Monastic Women and Secular Economy in Later Medieval Europe, ca. 1200 to 1500

Front matter

MONASTIC WOMEN AND SECULAR ECONOMY IN LATER

MEDIEVAL EUROPE, CA. 1200 TO 1500

Annalena Müller

Contents

List of Figures vii Glossary ix Acknowledgments xiii

1 Female Monasticism, Power, and Historiography:

An Introduction 1 PART I Early Medieval Structures and the Late Medieval Economy 21

Index

Figures

2.1 3.1

3.2

3,3

3.4

3.6

3.7

4.1 4.2

5.1

Schematic rendering of the Plan of St. Gall

Fraumünster and its patrimony in the thirteenth century. Map design: Agnes Schormann

Fraumünster and its late medieval patrimony (c. 1430). Map design: Agnes Schorman

(a) Buchau’s patrimony in the thirteenth century.

(b) Buchau’s patrimony in the fourteenth century.

(c) Buchau’s patrimony in the fifteenth century. Map design: Agnes Schormann

Buchau’s patrimony in the fifteenth century with jus patronatus. Map design: Agnes Schormann

Notre-Dame’s ninth-century possessions according to the confirmation by Charles the Bald (858). Map design: Agnes Schormann

Notre-Dame’s seigneuries and churches with jus patronatus. Map design: Agnes Schormann

Notre-Dame’s patrimony in the late fourteenth century. The vast majority of the abbey’s possessions were located in the vicinity of Soissons. Map design: Agnes Schormann

Map of Basel (Matthäus Merian, 1642) with Klingental Klingental’s landed patrimony and tithes in the late thirteenth (left) and late fourteenth centuries (right). Map design: Agnes Schormann

Klingental’s house-economy in the late fifteenth-century Basel. Map design: Agnes Schormann

57 73

Glossary

Monastic Offices

Abbess The head of a monastic community or an entire order. Nominally, the community elected their abbess. However, external appointments through a king or an emperor were possible throughout the medieval and early modern period. The abbess led and represented her convent internally and externally. She was responsible to maintain discipline and peace within the community as well as representing it to the external world.

Bursaress (Schaffnerin) The bursaress is responsible for the convent’s purchases and revenues. Depending on the institution, the bursaress may be responsible for the external economy only (i.e., things that need to be acquired from outside the monastic production).

Bursar (Schaffner) Sometimes also called a procurator; the male equivalent of the bursaress; in addition to financial administration, the bursar was responsible to represent the convent in legal matters.

Calendarian (Jahrzeitmeisterin) The calendarian was in charge of the anniversaries. She ensured that anniversaries and requiem masses were celebrated correctly, and that the tombs of those commemorated were decorated and the required number of candles were lit. The celebration of anniversaries was both a religious and an economic act, as the convent received payments for their commemorative service.

Conversa/converso (lay sister/lay brother) A woman or a man who “converted” from the secular to the religious life; often but not always widows or widowers.

Councillors (Ratschwestern) Their responsibilities varied depending on the community. At Klingental, between 6 and 12 nuns assumed leading positions as councillors. All of the convent’s officers were chosen from among the councillors, including the prioress. As a board, the councilors assisted the prioress, and all officers were accountable to the board.

x Glossary

Grainary mistress At Klingental, a grainary mistress was in charge of the grainary. Among other things, she ensured that there was always enough grain in stock to feed the convent's residents, including its employees and pensioners. The grainary was not only a place of income but also one of spending. From its revenues, Klingental's mayors were paid along with the convent's many other employees.

Prioress If a given community was not presided over by an abbess, it was usually a prioress who was in charge (e.g., at Klingental). A prioress was usually subordinated to an abbess or abbot who frequently resided in a different convent (usually, the abbey).

Pensioners (Pfriindner) In exchange for a sizable donation or annuity, many medieval convents provided room, board, and care for lay people; sometimes, entire families lived out their lives in a monastic community.

Sacristan (Küsterin) The sacristan was in charge of the convent church and everything belonging to it. She ensured that the church and churchyard were in good condition and that the altar was decorated on important liturgical occasions.

Tithe monitor (Zinsmeister) At Klingental, the tithe monitor was in charge of collecting tithes. He was subordinated to the bursar. Having both a tithe monitor and a bursar was fairly uncommon and testifies to Klingental’s economic wealth and the complexity of administering it. While most female communities would employ an external bursar of some sort, that bursar was frequently in charge of collecting also the tithes. Another Klingental specification was that neither bursar nor tithe monitor were externally employed, but belonged to Klingental’s familia as they were recruited from the ranks of the monastery’s lay brothers.

Vestiarian (Kammermeisterin) The primary task of the vestiarian was to ensure that there were always sufficient linen and other household commodities in stock.

External Offices

Amman/Pfleger A secular officer, frequently concerned with financial and legal matters, similar to a bursar of a monastery.

Mayer/mayor A local representative of a seigneur (duke, abbess, etc.); mayors had an intermediate position between subjects and seigneur; they imposed the seigneur’s will, collected tithes and rents, and frequently dispersed low justice; they were also responsible to report problems from the villages to the seigneur, and they ensured the maintenance of the agrarian infrastructure.

Glossary xi

Vogt Sometimes called advocatus, or imperial bailiff, or reeve; he was the local representative of the king or emperor and served as head of the regional court where capital crimes were tried.

Other Terms

Anniversary Annual ritual which commemorated the souls of the dead; anniversaries were celebrated by charitable and religious institutions, such as hospitals, parishes, and monasteries.

Anniversary book A type of register which developed from high medieval necrologies but with an additional focus on the economic and liturgical aspects of a convent’s commemorative services.

Erschatz A fee charged when a property changed hands in Basel — either through sale or inheritance.

Grainary (Kornhaus) The place where tithes and rents rendered in grain were registered and stored.

Vergichtbuch Official account books of debts kept by Basel’s courts since the late Middle Ages.

Weisung An annual visitation of the buildings meant to ensure adequate maintenance in Basel.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a great many people and institutions that have offered their support over the course of the past years. The generous funding of the Swiss National Foundation in the context of an SNSF Ambizione Grant has enabled me to research and write this book. My gratitude to Dr. Roberto Sala is immeasurable. His kind and patient help in designing the database was a sine qua non. Without the indefatigable work and commitment of Dr. Agnes Schormann, this book would have not been possible. A versed historian and a whiz in digital history, she helped feed the database and designed the maps used in this book. I also benefitted from the feedback of many people who took the time to read chapters or listen to talks I gave on its topics. These include the AGFEM circle and the members of the Institut fiir Geschichtliche Landeskunde at the University of Tübingen, especially Professor Sigrid Hirbodian. My special thanks go to Dr. Tjark Wegner, who has explained the different types of vögte, meyer, and other feudal office holders to me. In this context, I need to extend my thanks to Agnes Schormann once again — who read each chapter of this book and provided valuable feedback. I am also grateful to Dr. Anne Diekjobst, who always made time to discuss late medieval monastic economies with me and who, in the early stages of this book, urged me to pay close attention to anniversaries and post-obit economies. Further thanks are owed to Dr. Agniezska Rec who edited several chapters of this book, my editors, Michael Greenwood, Louis Nicholson-Pallett, and all the other great people at Routledge who allowed this monograph to be published. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank Karin, who has learned more about medieval nuns in these past years than she ever wanted to know, and Hopper, who spent a great many hours purring on my desk, being the best writing companion I could have wished for.

1 Female Monasticism, Power, and Historiography

An Introduction

From her abbatial quarters, Abbess Odeline de Trachy (1256-1273) can overlook the borrow called Notre-Dame. She can see the houses of the Rue St. Pierre, the new hospital, and the church of St. Pierre au Parvis, home of the recalcitrant canons who are subject to her authority. The streets below the abbey are busy as usual. There are the regular crowds near the market, the taverns, and workshops. Construction-noise is echoing in the streets. A new prison is being erected. It is bigger than then old one which has become too small for the growing number of men and women from the abbey’s seigneuries awaiting trial. The abbess is mistress over 27 seigneuries. It is her responsibility to maintain the peace and ensure that justice is served. She is also responsible for her subjects’ protection from external harm. That is why, Elisabeth has commissioned a tunnel to be excavated. The tunnel will connect the abbey’s walled quarter with the rest of the city if the city of Soissons should see another siege. In that case, the abbess will have to order the gates of the borrow shut. But the tunnel will allow for smuggling food inside the abbey’s quarter. If there is any to be procured, of course. In reality, there is little Elisabeth can do to protect her subjects from the wars that have ravaged the area for as long as anybody can remember. And even less for those living outside of Soissons. But maybe the tunnel will bring a little safety, at least for the residents of the abbey’s borrow...

Although this story is fictionalized, its key elements — the walled quarter, seigneuries, prison, and tunnel - are historically documented.! From the seventh until the late eighteenth century, the abbess of Notre-Dame de Soissons was a powerful feudal lord in the region of Soissons. And she was no exception. At the time, innumerable abbesses exercised secular authority all across Europe. They administered territories where they collected taxes, dispersed justice, and even recruited soldiers for the king’s army. In addition to being places of feudal authority, medieval convents were economic centers. Monastic demesnes produced great quantities of grain, wine, and fruits, which fed both a convent’s inhabitants and employees, and surpluses were sold on regional markets. Bridges, quarries, mills, and ponds brought further revenues that in one way or another entered the local markets.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003299905-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license

While a common phenomenon in medieval Europe, abbesses and the institutions they administered rarely appear in textbooks on feudal Europe. The majority of studies that engage with medieval society at large continue to conceive of the Middle Ages as a period of male authority. To some degree, this has long applied to social historians and researchers of women’s and gender history alike. The latter, too, long considered medieval women as marginalized agents - and those women who yielded power - political or economic - as exceptions from the norm.? In the mid-1990s, Georges Duby succinctly summarized the discipline’s prevailing perception when he wrote that “the Middle Ages were resolutely male.”* And elsewhere, that “by reason of their physical constitution, of the nature of their body, and the sex which defines them, women were deemed incapable of exercising the power of command, potestas.”* At the time, Duby was the most famous representative of this view, but he was not the only one. Rather, this notion remained dominant throughout the early 2000s.

In recent years, this view has begun to change. Challenging the “inherited narrative,” a growing number of studies have revealed elite women to have habitually yielded authority, ruling counties and duchies alongside their husbands or alone and even raising armies.’ These studies have shown that powerful women were not so exceptional in medieval Europe after all.* As a result, the traditional image of the male European Middle Ages has begun to crumble, as it is gradually being replaced by a new, more nuanced one.

This monograph will contribute to rewriting the narrative of women and power in medieval society by focusing on the secular and, particularly, the economic authorities of female monastics. With a chronological focus on the late Middle Ages, the following chapters will center on four convents located in modern-day France, Germany, and Switzerland. The four institutions are Notre-Dame de Soissons, Buchau Abbey, Fraumiinster of Zurich, and Klingental of Basel. The first three were founded in the early Middle Ages. Notre-Dame’s origin dates to the mid-seventh century, Buchau’s to ca. 770, and those of Fraumiinster Abbey to the year 853. All three were aristocratic convents which were endowed with far-ranging feudal prerogatives that were largely, but not exclusively, derived from landed possessions. The influence of the fourth convent, Klingental, a thirteenth-century foundation, was primarily economic and financial. It rested on an impressive portfolio which the convent’s nuns steadily built throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The four convents considered in this study are examples of top-tier female monasteries that existed all over Catholic Europe and that possessed both great economic and territorial authority throughout the Middle Ages and frequently beyond.

Women and Power: Beyond the Extraordinary

In the 1970s, feminist historians set out to show that women very much had had a history before the modern era, and that archives housed innumerable

= sources testifying to the lives, deeds, and agencies of premodern women. They argued that the historiographical silence regarding women was not due to a lack of documents, but resulted from the dominant male view on history that had simply omitted these sources. In a second step, women’s historians set out to show that the overlooked histories of women from all ranks of society mattered. Scholars, such as Joan Kelly, argued that the bypassing of historical women had yielded a distorted perception of the distant past in general. And that taking into consideration female perspectives would force historians to reconsider the discipline’s master narratives, including its periodization.” Kelly and others demanded that historiography as a whole needed to be overhauled and history be rewritten to include women.

The then new field of Women’s History had departed from a defensive position. Its proponents sought to prove that women’s history mattered for the discipline as a whole, a quest that was met with much resistance. Moreover, this defensive position brought with it a paradox. On the one hand, feminist scholars argued against the notion of female invisibility in the medieval world. On the other hand, they did so while operating within the conceptual framework of male power and female subordination in premodern Europe. As a result, much of the field’s work tended to conceive of female agencies as exceptional and as having to be wrestled from a more or less encumbering patriarchy. In recent years, the field’s historiographical narrative has begun to change from a defensive one, where women had to fight for their space and independence, to a more affirmative one that readily assumes that elite women naturally partook in power.

Operating with a more nuanced definition of power was the prerequisite for altering the narrative. When Georges Duby, and others with him, had argued that women were incapable of exercising power in medieval Europe, their assertion largely rested on a simplified version of the Weberian concept of power: Since women did not fight wars in medieval Europe, they were incapable of exercising power. The question of women and power has been revisited many times since the 1990s.’ In my view, one of its most useful reconceptions is that of German medievalist Christine Reinle. In her 2015 essay “Was bedeutet Macht im Mittelalter?,” she assumed a strictly structuralist perspective.! Reine did not contend herself with the notion of power as the ability to command and punish. Rather, drawing on sociologist Michael Mann, she established a structural definition of power and rule first, which allowed her to answer the question about women and power, second."

Max Weber famously defined power as the ability to impose one’s will within a social relationship despite resistance.'? The problem with such a broad definition of power is the same as Duby’s variation of it - it is too vague to be operable. Weber was keenly aware of the problem and shifted his attention to authority instead. Authority is closely connected to power, but it is structurally more tangible.'* Many sociologists after Weber have taken the same route, including Michael Mann. Mann defines authority as a form of power which the affected groups and institutions consider beneficial.

Legitimate authority, according to Mann, is based upon a set of shared values, such as notions of respect, adhesion to norms, and hierarchical structures. Like other sources of power, also authority is socially constructed. It is rooted, among other things, in economic, military, and/or political influence.'* Mann’s definition of authority also includes the aspect of imposing one’s will, which is central to any definition of power and authority. However, as Mann’s definition also considers the means through which the imposition of will is achieved, it opens the circle of those capable of exercising authority beyond men wielding arms. Christine Reinle used Mann’s definition and adapted it to make it operable for inquiries concerning medieval Europe.

When applying sociological concepts of power and authority to the Middle Ages, one needs to take into consideration a number of prerequisites which a ruler had to meet. According to Reinle, these include physical integrity and marital legitimacy. In addition to such cultural requirements, Reinle identifies access to material and social resources as the sine qua non for the effective exercise of authority and rule in medieval Europe.!5 Material resources include the discretionary disposition of land, money, warriors, horses, etc., while social resources comprise the ability to appoint individuals into (lucrative) offices.!* The effectiveness of authority in medieval Europe thus depended on its bearer’s structural, infrastructural, and social wealth. In other words, an authoritative ruler needed to possess the material resources to impose their will, to keep the peace among their people, and the social resources to grant favors and disfavors and thus to be able to effectively foster and regulate patron-client relationships.'” Whether women had access to such material and social resources depended on a number of things, including their social status and local laws of succession. However, the female sex was not a marker that excluded them from exercising authority.** If women disposed of the social and material resources, they could, and indeed, they did, wield authority in medieval Europe, as the growing number of studies engaging with medieval queenship and female aristocrats show.”

Nevertheless, one needs to be careful to not go overboard. Although recent studies have demonstrated that authority exercised by a female was not exceptional in medieval Europe, it also remains true that the Middle Ages were uncomfortable with a female ruler. Especially where secular rule was concerned, medieval society always preferred a man on the royal or ducal throne.? But, there was one vast area of dominion where women were the natural, even the only, choice: female monasteries. Early and high medieval abbesses were vested with much of the same authorities as secular lords. Just as secular lords, abbesses ruled over their convents’ seigneuries, they dispersed justice, levied taxes, and generally were the highest authority. This omnipresent “secular” aspect of female monasticism has hitherto largely escaped both scholars of medieval queenship and scholars of female monasticism.?! And this study sets out to contribute to filling this gap.

Female Monasticism and Their Forgotten Power in Medieval Europe

Monasteries were the archives of the Middle Ages. Not only centers of religious, philosophical, and medical knowledge, their walls also guarded a convent’s chartered rights, privileges, and other legal documents. The wealth of written sources that has come down to us from monasteries is unrivaled. It is therefore not surprising that monastic history has long been a traditional field of medieval inquiry. However, here as elsewhere, historians of the nineteenth and of the first half of the twentieth centuries tended to focus on male orders.” This is true in terms of both historical studies and source editions. Only over the course of the past 30 years, historical scholars have begun to take an interest in the overlooked influence of female monastic communities. This observation holds particularly true for Germanophone and Anglophone scholarship.?* In the latter, female monasticism has become a rich and diverse field of research since the late 1990s.*4 Closely tied to the cultural turn and the rise of gender history, studies have engaged with monastic communities as places of cultural production and learning, gradually debunking the myth of unlearned nuns and even revealing their convents as places of politics.?*

The focus of Germanophone historiography has been slightly different. Because of its traditional ties to Landesgeschichte, studies tend to be strictly empirical — sometimes bordering on the descriptive. Landesgeschichte can be described as regional history on an academic level with a distinct methodology which insists on considering every historical source available for the object or region under study.” Landesgeschichte has a long tradition within German academia in general and the study of medieval monasticism in particular. Moreover, and going beyond the disciplinary limits of Landesgeschichte, German historians have long been interested in the early medieval foundations of female convents and their role for the Christianization of Central Europe and the stabilization of Frankish rule.” A number of recent Landesgeschichte studies have begun to shed light on their later medieval fates and have shown that these aristocratic convents frequently remained socially and economically influential throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.?* However, resulting from its strict confinement to regional history and limited interest in comparison on a larger scale, scholars of the field frequently assume that these powerful convents of early medieval origin (Stifte) were a German specificity which fundamentally differed from nunneries elsewhere.”? As the following chapters will show, this assumption does not hold up to transregional scrutiny.”

While the geographical focus of Landesgeschichte is one factor for explaining the lack of transregional studies, the general lacuna of studies engaging with French nunneries is another. France is the natural region of comparison because of the shared Frankish origins of modern-day Germany, Switzerland, and France, and because Frankish Europe was the period to which date the origins of many powerful female monasteries.*! Apart from a few notable exceptions, French historiography has traditionally paid little attention to female monasticism, although medieval France was particularly rich in powerful convents.* The absence of source editions and reference works further complicates any research project on medieval French convents. And much work remains to be done here.’

Authority and Landownership

This monograph engages with different types of authority held by female monasteries and enquires as to how these developed in the long durée. Moreover, it asks about the factors and strategies that determined the institutions’ long-term economic success or eventual decline. Especially for monastic institutions of early medieval origin, landownership was a central source of both their economic wealth and authority. Thus, the terms “feudalism” and “manorialism” immediately come to mind when wanting to put names on their economic nature. However, the concepts of “feudalism” and “manorialism” have seen a similarly exhaustive scholarly engagement as the notions of “power” and “authority.” While I do not wish to enter the debate, the terminological evolution along with a delamination of the terms’ usage in this study needs addressing.**

Scholarly debates about feudalism date back to the eighteenth century. At the time, the notion had been shaped by two centuries of academic discussions on feudal and agrarian laws.% With the birth of the modern university and academic social and historical studies during the nineteenth century, social theorists and historians began to avail themselves of these previously strictly legalistic terms. The period’s scholars expanded their usage and gave them a broader meaning. They applied the terms to describe the economic and social constitution of the medieval political system.” In other words, during the nineteenth century, feudalism (and manorialism) changed from legal terms as found in medieval charters to analytical categories meant to reflect the structure of medieval society and economy at large.

That in itself is nothing unusual, as historians avail themselves of a great number of analytical categories, which are necessary to make the distant past intelligible to modern minds. This is also true for feudalism, which has brought about a number of groundbreaking studies that have allowed for a better understanding of the complexity and diversity of medieval societal structures, including, of course, Marc Bloch’s La société féodale (1939).% However, after over a century of feudal and manorial studies, the categories have been criticized as having become so general that they fail to describe something in particular.” It would be futile to engage at length in the criticisms and defenses of their continuous usage, as others have done so sufficiently.*’ Instead, it shall suffice to briefly outline the meanings attributed to them in the subsequent chapters.

As the concepts were only born in the “post-feudal ages” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is evident that no medieval man or woman would have described their societal environment as feudal, nor would they have understood what such a description might imply. However, although the terminology is modern, the phenomena it seeks to describe are not. Along with the late Susan Reynolds, I will distinguish feudalism “in the narrower, feudovassalic sense of relations between lords and vassals within the noble class” from “seigneurie or manorialism, that is, relations between lords and peasant.”* For the most part, the ties this study discusses fall into the category of manorial relations between lords (monasteries) and peasants. But naturally, it also touches on feudal ties whenever relationships between said monasteries and other nobles, such as kings or emperors, are concerned.

All manorial relationships have land at their center. In medieval Europe, landownership usually came with a number of rights over the people who lived on it. The character of these rights was not static and changed over time, and manorial authority was the most exhaustive during the early and high Middle Ages. Authority derived from landownership is what is meant when the following chapters speak of manorial or seigneurial authority. However, not all prerogatives of a seigneur were tied to the land he or she owned. A seigneur’s suzerain could transfer additional authorities to a local representative. Such was the case when Henry III vested the abbess of Fraumiinster with the regalia, which effectively allowed her to govern Zurich in the eleventh century. In that case, the abbess of Fraumiinster yielded both, manorial authority over her peasants and feudal authority over the citizens of Zurich.“ Thus, a clear-cut distinction between feudal and manorial authority is not always easy to make, as they could and often would overlap. Moreover, the actual power a manorial and/or feudal lord exercised over people also depended on their individual status. A lord had more authority over serfs than over free peasants, and urban citizens frequently enjoyed greater freedoms than peasants, etc. Because of the inherent blurriness and complexity of both the terminology and its actual implications, I only imply the minimal definitions, that is, simply distinguishing between relationships of lord and vassal and lord and peasant.

Such questions of terminology aside, landownership remained a central source of authority during the entire Middle Ages, not only in rural environments but also within cities. Throughout their existence, the three institutions of early medieval origin, that is, Notre-Dame, Buchau, and Fraumiinster, drew their wealth and power primarily from their manorial and feudal authorities with which they had been endowed during the centuries following their foundations and which they kept throughout their existence. On the other side, later medieval institutions, such as Klingental of Basel, were usually not been given manorial rights upon their foundation. Nevertheless, also these younger institutions strove to acquire demesnes. While also late medieval landownership still came with a number of rights over the people working it, these were less comprehensive and not stricto sensu seigneurial. As a result, the objective behind amassing arable land was different for convents such as Klingental. As Chapters 4 and 5 will discuss in detail, it was primarily economic.

Top-Tier Female Monasticism

The following chapters center on Notre-Dame de Soissons, Buchau am Federsee, Fraumiinster of Zurich, and Klingental of Basel. While these institutions differed in many regards, they are nevertheless a representative sample of wealthy and powerful convents whose abbesses, and in the case of Klingental prioresses, managed diverse economic portfolios. They were elite institutions, and entry into any one of them required not only the payment of a significant dowry, but for the most part also noble lineage.* All four of them were wealthy and did not have to worry about making ends meet. They did not depend on civic donations to maintain their convent nor was the community obliged to engage in paid labor to supplement their institution’s resources.* In other words, Notre-Dame, Buchau, Fraumiinster, and Klingental were upper tier convents. Considered in their upper-tier context, the nunneries of early medieval origin are typical, in that they were endowed with large territorial holdings which required long-term managing, whereas Klingental is an example of a late medieval urban convent whose influence was derived from its economic success. An important factor that all four communities shared was their self-government.

Of the four, only the Dominican convent of Klingental was part of a larger monastic network. Generally, female houses within a monastic order were less independent in their actions, as they usually required their abbot’s (or prior’s) consent for economic and other important decisions.** However, within some orders, such as the Dominican, individual houses enjoyed far-ranging independence. The absence of a paramount abbot or prior allowed these communities to act independently in matters concerning their convent and patrimony. At the same time, their independence allows us to discern their economic strategies and the scope of their actions more clearly in the sources than in those cases where they were mitigated through a superior abbot. However, independence from a superior abbot does not mean that the abbesses and their communities had no superiors or rivals. Quite naturally, they had to engage with bishops and negotiate with secular lords and city councils. The ways in which the institutions did so - if they were able to put family networks to use, and the ways in which they managed their ties to the citizenry over time — were crucial for maintaining their long-term economic health and independence.