In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the provisions for the imperial and royal army consumed a large part of the Habsburg Monarchy’s treasury expenditure, making army supply one of the most important public procurement procedures of the time. In this article, this complex system, which, in the words of O. Williamson, operated on the borderline between market and hierarchy, is presented through the memoirs of Ignác Vörös de Farad (1757–1825). The author of this ego-document was a commissioner during the war between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire in 1788–1791, and as such was involved in the management of the supply system. Through textual analysis, the system and its stakeholders in a period of military conflict are made visible and interpretable, using methods of new institutional economics and new economic criticism. The paper is based on the forthcoming publication by the authors, entitled A katona, a kereskedő, a tisztviselő és az egér: Hadseregellátás és mikrotörténet: a regénytől az aktáig (The Soldier, the Merchant, the Clerk, and the Mouse: Military Supply and Microhistory from Novels to Archives.).

In 1824, two brothers, Heinrich and Bernhard Lackenbacher, received from King Francis I Hungarian nobility and land donation, as well as the prædicatum (usu- ally the place name of landed property donated by a monarch) “of Solomon”. The brothers, who continued their father’s business, were grain wholesalers of Jewish origin, who had converted to Catholicism some years before their ennoblement. The present study examines two problems concerning their ennoblement. First, it examines in detail how they earned their title and land in order to assess both the bureaucratic process and expense of ennoblement and its value for the brothers in the “society of the Estates system”. Doing this, the paper also explores the mean- ings of the prædicatum and the coat of arms, as both apparently represented the personal taste and aspirations of the brothers. Second, the study analyzes contem- porary attitudes towards the new ennoblements and land donations at the time. These were articulated by two members of the wealthy landowning nobility, Sán- dor Kisfaludy (1772–1844), a popular writer and poet from Zala County, and István Borsiczky (1783–1850), the representative of Trencsén County at the Diet of 1832–36. They both perceived and presented the Lackenbachers as members of a wider social group, seen as “other” or “alien” within the Hungarian nobility despite their title and land, and discussed this new type of ennoblement as a ten- dency. The statistical analysis of ennoblements in this era, however, does not verify these perceptions. Constructing an image of otherness within the nobility calls the attention to the discrepancies between legal status and social prestige in the society of the late Estates system in Hungary and exposes the possibilities and limits of crossing the boundaries between the estates.