Population and Bank Support

In their 1977 paper, Hill et al. The Kirtland Economy Revisited (BYU Studies Vol 17, 4, Article 2) argued that the idea of founding a bank such as the Kirtland Safety Society was an appropriate idea based on the size of Kirtland and the number of other banks in existence in other communities.

Kirtland at this time was one of the larger communities in northern Ohio---a number of smaller communities already possessed banks. Judging from the successful experience of other banks in Ohio, one with as little as $20,000.-- in paid-up capital, Kirtland probably could have supported a modest bank. (433)

In a footnote they go on to enumerate some of the locales with banks that Hill et al had in mind.

... smaller banks in northern Ohio included Warren (3), Ravenna (2), Canton (2), Salem, Youngtown, Elysia, Ashtabula, and Cuyahoga Falls. Cleveland, which had perhaps twice as many people [as Kirtland, RCK] had eleven [sic RCK] banks. (433 Fn 61)

In my dissertation,  where I discuss this argument (246), I argued that this exposition was misleading on multiple grounds. But in order to fully counter the claim by Hill et al, one needs to first explicate the argument structure. And in order to explicate the argument structure, we need to make clear that this argument is trying to support the larger notion that the creation of a bank, as endeavored by the Church leadership in 1836 was a reasonable thing to undertake and had all of the appearances of success on its side. 

So the argument structure goes something like this:

• Warren had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Warren had three banks.
• Raven had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Warren had two banks.
• Canton had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Canton had two banks.
• Salem (Ohio) had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Salem had one bank.
• Elysia had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Elysia had one bank.
• Ashtabula had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Ashtabula had one bank.
• Cuyahoga Falls had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Cuyahoga Falls had one bank.

The inductive leap of this assumption then is that towns with smaller populations than Kirtland had between one and three successful banks in 1836. We will call this argument Min1-3

(Note: The bank of West Union, which is the one of $20,000 capitalization, is not in this list. Perhaps it was not possible to arrive at population data for West Union?)

The argument in the case of Cleveland goes in the other direction.

• Cleveland had double the population of Kirtland.
• Cleveland had twelve banks.

The inductive leap here is that Kirtland should be able to support six successful banks. We will call this argument Max6.

Combining these two inductive leaps Min1-3 and Max6, we can now create another inductive leap, to wit:

• Kirtland's population sized should have supported at least one to three banks (Min1-3) and possible as many as six banks (Max6).

We will call this argument Kirtland-1-3-6. 

Hill et al are arguing that the Church leadership made this same sequence of inductive leaps. They have no documentary proof for this, but it is a reasonable imposition: the members of the Church leadership were well connected with political leaders and the legislature; furthermore, they had taken out loans before and engaged in real estate speculation, a task that required banking connections during the boom times of the federal land sales [RCK15, 248f]. Assuming Kirtland-1-3-6 and the absence of any banks in Kirtland in 1836, at all, it was a reasonable idea to found one and to expect it to succeed.

The first problem is that the argument is prefixed by the assumption that Hill et al interpreted the data given in Coover correctly. Unfortunately, as I argued in my dissertation [RCK15, 247], that is not the case. Coover's list gives all the banks known for Ohio between 1803 and 1866, not just the banks operating in 1836 time. In fact, since Coover was a collector of banknotes, all that can be said is that at some point someone issued a note with the name of a bank located in one of these cities (and some people made notes for non-existent banks, as Coover pointed out). 

As I pointed out in my dissertation [RCK15, 247], the following banks have to be removed from the list, because we know nothing about when and how successfully they operated:

• Two of the three banks in Warren.
• Both banks in Ravenna.
• One of the banks in Canton.
• The bank in Salem.
• The bank in Youngstown.
• The bank in Elysia.
• The bank in Ashtabula.
• The bank in Cuyahoga Falls.
• Ten of the twelve banks in Cleveland.

In terms of inductive evidence that is a slaughter. 

But there are further problems. There are two key unstated assumptions in this argument:

1. Population size is a good predictor for bank success.
2. Past success is a good predictor for future success.

The first is wrong on the observation, as spelled out in my dissertation, that a lot of the money in Ohio banking was from out-of-state, both financiers of the East Coast [RCK15, 244] as well as Europeans doing import/export business with the United States. In the 1830s, the United States was effectively a third-world country, running a huge trade deficit on its import of goods and export of raw and somewhat processed materials. Because these problems were common to all of the frontier states, the situation was the same in Michigan for example.

The second one seems like a reasonable slogan, but one could only have agreed to that assumption with respect to a bank if one was ignorant of the then-brewing storm regarding small bills in general (New Jersey and Maine in 1835 forbidding small bills, Virginia & Maryland & Pennsylvania purging small bills from their monetary system at the same time). Furthermore, the no-bank Democrats had just won dominance in the legislature of Ohio, they had been cool on charters for bank for a while now, and they had passed no charters in 1836 by the summer, pointing to the unused potential for capitalization in the existing charters [RCK15,234f]. Ohio was also pressuring its bank during the spring of 1836 with threats of taxation should they not strive to remove the small bills from circulation, with all $3 bills phased out by July 4, 1836. 

Perhaps even more importantly, President Andrew Jackson on July 11, 1836 had issued his famous specie circular via the Treasury, which eliminated local banknotes as method of payment for purchasing federal lands and insisted on hard specie. Professional cashiers left the frontier banks after this circular, unless their fianciers promised additional monetary support, as Henry Dwight of Massachusetts did to H.K. Sanger, who was cashier at the Bank of Michigan [RCK15,244].

Post Scriptum

It is not entirely clear when the Church leadership decided to go ahead with the plan for the Kirtland Safety Society. Oliver Cowdery was already traveling to New York to inquire into credit for printing plates in August of 1836. The revelation promising resolution to the financial plights (v5) that is now Doctrines & Covenants 111 was given in Salem, Massachusetts, August 6th, 1836. The letter that reports the decision was printed in the Messenger & Advocate in September 1836.  

Points that I did not make clear with reference to this argument in my dissertation include that the Kirtland Safety Society was anything but modest [RCK15, 250], and the number of Cleveland banks in the research by Coover on Ohio Banking Institutions from 1913, on which the observations were based, is twelve not eleven.

Argument Structures around the Kirtland Safety Society

While historians want to be both educated and corrected by their sources, it is often difficult to pin down that that exactly means. In the following, I want to look at a few examples of how this plays out in the case of the economic history of the Kirtland Safety Society (this is Chapter 10 in my dissertation).

The backbone of course is the chronology. Many narratives already fall apart due to not aligning with the basic chronology of the matter. Of course the selection of what elements to include in the chronology brings us back to the problem of enplotment.

It is important to realize that a chronology is not a sequence of dates, but a sequence of dated events. The distinction is crucial, because dates are just chronometric units, while events have actors and properties and are enmeshed in a event sequence, as well as a geometric positioning. The chronometric units have a canonical order, but it is independent of all semantic contents---which is precisely what makes them units.

Perhaps it is best to first to tease apart the pieces that can go into a historical argument. For an intentional action, we have to presuppose some kind of script, that is, a codification of the "usual" way to do this. This would be the usual way from the point of view of the contemporaries, of course, not from the point of view of the historian. 

The "usual way" is typically distilled in some form from another event that has a similar structure. As Eduard Meyer pointed out (1912) [cited in the dissertation], it is this compare-and-contrast operation that is at the root of the historical research effort for distinguishing the common from the unusual. In the Kirtland case, I used the Owl Creek Bank, which did occur in Ohio about two decades before the Mormon arrival, as well as the Old Bank of Michigan, in which Joseph Smith~Jr's uncle Stephen Mack had participated. In the end it was the cross-comparison between these three instances that provided the fodder for the historical reconstruction.

These three elements were underpinned on the one hand by a history of banking in Ohio, mainly a sequence of state legislature actions and bank foundations (which had to be chartered by the legislature), and a history of the more global economic settings both in Ohio proper and in the US. This was the place for wealthy East Coast magnates and European importers, mainly from England, that had a strong influence on the money supply. This was also the place for Jacksonian interventionism at the national level and the ins and outs of the federal land sale that had such an impact on the monetary supply. All of these lines had their own event sequence with its own "arc" so to speak, mostly expressed as supporting or blocking specific aspirations on the legislative side and injecting or removing money on the financiers' side. 

The final element was the chronology of the creation and dissolution of the Kirtland safety (anti-)banking society itself. The comparison with the other banking charters in Ohio as well as with the Owl Creek Bank highlighted the inversion of the order of steps (charter last) as well as the enormous leverage that had been prototypical of other bank failures in the past and would eventually be outlawed in 1839 by the legislature, requiring 1:3 at the most.

For all of these elements, the observation of the overdetermined asymmetry of causation was in effect. For example, only a small fraction of the notes issued by the Kirtland society survived, supporting reconstructive efforts such as simulations how many bills of which type might have been issued. Also, the stock subscription book survived, allowing to determine which families of the Mormon elite had taken out the most stock and subscribed how much of their money. Some newspaper editorials and similar statements survived, but many other actions and their direct and indirect effects remain inaccessible, lost to time.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When a friend of mine interviewed a pagan who wanted to know more about easter eggs, easter bunnies and easter foxes, this lead me to Georg Franck von Franckenau, a medical doctor and personal attendant to Christian V of Denmark, who wrote some 20+ Medical dissertations in the style of Latin Satires, published posthumously by his son in 1722, where Satire #19 is the first discussion of the easter egg and the easter bunny, with Latin and German quotes (p.396 in the book, p.413 in the PDF). The work of Franckenau, especially his analysis of the sexual and the erotic in these dissertations, is discussed in this paper, which places Franckenau squarely into the Baroque tradition of curiosity literature (p.88 Fn 14). The author makes a good case for the relationship between the extreme and marvelous and the Baconian inductive method on the other, which required these outliers to adjust the conceptual framework (p.96 Fn 55).

Among books that discuss the curiosity literature is Christoph Daxelmüller (1979), Barockdissertationen und Polyhistorismus. Die Curiositas der Ethnica und Magica im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg, 117–186, which is available at the Vienna FB for European Ethnography.

Indian Monument Discussions

In an off-cuff remark, J.B. Turner, Mormonism in All Ages (1842), p.190, jokes that the missing tribes must have been hiding in a Symmes' Hole, referring thereby to one of the 19th century Hollow-Earth proponents.

Captain Symmes had not been the first to suggest this idea in 1818, but he found especial notice, and some of his followers, such as James McBridge, the pioneer, published a book of his theory, Symmes's theory of concentric spheres : demonstrating that the earth is hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles (1826), and pushed for explorations to find such a passage.

Uncle Dale Broadhurst, as always, has the scoop on how these musings turn up in early and later Mormon history. Ezra Booth had claimed (in Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 1834, p.127) that Joseph Smith Jr felt the Northern tribes were in the polar regions, separated by ice and mountains from the rest of the world; and the revelation that was printed in the Evening and Morning Star (May 1833) soon thereafter, writes:

And the Lord even the Savior shall stand in the midst of his people, and shall reign over all flesh. And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord, and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves, and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. [= D&C 133:26]

Which may not be as clear as we would like it to be, but the north and the rocks and the ice are all there, at any rate.

Dale Broadhurst also argues that the fact that the July 1832 edition of the Evening and Morning Star can cite another article that refers to the theory of Capt. Symmes without any explanations indicates that Symmes was considered common knowledge at this point.

That the Symmes theory was well known in all religious circles of the time is best highlighted by the mention that the Rev. McCalla made in his closing arguments on pedobaptism against Alexander Campbell, where McCalla eschewed discussing the issue again "until an opponent would come from the regions discovered by Captain Simmes", as reported in (Richardson 1870, 2:86).

James McBride was involved in questions of Indian Monuments in other ways as well. He had made drawings that found their way into Squier and Davis' landmark 1848 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, with which the Smithsonian inaugurated their Contributions to Knowledge series. Even though a landmark in its description, that work was still dominated by the assumption that a different race than the then-living Indians had built the monuments.

In addition to relying on other's artwork, Squier and Davis used travel descriptions to identify what to map, for example, Thaddeus Harris' The journal of a tour into the territory northwest of the Alleghany Mountains ; made in the spring of the year 1803 : with a geographical and historical account of the state of Ohio ; illustrated with original maps and views, printed in Boston in 1805. Or the descriptions of H.M. Brackenridge's Views of Louisiana : containing geographical, statistical and historical notices of that vast and important portion of America (1817) printed in Baltimore.

They also relied on Caleb Atwater's 1819 memoire in the Archaeologia Americana (Vol I, 1820), entitled Description of the Antiquities discovered in the State of Ohio and other Western States (Uncle Dale Broadhurst has excerpts of Atwater's memoire, too, of course). [Interestingly enough, in that very volume of the Archaeologia Americana, pp.325ff and then pp.333ff, there are discussions on the Indians coming from Asia, mostly due to similarities of physical features. Of course, as some of the authors point out, some people were trying to have the Indians come from Plato's Atlantis (p.340), e.g. Mathieu of Nantes RCK] They may have used Secretary Joseph Moulton and John Yates' History of the state of New-York : including its aboriginal and colonial annals, 1824, as well.

Harris' account was reprinted in volume 3 of Reuben G. Thwaites twenty-plus volume collection, Early Western Travels 1748-1846, printed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906. Reuben G. Thwaites was an American historian and friend of Frederick Jackson Turner, who would travel the Ohio River for "color" in the way that 19th century military historians like Delbrück would walk battle fields.

Saints without Halos website

Scott Kenny used to operate a website called Saints without Halos, providing biographical accounts of the top echelon of the Mormon leadership from contemporary sources. The website went down sometimes in 2012 and never returned; thank goodness for the wayback machine.

Ideas for BYU Research

This is from talking to the curator for the 19th century collection.

We talked briefly about William Law (1809-1892) and his contribution to the Nauvoo effort. Under MSS SC 2562 there is a diary available for the last few months of their interaction, up to the murder of Joseph Smith Jr.

There are also some good 2nd-ary literature materials available, including Roger D. Lenius' Joseph Smith's Red Brock Store, which is available in the Americana section.

Finally, additional economic documents might surface in the Hyrum Smith Collection, Vault MSS 774, Series Three.

Among the locals, I need to contact Brandon Plewe again, and I need to see if the hook-up with Alexander Baugh is going to work out or not.

Finally, if I have a focused set of questions together, I should consider hitting the Church History Library in Salt Lake City after all. Maybe I can do a stay-over in SLC, to make it worth the effort.

Google Flu Trends

While this is not a historiographical topic, the issue recently arose due to newly published papers, and it is one of these exemplary cases of Big Data that generate both publicity and prototypical arguments. The story itself is as always complicated, making it thus a good example for science historiography.

By 2009, some of Google's researchers had turned their Google Friday project into a service that used MapReduce over localized search requests to predict flu outbreaks. Their paper was submitted to Nature (a reprint is found here) and generated enormous interest, because they used a variety of clever techniques to keep the theory low.

However, the system performed badly during the H1N1 influenza epidemic, mostly because the non-seasonal nature and the heightened media-awareness required a very different set of queries to suss out what was happening, as Google researchers analyzed in 2011.

In March of 2013, Nature counted Google Flu Trends as one of the victims of the flu. Google researchers published yet another analysis and modification of the algorithm at a conference for neglected tropical diseases.

In March of 2014, another round of papers was released---here and here---by empirical social science researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard, arguing for the statistical problems of approaches such as Google Flu Trends, mostly attacking the exemplary status and the theory-reduced aspects.

The release of these papers had an echo in the blog-sphere that caused more general discussions about the achievements and limitations of big data, whether in the Financial Times, or in the New York Times (Bits Blog).

Dissertation Organization

I remain convinced that in some sense a dissertation, just like a master thesis, is an exercise in knowledge organization before it is anything else. The degree in the Social Sciences and Humanities is given to those people who can demonstrate that the can take a large body of knowledge, enter it, trace its connections to their respective lairs, and emerge with a 300-400 page record of that journey that documents their successful traversal.

Thus, developing the infrastructure required to get to the point of completing that traversal successfully is a key element of the overall effort. Just as in the case of the master thesis, having developed such infrastructure is an enabling tool for the next stage of the journey---whether that is the habilitation or the professional career of the researcher, is a separate matter.

With the first 100 page draft of my overall project, I was able to convince myself that the abilities tested for in the master thesis are still available; I dusted these off, so to speak. The approach of re-deriving things from the primary sources does not only speak to the archival-centric focus of the effort, but also forms a bulwark against the mountain of secondary literature, by definition average on average, and an inoculation against easy interpretations, especially in the partisan literature.

The overarching effort requires some form of dashboard, that makes it easy to

• track the incoming literature
• track the "processing" phase of the identified literature, at minimum
• obtaining (downloading, ordering, purchase, ...)
• bibliographical indexing (BibTeX)
• processing of contents
• determination of novelty and relevance
• excerpting
• secondary long-term storage in the case of downloads
• query of state of each item
• answering "what next" and "how much effort" types of questions

On the surface of it, one would suspect that bug and task tracking systems might be best suited to this effort; on the other hand, their notions of modules, features and OS types square badly with the requirements of the object being manipulated.

BibDesk type database applications on top of BibTeX files are helpful at the level of granularity of the individual book or article, esp. if one is willing to use the chapter approach to sub-sections in works such as Sacred Loneliness or Early Mormon Documents, to map the granularity gap between bibtex and the units of information at hand.

As with all structurally organized information, they might provide a way to transform out of a specific solution, once a better approach is identified.

reconceptualizing the project structure

After working on extracting events that describe cases of mobility, financing, persecution and apocalyptic thinking from the sources, it now becomes possible to reconceptualize the presentation structure.

1. Introduction
2. Event Data Set Presentation
3. Planned Dimension I: Mobility
4. Planned Dimension II: Economy
5. Planned Dimension III: Urbanization
6. Discovered Dimension IV: Social Trust
7. Mediterranean Model Hunting
8. Application: The Mormon War of 1838
9. Evaluation & Conclusion

Notice that social trust was a dimension whose importance was only discovered in the analysis of the three planned dimensions of mobility, economy and urbanization. But it becomes a key component of understanding the alienation felt between the LDS and the gentile communities, which finds expression and reinforcement in repeated evictions.

Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania

Samuel Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania: Devoted to the Preservation of Facts and Documents and Every Kind of Useful Information respecting the State of Pennsylvania, printed at Wm. F. Geddes on Library street in Philadelphia, is one of these publications that historians cannot but love.

Hazard gathered up all sorts of news worthy happenings of the time on an annual basis for his Register.

On the web, I have located all hyperlinked volumes; the italicized I am still searching for:

• Volume 6 (Jul-Dec 1830)
• Volume 7 (Jan-Jul 1831)
• Volume 8 (Jul-Dec 1831)
• Volume 9 (Jan-Jul 1832)
• Volume 10 (Jul-Dec 1832)
• Volume 11 (Jan-Jul 1833)
• Volume 12 (Jul-Dec 1833)
• Volume 13 (Jan-Jul 1834)
• Volume 14 (Jul-Dec 1834)
• Volume 15 (Jan-Jul 1835)
• Volume 16 (Jul-Dec 1835)

Hazard had also worked on the archives of Pennsylvania

• Volume 1
Volume 2
• Volume 3

and another register of statistics about the US government in general, the US Commercial and Statistical Register, 

• Volume 5 (Jul-Dec 1841)

Mayflower related sources

There is a good list of sources related to the "Mayflower" at the "Primary Sources and Books" link on the Mayflower History website.

Rapp, Harmony and Smith

The town of Harmony, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1804 by the Harmonists movement, whose acknowledged leader was Georg Rapp. 

The Harmonists were celibate, disavowed all tobacco, lived as a commune, and were preparing for the 2nd coming of Christ. Rapp was taken to be in constant communication with the Divine. 

The Harmonists stayed in Pennsylvania until the lack of space for expansion and the bad climate for growing wine made them decide to head for Indiana; they sold their community to a Mennonite by 1814 or 1815. 

In 1825, Joseph Smith Jr met his future wife Emma Hale there, when he boarded with her father Isaac. In December 1827 they moved from Manchester, New York, to Harmony, Pennsylvania, to claim some of Emma's possession and work a farm near their in-laws.

John Clark's reflection from Upstate New York

This one Google books contains John A. Clark's Gleanings by the Way, published in Philadelphia in 1842, but one has to read it online. However, Gutenberg has a copy, and BYU offers a PDF.

The Rev. John A. Clark was the rector of St. Andrews church in Philadelphia, but had traveled in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, including the Susquehanna valley.
Clark covers the Golden Bible story starting with Chapter 22, p.216 to the end of the book.
Clark is also awesome because he contains notes about Mormon banking in Chapter 31.

Toward the Spalding Enigma

Spent some time this morning looking into the clues of the Spalding Enigma, when I finally got into that section of the Howe story -- who first published the materials on Spalding and Rigdon.

The Wikipedia article seems oddly biased toward the apologetic LDS position.

Broadhurst's website has a reconstruction that lacks the footnotes (sigh) but makes sense as a narrative, if the omissions from the official LDS history that they record are indeed correct. Specifically, the claim is that Smith and Cowdery met before 1827 (in 1822) and that Rigdon knew Spalding and his work and was instrumental in the publication of the Book of Mormon, faking a conversion experience when Pratt and Cowdery came to missionize.

A separate group of guys that are friends of Broadhurst and did a lot of the legwork of the Spalding-Rigdon theory wrote a book about the enigma in 2005; the have a website for their efforts.

Mormonism and authorship attribution

An interesting reference (though no details as of yet) on how Sidney Rigdon rigged up the book of Mormon by talking the writings of a fantasy writer of that age, Solomon Spaulding, and giving them a theological work-over.

Alexander Campbell on the book of Mormon

Ah, the ease of the Internet. Turns out that Dr Alexander Campbell's book Delusions, a contemporary refutation of the book of Mormon, is available here and here.

His key points of internal evidence, by which Campbell means, as in light with the remainder of the Bible, are:

• (p.11) God separated the Aaronite and the Levite priesthood so strictly that Hebrews 7 points out that even Jesus could not approach the altar and usurp the position of Levi.
• (p.12) The departure from Jerusalem and Canaan, far from being experienced as a curse and punishment (see Deuteronomy 29,21), is accepted happily by Levi & Nephi. But positing any other land makes God into a liar, breaking His prophecies. 
• (p.12) Neither do the Jews show any sadness for Jerusalem and the Temple of the Lord, as they did in Babylon.
• (p.13) Paul states that some of his knowledge about the Apostles are secrets that are only now being revealed (e.g. Romans 11), but the Book of Mormon gives them out hundreds of years earlier.
• (p.13) Campbell is suspicious of the fact that so much doctrinal controversies discussed in New York during the 1820s, citing "infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man" (p.13).
• (p.13) John the Baptist is said to preach in Bethabara and Jesus claimed to be born in Jerusalem.

His key points of external evidence are:

• Smith and his collaborators cannot bear witness for themselves, as John 5:31 ("If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.") points out.
• The test for prophets is whether their prophecies have come true (Deut 18,22; not 18,3 as in the pamphlet).

The City Walls of Krems

I have been wondering for a long time who paid for the construction of the city wall of Krems in Lower Austria. I recently found a news report from 2002 that discusses the planned renovation of the old city wall and gives the context of original construction as the the reign of Emperor Friedrich III, specifically 1477 to 1480.

Now that the funding situation is clarified, the context needs to be taken into consideration. A look at the chronicle of the museum of Lower Austria shows that, while Friedrich's control of Lower Austria was continuously contested during his reign, partially by his younger brother Albrecht VI, partially by his neighbor Matthias Corvinus, Friedrich III persistently invested into the economic improvements of Lower Austria. He gave salt trading rights to Retz (1458) and made Weißenkirchen into a market (1459) for the Wachau. Despite his brother Abrecht VI having nominal control over Lower Austria since December of 1462, Friedrich gave the right to deposit goods (Niederlagsrecht) to Stein and Krems and to trade Venitian goods via Mariazell. He also granted improvements to the coat of arms for Stein and Krems in 1463, as well as the right to construct a bridge between Krems and Mautern on the southern bank of the Danube (which got its coat of arms from Friedrich in 1467).

By December of 1463, Albrecht VI had died and the estates recognized Friedrich III as the ruler of Lower Austria. However, 1476 Matthias Corvinus captured the eastern part of Lower Austria, and only the Peace of Korneuburg and Gmunden of 1477 quelled the competition, until the war broke out again in 1482. So the fortification of Krems belongs into two contexts, the preparations of Friedrich III for more hostility with respect to Lower Austria, and the general development of the geographic base of the Hapsburg empire.