Money Prices and Power in Poland 16th-17th Centuries

The first articles in this volume focus on sources for the history of Baltic commerce and the evaluation of their data on prices. In most cases though surviving data is hardly adequate for any extensive quantitative analysis of Polish economic history and many of these articles endeavour in different ways to use comparitive approaches to help overcome this lack of substantial statistical base - hence the set of studies on the economy of travelling and the observations of travellers. Professor Maçzak then turns to the structures of power in Poland and elsewhere in late renaissance Europe looking in particular at informal power relationships and patterns of patronage. In terms of the Polish-Lithunaian state he would hold that centralized government was already critically weakened in the late 15th century and the 16th century saw the creation of a new power structure based on local self-government and dominated by the nobility.