Introduction

The particular character of the material culture of North Hanseatic medieval cities suggests impressive urban structures with their own law. Behind these are complex institutions with ‘public’ services deriving from them, which is what make it possible for a highly-differentiated township to function.

The written monumenta, in particular the town and invoice books (as well as documents like privileges, files of jurisdiction or business acts, wills, public and private chronicles, parish registers, etc.), help to decipher that administrative core, the workings behind the protection and control of that complex community. The reason for this is that the budget system in general played a key role in the organization of all aspects of urban life. The complex structures of urban society were unthinkable without finances and without the ‘rationality’ of a ‘specific management’.

The formation and maintenance of a city are only conceivable in connection with the development of a public cash system. Its structure, along with the development of urban law, determined the level of understanding of local administration, and its efficiency defined the scope of material mobility vis-à-vis the town authority and the surrounding powers. As this demonstrates, money is power. Examples to be borne in mind are the acquisition of privileges by purchase (e.g. wall construction), financing of military potential (e.g. mercenary force), purchase of profitable jurisdiction (e.g. tolls, mills), and investment in public infrastructure (e.g. harbours, cranes, department stores, canals).

General Observations

The genesis of urban finances and their administration in Braunschweig, Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck and Lüneburg could be interpreted as an entirely synchronous process. Lüneberg's position as a salt-town made it something of a special case, which I will return to later. If we look at the oldest documents in each case – fragments of the finance departments' calculations (Kämmereirechnungen) from the early fourteenth century – and also bear in mind that no other systematically organized accounting tradition was established until some decades later, it is possible to arrive at some initial general observations.

After the constitution of an independent council, the medieval town budget consisted of an ordinary budget and an extraordinary budget.