Seite - 267 - in The Power of Urban Water - Studies in premodern urbanism

16 Water asanEconomicResourceandasanEnvironmental Challenge 267 The reason for the establishment and traditing of the account roles probably lies in the quarrels between lord and local commune over the excise tax imposed by the town’s elite for the purpose of financing the constructionwork. Upon that act, probably pre-existing tensions erupted andwere later resolved – for the time being – by co-management of the excise tax, which resulted in shared accounting. Still, the archbishops built a fortress, soon to be intra muros,andafteryearsofoccasionallyevenviolent struggles, theyprevailed.Yet, thecommunal efforts in constructing and financing thewallwere amajor building block, so to speak, in the process of forming the commune as a body politic andmunicipal institution.12 Granted, these accounting rolls are rather situative, standingquite alone in tradition,unlike the serialmunici- pal account books of later centuries, but certainly the series of eleven consecutive rolls on the samematter is remarkable for the13thcentury–andtheyareamongtheearliest in theEmpire– and theyare equally certainly relevant to our interest here. While,atKoblenz,weobservearather indirect linkageofwater, townandpoliticalconflicts betweencommuneand lordship,wehavemoreexplicitmaterial on that triangle for someAlsa- tiansituations inthe13thcentury.Wethereforereturnto that regionandits intenseurbanisation process, increasing in the 13th century, mainly withmedium and small sized towns, which is largely due to wine-growing and the wine trade, and the successful export of this.13 In 1236, KingHeinrich (VII) granted the TeutonicOrder the right to build awatermill close to his rela- tivelyyoungcivitasofMülhausen inUpperAlsace.At first sight, theremightbenothingextraor- dinary about this grant by the royal court, but the local townspeople –whohad aministerial elite adhering to the royal party–becamequite enragedover it. For theyhad just experienced the King and the Bishop of Strasbourg (the former manorial lord there) quarelling over the dominionof that stretch for twodecades–and theycertainlydidnotwanta third feudal factor ‘onsite’. So, theycalleda townassembly in thechurchand–uponcommuniomniumconsilio– built their ownmill right at the place designated for the Teutonic Knights.What a power grab by theurbancommune!Tounderstand thataction,onehas to take intoaccount thatmillswere not only places of food processing then, but also inevitable places of power, and not least for levying fees, namely themill tax.14 Furthermore, in this case the supposed site was probably part of the common land, to which the commune had rights of use, if not of appropriation – andwhichwas a, if not the important factor in thedevelopment of the communeas apolitical actor, not only inMülhausen, but in several developing towns of the region.Water expanses were, indeed, often an essential part of the commons and oftenmanaged by the commune. It is quite significant that the documents relating to this quarrel represent the very earliest ones of theMülhausencity archive. In the end, the communehad togive in to thewill of their lord, theking,butat least theyhadtheTeutonicKnightspay for theright to themill incash.Another example forwaterorwaterways, respectively,15beingcontestedbetweenlordshipandcommune stems from the small territorial town of Rappoltsweiler, where, in a partition treaty agreed to among thenoble familyofRappoltstein, it ismentioned that the communehad tomaintain the roads through town, but it is further claimed, too, that the lordship alonehad the right to use thewater that runs through town, for their seigneurialmills only. In this secondcase, the town lordswere just toopowerful –and too close in space– togrant the commune this right. NowontoColmar,which laterwouldbecomethe leading Imperial city inUpperAlsaceand which, in someways, is a sister town toMülhausen in terms of its early development.16 Here, the spacebetween threeadjacentmanorsofdifferent ecclesiastic landlordswas, in the 11th and 12 Fouquet forthcoming. See the study specifically aiming at communal building aroundandoverwater byGru- ber, this volume. 13 The followingapudZeilinger 2018, 108f. 173–175. 14 Cf. Petersen–Reitemeier 2017. 15 Cf. Schenk 2018;Himmelsbach 2017. 16 Againafter Zeilinger 2018, 72–100.