WARMUND, Gottlieb, pseud.

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Geldmangel in Teutschlande und desselben gründliche Ursachen, First edition of this rare work on the cash shortage in Germany and its causes during the Thirty Years' War. The author identifies 22 causes of the money shortage and offers a critical examination of the economic, legal, political, and social foundations of German society.War is placed as the core factor resulting in cash shortage, a stalling economy, and poverty. Civil wars are the most pernicious in creating recessions, as manners become brutal, education is abandoned, and population is decimated. War economics, based on looting and direction of resources to armed parties, prevails over civil exchange.However the author goes beyond the circumstances of war, tracing Germany's economic downturn to pre-war systemic failures, such as serfdom, money lending practices and interest rates, taxation, laws, nobility, inheritance, and the rising absolutism. Comparisons are drawn with the Ottoman and the Russian empires. The broader political and philosophical scope of the work is typified in the symbolic engravings of the frontispiece, each with a brief motto engraved in a cartouche: overt allegories of peace, industry, legality, and fraternity.Authorship is still debated, and, alongside previous attributions to Gottlieb Hosmann and Johann Lyser, it is now credited to either Erasmus Francisci (1627-94) or Johann Friedrich Schweser (1606-1681). Francisci was also one of the first Germans to write extensively on current affai

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