Brandskatt przedmieść Starej Warszawy z 1655 r. – nieznane źródło do dziejów nowożytnego miasta
The 1655 brandskatt of the suburbs of Old Warsaw: An unknown source for the history of the early modern city

Summary/Abstract: Of the several types of contributions, the brandskatt is the least recognised – and, as such, not widelyintroduced into the scholarly discourse – a type of emergency tax imposed by the Swedish army on the territoryit occupied in the early modern era. The idea behind the tribute was a one-off levy to protect selected propertiesfrom fi re or looting. We lack information as to who selected the ‘protected’ buildings and according to what key,yet on the basis of the analysis of emergency tax imposed on the outskirts of Old Warsaw in 1655, it transpiresthat the list included numerous properties of people connected to the royal court or the royal faction. We can fi ndcentral, court and land offi cials as well as courtiers and some clergymen. The authors proposed a juxtapositionof the tax register with a guide to the city produced twelve years prior, namely Gościniec abo krotkie opisanieWarszawy (Gościniec meaning in Polish ‘the main road’ but also ‘a gift from a journey’, or Short Descriptionof Warsaw) by Adam Jarzębski. Such a procedure helped verify the location of properties and the names of theirowners, and confi rmed the customary sequence of constructing tax registers, preserved in the memory of their con-temporaries, manifested in the order in which key buildings were presented and properties visited while the taxwas being collected.

• Details
• Contents