Page 186 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Margareth Lanzinger

accordance with the gender logic of the time. The fact that innkeepers, as
it seems, very often married the daughters of innkeepers was apparently
not only a great advantage for the management of the business during the
marriage. The fact that they were familiar with it from childhood was also
an advantage when they took over an inn and its management as widows.

Innkeepers in Innichen on the Puster Valley Road
While the Passeier Valley connected wagon routes with a mule track and
a mountain road led to Kastelruth, the market town of Innichen was sit-
uated on the main road through the Puster Valley, on one of the possible
routes from the southern German trading towns to Trieste and Venice, al-
beit at an altitude of 1,175 metres. As mentioned at the beginning, this
route became increasingly important in the course of the eighteenth cen-
tury: onthe onehand, becauseTrieste hadbecome a Habsburg free port
in 1719 and, on the other, because new trade routes east of the Brenner
were opening up from Vienna. In 1775, the market town – excluding the
church and public buildings – had a total of about 120 houses and 944 in-
habitants. Throughout the early modern period, there were four large inns
in Innichen: the Bär (Bear), the Weiße Rössl (White Horse), the Goldene
Adler, later the Schwarze Adler (Golden or Black Eagle), and the Papprian’s
Inn. Three of them were located in the centre of the village at the cross-
roads of two main roads: the Puster Valley road between Brixen and Lienz
and the road to Sexten, which led over the Kreuzberg Pass to Cadore and
on to Trieste and Venice. The Bär and the Papprian’s Inn were Tafern inn-
keepers.
The inns were repeatedly sold and bought, sometimes between relatives
and in-laws. From the 1740s onwards, there is evidence of some longer-
term continuity of family ownership. The fact that the innkeeper fami-
lies were a comparatively wealthy milieu is indicated by the various pub-
lic functions that the innkeepers held at court, in the market town and
in the parish: as a court committee member, a guardian, a curator, and
a witness, among other roles, including repeated agreements or transac-
tions with other innkeepers. Franz Anton Peintner, for example, was a wit-
ness to a marriage contract from 1765 with the following title: ‘Testes Herr
Franz Anton Peintner, Burger, Handlßman, Gastgeb, G[eric]hts Ausschuß
und Closterfrauen Ambtmann’ – witness, burgher, merchant, innkeeper,
court committee and women’s monastery administrator (tla, vbi 1765,
54’–55). Being addressed as ‘Herr’ – as well as ‘Frau’ – signalled a higher so-
cial status. Franz Anton Peintner was the grandson of a well-known family

184