Financing transfers: buying, exchanging and inheriting properties in early modern southern Tyrol

Abstract

ABSTRACT The debate on early modern European land markets investigates the involvement of kinship networks and possible links between land transfers and rural credit. In context of our project “The Role of Wealth in Defining and Constituting Kinship Spaces”, I found proceedings settling post-mortem successions as well as many commercial land transactions in the court district of Sonnenburg in the Puster valley. These inheritance and purchase contracts have one thing in common: they had to be financed and often this was done by a transfer of existing liabilities secured on the land. This leads to the question of affordability. For, especially in context of a variant of impartible inheritance, succession involved assuming existing debts and new obligations with compensation payments of ceding siblings. But not all succession decisions or conveyances’ terms of payment were recorded in the court books. I will complement the limited quantitative data with case studies that show the entanglement of commercial and succession related transfers to ask who had access to transfers and how they were financed. In particular, I will use case studies that reveal the importance of family money – specifically women’s marriage portions – and complex negotiations in financing land transactions. Looking at financing as a social practice shows how careful planning and flexible horizontal lending structures enabled multiple land transactions in early modern Tyrol.