2.1 The Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family

In the early eighteenth century, Count Karl Joseph of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein (1686–1746) had become one of the largest landowners in Lower Austria, where almost all of his estates were located. Legally, his possessions were a mixture of seigneuries (Herrschaften) of fideicommissary nature and allodial estates – property that he was free to sell, lease or mortgage. He had inherited almost all of the patrimony from his father, his mother and a paternal uncle, each of whom had established or transferred a separate fidei commissum.Footnote ¹² In 1735, a report to Lower Austria’s noble court of law – the Landmarschall’s Court – stated that Karl Joseph’s annual passive income amounted to 56,669 Rhenish gulden (fl).Footnote ¹³ A study ranking the size of great-landowners in Lower Austria still needs to be written, but if the report is true, the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family would have made it into the top 20 of the richest noble lineages in the neighbouring kingdom of Bohemia.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite his wealth, Karl Joseph was not as politically ambitious as many of his aristocratic contemporaries, who often sought the highest offices and honours at the imperial court through diplomatic service. As chamberlain and later privy councillor, Karl Joseph did have access to the court, but overall he seems to have been content with the position of councillor in the Lower Austrian government, a regional administrative body, which he had acquired in 1707.Footnote ¹⁵ In comparison to diplomatic services, the historiography of the Habsburg Empire does not usually regard service in the regional administration as a promising field of political activity for noblemen who wished to be awarded the most prestigious offices and honours.Footnote ¹⁶ Karl Joseph’s father, who had been the emperor’s ambassador to the Holy See from 1700 to 1705, had in fact discouraged his son from entering the diplomatic service because of the great personal and financial sacrifices involved and the uncertain prospects of success.Footnote ¹⁷

Karl Joseph had married Maria Franziska, née Countess of Truchsess-Zeil (died in 1737), in 1706.Footnote ¹⁸ The counts of Truchsess-Zeil were a prestigious Swabian noble family, members of which enjoyed immediacy to the empire and influence in several prince-bishoprics, although Maria Franziska seems to have received little property from her family of origin, at least when her means are compared with those of her husband. We estimate her net worth in 1737 at between 10,000 and 20,000 fl.Footnote ¹⁹ The couple had four children surviving into adulthood. By the early 1730s, the eldest son, Franz Anton (1707–1765), was working in the Lower Austrian government, like his father. He had already married twice, in 1732 and 1733, and his second wife, Maria Josepha, belonged to the highly respected and wealthy Hungarian Esterházy family. The younger sons Joseph (born in 1710) and Karl (1717–1792) were probably being prepared for their future military careers and a daughter called Theresia (1716–1792) was also entering adulthood.Footnote ²⁰

2.2 The debt crisis and the first judicial administration from 1735 to 1743

It is not until 1734 that the record mentions major problems in the Lamberg-Sprinzensteinian economy. In October of that year, Karl Joseph submitted a petition (supplication) to Emperor Charles VI (reigned 1711–1740) on an urgent matter: Lower Austria’s landlords and landladies acted as the state’s tax collectors vis-à-vis their subjects. If said subjects were unable to contribute the full tax sum negotiated by the emperor and the Lower Austrian estates for a given year, their lord or lady was liable to pay the difference from his or her own purse. This was the fate that had befallen Karl Joseph – he had been unable to collect the full taxes demanded from his seigneuries for some time. He explained that

Poor harvests also seem to have affected other seigneuries in this part of Lower Austria in the early 1730s. By 1735, Karl Joseph’s tax debt already amounted to 94,000 fl with a penalty interest rate of 10 per cent.Footnote ^22, Footnote ²³ In order to pay off his tax debt, Karl Joseph asked for permission to mortgage his fideicommissary estates with loans of 100,000 fl, since ‘in these well-known times of credit scarcity, it is impossible to raise money without more than sufficient security’.Footnote ²⁴ The founders of fidei commissa usually forbade their successors to take such a step, so Karl Joseph needed a special permission from his sovereign. The petition apparently reached Charles VI personally, and ‘per imperatorem’ it was decided on 15 October that a ‘family curator’ (curator familiae) appointed by the Lower Austrian government should prepare a report on Karl Joseph’s financial situation. Although this report does not seem to have survived, we do know that a report on Karl Joseph’s finances was presented to Charles VI personally on 29 April 1735, and that in response an imperial decree was issued on 7 May that changed the family’s fortune for years to come.Footnote ²⁵

The decree granted the permission to charge the fidei commissa with a debt of 100,000 fl, but Karl Joseph was to lose the control over the entirety of his patrimony. In his place, a non-noble clerk called Matthias Adam Schendl was to become the administrator of all of Karl Joseph’s possessions, both fideicommissary and allodial. He was to take an oath before the head of Lower Austria’s noble court – the Landmarschall Count Aloys Thomas Raimund of Harrach – and an addendum of 10 May appointed an official of the Landmarschall’s Court and a councillor of the Lower Austrian government to supervise and report on Schendl’s activities. Initially, it was also the court that was to come up for the administrator’s wage. His powers were far-reaching. The entire seigneurial bureaucracy was to be under his control.

Schendl also had the right to make changes to the staff, and his task was to find ways of increasing revenue and reducing unnecessary expenditure to establish a ‘good economy’ (gute würtschafft). Karl Joseph was not to interfere in the affairs of the administrator. He and his family members were still allowed to visit the estates, but the cost of their stay was to be deducted from their annual pension, which was to be determined by the Landmarschall’s Court once it had a clearer picture of the count’s finances.

While the main priority in establishing the judicial administration was clearly the collection of overdue taxes, there were at least two other objectives with which Schendl was tasked and which, according to the imperial decree, imposed the removal of Count Karl Joseph’s powers. On the one hand, not only had the count failed to pay his taxes but his debts had also proved to be considerable, and his creditors had not been content with their debtor in recent years. Some were already taking Karl Joseph to court for overdue payments, while others announced that they were considering doing so. Initially, the emperor protected the count’s property by ordering a moratorium of three months, during which no judicial execution could take place. In the meantime, and with the help of other officials, Schendl was to investigate which allodials should be sold to stabilize the economy of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family and satisfy the creditors. Potential buyers were to be sought. A second objective was to keep the fidei commissa intact. If the tax debts and debts secured by the fideicommissary estates themselves were not paid, parts of the fidei commissa would have to be alienated by judicial execution, which the emperor wanted to avoid.

Charles VI did not specify a date or conditions for the end of the judicial administration. In fact, Karl Joseph himself would never regain control of the estates, and his son would not do so for another eight years. Only a few months after Schendl began his work, he reported that the finances of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family were in a catastrophic state. The total annual income (including Karl Joseph’s salary as a councillor of the Lower Austrian government) was 58,669 fl, while the necessary annual expenses were said to amount to 66,893 fl.Footnote ²⁷ Schendl even came into conflict with Karl Joseph’s eldest son, Franz Anton, who demanded a personal pension for himself and his wife and children, which the administrator initially did not believe to be possible. Finally, the Landmarschall’s Court approved a pension of 400 fl per month for Karl Joseph and 300 fl for Franz Anton. From 1737 onwards, the latter received 500 fl. However, Franz Anton’s pension had to be deducted from his own debt claims against his father.Footnote ²⁸ The actual payments to the noblemen were somewhat lower than originally foreseen, as discussed in Section 3. The other family members largely depended on the income of Karl Joseph and Franz Anton.

In view of these financial circumstances, the Landmarschall’s Court soon decided that all the family’s allodial estates would have to be sold and that the purchase prices should be as high as possible in order to reduce the debts.Footnote ²⁹ In order to establish a reliable list of liabilities, a so-called convocatio creditorum was ordered in May 1736, which meant that all creditors were to report their claims against Karl Joseph to the Landmarschall’s Court within six weeks.Footnote ³⁰ The resulting lists of creditors show that the status passivus of the family at the beginning of 1737 amounted to at least some 840,000 fl.Footnote ³¹ To ensure that profitable sales could be made, the moratorium on judicial executions, originally intended to last only three months, was constantly prolonged.Footnote ³² Typical of insolvency cases in the Holy Roman Empire from the seventeenth century onwards, it took several years before many necessary sales could be carried out.Footnote ³³ Schendl had made the first major sale in 1737, when he sold the lucrative seigneurie of Waidhofen an der Thaya together with a smaller post for 215,775 fl.Footnote ³⁴ In 1739, Charles VI offered Karl Joseph and his eldest son to propose alternative solutions to the debt crisis. However, both proposals were ultimately rejected and the sale of the remaining allodial estates was ordered.Footnote ³⁵ The seigneurie Kottingbrunn, the small village of Nondorf and the family house in Vienna were sold in 1740 for 120,000 fl, 13,613 fl and 87,415 fl respectively.Footnote ³⁶ The house was purchased by the future Holy Roman Emperor Francis I (reigned 1745–1765).Footnote ³⁷ No purchaser could be found for the last remaining allodial seigneurie of Gilgenberg. It was finally alienated in 1741 at an auction between five creditors holding a mortgage on the estate, with the minimum price being 50,000 fl.Footnote ³⁸

It was largely because of these sales that Karl Joseph’s total debt was reduced to 344,501 fl. At the end of these operations there was little left of the family’s patrimony other than the fidei commissa. It was only after the sales had been completed and a new sovereign had succeeded Charles VI – his daughter Maria Theresa (reigned 1740–1780) – that the family’s fortunes changed. Already in 1741 and 1742, on the initiative of the Landmarschall’s Court and her majesty herself, several commissions had been held between the male members of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family and their creditors. The aim was to negotiate an agreement in which the creditors would waive some of their claims.Footnote ³⁹ On 3 May 1743, the queen finally issued a new royal resolution, declaring that these efforts had been successful: a majority of those lenders who did not have a specified security were said to have agreed to waive their claims to all unpaid interest and 50 per cent of the principal.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although the monarch named a few creditors whose original loans were not to be diminished, the measure reduced the total debt of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family to 250,859 fl. As the fidei commissa were now deemed able to bear this burden of debt, the administration that had lasted for almost eight years was declared to be over. But it was not Karl Joseph who regained control. Instead, the next successor in line, Franz Anton, was sworn in as the new landlord. Schendl was to remain in his service as an advisor. The queen also laid down a number of conditions under which Franz Anton was to manage his finances. He should pay at least 15,000 fl per year to cover interest and debt repayments and send the receipts to the Landmarschall’s Court. He was also to support the members of his family with annual pensions: his father with 3,000 fl, his two brothers and his sister with 500 fl each.

2.3 Continued debt problems and the second administration from 1756 to 1767

Karl Joseph died in 1746 in a rented flat in the Lower Austrian city of Wiener Neustadt, lamenting in his will the ‘misery in which they have left me’.Footnote ⁴¹ His remaining belongings, most of which he had bequeathed to his eldest son, totalled 9,001 fl.Footnote ⁴² This still made him a wealthy person compared to the average city dweller, but it perhaps constituted less than 1 per cent of what he had once possessed. The family’s financial problems did not end under his successor, Franz Anton. Only 13 years after the count had taken over the patrimony in 1743, a new administration was imposed, this time lasting 11 years. As with the first administration, the second one had its origins in financial problems that started when the seigneuries’ income fell sharply, this time between 1748 to 1752.Footnote ⁴³ The count was left unable to pay his taxes and debts. In 1752 alone, Franz Anton’s tax debts amounted to 54,149 fl, obligatory debt services worth around 60,000 fl had not been made, and ten different creditors were suing the nobleman at the Landmarschall’s Court.Footnote ⁴⁴ At first, Franz Anton tried to solve his problems with a new permission for a loan worth 30,000 fl, and in 1754, he sold the fideicommissary seigneurial complex of ‘Rastenberg cum appertinentiis’ for 128,200 fl with a special permission from the sovereign.Footnote ⁴⁵

However, these measures were not enough to convince Maria Theresa of Franz Anton’s solvency. On 10 December 1755, she ordered that the count’s fidei commissa should be placed under the administration of the abbot of the monastery of Zwettl from January 1756. The abbot had apparently agreed to take over the patrimony in return for the possibility of retaining any surplus of the seigneurial income remaining after tax payments, necessary debt repayments and an annual pension of 4,000 fl for Franz Anton and his family. Otherwise, the terms of his administration were similar to the imperial decree of 1735.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, the abbot reported that Franz Anton’s debts were somewhat higher than the 225,224 fl originally stated and asked to be exempted from this duty the following year, which was granted.Footnote ⁴⁷ From 1757 to 1767, four successive officials of the Landmarschall’s Court had control over the Lamberg-Sprinzensteinian patrimony: Leopold Holzmeister (1757–1760), his widow Anna during an interim phase (1760), Johann Matthias Puchberg (1760–1761) and Johann Baptist of Liechtenstern (1761–1767). Liechtenstern’s office had been changed from ‘administrator’ to ‘inspector’ in 1762. An inspector had fewer rights to make staff changes without judicial permission than an administrator.Footnote ⁴⁸ The efforts of these officials reduced the family’s status passivus to 177,273 fl.Footnote ⁴⁹ The administration was finally and unspectacularly brought to an end by a brief imperial decree from 15 September 1767. The document declared that Anton (1740–1823), the eldest son of Franz Anton, who had died in 1765, should become the new landlord on 1 January 1768.Footnote ⁵⁰ An important factor in this turn of events may have been that Anton had managed to make a deal with the Archbishop of Vienna to sell the seigneurie of Kranichberg for the very lucrative price of 145,000 fl, which the empress permitted, thus ending the family’s debt crisis for good. Anton would retain control of the seigneurial city of Drosendorf and the stem seigneurie of Ottenstein. Before his death in 1823, he even managed to buy back some of his family’s former possessions.Footnote ⁵¹

2.4 Between punishment and protection

What were the legal premises for the governmental proceedings against the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family and how can their social logic be characterized? We have so far avoided describing the state’s treatment of the insolvent counts as bankruptcy proceedings. In early modern parlance, bankruptcy implied that the debtor had defrauded his creditors and was often punished with severe penalties.Footnote ⁵² The term does not appear in the sources relating to the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein case. Another term that is not mentioned is ‘concursus (creditorum)’. This term, originally developed by Spanish jurists in the sixteenth century, occasionally appears in Austrian legislation from 1700 onwards.Footnote ⁵³ However, despite the fact that the concursus corresponds in many respects to the events surrounding our protagonists, the term is not used in the records.

A Spanish concursus was a legal procedure that was usually initiated by a debtor declaring to a court of law that he or she was unable to pay his/her creditors. The court would take over and administer the debtor’s property. The person who carried out this task was usually called curator bonis; more rarely the terms administrator bonis or defensor bonis were used.Footnote ⁵⁴ The debtor lost the right to use most of his property, and all transactions with it, such as sales, donations and so on were forbidden. The judicial authorities would then try to gain an overview of all assets and liabilities, the latter by issuing a petition called ‘convention of creditors’ (convocatio creditorum) in which anyone purporting to have claims against the debtor would have to announce them. The next step would be to verify the legitimacy of these claims; then the court would have to determine the order in which the creditors were to be paid. Creditors with a higher priority were satisfied before those with a lower priority if the assets were insufficient to cover all liabilities. Finally, the court would auction off the debtor’s assets and pay the creditors. The concursus was different from older forms of insolvency procedures in several ways. First, a court of law fulfilled most major tasks concerning the administration and distribution of the insolvent person’s property, while other legal procedures allowed or required the active participation of creditors. Second, all legal proceedings relating to the debt of an insolvent person were combined into one single court case as opposed to several cases running parallel to each other at the same time. Third, the concursus was relatively lenient towards the person of the debtor, as many legal systems required his imprisonment, while this was not necessarily the case in Spanish insolvency law. Concursi were also often prolonged procedures and open to possible renegotiations between debtors and their creditors, the latter being able to delay the execution of assets or alleviate other terms of proceedings by majority vote.Footnote ⁵⁵ Alternative forms of dealing with insolvencies, practised in England until the early eighteenth century, for example, were instead aimed at liquidating assets quickly, protecting the claims of individual creditors and punishing the debtor, even if he was of noble origin.Footnote ⁵⁶

It is often argued that the concursus was introduced into central European law and legal practice from the mid-seventeenth century onwards owing to the influence of the treatise ‘Labyrinthus creditorum concurrentium’ by the Spanish jurist Francisco Salgado de Somoza, published in 1651.Footnote ⁵⁷ Other scholars regard Salgado de Somoza’s influence to be overstated and argue that similar procedures developed independently in German legal practice.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the case of Lower Austria, the description of a ‘crida-process’, which shares many features with the concursus, including the central role of the court of law, predates the Labyrinthus by about a hundred years, which does not exclude the possibility that the legal practice in the Spanish Habsburg Empire was known to jurists in the Austrian one before Salgado de Somoza.Footnote ⁵⁹ The word crida occasionally appears in sources relating to the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family.Footnote ⁶⁰ Since the modalities of the crida-process were not laid out in too much detail in texts by Austrian jurists, it is probable that the legal theory of the concursus supplemented the decisions by Austrian judges.

Despite the many similarities between the judicial administration of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein patrimony and a concursus, there are also some differences. Most stem from the fact that many decisions regarding the regulation of the family’s finances came from the crown itself rather than from a more regular court of law and most of them favoured the debtors. A closer look at the divergences between official norms and actual practice can thus reveal measures by which the state protected the economic interests of the insolvent aristocrats. Both the judicial administration of 1735 to 1743 and that of 1756 to 1768 were initiated by an imperial decree and not, as was usual in the concursus, by the voluntary declaration of the debtor.Footnote ⁶¹ The first administration, in particular, was partly a response to overdue taxes, although the measures taken by the state would probably have been limited to a so-called sequestration of parts of the patrimony had the nobles not also been heavily in debt.Footnote ⁶² Another difference is that in a concursus, a convention of creditors is called at the very beginning of the procedure.Footnote ⁶³ One reason for this was that the assembled creditors were to vote on the administrator of their debtor’s property.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the case of Karl Joseph’s insolvency, the first convention of creditors was not convened until May 1736, one year after the beginning of the administration.Footnote ⁶⁵ Administrator Schendl was thus appointed not by the creditors but by the emperor and, indeed, on the recommendation of the debtor himself.Footnote ⁶⁶ The clerk had been in Karl Joseph’s service from at least 1728, and he had been involved in the repayment of his employer’s debts before the beginning of the administration.Footnote ⁶⁷ No evidence could be found that a convention of creditors was even assembled during the second administration. Finally, it is not clear whether the alienation of all the debtor’s allodial possessions was initially the aim. The stated main task of the first administration was to put the debtor’s finances in order. The imperial decree of May 1735 mentions that sales would be necessary to this end, but the decision to sell off all of the allodials again did not come from the Landmarschall’s Court until May 1736.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even thereafter, in 1739, Charles VI had offered the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein the opportunity to submit plans for the settlement of debts that would avoid the alienation of all the allodials, and it was he who would have the final say on the viability of these plans, not the creditors as would be the case in a regular concursus.Footnote ⁶⁹

The reason why the handling of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein economy was called judicial administration far more often than concursus or crida was that it was in many respects an open-ended measure imposed by the sovereign to regulate the finances of an aristocrat. The extent to which these measures would eventually follow the trajectory of a more ‘regular’ insolvency case, as described in the Labyrinthus or Austrian crida law, was not to be determined at the outset, but depended on further decisions after more details of the seigneurial economy were revealed. Most of the divergences were aimed at further restricting the decision-making powers of creditors and keeping open alternative solutions favourable to the debtor.

Beyond these more technical legal differences between the judicial administration and a concursus, there were further governmental and judicial interventions in favour of the insolvent aristocratic family that resemble measures by which sovereigns and governing bodies protected elite interests in other parts of continental Europe. Most importantly, neither Karl Joseph nor later his son was ever subjected to ‘personal execution’, that is, punishment against their own person, although noblemen in Habsburg Austria could in principle face this fate.Footnote ⁷⁰ The state’s attitude towards insolvent individuals was seemingly not so lenient when insolvent individuals of lower social origin were concerned. In 1655, for example, Emperor Ferdinand III issued an ‘executions-ordnung’ for Lower Austria, which stipulated that insolvent debtors who could not prove that their difficulties were owing to no fault of their own – for example owing to accidents or natural disasters – could be deported to serve on the military border with the Ottoman Empire or condemned to forced labour on Vienna’s fortifications.Footnote ⁷¹ These measures were explicitly confirmed in a ‘Fallitenordnung’ by Charles VI in 1734 – a text addressed to merchants and issued just one year before the beginning of the insolvency procedures against the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family – with the addition that the perpetrators of ‘evil and fraudulent falliments’ could be hanged at the gallows.Footnote ⁷² There exist no studies exploring if and how these legal norms were applied in actual practice, but their existence suggests that authorities handled insolvencies by non-nobles in a rather punitive manner. This was not unusual on a European scale, where ‘death penalty, servitude, debtors’ prison and stigmatizing penalties’ were common ways of dealing with insolvent individuals.Footnote ⁷³ In contrast, the members of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family went free and received several thousand gulden a year from the administration. Both Karl Joseph and Franz Anton also retained their offices in the Lower Austrian government – an institution connected with the administration itself – which yielded a further 1,000 to 2,000 fl per year.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the 1750s, Franz Anton had even been given the honorary title of Privy Councillor, indicating that he was still seen as a respected member of the nobility of his time.Footnote ⁷⁵

Just as insolvent aristocrats in Castile and western Germany, the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein also profited from moratoria on judicial executions, which ensured that alternative solutions could be sought and that sales could be effectuated at advantageous prices.Footnote ⁷⁶ Moreover, typical of regions where the legal device of the fidei commissum played a strong legal role, fideicommissary possessions – which were supposed to belong to the ‘abstractum family’ and not to an individual person – were not forcibly liquidated in order to satisfy the claims of creditors, although the sale of the fidei commissa would have easily sufficed to pay off all of the debt.Footnote ⁷⁷ It was the stated aim of the sovereign’s measures to keep these legal objects intact and, as far as the first administration was concerned, once most of the allodial estates had been sold, the authorities stopped further alienations. This did not change until the 1750s, when financial difficulties arose again and there were no more allodials left to sell. Nevertheless, the sales of two fideicommissary seigneuries in 1754 and 1768 seem to have been initiated by their ‘owners’ to avoid or end the judicial administration of the rest of the patrimony. Since the fidei commissum in the Habsburg Empire was a legal device employed almost exclusively by the aristocracy, it was also mainly members of the landed elite who were able to use legal strategies involving them in order to protect assets.Footnote ⁷⁸ Contrary to fidei commissa, fiefs (Lehen) – another type of property which in theory could not be easily alienated and which was utilized with great legal skill by insolvent noble debtors in western Germany – did not play a role in the insolvency of the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein, although family held smaller landed assets with this legal quality.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the course of the first half of the seventeenth century, the inalienability of Habsburg fiefs in Lower Austria had been largely abolished.Footnote ⁸⁰

A final advantage that was granted by the state to the family manifested itself in May 1743, when Maria Theresa ended the first judicial administration and cancelled some 100,000 fl of non-mortgaged debts, reducing the claims of dozens of creditors by more than 50 per cent. The decree imposing this measure states that this was the result of an agreement between Franz Anton, his two brothers and the creditors in question.Footnote ⁸¹ However, a joint declaration by a large number of these creditors in August 1741 paints a very different picture.Footnote ⁸² The former creditors stated that they had been pressured by the Landmarschall’s Court and the Royal Court itself to negotiate an agreement with Franz Anton. At the time, the count was planning to reduce the debt by between 25 and 33 per cent, and the creditors pleaded with their sovereign not to confirm such a measure. However, they also admitted that they could not demand the judicial execution of the fideicommissary property and declared that they would agree to a debt reduction if her majesty would demand one. They even added:

In other words, the initiative to reduce the debt did not come from the creditors, who rightly pointed out that ‘we would be acting completely irrationally if we elected our own harm’.Footnote ⁸⁴ It was the higher authorities, apparently even the queen herself, who urged the cancellation; the creditors merely admitted their helplessness should the state impose a solution to their detriment, while at the same time affirming their loyalty to the crown. This may have been a wise decision, as 1741 was a year of civil war in the Habsburg Empire. In early modern Spain, debt cancellations, reductions of interest rates and other measures favourable to insolvent noble debtors constituted an important form of patronage by which the crown supported loyal aristocrats. These favours were thus an instrument by which the sovereign kept the nobility dependent.Footnote ⁸⁵ Political considerations could also be what incentivized Maria Theresa to grant patronage to the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family. Franz Anton’s wife, Maria Josepha, was a member of the Esterházy family. During the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), several of its members, including Maria Josepha’s brother, were key supporters of the disputed queen in the Kingdom of Hungary.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the next section, we will demonstrate who the main losers in the state’s insolvency proceedings against the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family were and how much of the counts’ patrimony was withheld as a compensation for creditors owing to fideicommissary bondage.

3.1 Liabilities

Among the aristocracy of the eighteenth-century Habsburg Empire, taking out a loan typically worked as follows: the debtor would promise the creditor to pay an annual rent as interest, usually 5 or 6 per cent of the principal (Hauptsumme), the sum originally borrowed. After a certain period of time specified in the original bonds – usually one year, although longer periods were possible if the loan was large –either the creditor or the debtor could ‘call in the capital’ (das capital kündigen). If it was the debtor who called it in, he would return the principal and no longer have to pay the annual interest rate. If the creditor called it in, the debtor would have to repay the principal within a fixed period, usually three to six months.Footnote ⁸⁷ If a creditor wanted his money back and the debtor would not pay in cash, the debtor could be forced to provide a security specified in the original bond through a court process called ‘executions-process’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the case of the aristocracy, landed property was often mortgaged in this manner. If no security was given at all, the creditor could even name one of the debtor’s (allodial) possessions, immobile or mobile, as satisfaction to the court. The judge would decide whether the claim was appropriate.Footnote ⁸⁹

While it might not seem that these modalities, which allowed creditors to demand their full claims only one year after a loan was granted, would encourage agents to take on a lot of debt, examples of highly indebted Austrian aristocrats are not hard to find, and many of them never ran into serious financial difficulties. The system worked because many creditors of nobles simply kept their capital unterminated for years or decades, using their debtors as a cash deposit against interest payments. Even if a creditor with a large claim demanded repayment, a debtor did not usually have to pay everything out of savings, sales or by providing collateral; he could simply take out a loan from a third party and pay the debt with credit. The state itself demanded the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein take up new loans worth 30,000 fl to pay off older creditors in 1743 and 1752.Footnote ⁹⁰ Vice versa, the creditor himself also had the possibility of recovering his principal without bothering his debtor, since he had the right to freely sell his claims to a third party; such transactions seem to have been frequent.Footnote ⁹¹ A debtor with a good reputation and perhaps a social network willing to help in times of need thus had ample opportunity to take on large debts without risking a reduction of his patrimony. It was only when a given debtor lost his trustworthiness, for example by repeatedly failing to pay the annual interest, that he got into trouble. Multiple creditors would call in their money, and it would be more difficult to find new lenders or credit buyers to satisfy the older claims, making sales or judicial execution necessary. If it was unclear whether the debtor’s allodial assets would be sufficient to satisfy all creditors, an insolvency case (crida-process) could be initiated.Footnote ⁹² In the case of highly indebted nobles, such a scenario could easily occur when external shocks such as wars or natural disasters reduced their rent income.Footnote ⁹³ The financial difficulties experienced by the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein themselves were precipitated by poor harvests in the early 1730s. The aristocratic credit system in other parts of early modern central Europe seems to have been very similar to that in Austria.Footnote ⁹⁴

The total amount of debt that had brought the Lamberg-Sprinzensteinian economy to its knees in 1735 is not mentioned in the sources from the early years of the administration, and the contemporaries themselves seem to have been uncertain about its exact size. It was not until May 1736 that a convention of creditors was announced to clarify the situation. The first complete lists of liabilities that have survived date from even later, probably 1739, although the first major sales had already taken place in 1737. This is also the year in which the oldest surviving administration records give a clear picture on income and expenditure. We can therefore attempt to reconstruct the original amount of debt back to the beginning of 1737, a point in time before the first major sales were realized and thus likely to be close to the original debt sum in 1735. The data in Table 1 has been calculated using the following formula:

Table 1.

Estimate of the minimum debt of Count Karl Joseph of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein, early 1737

* Notes: weighted by the value of a given debt claim; **the first source with a comprehensive list of interest rates for allodial mortgage debt dates from 1739. By that time, this category of debt had been reduced to 266,081 fl.

Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-457; K 033/494, 17 September 1735; K 34/499, s. d., ‘Specification aller passivschulden’.

Debt 1737 = Allodial debt 1739Footnote ⁹⁵ + Fideicommissary debt 1739Footnote ⁹⁶ + Principal repayments 1737–1738Footnote ⁹⁷ − New credits 1737–1738.Footnote ⁹⁸

Note that this calculation does not include overdue interest payments because they are not consistently recorded in the sources. If they were added, the final result would be several 10,000 fl higher.

As can be seen, although the tax debt of 94,000 fl calculated in 1735 was the cause of the judicial administration, it was not the main problem of Karl Joseph’s finances. Apart from the overdue claims of the state, which were largely paid by mortgage loans secured on the fidei commissa in the following years, his allodial debts to private creditors in 1737 amounted, according to my cautious estimate, to some 730,000 fl. Most of the credits were theoretically secured, although, as will be shown, these securities were not always sufficient to carry their burdens. About 180,000 fl of debt was classified as ‘chirographic’ from the outset, meaning that the lenders had not received any specific security in the original bond. Possessing such claims was especially disadvantageous because they usually had the lowest possible rank in the order of repayment in insolvency proceedings, including Austrian judicial practice.Footnote ⁹⁹

The debts of about 840,000 fl were enormous, considering that the ‘diet’s grant’ (Landtagsbewilligung), the emperor’s main source of annual direct tax revenue in Lower Austria, amounted to an average of 900,000 fl in the late 1730s.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, the family’s status passivus was also not exceptional among the aristocracy. For example, a highly successful nobleman without severe financial problems, the Landmarschall Count Aloys Thomas Raimund of Harrach, whom we have already met, had inherited 572,844 fl (541,337 fl if deflated to the value of the gulden in the mid-1730s) in debts from his father in 1706. It took him more than a decade to reduce his liabilities to 334,224 fl (283,756 fl in the mid-1730s) in 1717.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Several Bohemian noblemen who became insolvent in the mid-eighteenth century also owed sums similar to those of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family.Footnote ¹⁰² The incurring of debts, even enormous ones that could affect entire regional economies, was a standard feature of aristocratic households in the Habsburg Empire at this time.

The creditors satisfied by the first major sale of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein judicial administration in 1737, worth about 215,000 fl, are not specified in the sources. We have therefore concentrated on reconstructing the social profile of the creditors in 1739 on the basis of lists of allodial, fideicommissary and chirographic lenders.Footnote ¹⁰³ The picture that emerges in Table 2 is very different from that of insolvent noble debtors in the prince-bishopric of Münster in north-western Germany, where the creditors of nobles were mainly affluent urban burghers and religious institutions, with only a minority of loans coming from secular nobles.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The overall composition of Karl Joseph’s creditors resembles that of some Bohemian and Hessian noblemen analysed in the literature, but with a lesser role played by the Catholic Church.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Karl Joseph predominantly borrowed from his own social milieu, with more than half of his debts owed to people of his own rank of count and more than 70 per cent to people of some noble rank. Given that the creditors who were satisfied with the sale of Waidhofen an der Thaya in 1737 were probably also disproportionately noble, the social profile of Karl Joseph’s lenders would have been even more aristocratic at the beginning of the administration in 1735. The share of ecclesiastical and charitable institutions was only about 15 per cent. A significant minority of these claims were not so much the result of loans as of bequests and donations by ancestors of Karl Joseph.

Table 2.

Social rank and gender of the creditors of Karl Joseph of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein in 1739

Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-457; K 34/499, s. d., ‘Specification aller passivschulden’.

Commoners – including seigneurial officials and a group of creditors with small claims, referred to in the sources as ‘auszügler’ – had claims on about 14 per cent of Karl Joseph’s status passivus. The identities of many auszügler are specified in documents younger than 1739. In 1741, 23 of them, with claims worth 9,100 fl in total, signed a joint declaration.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In 15 cases, they added their occupation, the most common being blacksmith, but there were also saddlers, coachmen and decorators (tapezierer). Most probably, the auszügler were manual labourers who were owed money. It was typical for early modern nobles not to pay for goods and services immediately after their delivery. Instead, accumulated bills for larger numbers of goods and services provided by a given supplier over time periods that could last from several weeks or months to several years were paid all in one, either periodically on certain dates or irregularly on demand. For the suppliers, it could be advantageous not to ask their clients too frequently for payment to keep them as customers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Only two creditors of common origin had collateral; the rest were chirographares. In the case of the auszügler, this was because debts based on advanced labour services were not usually secured by a mortgage. Commoners who provided personal credit may not have been offered a security because they had smaller loans to offer on average. Alternatively, they may have abstained from demanding a mortgage out of social considerations.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The chirographares, and thus disproportionately the creditors of lower social rank, were in the most disadvantageous position in the insolvency procedures. Their loans were not repaid by the sales of allodials, and many of them had claims reduced by half in 1743, although this reduction did not apply to the auszügler, who received an exception.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ If the auszügler, seigneurial officials as well as institutions and collectives are discounted, there remain 41 major creditors who can be identified by name. About a third of them were women and they were owed close to a third of the debt owed to persons who could be identified by name. The average loans by these women were only slightly smaller than those of men.

Given the aristocratic social profile of Karl Joseph’s creditors, one might assume that he borrowed a lot of money from relatives or that he had to balance their inheritance claims with debts. But only three close relatives played a substantial role. Count Johann Adolph of Metsch was the father of the first wife of Karl Joseph’s son Franz Anton, although the marriage lasted barely a month.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In 1739, Metsch was still owed 18,000 fl, and in the early 1730s his debts had been even higher. By the beginning of the debt crisis in 1735, he had transferred 40,000 fl of chirographic claims against Karl Joseph to his former son-in-law, having initially promised him a transfer of 100,000 fl in the marriage contract.Footnote ¹¹¹ Franz Anton had thus become another major creditor of his own father. For him, this position was crucial during the administration, since it was only on condition that his claims were reduced that he was permitted to receive a regular pension. Another significant creditor of Karl Joseph, Count Albrecht of Althan, had claims to the value of 14,000 fl secured by fideicommissary property. He descended from a sister of Karl Joseph’s father. In 1725, Karl Joseph had also borrowed about 10,000 fl from his wife Maria Franziska,Footnote ¹¹² but this had been repaid by 1739. Her dowry would also have been repaid by then, since the dowries of the spouses of insolvent individuals had a higher priority than even mortgages in Austrian crida law.Footnote ¹¹³ Other than that, there were no persons with a similarly close degree of kinship among the count’s former loan-givers in 1739.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The fact that Karl Joseph was the only child of his parents is no doubt an element explaining this fact.

Many of the count’s noble as well as non-noble creditors may have simply chosen to lend him money because they were seeking an opportunity to deposit cash for annual interest. Interest-bearing debt claims against landowners constituted an important source of income for landless nobles, especially women and male cadets, but also for landlords who wanted to diversify their sources of revenue or who lacked good opportunities to invest savings in land purchases. The Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family with their ample landed patrimony would have appeared like a rather secure source of annual interest, since, ‘given that the age offered no savings bank network, creditors deposited their excess funds with aristocratic cashiers, whose estates and revenues served as a guarantee of repayment’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ For some creditors, gaining the favour of the counts or similar motives may have been incentives to loan them money as well, but this cannot be proven with the source material analysed for this study.

3.2 Notes on the chronology and reasons for the accumulation of debt

Like other historians researching noble insolvencies in the early modern period, we were unable to find information on the actual purpose of most of the loans that eventually broke Karl Joseph’s financial back.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Early twentieth-century regional historians blamed the ambitions of the count’s father, Leopold Joseph (1653–1706), who had served for five years as ambassador of the Habsburg Empire in Rome.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But while Leopold Joseph was in the red when he lived in the Eternal City, by the end of his life in 1706 his self-reported debts amounted to no more than about 150,000 fl, far less than what caused the financial crisis three decades later.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In a court case in the 1820s, it was alleged that Karl Joseph had inherited 414,097 fl of debt from his maternal ancestors, which was mortgaged on the fideicommissary seigneurie of Drosendorf.Footnote ¹¹⁹ However, it was impossible to verify this claim with other archival material, and the source making this statement is highly unreliable, as its author had a vested financial interest in constructing this narrative. The only documents that indicate the date on which certain debts incurred – a collection of 25 dated bonds and a list of the creditors secured on the allodial seigneurie of Kottingbrunn (see Figure 1) – do not suggest that it was intergenerational debt accumulation that caused the crisis.Footnote ¹²⁰ It must be emphasized, however, that these sources are unlikely to be representative of the whole of the status passivus, and the fact that debts were often paid with loans reduces their informative value. Most of the loans in the two records were not taken out until the 1720s, a decade and a half after the death of Karl Joseph’s parents. This suggests a connection with the purchase of the county of Neuburg am Inn – a small territory on the border between Upper Austria and Bavaria that ‘enjoyed’ immediacy to the Holy Roman Empire –which the nobleman had bought in 1719 for 440,000 fl.Footnote ¹²¹ However, Karl Joseph managed to resell this short-term acquisition to the prince-bishopric of Passau in 1730 for 500,000 fl.Footnote ¹²² The latter purchase contract mentions that Karl Joseph had spent a lot of money on building in the county, but it does not seem plausible that these efforts were the main source of the full encumbrance in the late 1730s. Building efforts are assumed to be an important source of aristocrat debt by several scholars.Footnote ¹²³

Figure 1.

Date of loans taken out by Karl Joseph of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein and his parents (number of loans in brackets).

Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-457; K 030/474-475; K 227/1084, 1744, ‘Extract, was bey …’

Without further investigations, which are beyond the scope of this article, other origins of the loans can only be inferred from the literature. It has often been argued that the eighteenth century was a time when landed elites in several parts of Europe were particularly vulnerable to over-indebtedness. In the case of England, John Habakkuk explained this alleged phenomenon in part by a kind of consumer revolution among the elites following the Glorious Revolution. Luxuries from abroad and manufactured goods became more available, and the tendency of nobles to move to the booming city of London, where there was plenty of opportunity to spend money, strained the budgets of many.Footnote ¹²⁴ Similar tendencies would have been at work in the Habsburg Empire and its capital Vienna, especially among those segments of the nobility who spent much time at the imperial court. Franz Joseph of Plettenberg-Witten, a nobleman from north-western Germany who had moved to Vienna in the 1740s, had run up debts of 800,000 fl (620,800 fl in the mid-1730s) by the time of his insolvency in 1764; his extravagant lifestyle was said to have been the main cause. A later heir of the same family, Max Friedrich, had apparently accumulated debts of 230,000 fl (153,640 fl in the mid-1730s) within two years of moving to Vienna in 1797.Footnote ¹²⁵ Considering that it was partly lavish aristocrats such as these with whom Karl Joseph would have competed in status consumption, overspending on luxuries may have been a major factor in the over-indebtedness.

Aleš Valenta, in his analysis of insolvent aristocrats in Bohemia, agrees that efforts to show off wealth were a major source for expenditure that exceeded the regular income of many nobles.Footnote ¹²⁶ He also points to strong fiscal pressure from the crown from the eighteenth century as another cause.Footnote ¹²⁷ There is some merit to this argument. The ‘diet’s grant’ in Lower Austria increased ninefold in nominal terms from the 1650s to the 1730s, largely as a result of the expansion of the standing army.Footnote ¹²⁸ In theory, many tax increases on the rural population did not directly affect the seigneurial income of their landlords and landladies. The quantum of direct taxes that subjects had to contribute was based on the rents they paid to their landlord or landlady, but most taxes constituted a separate due the subjects had to come up with in addition to their seigneurial rents. This type of taxation is very evident in the records of the judicial administrations of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein patrimony, where money taken in as seigneurial service (herren-gaab) and money collected as taxes (landts-anlagen) was always registered in separate sections. The requirement for landlords to pay the dues their tenants could not pay was one source of noble indebtedness. We have already seen that between 1732 and 1735 alone, Karl Joseph accumulated a tax debt of 94,000 fl. Years later, his son Franz Anton indebted himself to the state with 54,149 fl between 1748 and 1752. It is possible that similar situations had arisen before 1730 and that Karl Joseph had dealt with them by taking out loans.

Finally, it is worth asking whether political involvement might have put a strain on the count of Lamberg’s finances, since the sovereigns’ expectation that aristocratic office-holders would finance their functions partly from their own resources was a feature of the Habsburg system of governance, especially in the field of diplomacy.Footnote ¹²⁹ While Karl Joseph’s position in the Lower Austrian government is not usually regarded as a promising occupation for high ambitions, the count did oversee at least one expensive project of the state. From 1721 at the latest, he chaired a government commission to improve the region’s transport system.Footnote ¹³⁰ A proposal from this period suggested that 350,000 to 400,000 fl should be borrowed to build roads.Footnote ¹³¹ The sources in the Lamberg archive do not tell us much about the outcome of these efforts. It is possible that, if the commission failed to find enough lenders, the count would have stepped in with his own financial resources to take the project forwards in the hope of advancing to the position of governor or a prestigious court office.

3.3 Assets

At the beginning of the judicial administration, all of Karl Joseph’s seigneuries and other properties were located in Lower Austria. Initially, the administrative records divided his landed patrimony into six seigneurial units, four of them of fideicommissary nature (Ottenstein, ‘Rastenberg cum appertinentiis’, Drosendorf and Kranichberg) and two allodial (Kottingbrunn and Gilgenberg). An allodial house in Vienna, let to another count soon after the beginning of the administration, was also an important source of income.Footnote ¹³² Table 3, which is based on records of the first administration for the years 1737 to 1742 as well as records from the second one for the years 1757 to 1759 and 1765 to 1767, shows the development of the regular income of the patrimony in the mid-eighteenth century (excluding tax collections, property sales and other extraordinary income).Footnote ¹³³ The considerable decline in income from the fideicommissary estates after 1740 can probably be explained by the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The data demonstrate that the landed estates bound by the three fidei commissa, established between 1671 and 1706 by ancestors and relatives, were the most important source of regular income for Karl Joseph and his eldest son. It is important to note that income from allodial possessions most probably provided for a higher share of the total income of the patrimony in the time before the first administration records are available. This is because the allodial seigneurie of Waidhofen an der Thaya, which had likely yielded 10,000 fl or more annually, was sold in spring 1737.Footnote ¹³⁴ Before this event, allodial possessions may have provided between 30 and 40 per cent of the revenue. Still, the fidei commissa initially came up for more than half of the income and, since they were relatively safe from judicial execution, we may say that the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family was never in imminent danger of losing the bulk of its landed estates. It is noteworthy that the indebted aristocrats were not themselves large moneylenders. The only time that interest became a relevant factor in the finances of the judicial administration was between 1740 and 1742. It was the policy of the administration to lend surpluses from good years against interest.

Table 3.

Average regular annual income of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein patrimony in the eighteenth century in gulden

Note: In brackets, the share of total income in per cent.

Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-0460, 0463-0466, 0473, 0493, 0499.

Considering that the fidei commissa constituted the bulk of Karl Joseph’s assets and that this type of property could not be used as collateral for loans without special permission, it seems surprising that the count was able to get into debt to the point of insolvency at all. One method, as discussed earlier, was to borrow around 180,000 fl in chirographic credits, which was legal. To identify the second method, we must compare the value of his assets in the late 1730s with their encumbrances. One way of determining a base price for a seigneurie in Lower Austria, or at least most components thereof, was simple and had been carried out by members of the Landmarschall’s Court in 1739, when the value of the count’s allodial possessions was estimated.Footnote ¹³⁵ The court officials calculated the average seigneurial income of the previous eight years then multiplied this average by a factor of 20, a variant of the ‘20-years-purchase’ system, which was also common in other parts of Europe.Footnote ¹³⁶ To this base value, which constituted the majority of the eventual estimate, was added the assessed value of castles, gardens, fishing ponds, livestock, demesne land and similar possessions.Footnote ¹³⁷ Since the average loan carried an annual interest rate of 5 per cent, or 1/20th of the principal, there was a parallelism between the value of seigneurial property and debt. The interest payment on a debt of 100,000 fl could ideally be covered by the income from a seigneurie with the same value. Of course, actual purchase prices diverged from this almost utopian scheme, but it seems to have been a common guideline. In 1739, the Landmarschall’s Court also assessed the value of some movable assets – antiques, medals, books, paintings, stocks of wine and grain, and some active debts – although it was noted that not everything had yet been inspected.

Figure 2 compares the value of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein assets with the debts. This reveals two facts. First, Karl Joseph had hopelessly overburdened two of his seigneuries. Gilgenberg was burdened with mortgages of 70,000 fl, although its actual value was closer to 50,000 fl. This deficit could be balanced by the fact that the seigneurie Kottingbrunn could be sold at a value 20,000 fl higher than its liabilities. But the more serious case of the lucrative seigneurie Waidhofen an der Thaya was not so easy to resolve. The estate was burdened with mortgages to the value of 286,156 fl, even though its sale in 1737 yielded only 215,775 fl. The result was a deficit of about 70,000 fl, which was treated as a chirographic debt in the later course of the judicial administration. Another way in which Karl Joseph had circumvented the prohibition on charging on his fidei commissa was by mortgaging certain allodial possessions for sums that could never be satisfied by their sale. All in all, the total value of the allodial possessions (including movable assets) at the beginning of 1737 was only 575,334 fl, which was not sufficient to cover the family’s total debts of about 840,000 fl. Second, if we apply similar modalities to those that the Landmarschall’s Court used for evaluating the price of allodial seigneurial possessions to estimate the value of the fidei commissa in the late 1730s, the worth of Karl Joseph’s total assets in 1737 amounted to around 1.1 or 1.2 million fl. This explains why the count so confidently borrowed beyond the capacity of his allodials, the encumbrance in 1737 being ‘only’ 70.3 per cent of his total assets if the fidei commissa are included.

Figure 2.

Estimation of assets and liabilities of Karl Joseph of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein, 1737–1741.

Notes: Total assets 1737 = 1,165,781 fl; total liabilities 1737 = 840,526 fl. The fidei commissa were not actually evaluated by the Landmarschall’s Court in 1739. The value in the graph was calculated by multiplying the average seigneurial yields from 1737 to 1739 by a factor of 20. On the one hand, the value would be a minimum estimate because the value of castles, gardens and so on could not be added. On the other hand, 1737 to 1739 were good years for the seigneurial economy. Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-0460; K 034/497, 10 January 1739 and s. d., ‘Verzeüchnus, deren in Wien …’; K 034/500, 16 December 1739.

In a sense, the nature of the nobleman’s insolvency was that of a severe cash-flow insolvency rather than a complete lack of means to pay his debts. The total value of the assets under Karl Joseph’s control would have been sufficient to satisfy the claims of all his creditors, but fideicommissary dispositions in previous decades had prevented the liquidation of many of them, and the state was reluctant to grant exemptions in this regard. What caused the debt crisis was the fact that the necessary payments had reached a level that could no longer be repaid from regular sources of income, after a substantial number of creditors had demanded the repayment of the principal. This happened between 1732 and 1735, following a fall in seigneurial income. Once the crisis had set in, not even the price of all the allodials was sufficient to satisfy the creditors. Thus, authorities considered sales and the use of fideicommissary income as collateral to be necessary, and these measures were to be organized within the confines of a judicial administration.

3.4 Inflation

Over the long run, inflation in the eighteenth century somewhat improved the financial situation of the counts of Lamberg-Sprinzenstein (see Figure 3). Lower Austrian landlords received a lot of their income from labour rents and rents paid in kind as well as activities such as beer production or livestock breeding.Footnote ¹³⁸ Thus, rising prices usually augmented the income of landlords while the claims of their creditors stayed the same. Since the value of landed estates was usually determined on the basis of their annual yields, inflation also increased the proceeds from asset sales. The debt crisis of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family began at a point in time when prices for agricultural products were comparatively low. Already in the course of the first judicial administration that lasted from 1735 to 1743, the purchasing power of the gulden declined by about 15 per cent. By the late 1760s, when the debt problems were mostly resolved, the value of the gulden was only about 70 per cent of what it had been in the middle of the 1730s.

Figure 3.

Purchasing power of the gulden in eighteenth century Vienna (base = average 1733–1737).

Source: Robert C. Allen – Research Pages, https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/sites/allen-research-pages/ [accessed 15 May 2024].

However, the benefits of inflation for the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family must not be overstated. Although prices for agricultural products rose during the time of the first administration, the revenues from the patrimony did not increase. Quite to the contrary, the yields of the fideicommissary estates fell from about 30,000 fl per year on average in the years 1737 to 1739 to roughly 21,000 fl in the years 1740 to 1742 (see Table 3). Economic disruptions, most probably owing to the War of Austrian Succession, negated possible alleviations provided by inflationary developments during this stage of the debt problems. By the time of the second administration from 1756 to 1768, however, although the patrimony had been reduced in size, the nominal income from the remaining estates had visibly improved. The fideicommissary seigneuries of Ottenstein, Drosendorf and Kranichberg, which had not been alienated throughout the debt crisis, yielded an average annual income of 21,756 fl between 1737 and 1739, only 14,656 fl between 1740 and 1742, but 27,704 fl during the first three well-documented years of the second administration (1757–1759) and still 23,526 fl during its last three years from 1765 to 1767. Whether the nobles, their creditors or state authorities were aware that inflation would facilitate debt repayments in the long run is uncertain. Prices had considerably fallen in the early 1720s, for example. Throughout the eighteenth century, the purchasing power of the gulden fluctuated, ‘expensive years’ being followed by ‘cheaper years’ and vice versa.

3.5 Expenses of the judicial administration

On the question of whether the judicial administration from 1735 to 1743 successfully managed the patrimony and its encumbrances, Karl Joseph and his eldest son expressed strong opinions:

Looking at the income and expenditure of the judicial administration between 1737 and 1742, shown in Figures 4 and 5, we can conclude that the two men were accurate in that the actual interest payments of 110,458 fl were several 10,000 fl lower than they should have been.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Especially in the last two years, after the War of the Austrian Succession had reduced the income of the patrimony, the overall debt service was low.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Fortunately for the counts, Maria Theresa had decreed in 1743 that the outstanding interest of chirographic debtors should be cancelled. When it comes to the repayment of principal, the administration did make good progress, repaying 486,393 fl between 1737 and 1742, even discounting the 28,753 fl which Franz Anton had received as a pension, and which were deducted from his debt claims worth 40,000 fl. By May 1743, the status passivus of the patrimony had been reduced from over 840,000 fl in 1737 to 344,501 fl, largely achieved by selling the allodial estates for 489,991 fl. Schendl also managed to collect most of the 154,038 fl in taxes that the state had demanded from the subjects of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein patrimony between 1737 and 1742, although he had to add 6,927 fl from the seigneurial income to pay the full sums, since some subjects could not or would not pay their full dues.Footnote ¹⁴²

Figure 4.

Income of the judicial administration 1737–1742.

Note: 848,706 fl in total. Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-0460.

Figure 5.

Expenses of the judicial administration, 1737–1742.

Note: 822,933 fl in total. Source: NÖLA, HA Lamberg HS 0455-0460.

Contrary to the narrative of the two counts, it must be pointed out that one reason why the judicial administration was impeded in its ability to repay debts was that the state had granted the noblemen the privilege of receiving substantial annual pensions. All in all, between 1737 and 1742, Schendl transferred 54,379 fl of the seigneurial income to members of the Lamberg-Sprinzenstein family, which amounted to about 7 per cent of the total expenditure and 28.5 per cent of the regular income. The largest benefactor, with 28,753 fl, was Franz Anton, the next successor in line. As already mentioned, this was owing to the fact that his supplies also counted as debt redemption and thus contributed to the improvement of the status passivus.Footnote ¹⁴³ Nevertheless, this meant that he was effectively given priority over other creditors, and the reduction of his debts – which would have expired on his father’s death anyway, because they would have become debt claims against himself – restricted Schendl’s means of repaying others. The second largest benefactor was the patrimony’s former owner, Karl Joseph, who received a total of 19,764 fl, or 3,294 fl per year. Other members of the family received hardly any direct transfers from the administration. Schendl was allowed to use 1,800 fl of the seigneurial revenue to cover the costs of the funeral of Karl Joseph’s wife, Maria Franziska, in 1737, and the Landmarschall’s Court did grant the younger sons Karl and Joseph small allowances of 3,153 fl and 810 fl respectively, to further their military careers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Their sister Theresia did not receive a single gulden from the administration. However, her financial situation may have been better than that of the cadet sons, as her mother, who died in 1737, had made her the heiress of assets worth some 12,000 fl.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The three siblings were finally guaranteed an annual pension of 500 fl from the income of the patrimony by the royal decree of 1743, which had ended the administration.