A landscape of fluvial transport routes. The Eastern Alpine section of the Danube river and its tributaries in pre-modern times

Many European rivers have significantly shaped the nearby living societies and their economies in the past. This is also true for most parts of nowadays Austria, where numerous resources were produced in the Eastern Alps that were then transported on the major tributaries of the Danube river, such as the Salzach, Inn, Traun and Enns rivers. Along the salt trade routes, communities of shippers emerged. In other regions such as Eastern Upper Austria and Western Lower Austria, most of the crafts were dedicated to the procession of iron ore coming from the Erzberg mountain in inner-Alpine Styria. Firewood and timber has been drifted on the rivers and even on artificial canals (such as the Schwarzenberg drifting canal network) to the cities in the Austrian pre-Alpine foothills, both from the high Alps and the Bohemian Forest. The rivers did not only provide the network for trade and knowledge exchange, but also brought the risk of recurring floods to the mills and to the settlements in general. This paper tries to highlight the diverse roles of the Danube river and its tributaries for the development of regional and supra-regional economic networks from the High Middle Ages up to the first half of the 19th century