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which defined in detail how different individual social classes should dress. 

 

The commercialisation of the seigneuries had the largest impact on the towns, where 

burghers wished to restrict rural trade and crafts. The restrictions on bonded peasants’ 

enterprise also harmed the seigneurs. In 1492, measures were passed in Carniola which were 

intended to overcome the stand off between towns and villages by means of trade. Areas of 

varying size defined around towns and market settlements in which craftsmen could not 

operate. Peasants were only permitted to sell their surpluses in the towns and other designated 

markets, or on specific church holidays, but could freely trade over longer distances in salt, 

wine, grain, livestock, linen and other domestic craft products. The frequent repetition of 

provisions restricting trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicates, of course, that 

rural trade still flourished. The role of bonded peasants and their share of trade continually 

grew and the volume of rural trade far outstripped that of the professional town traders in 

quantity, though not in quality. The large volume of peasant trade is suggested by the fact that 

between 6,000 and 8,000 horses were continually involved in carting work in Carniola, and 

the salt trade included up to 90,000 loads per year in the second half of the sixteenth century. 

It was the desire for profit as well as the fight for survival that pushed peasants into business. 

Their invention and enterprise allowed a few to join the ranks of the richer peasantry, and 

even become successful members of the burgher class, but most failed to achieve more than 

mere subsistence. For many bonded peasants, who in addition to all the levies and obligations, 

also had to pay what were actually the monetary dues of their feudal lords (the annual 

provincial tax approval), the only real hope of escaping their circumstances lay in spiritual 

consolation. One example of such consolation can be seen in the famed Dance Macabre 

frescoes, painted by Ivan of Kastev in 1490 in the fortified ‘tabor’ church at Hrastovlje, which 

portray the universality of death, which affects princes, lords and peasant alike. 

 

The various pressures that had already led to an increase in land dues also caused 

dissatisfaction among peasants, and ideas and hopes of rebellion. During the Austro-Venetian 

War, the seigneuries and the ‘state’, which were largely dependent on the value of the 

peasants’ agricultural yield, increased the financial demands on their bonded peasants, while 

also forcing them into military service. As the war went on, these peasants, men “suitable for 

working the land, not fighting against first-class soldiers,” as the military commander 

Christoph Rauber described his Carniolan conscripts in 1508, began to lose their coastward 

trading opportunities, which a total blockade soon cut off completely. Unrest in Carniola, in 

parts where local conditions affected the bonded peasantry even more harshly than elsewhere, 

led to the creation of a peasant league in the first months of 1515, which soon encompassed 

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much of Carniola. The peasants, who demanded a return to the ‘old law’ and the right to 

decide on extraordinary taxes, rejected any discussion with special commissioners appointed 

at the request of the Carniolan Estates, and sent their own representatives to Emperor 

Maximilian in Augsburg. Yet at court they received nothing more than a few promises and the 

demand that the peasant league be disbanded. Peasant leagues (Bauernbunden) later formed 

throughout Inner Austria, with around 80,000 peasants joining in a rebel movement that 

covered almost the entire Slovene-populated territory. The dissatisfaction grew into open 

armed rebellion (except in Gorizia), which comprised two main waves. Initially, during May 

and June, the peasants achieved a number of major successes. The nobility’s forces were 

forced to withdraw to Ljubljana and Kamnik in Carniola, to Maribor in Styria, and Villach in 

Carinthia. In the second wave, from mid-June to the end of July, the mercenary army of the 

Estates, which was supported by imperial army units, gradually overcame and split the 

peasant forces in a series of smaller engagements, with several major battles, such as those at 

Konjice and Celje, also taking place. When Georg von Herberstein, appointed by the Inner 

Austrian Estates as overall commander of the forces sent to pacify the provinces, entered 

Carniola with units of the joint Estates’ army, the uprising was quickly put down. After five 

months of the peasant rebellion, which was poorly organised and militarily weak, except in 

Carinthia, with little co-ordination across the different provinces, the final reckoning came. In 

Graz alone, 161 rebels were put to death. In Carniola the nobility forced the peasants to pay 

yet another one-off cash levy, in addition to the cruel clean-up campaign that swept the 

countryside. The peasants only achieved gains in Carinthia, where it was conceded that future 

disputes between them and their seigneurs would be resolved in the presence of peasant 

representatives before the regular territorial courts for feudal landlords. The “crazed 

company” as Valvasor later described the rebels, was charged with a special annual tax, called 

the ‘rebel’s penny’, introduced to provide reparation for the damage, and the bonded labour 

obligation (tlaka) was, of course, increased to restore the castles damaged in the uprising. 

 

The Slovene peasant uprising (Windischer Bauernbund), as it was also referred to in 

contemporary sources, saw the first appearance of the Slovene language in print. The 

following words appeared in a German song of the mercenary troops from 1515, which 

seemed to mock the Slovene rebels: stara prauda  (the old law) and leukhup, leukhup, 

leukhup, leukhup woga gmaina (“rally, rally, rally together, all the company of the poor”), but 

this became the peasants’ definitive calling cry. Over time, the revolts began to make their 

mark on society, and along with a range of other factors gradually changed the organisation of 

the feudal world and challenged its fixed division into three Estates (the clergy, the nobility, 

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