Heritage and Genealogy Association member Larry Schneider because it contained the names of some of his Schneider and Jonke ancestors. Mr. Schneider located the book in the Library of Congress and reproduced its entire 200 pages. We immediately recognized a gold mine not only for the student of Gottscheer history, but also for scholars of Austrian and Habsburg government at the local level on the empire’s strategic frontier.

We initially tried to translate the book using volunteers. We thank these volunteers for their intrepid effort, especially Martha Hutter who did more than most and whose English rendition was beautifully done. Likewise, members Edith and Helmut Herold of Kitchener, Canada; Maximilian Mische of Oakland, California; and Thomas Bencin of Ridgewood, New York, who translated or had translated sections of the work that Andrew Witter had only to minimally improve. Their work was invaluable and greatly helped Andrew Witter’s concluding work on the translation. We thank the author’s nephew, Arnold Rom, for his permissions; Richard Jaklitsch and Thomas Stafford for their invaluable assistance with the illustrations; and finally, Paul Jenner and the late Richard Stiene for their research on printing and publishing of this work. Richard’s enthusiasm, knowledge, and friendship will be missed.

Finally, we acknowledge Andrew Witter himself for stepping forward to execute this challenging translation with linguistic precision and literary style; Barbara Rossi, a professional copy editor who volunteered her skills; and board member Edward Skender, who served as supervising editor of the project. This project took over five years to complete. It might never have gotten done without the continued encouragement of the members of the Association, and especially the officers and board members, whose faith in the Association’s goals allowed this project to come to fruition.

It is also noteworthy that the original work was sponsored by the Society of Gottscheer Germans in Vienna, and that this book is now presented through the auspices of the Gottschee Heritage and Genealogy Association in North America. Both organizations’ membership were and are made up of the descendants of the very people whose names are contained in this book. Gottschee may have been a dangerous, rough, and hardscrabble place as Baron Khisl characterized it in 1616, but that may well be the reason we, the descendants, cherish Gottschee’s heritage and the character it gave to our worthy ancestors and hopefully to us and our descendants.

Elizabeth Nick

President

Preface

While linguistic studies of the Gottscheer dialect have yielded satisfactory results, the written history of the Gottschee district remains incomplete, for after a promising start in the previous century, authoritative research in this field has come to a standstill without having produced adequate historical source material. The danger is that interest in Gottschee history—the history of a people who have preserved their Germanic heritage throughout so many centuries in a foreign environment—will decline if this situation continues, has prompted me to search now and then for additional sources of historical information on the district. The war,² its distressing aftermath, and the demands of my professional work have unfortunately delayed completion of this project. In the winter of 1929/30, however, I was able to conduct a very successful search in the Treasury, House, Court, and National Archives in Vienna, the results of which convinced me that more documents on Gottschee history were waiting to be found at other sites as well, particularly at Graz, formerly the supreme governmental seat of Inner Austria. And indeed the search through the Provincial Government Archives at Graz in the summer of 1930 turned up a wealth of precious documentary material, which I present to the public in this book. I am hoping that it will revive interest in the writing of the local history and that it will overturn the erroneous opinion that further sources of information on the district’s past no longer exist.

While the few hitherto unknown documents in the Vienna archives deal mainly with the time of Friedrich III, Maximilian I, and Ferdinand, the public papers at Graz date primarily from the time of Archdukes Karl and Ferdinand. These papers from the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries also contain transcriptions of important documents from earlier times and reports on and references to the conditions which prevailed in bygone days. They are thus of great value for the history of our district in the 15th century.

Of course it was not possible for me to evaluate the materials at Graz myself. I would therefore like to acknowledge the directors of the above mentioned archives, who most obligingly transferred the documents to the National Library in Vienna where I was able to work with them, thanks to the kindness of the library management.

The work took a great deal of time, not so much because of the handwriting—which was difficult to read in many places—but more so because the documents have been mixed up over the course of centuries that in most cases their interrelationships could be determined only from copies and extracts.

The contents of the nearly 2,000 pages of documents from Graz are so broad that until now it has been utterly impossible for me to deal with them and to make use of them descriptively. This will require much time and exhaustive research. Since I cannot be sure that I will be able to finish the intended work, I will at least publish the documents and thus make them available to other authors.

My comments on two subjects will be more detailed on: (1) the owners and leaseholders in the Domain of Gottschee; and (2) the legal and economic position of the farmers. In addition there will be opportunities to touch on several other questions on which the sources report.

The documents are presented either in full text or in excerpts, depending on how significant they seemed to me. In some cases the original spellings are preserved for linguistic purposes, but in most cases current spellings are used. Only the names of the subjects are without exception written exactly as they appear in the documents. These documents are sorted by year, month, and day; how they relate to one another is indicated by references, footnotes, and an index. The chronological sequence is interrupted only where it seemed absolutely necessary to combine related materials under a separate heading.

Special thanks is owed to the directors of the Society of German Gottscheers in Vienna, who never hesitated to assume the costs for the printing of the work and who by so doing demonstrated full understanding of their cultural duties, as written in the Society’s articles. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the Society has both acquired a memorial in honor of itself and achieved a great advance in the written history of its homeland.

Georg Widmer

Vienna, May 1931

PART I

The Domain of Gottschee: Historical Introduction

1

Owners and Leaseholders of the Domain of Gottschee

We are already well informed about the owners of the former Domain of Gottschee. We know that the Ortenburgs, who held the region as a hereditary fief from the Patriarchate of Aquileia and who had the land cleared and settled, were succeeded in 1420 by the Counts of Cilli, which family died out in 1457 and was succeeded by the Habsburgs. Reserving the right of repurchase, Emperor Maximilian I then sold the domain to Jörg von Thurn in 1507; but under Maximilian’s successor, Ferdinand I, it became a Habsburg possession once again. After the division of the House of Habsburg, Gottschee remained with the Styrian line until Ferdinand sold the domain to Hans Jakob Khisl in 1618. From the Counts of Khisl, it was then acquired by the Counts of Auersperg, in whose possession it remained until the abolition of the landed nobility in 1848.

We also have some, although limited, knowledge of the individual leaseholders and administrators of the domain. The source material published here provides further information on them in particular.

First we learn that the Ortenburgs, like most of their successors, did not maintain a permanent residence in the domain and that their representatives were called judges when exercising authority. They not only acted as judges in the modern sense of the word, but they also kept the land register and collected taxes, as the Waldordnung, or Forest Law, of 1406 clearly indicates. The representatives held a very important position, as the Ortenburgs had the right to administer criminal justice, including the death penalty. The significance of the Forest Law will be discussed later.

So far, no new documents from the time of the Counts of Cilli have been found in Vienna or Graz, and I do not know where else to look for the administrative records from this particular period.

Beginning with the time of Friedrich III, sources become more plentifully available. Under him and afterward, the lord’s representative is called Pfleger [bailiff] or Amtmann [steward] or both bailiff and steward when administering justice and attending to legal affairs. The bailiff presided over the district court at Friedrichstein, the jurisdiction of which extended over the entire domain. He no longer had anything to do with the collection or management of taxes, with the exception of the feudal tithe. Economic activity was in the hands of several stewards, who also properly could be called estate managers, and one was usually appointed for the manorial offices at both Upper Gottschee and Lower Gottschee, and one for the manor at Rieg, although sometimes there was only one for all three manors.

Unlike civil servants of today, the bailiffs and the stewards did not receive salaries; rather, they leased their positions, that is, they had to pay the sovereign an agreed annual fee. They extracted the fee, and a goodly percentage above it, from their manorial districts — the bailiff by exacting court fines, the stewards by collecting taxes in the form of goods, which the peasant subjects were obliged to hand over.

Later, since the time of Maximilian I, in particular, the manorial offices were no longer filled individually; rather, the entire domain including the district court was leased out in a new way. Whereas the leaseholder formerly had to pay an annual fee, from then on he had to lend the sovereign a certain sum as a loan for which he received no cash interest. Instead, the leaseholder received as security the right to use the feudal revenues of the domain, that is, the subjects’ yields, monetary tithes, and personal labor, but not the taxes, which he probably collected but had to pay over to the sovereign.

The sovereign had to pay back the lent sum, Pfandschilling, to the leaseholder upon redemption of the domain. It is clear that the leaseholders tried to extract the largest possible revenues from the leased domain and in many cases oppressed the peasants with excessive demands for work, although at the time they acquired the fief, they had to promise not to overburden the subjects with rent, taxes, or forced labor. This promise, however, was most often considered an unbinding formality, especially since the sovereigns themselves often increased taxes without regard for the existing peasant privileges. Should the sovereign, who in this case was also the emperor, learn that the leaseholder was drawing unreasonably high revenues from the property, he in turn increased the amount of the sum lent to him, that is, the leaseholder had to furnish a new, larger loan.

In 1457 Niklas Piers was appointed as the first imperial steward under Friedrich III and was entrusted for life to take care of Castle Friedrichstein with customary keeping of the fortification. He is mentioned again in a commission decree from the year 1614,³ wherein it is reported that he granted the neighborhood of Nesselthal the right to forbid merchant caravans from using the paths that crossed the meadows and fields belonging to the inhabitants of Nesselthal during the period between 24 April and 29 September. What year he granted this right is not stated; it was renewed in 1506 by Sigmund Piers, nephew of Niklas, who had been both bailiff and steward at Friedrichstein since 1478.

The documentation mentions the following stewards in charge of fiscal affairs: 1466—Friedrich Aprech, pastor at Tüffer, leaseholding steward of the manors at Gottschee and Rieg; February 1468—Hans and Niklas Aprech, stewards at Gottschee and Rieg an der Fröschn; in July of the same year — Hans Aprech for Gottschee and Balthasar Wagen for Rieg, who is already mentioned as such in April of the same year; and in October – a certain Petritz was steward of Gottschee, probably one of the brothers Caspar, Jörg, and Melchior Petritz, citizens of Gottschee, to whom the emperor in 1476 granted the right to mine and process iron ore at Grafenwart (Kostel), or the Caspar who sold his house