Government Finance

The history of government finance in the countries of the Baltic area in the later Middle Ages suffers generally from a lack of sources. It is normally impossible to express economic realities for this area in statistical terms. Financial records were poor from the beginning and have been preserved only in a fragmentary fashion; but even if they had been preserved without loss, they would probably still have told only an unsatisfactory tale of what really happened. It is not before the period of centralized royal governments that we first have the chance of surveying financial development with any degree of certainty. Even at this stage, however, although some figures are available, they are scarcely ever of a sort which would permit safe deductions about the rise and fall of revenue.

For our knowledge of government finance we are consequently thrown back for the most part upon legal and political documents and what we know of the political circumstances of the time. Such material, clearly, provides only glimpses of economic conditions and hints about the crucial economic problems of government. On the other hand, it does reveal the relationship between needs and resources—the activities of kings and dukes and their counsellors which called for expenditure, and the measures they took to obtain some sort of financial balance. It is in any case impossible to estimate the taxable capacity of a medieval people; at least in the political sources we get evidence of the limits of its willingness to pay taxes. So the history of government finance in the medieval states of northern Europe is the history of state administrations wrestling with economic difficulties of which we only now and then get a clear view.