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In Germany, the sixteenth century ushered in the great age of what was known as good police, when governments for the first time began actively to intervene in economic and commercial affairs for reasons other than the purely fiscal (the raising of taxes). At imperial and territorial level, the authorities began to tackle issues such as monopolies, price-rigging, and forestalling, as well as seeking to regulate and secure supplies of essential commodities. Issues of welfare were also part of good police, as princes and magistrates struggled to come to grips with the plague of the age — vagrancy and begging by the poor, the homeless, and unemployed or discharged mercenaries. In relatively self-contained territories such as Bavaria or Württemberg, edicts to enforce good police flowed unimpeded from princely chanceries. Throughout the sixteenth century, the police assemblies of the Rappen league in the Upper Rhine addressed two fundamental issues — the provisioning and price regulation of meat and grain — which were of existential importance in an age of rising population and gathering inflation.

The political development of the Upper Rhine lends only modest support to the notion that it formed a natural region. The coherence of what at first sight appears to be a self-contained region was in fact the outcome of a late medieval contraction and concentration of political power. This chapter argues that an analogous, and indeed simultaneous, contraction can also be observed in the pattern of regional monetary cooperation. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, that cooperation had been vested in regional coinage associations. Such associations sprang up across the length and breadth of Germany. Although their importance as agents of regional monetary policy needs no stressing, their significance in the longer term — at least on the Upper Rhine — lay in providing a framework for cooperation over fundamental issues of ‘good police’ and public welfare. This chapter looks at one coinage association, the Rappen coinage league, focusing on its rise and collapse.

Unlike the constant struggle to regulate the meat market on the southern Upper Rhine, the provisioning of grain rarely presented the authorities with a serious challenge until the last third of the sixteenth century, when a series of harvest failures, possibly exacerbated by demographic pressure, led to repeated bouts of dearth and famine. The authorities' only concern was to prevent Fürkauf, understood in this context not as a general hostility to commerce or towards foreigners, but in the exact sense of forestalling, pre-empting the workings of a free market by buying corn on the ear directly from the peasantry or at unlicensed markets in the countryside. The desire to conserve dwindling stocks of grain within a given territory prompted bans on exports, although these were subject to innumerable exceptions. Whereas with meat the Rappen league had depended on supplies brought into its area either from its fringes or from abroad, with grain its members traded freely throughout the Upper Rhine.

From 1300 onwards the shifting balance of political and military fortunes on the Upper Rhine had fostered the growth of regional solidarity. The requirements of public peace on the western frontiers of the Empire found their expression in the many defensive treaties which bound local lords and cities together. Yet a sense of positive solidarity, grounded in the perception of enduring common interests, had also emerged in the two centuries before 1500. Its most obvious manifestation was the transformation of the Rappen coinage league from a loose association stretching well into Switzerland to a coinage area restricted to the southern Upper Rhine, whose boundaries were defined more by geography and commerce than by ties of lordship. The rise of confessional divisions gave an added twist to the intricacies of dynastic politics. By 1600, a sense of regional identity on the southern Upper Rhine had neither collapsed nor disappeared — but it had become progressively fractured in the face of territorial and confessional politics.