Call for Papers
The Sale of Governance in Pre-Modern Europe and the Mediterranean (1100-1600)
Workshop Friday-Saturday, 19-20 June 2026
University of Vienna, Institute of Austrian Historical Research
Workshop Aims: Beginning in the High Middle Ages, rulers in Europe and the Mediterranean put governance on offer. From Crete (purchased by the Venetians in 1204) to the Canary Islands (bought by the Spanish nobleman Enrique Pérez de Guzmán y de Castilla in 1418) to Iceland (offered first to the Dutch, then to Henry VIII of England in 1518) to countless examples in the Holy Roman Empire, late medieval/early modern secular and religious authorities priced, pawned, mortgaged, bought, and sold offices, bishoprics, titles, fiefs, cities, and entire regions in what became an active market for governance that ultimately totaled many millions of pounds, florins, ducats, hyperpyron, and guilders. Selling governance meant more than just accepting a bribe in exchange for appointing an official; it involved temporarily or permanently transferring authority over land and people to those who would pay for it.
In the past decade, numerous studies of public finance and taxation have taken note of this phenomenon. While richly detailed and important, these works typically approach the market for pre-modern governance from the perspective of either diplomatic or economic history. This workshop aims to build from this excellent work by exploring the market for pre-modern governance in its broadest and most ambitious geographical and methodological terms. It aspires to bring together scholars working across all of pre-modern Europe and the Mediterranean. It further encourages contributions drawing on a wide range of archival, visual, and literary sources including legal decisions, private letters, chronicles, funeral orations, civic rituals, poetry, prose, manuscript illuminations, frescoes, and mosaics, among others. We also invite scholars working beyond political and economic elites to explore how all levels of pre-modern European and Mediterranean society from rulers to ruled came to imagine governance as monetizable. Ultimately, the organizers wish to promote scholarship that examines vendible governance outside merely the financial and economic by addressing how the market for governance intersected with questions of class, race, gender, politics and society.
Questions the workshop aims to address include:
- How and why did selling and mortgaging rights of governance arise in the High Middle Ages and become commonplace in later centuries?
- Did the sale of secular and ecclesiastic governance differ across Latin Christendom? Can we speak of one culture of vendible governance or many?
- How do the selling and mortgaging of governance require us to rethink historical grand narratives on state formation and capitalism?
- What role did the Commercial Revolution play in promoting the market in governance? How did political actors borrow technologies, practices, and routines from the commercial world?
- Given that recent research has begun to draw attention to women who bought and sold governance, what roles did gender and gendered language play in shaping these practices?
- How did contemporary chroniclers, annalists, and other historical writers narrate the sale of governance? What economic, legal, religious, and spatial exempla from the classical, Christian, and commercial worlds did they draw upon?
- How did contemporary artists render visual the sale of governance in various media including mosaic, manuscript illustration/illumination, tapestry, etc.?
- What role did the sale of governance play in the expansion of Latin Christian rule in the Baltic, the Levant, and the Aegean (e.g. the Frankokratia)?
- How did local populations respond to the sale of their communities or rights? How did they articulate their resistance or cooperation? How should historians integrate the sale of governance into our narratives of pre-modern colonialism, imperialism, and race?
Workshop Details
- We welcome proposals based on new research from scholars at any stage in their career.
- Proposals should include a 250-word abstract. Please include a two-page vita.
- Submit proposals by 15 October 2025 to either Prof. Michael Martoccio (martoccio@wisc.edu) or Prof. Jonathan Lyon (lyon@univie.ac.at) with the subject line “2026 Vienna Conference.” Acceptances will be sent by 1 November.
- The organizers will offer to cover presenters’ travel and lodging expenses.
