The Powers of Space

Two things must be noted when locating Luther in the idiosyncratic coordinates of his times and space. First, he was an agrarian man. He spent the majority of his career as a reformer in Wittenberg. Wittenberg was located in the north-west of Saxony, in the Kurkreis or electoral Saxony – there were two Saxon territories, one ruled by the duke and the other by the elector – that is the part of the Saxon lands which had by far the largest share of grain sales in total Saxon government revenue at the time (if we may interpret revenue accounts as reflective of this area's stage of development and structure of economic activity). The area produced regular grain supplies that were used in provisioning those parts of Saxony further to the south-west, in the Erzgebirge Mountains, where employment and production were geared towards non-agrarian activities, mainly mining. Here, in the Erzgebirge Mountains and its offshoots, native grain production had for a long term proved unable to keep up with the surging demand for foodstuffs. This was due to the structural changes in this area which saw increasing numbers of people emerge outside the agrarian sector. At Luther's times day after day whole caravans of carts loaded with grain would ply Saxon roads southward from the northern areas, passing through Grimma near Leipzig and other staging posts where the Saxon rulers levied the Geleit payment, a convoy duty, leaving us with an ample record of quantitative sources documenting the frequency and intensity of domestic transport patterns. Thus, the areas in need were relieved from those areas with a grain surplus. In 1525 circa 3,500 carts with teams of up to 14,000 horses and oxen carrying a total of perhaps 8,000 tons of grain passed through the Saxon Geleit or toll of Borna to the south of Leipzig, bound for the Erzgebirge Mountains.