Mining for precious documents in Vienna’s archives

The early modern Habsburg Monarchy is an interesting playground for mining historians. This particularly applies to the period after 1526, when the Habsburgs incorporated the medieval kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary and thus brought some of the most important mining regions in Central Europe under their rule: Tyrol, the Bohemian Ore Mountains and the Slovakian Ore Mountains.

To research the early modern mining history of the Habsburg Monarchy, historians must almost become miners themselves. Just as miners must make their way through complex geologies, historians have to fight through complex archival strata and mountains of records, whose histories have produced extraordinarily diverse layers of sediment and deposits of documents in diverse places. Through their search for the rich ores – the important sources for answering research questions – historians must understand the “complex geology” of the archives. This applies in particular to former Habsburg records, which are today distributed among different nation states and their associated collections. In this blog post, I want to shed some light on this complex geology and point out potentially interesting deposits, focusing on the Hungarian documents in the Austrian State Archive in Vienna.