ABSTRACT
The city of Reval may seem like a curious place to begin our discussion of the role played by artisans in the political system of the seventeenthcentury German city. Reval, after all, lay far from the German heartland: today it is better known as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Nor was its population entirely German, for the city had a sizeable underclass of Estonians and a sprinkling of other ethnic groups. Yet the politically active inhabitants of Reval were predominantly German and the city's institutions were entirely Germanic. Reval's political history, moreover, is exceptionally well recorded. Drawing on a rich and rather overlooked body of literature on the history of early modern Reval, we can preface our general observations about the role of artisans in German urban politics of the seventeenth century by seeing how the artisans of this particular city attempted to articulate and achieve their collective objectives.
