The overarching concept of fraud (German: Betrug) as a kind of property crime was not in use in early modern German law. Both in everyday speech and in legal language, only the individual types of crimes were named; criminal codes often devised quite circuitous descriptions for this group of delicts. “Property” as an object protected by law appeared, for example, in the Habsburg Empire for the first time in the Allgemeines Gesetz über Verbrechen, und derselben Bestrafung …