Whose Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary addresses conflicts surrounding water management, a space where different economic and other socio-political interests meet and sometimes clash. The geographical space that it focuses on is the Kingdom of Hungary, and the time frame is the period from the foundation of the Christian state around the year 1000 to the late medieval period.
Modern politics focuses on who has legitimate claims in water-related disputes, but for historians, it is certainly more relevant to understand how such conflicts were approached and resolved in the past. These questions include what kind of disputes unfolded concerning water use; to what degree water was conceived as a private or common good; and how different interests were aligned with each other. Throughout the book’s chapters, it is argued that the use of water by the societies of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages gave rise to complex sets of customs and norms that, until the modern era, were the most important principles for settling water-use disputes.
Whose Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental and landscape history, as well as those studying the legal and urban history of premodern Europe.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names
1. Introduction
1.1. Riverine Landscapes as Conflict Environments in Premodern Europe – Some Historiographic Reflections
1.1.1. New Directions in Research – Where Environmental, Social, and Technological History Meet
1.1.2. Hungary and Central Europe – Research Traditions and Recent Results
1.2. The Goals of this Work
1.2.1. Time and Space
1.2.2. About Sources
1.3. The Structure of the Book
2. The Spread of Water Mills in Medieval Hungary with a Central European Overview
2.1. Mills and Benedictines – Some Preliminary Considerations
2.2. The First Water Mills in the Region – Historical Evidence, Linguistics, and (the Lack of) Archaeological Data
2.3. Conclusions
3. Waterscapes as Conflict Environments in Late Medieval Hungary
3.1. Legal Regulations and Practice of Mill Construction in Medieval Hungary
3.1.1. Locus molendini – A Place, a Right, a Claim?
3.1.2. Locus Molendini in Early Literacy – First References and Terminological Unifications
3.1.3. Terminological Uniformity – Uniformity in Meaning?
3.1.4. Mills and Mill Sites – How Do They Relate to Each Other?
3.2. Rivers in Urban Landscapes – Rivers, Streams, Moats, and Disputes
3.2.1. Major Waterways and Mills – The Example of Buda, Óbuda, and Pest
3.2.2. Streams and Mills in Urban Environments – the Cases of Zagreb and Felhévíz
3.2.2.1. Felhévíz and its Hot Springs
3.2.3. Urban Moats and Water-Use
3.2.3.1. Building Moats, Using Their Waters – A Short Overview
3.2.3.2. The Case of Sopron
3.2.3.3. The Case of Prešov
3.2.3.4. Moats, Urban Topographies, and Mills – Some Conclusions
3.3 Rivers in Mining Areas – Abundance of Water versus Lack of Access?
3.3.1. Mining Town Privileges and Water-Use
3.3.2. Early Urban Privileges and Water Use
3.3.3. Kremnica and Its Water Mills
3.3.4. The Foundation of Nová Baňa and its Water Mills
3.3.5. Mills in Mining Towns: Who Was Entitled to What?
3.4. Rivers as Borders – Another Minefield?
3.4.1. The Border between Ľubotín and Orlov – What Can a Single Case Reveal?
3.4.2. Riverbed Changes and Estate Borders – Was There a Medieval Customary Law in Hungary?
3.4.3. Riverbeds and Borders – Some Conclusions
3.5. Conclusions: Rivers as Conflict Environments
4. The Men behind the Wheel… Building on Water in the Middle Ages
4.1. The Renovation of the Moat of Sopron in 1540 – A Unique Source
4.1.1. The Expenditures on the Work
4.1.2. The Labor Organization
4.2. Millers
4.3. Ditch and Pond Diggers and Pond Masters
4.4. Conclusions
5. Conclusions and Outlook
5.1. The Politics of Water – An Epilogue
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
András Vadas is an associate professor in medieval history at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He graduated from the same institution (PhD, 2015) and the Central European University (PhD, 2020). He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship at Georgetown University (2017) and taught at Columbia University as an István Deák Visiting Professor (2025). He is the author or editor of about a dozen books in English and Hungarian on the environmental, urban, and economic history of premodern Central Europe. His first English-language monograph, The Environmental Legacy of War on the Hungarian-Ottoman Frontier, was published in 2023.
