Coping on the Edge: Disaster, Conflict, and Frontier in Premodern Central Europe

Combining traditional historical research with environmental history, migration studies, historical anthropology, and religious history, this book examines how societies in the southern frontier of medieval and early modern Hungary navigated the recurring disasters that defined their existence. The region—caught between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and other imperial spheres—faced wars, plagues, famines, floods, and forced migrations that not only disrupted lives but also reshaped governance, identities, and community resilience. The book draws on underused archival sources, parish records, plague reports, and visual materials to explore both grassroots coping strategies and the premodern forms of institutional disaster management. It moves beyond seeing disaster as a mere historical backdrop, instead showing it as a political and ideological tool used by states to control mobility, engineer settlement, and consolidate power. Regional histories are situated within broader global comparisons and other imperial “laboratories” of crisis management from the Mediterranean to colonial India, offering fresh comparable insights. The book addresses scholars and advanced students of Central and Eastern European history, medieval and early modern studies, migration history, environmental history, and disaster studies, as well as a broader readership interested in the dynamics of historical frontier societies and their enduring strategies of survival.