in the early Middle Ages, which had focused narrowly on office-holding and legal jurisdictions. Great regional lords in German lands, argued Schlesinger, did not come to power by assuming and privatising the privileges of public offices—such as that of the duke or count—they had held under the Frankish monarchy, but drew power from their own private family lands and the customary legal authority they exercised as leaders of a band of vassals and subjects in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Germanic warrior-chieftain. This thesis stood in sharp contrast to that being promoted by another rising young scholar, Gerd Tellenbach, who believed that the nobility of France and Germany owed their origins to Frankish aristocrats placed in high positions over regions conquered by the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries. Schlesinger argued in his work for the enduring influence of old Germanic attitudes about loyalty and leadership that produced a unique social structure and forms of political organization in German lands. This ethno-cultural view of the history and formation of legal and political institutions was strongly represented among a number of nationalistically-oriented German and Austrian medievalists of Schlesinger's generation, including Karl Bosl, Theodor Mayer, and Otto Brunner. Schlesinger's theories about Germanic ethnicity and its influence on law and authority in medieval society were later critiqued by scholars like the Czech medievalist Frantisek Graus and the legal historian Karl Kroeschell. Schlesinger himself effectively attacked certain prevailing historical ideas as well. In a famous lecture delivered in 1963, Schlesinger sharply criticized the politically-charged field of Ostforschung ("East[European] Studies"), which had for a long time, but particularly during the Third Reich, served as a thinly-veiled effort to lend scientific credibility to anti-Slavic prejudice and German domination of Poland and other parts of eastern Europe. Schlesinger insisted that the traditional paradigm of Ostforschung had been discredited and should be replaced by a broader, more interdisciplinary and historically rigorous study of East-Central Europe on its own terms, not as a tool of German politics. Accordingly, Schlesinger wrote extensively on settlement along the German-Slavic frontiers in the Middle Ages, as well as on the development of bishoprics and towns in the Saxon and Slavic areas of eastern Germany, paying particular attention to local and regional contexts for economic and demographic change. He made seminal contributions early on as well to the important Repertorium der Deutschen Königspfalzen project, which assembled detailed archaeological and historical studies of