Eugen Peter Schwiedland · 1918
Schwiedland’s historical-economic book review presents Peez’s archival study of Vienna’s Landsverleger-Compagnia (1622–1624) through the concerns of wartime provisioning. Its organizing premise is that the economic disruptions of the First World War lend renewed relevance to the Thirty Years’ War:
Der Weltkrieg, der die wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse tief erschüttert und namentlich die Landwirtschaft auf eine harte Probe stellt, steigert das Interesse für analoge Verhältnisse während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges.
English translation: The World War, which has profoundly shaken economic conditions and is putting agriculture in particular to a severe test, heightens the interest in analogous conditions during the Thirty Years' War.
The review moves from this contemporary analogy to the company’s foundation, the commercial pressures that defeated it, and its place in the history of Austrian trading companies. Schwiedland identifies it as old Austria’s first trading company and, apparently, Europe’s first wartime provisioning company. His central interpretive move is to connect its commercial organization with the attempt to regulate prices under conditions of war and dependence on external supplies.
Vienna’s cattle trade linked German consumers to supplies from Ottoman Hungary, especially the Alföld, and Styria. It generated customs revenue and merchant wealth while supporting a reciprocal trade in German goods toward Hungary and Ottoman territories. Yet Hungarian suppliers used their advantageous position to maintain high prices through organized rings. Faced with expensive provisioning and fiscal distress, the imperial authorities considered a state monopoly before choosing a monopolistic company in whose profits Ferdinand II held a one-third share. Schwiedland emphasizes the evidentiary strength of Peez’s account: the Hofkammer archive preserves material on the enterprise and its investors, alongside balance sheets and their official scrutiny.
The company’s history becomes a study of the limits of price regulation. Schwiedland singles out monetary deterioration, general inflation, maximum prices, and conflicting Austrian and Hungarian interests as parallels with modern conditions. Austrian agricultural insufficiency and Hungarian predominance in cattle raising culminated in a boycott of Vienna’s market, forcing the dissolution of the company intended to regulate prices. A striking detail makes the unevenness of wartime scarcity concrete:
Zu erwähnen ist auch die Verteuerung der Fettstoffe: 1624 kostete in Wien Unschlitt fünfzehnmal soviel wie Rindfleisch.
English translation: Also to be mentioned is the rise in the price of fats: in 1624 tallow cost fifteen times as much in Vienna as beef.
The review then widens from the company to the institutions and geography of the trade. Peez’s contribution includes detailed treatment of the imperial Handgrafenamt and the cattle markets at Vienna and Auspitz. Schwiedland traces cattle and hide movements across central Europe, the activity of Augsburg and Nuremberg merchants, and Venice’s competition for Hungarian cattle. These connections show why Vienna’s privileged purchasing position remained vulnerable to alternative routes and direct dealings between German merchants and Hungarian drovers. A footnote adds a linguistic explanation of “Gries,” linking the market’s physical terrain to French “grève” and its association with labor stoppages.
The conclusion places the failed company within a longer institutional sequence. After its dissolution, Hungarian influence over Vienna’s market returned and prices rose; under Leopold I, the First Austrian Oriental Company again brought them down. Schwiedland therefore treats the early enterprise as a precedent whose importance survived its short commercial life:
Darum ist die Landsverlegerkompanie als Vorläuferin der späteren großen österreichischen Handelskompanien zu betrachten.
English translation: For that reason the Landsverleger Company is to be regarded as the forerunner of the later great Austrian trading companies.
His favorable judgment rests on Peez’s reconstruction of economic life under severe pressure. The review’s distinctive relevance lies in its conjunction of archival business history and wartime comparison: monopoly, fiscal participation, and price ceilings appear as historically situated responses to supply dependence, constrained by the market power of producers beyond the authorities’ effective control.
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