Two German crowns: monarchy and empire in medieval Germany 9780932269669

Table of contents :
Frontmatter (page N/A)
Preface (page iii)
Introduction (page 1)
One Prelude to Germany: Frankish Ascendancy and Legacy (page 10)
Two Civil Conflict, Partition, and Disintegration (page 18)
Three From Shadow King to German Dynasty (page 23)
Four The Investiture Controversy (page 33)
Five The Revival and Decline of Imperial Power (page 47)
Six Germany in the Later Middle Ages (1291-1517) (page 71)
Seven The Overlapping Concepts: Medieval German Monarchy and Medieval "Roman" Empire (page 82)
Notes (page 88)
About the Author (page 95)

Citation preview

: TWO GERMAN CROWNS Monarchy and Empire in Medieval Germany

Otis C. Mitchell

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PIT TTS Te alll Tee u Iu i} Wyndham Hall Press g; ME eT NTE | ...8 tradition of excellence...

TWO GERMAN CROWNS

MONARCHY AND EMPIRE

IN MEDIEVAL GERMANY | Otis C. Mitchell

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 85-051753

ISBN 0-932269-66-4 | copyright c 1985 by Otis C. Mitchell Printed in the United States of America

No portion of this book may be duplicated without the written

consent of the author who holds the exclusive copyright. Address inquiries to the author personally or to the publisher: WYNDHAM HALL PRESS, Post Office Box 877, Bristol, IN

46507, U.S.A. | | | |

Preface ii Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE 10 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prelude to Germany: Frankish Ascendancy and Legacy

CHAPTER TWO 18 Civil Conflict, Partition, and Disintegration

CHAPTER THREE 23 CHAPTER FOUR , 33 From Shadow King to German Dynasty

CHAPTER FIVE 47 The Investiture Controversy

The Revival and Decline of Imperial Power (1152-1291)

CHAPTER SIX 74 Germany in the Later Middle Ages (1291-1517)

CHAPTER SEVEN 82

Notes 88 About the Author 94 The Overlapping Concepts: Medieval German Monarchy and Medieval "Roman" Empire

i

il

PREFACE

What follows is an attempt to provide a readable and comprehensive account of the development of two important ideas

during the Middle Ages in Germany, the interlocking and overlapping concepts of German Empire and German Kingdom.

It is admittedly a wide-ranging account aimed at general readers and students at all levels. This little study was written in part because of the relative scarcity of books and articles on medieval Germany in the English language. English-language works on the particular principalities in medieval Germany,

for example, are quite rare. Even synthetic studies such

as this one, covering large areas of German medieval history, have not been issued with great frequency. If one could produce

a richly filled bibliographical section of studies in English that touch upon the subject discussed in this book, then this work probably would not have been written.

The current book is produced in part because most German histories of a general nature, owing to the late unification

of Germany, begin only in 1815. But far too much of German

development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is

unintelligible to those who lack a background knowledge of the country's history. Statesmen and poets of the nineteenth century, and nationalists in the twentieth century, have tended

to glorify the German medieval past. And that medieval past provides the explanation for why the Germans for centuries

could feel a cultural affinity while lacking political unity. Hence, the "Reich" of the Middle Ages is well worth studying if the interested individual seeks to understand many of Ger-

many's modern quandries. It is in the spirit of the position just described that this little study depicting the development over time of two notions of political power, developed concepts determining the shape of later German polities, is offered.

This study makes considerable use of secondary sources. At

the same time it also makes use of primary documents, particuiii

larly that foundation stone of German medieval studies, the MONUMENTA GERMANIAE HISTORICA. As is always the

case with the books I have written, any errors in judgments made are my own.

Otis C. Mitchell Cincinnati, Ohio June 1985

iv

INTRODUCTION

"Discovering" Medieval Germany

The English and the French find little difficulty in defining their medieval past. To be sure, there were some disputed border areas. There were also regional dialects as the decentralized and feudalized structures of medieval societies and polities

generally encouraged differentiation of language. But these kingdoms also owned vast lengths of coastline clearly defining where the holdings of the King of France or the King of England ended. These basic territorial facts made it possible to speak

in a relative descriptive fashion about medieval France or

England and, when doing so, to be reasonably accurate whether the reference was a geographic or a political one.

Germany in the Middle Ages constituted a somewhat different

case than the English or French examples. Germany's past during the Middle Ages was typified by uncertain frontiers, the flow and ebb of colonization across these frontiers, and long-term political fragmentation. Perhaps in consequence of all this, German scholars have been wary of producing the

kinds of synthetic works that have appeared in greater abundance on French and English medieval topics.

From literary sources, it does appear that something like a common written German language (in medieval German diutischin sprechin) was beginning to emerge in Germany only

at the end of the eleventh century.! After that time it is apparent that Germans gradually became aware of the common bond of literary German, a tie that transcended regional dialects and ordinary colloquial conversation. For some time the exist-

ence of that sort of cultural cement was confined to courtly, cultural circles. And it was in these circles, and not among the common folk, that a concept of a Germany, a somewhat vaguely outlined Deutschland, and a German language, a deutsche Sprache, existed from about 1100. ]

Written German varied greatly, however, from the colloquial dialects needed to communicate with the varied peoples from

different provincial areas. And even written German (and

of course much more extensively in the case of spoken German) was divided into the broad families of Low and High German.

Further, High German itself was by no means uniform. As late as 1440, the German dialects were described by a contempo-

rary observer as being divided into "three tongues," those of Meissen-Thuringia-Saxony, Swabia-Franconia-Bavaria, and

the language used in the Rhineland.2

Behind the diversity, however, the process of standardization

continued. There was, as we know from an examination of contemporary documents, no confusion in the mind of the

ordinary German soldier of the time of Frederick Barbarossa whether, when he spoke, he was speaking German or some

other tongue. In time, the Meissen-Saxon variety of High German became the official language of the imperial and prince-

ly bureaucracies rather than Latin. From the mid-fourteenth century on, towns and courts were adapting German as their official langauge. By the time of Luther in the sixteenth cen-

tury, a kind of administrative German that had developed in a Trier-Prague-Wittenberg triangle had so informed the official written language of the whole German territory that

it was well on its way toward standardization. It is therefore not quite accurate to state, as some have stated, that Martin

Luther was the putative father of the German language. It

would be more proper and accurate to state that, when Martin Luther produced his German version of the Bible, he was acting as the great popularizer of a written German language already widely in use.

The process described generally above had, by around 1500, created a linguistic area where German was spoken that did

not change a great deal by the twentieth century. This is not to say that the German tongue did not change a great

deal by the advent of modern times in its usages, grammar, etc. Naturally, it did. Language is never unchanging and the German tongue demonstrates basic alterations by recent times similar in magnitude to those differences that distinguish old English from the contemporary language spoken in the Anglo-

Saxon world. It is accurate to state, therefore, that, by the

fourteenth century, literacy was widely extended in German 2

lands, both in terms of the number of people who could read and those who could read specialized works in either the vernac-

ular or Latin. The ability to read Latin as well, of course, was the common case among churchmen.

Yet, however much there existed common language bonds and the mixing of the cultured classes, tendencies that to some degree tied together German territorial divisions during

the Middle Ages, there were no parallels east of the Rhine

to the successive steps by which medieval England and France achieved a greater and yet greater measure of political unity

over time. There exists a constant problem in studying the history of the Germany of the Middle Ages involving, first, the question if there is indeed such an entity as "Germany" and if to any extent there is a Germany, where and precisely what it might have been at any given time in its historical experience. Added to this problem is the connected quandry of, if there is even a vague outline of Germany, then what territories and peoples should be included within its borders?

If a history is to provide a basis for assigning German boundaries,

at what point in the past can it be said that actual boundaries coincided with a "true" Germany? The very deep problems encountered in trying to synthesize, to lift out of medieval German history broad themes that are meaningful for a contem-

porary observer, are revealed in part by the fact that, as late as 1350, even though a vague concept of Germany existed,

the word Deutschland was still only in limited but not common usage. Revealingly, however, the plural deutsche Lande was. Thus was revealed in these simple phraseologies the diversity and complexity of German medieval history.

The history of the separate "lands," therefore, that made up

the medieval German Empire is thus a subject of baffling complexity. One may ask, and indeed must ask from time to time, of what or whom those men who called themselves German kings in medieval times were actually kings? It will be noted

in the pages ahead that the earlier Saxon rulers were called

"kings." But it must also be noted, to demonstrate the problem of defining their territorial hegemony, that they were variously called kings of the Franks, east Franks, Franks and Germans,

or, simply, of the Germans. At times the same rulers also called themselves Emperors of the Romans. German ruler Henry II, for example, was so anxious to start calling himself 3

Emperor of Rome that he did so some time before his actual coronation by the Pope in 1014. Later on, after a long and

somewhat disastrous struggle with the popes, the German

emperors commenced to call themselves again regnum AlamanhNiae and dropped the Romanorum.

It is apparent, therefore, that "empire" and "kingdom" had various shades of meaning througout the medieval era. Moreover, while emperors were thinking of themselves in this way the medieval popes persisted in thinking of the rulers of Germany

(particularly from the pontificate of Innocent III) as kings who had been promoted by act of the pontiffs in Rome to the

rank of Emperor. This papal ideological stance led rather naturally in time to the attempt (see Chapter Five) by Pope Inno-

cent IV to depose an emperor who had earlier undergone the proper papal consecration and coronation.

Naturally enough, this dual distinction between the king and

the emperor became blurred rather than clarified as it developed

over the many years after its initial appearance. When the Habsburgs tried at the end of the thirteenth century to clarify

the distinction, they decided that certain castles belonged to Rudolf of Habsburg because he was King and certain ones because he was Emperor. This obviously did little but muddy

even further already darkened water. During the imperial rule of the fourteenth century, it even became fashionable to state as though it constituted a patently observable fact

that there was no distinction at all and, in fact, the two crowns had finally blended into one crown. From this point in time (about the 1340s), if reference to the Empire was required, then "German" or "Holy" became the most popular adjective.

There were many confounding geographic problems connected

to all this confusion over defining crowns worn by German rulers. As late as the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was often said that the Empire had four chief cities: Arles (in Burgundy), Aachen (in Germany), Milan (in Lombardy), and Rome. Yet, this international conception of domain was contradicted in popular Germanic thinking; for Germans the dominance of Germany over the Empire prevailed.

Thus far, we have described a growing consciousness of being German promoted by language and frequent contacts among 4

certain classes, a consciousness that had no meaningful impact on the production of an ordered Germanic polity. There was

no one fundamental reason for the failure of the Germans to turn these cultural bonds into a strengthened kingship. It has often been suggested, and far too superficially, that the early German kingship of the tenth century was strong and, thereafter, there was a steady march through time toward the weakness of the late Middle Ages. This simplistic view

should be corrected by painting an ebb and flow of asserted power, generally tending in the direction of greater weakness.

The great political question of the Middle Ages in Germany was simply: why did German monarchical ineffectiveness appear during an era when the English and French monarchies were developing as centralized innstitutions? The list of the Germans' lack of advantages when contrasted with the English and French cases offered by historians is normally extensive. Such a list would likely include: (1) the central position of German lands in Europe leading to threats of invasions from hostile forces originating both to the west and east; (2) the size of the Germanic area in terms of a decentralized medieval socio-economic infrastructure and related tendencies for a regional particularism to assert itself in the country; (3) the lack of a law of primogeniture and the related tendency for the elective nature of the kingship to weaken the impact of

authority; (4) the impact of particularism and the elective nature of the kingship on the ability of royal authority to form a distinct royal domain, rationally administered and properly

funded; (5) the transformation of those who originally had been royal servants in various local areas from part of the

administrative retinue of the crown into independent land-owners

impeding the exercise of royal power; (6) the insubordination of princely vassals in territories like Bavaria and Saxony, who

took advantage of the German rulers’ preoccupations with

affairs outside of Germany to take control of affairs for them-

selves until they became virtually independent; and (7) the various difficulties encountered in sojourns south of the Alps, long absences from the German homeland that tended to be ruinous in terms of great sums of money spent, royal deaths,

and the creation of a power vacuum north of the Alps.

These constitute a formidable set of problems, and the list could doubtless be made even longer. But to view the quandries 5

of medieval Germany in perspective, it should be noted that, if Germany was large in terms of a primitive socioeconomic

infrastructure so too was the France of that day. And yet

France, only over long centuries of struggle to be sure, eventual-

ly formed a centralized and strong monarchy. The Germans did, in fact, experience much trouble with rebellious vassals.

But rebellious vassals were a feature of life in medieval England and medieval France as well. The problem of elective kingship, it is admitted, was a quite large one. But a survey of the history in the pages ahead will reveal that a kind of de facto heritable

situation got around those difficulties with fair frequency and such dynasties as the Hohenstaufen managed to assure the succession for a sizeable chunk of time.

The major German disadvantage not shared by England and

France, and in the view of this author the decisive disadvantage,

was the continued consequence of the Italian adventure. It

was the grasp, century after century, for the elusive two crowns

of German monarchy and international-Roman empire, the attempt to blend these into one great pan-European crown in fact, that most impeded the development of Germany as a national state. This disastrous seeking after control over alluring southern regions can be seen as exercising a negative impact before the pontificate of Pope Innocent III at the ending of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries. There-

after, however, things became much worse during the civil

wars of the thirteenth century and the Interregnum of 1256-1273

(see Chapter Five). By 1273, a glance back over the previous

century reveals marked stages in the dissipation of royal resources.

By the fifteenth century, the German monarchy possessed very little wealth and little capacity to raise funds beyond that which could be drawn from a dynasty's own family posses-

sions. These kinds of possessions any king might inherit or

acquire, but they were not normally capable of producing suffi-

cient revenues to support pretensions to empire. Moreover, independent princes were by this juncture too strong to tax directly in any effective way and even the rising towns could not or would not provide sufficient aid. A counterpart to the late medieval German monarch's inability to secure sufficient money to support a cohesive kingdom was the monarch's lack of developed administrative institutions. The same thing is 6

true of the area of law. Both princely administration and

princely justice in a great many principalities (Bavaria provides an excellent example) could be seen by the late Middle Ages

to be more advanced than that of the Empire. Of course, England and France were far ahead of the German Empire

also in these areas by those late medieval centuries.

It is quite easy to make the assumption from all that has been

stated thus far that, by the time of Martin Luther, the more microcosmic princely territories of late medieval Germany

constituted a better comparison with the western monarchies than did the Empire. And that assumption has considerable validity. Unfortunately for Germany, in the absence of a strong monarchy, individual princes strove to apply and widen such powers as they themselves possessed. The aim of each princely family was to secure itself. And this led to the endemic practice

of private warfare and the eventual heightened use of mercenaries.

The historian frequently discovers that the development of a country is influenced by certain problems that reappear century after century within a given cultural context. Such problems may appear dramatically and suddenly, as in the case of revolution or war. These kinds of problems may also remain dormant for long segments of time all the while molding

policies, thus causing turmoil in domestic or foreign affairs. Some of these sorts of problems are well known. Britain's need in the modern era to keep its sea lanes open to suppy the island core of an empire, and the fact that this need was

major determinant of national policy, comes to mind. So too does Russia's drive in the modern era for a warm-water port under both Tsarist and Communist regimes. In a quite similar manner German history has at least two fundamental problems that draw special attention from historians. The first problem has plagued Germany for more than a thousand years and brief

reference was made to it earlier. It is: Where is Germany,

or, phrased in another manner, what peoples belong to Germany?

The second problem is: What region, what state, what dynasty,

or what people ought to lead Germany? During the Middle Ages, various powerful duchies and rising dynastic families vied for pre-eminence in German lands. Only in the fifteenth century, with the rise of the Habsburg dynasty, did it appear that centralized rule, so long underdeveloped, might finally 7

appear. However, the religious split of the Reformation in the following century rapidly put an end to that possibility. The heritage of the Middle Ages was that this problem proved

to be insoluble. This question in German history was not answer-

ed and has not been answered except, temporarily with a Prussian response, during the last part of the nineteenth century.

The answers to the problems of German decentralization and political fragmentation raised in this introduction, to the extent

that general answers can be given, are rooted in the many centuries of German history, a history that first appeared

as an extension of the Roman historical experience. Our earliest

and fragmentary information about the Germans comes to us through Romans like Julius Caesar who, while extending the frontiers of Rome after 55 B.C., encountered the Germanic peoples in many skirmishes. Later, the Roman historian Tacitus (98 A.D.) provided a more extensive account of the various Germanic tribes. We know from various sources that the Ger-

manic tribes began to move around the middle of the third

century in a general mass migration known as the Volkerwander-

ungen ("the wandering of the peoples"). Over the next three centuries, tribe after tribe of Germanic origin migrated over the surface of Europe, finally obliterating the boundaries of the old Western Roman Empire. Although few reliable historical

details are available from this period, it was during this time

that the separate German tribes first appeared as distinct

units. By 500 A.D., Europe had been transformed. All sorts of non-Roman kingdoms had taken the place of the former empire of Rome in the West. For the purposes of this work,

the most important of these, in that its legacies had much

to do with the eventual development of the idea of the "two crowns" of Germany, was the Frankish kingdom.

The earliest Frankish kingdom was established during the fifth century in what is now northeastern France along the lower

Rhine river. In its later Carolingian shape the Frankish kingdom

constituted a polity that gave birth to an eventual German medieval kingdom. Moreover, the oldest German princely families can, it appears, be traced back to Carolingian times and to the Counts appointed by the Carolingians to administer justice in their name throughout the diverse provinces of the

realm. It is thus proper to turn in the initial chapter to the

origins of the concept of the German crowns of our title during 8

the Carolingian period. In doing this, we will begin to see

the developing overlapping concepts of monarchy and empire, two not always complimentary concepts of medieval overlordship, taking shape in terms of an historical binding that makes it impossible eventually for us to consider one in any depth without considering the other simultaneously.

9

CHAPTER ONE PRELUDE TO GERMANY

Frankish Ascendancy and Legacy

The "fall" of Rome, as we have seen, featured the far-reaching movements of peoples, migrations that destroyed the equilibrium

of the ancient world. The first of the two major waves of population movement to upset and help destroy the Roman

Empire was that of German and Slavic invaders from the East; the second was the rise and expansion of Islam. The impact of these two movements was catastrophic. The seventh century was a time of real dislocation and crisis all over Europe. When

that period of 100 years had ended and the dust of disruption had settled, Rome was no more in the West and there was a real break in historical continuity. ! Commerce had shrunk to nearly nothing. The result was that the old somewhat urbanized western territories of the Roman Empire were trans-

formed into a society of landlords and peasants, of villages and estates. What was produced was little more than a subsistence-level economy. The ruling dynasties that existed were quite weak.

The most successful of the barbarian kingdoms existing in

this context were to be found among the Salian Franks. Created initially by a rather thoroughly barbarian ruler named Clovis (482-511), by the mid-sixth century the Frankish domain extend-

ed over the whole area formerly ruled by Rome in Western Europe north of the great mountain ranges, the Alps and the Pyrenees. This domain was quite vast when considered in terms of the tenuous medieval socio-economic infrastructure. It therefore soon divided rather naturally into three parts, Burgundy, a western domain called Neustria, and an eastern territory carved out roughly on both sides of the Rhine and known as Austrasia. The eastern domain was ruled over by a branch of the Frankish tribes known as the Ripuarians. Each 10

of the three domains was administered by a so-called "Mayor of the Palace," although the Frankish "Merovingian" (named after a mythical supposed founder "Merovius") King still ruled

over the whole kingdom at least in name. It was important for later German history that, with this tri-partite division, differing degrees of royal control developed in different areas.

Significantly, royal authority in the east never assumed the same proportions it did in the west. For this reason it was more difficult to control the eastern bishops of the Church and these prelates' taste for independence, which became traditional over time, assumed considerable importance in later Germanic history.

After 687, a new Frankish family, the Carolingians, began to rise to prominence in the domain. The Merovingians retained

the official kingship into the eighth century, but in the late

seventh century (786) one of the Carolingians, Charles Martel, "the Hammer," rose by force to become Mayor of the Palace for the whole kingdom. Charles Martel had always acted as if he was King, but still lacked the title when he died in 741. In the eighth century, after 741, the Merovingians were replaced

completely by the Carolingians in the person of Pepin the Short (ruled 741 to 786) who became actual King of the Franks

in his own right.

From 687, the Carolingians halted the Frankish decline and went on the offensive, although this was done in very slow Stages. Eventually, the Carolinginas established control over the disorder-rent Frankish domains by force and through what has sometimes been called by scholars a "secularization" of Church lands. The process was not precisely what the word normally connotes. Rather, the churches, which were now in possession of more land than any other one entity, leased parcels of it out to those nobles selected by the Carolingian rulers. These nobles, since they owed their land more to the king, who had picked them to have property, than to the Church,

which appeared the removed and indirect grantor, became loyal and reliable vassals of the Carolingian ruler. These so-called vassi dominici then spread out throughout Frankish

lands, acting as agents of royal domination. The end result of this process was a lasting alliance forged between the Carolingians and the Church.

1}

The alliance between the Church and Pepin produced his anoint-

ment as Frankish ruler by an ecclesiastical representative. Moreover, in 754, troubled by Lombard pressure from the north

of Italy, Pope Stephen II (pontiff from 752-757) appealed to Pepin for aid. He assured Pepin of spiritual support from the highest levels of the Church for his anointment as King. Pepin therefore took the field against the Lombards and defeated them in two years time. In a dramatic gesture he then gave to the Pope during 756 a broad strip of territory, this grant

stretching from Rome diagonally across the Peninsula to Ravenna. This “Donation of Pepin," of course, formed the

basis of the later "Papal States" and cemented the

Frankish-Papal alliance.

Once its power base was established at home, this Carolingian dynasty embarked upon a career of foreign conquest. Some of the conquests abroad involved the retaking of German lands, among them Bavaria, which had pried itself away from dependence on Frankish administration during the period of Merovingian decline, and Thuringia. In this way the foundations were laid for the Carolingian empire of Charlemagne. The eldest son of Pepin the Short was Charles the Great, better known in history as Charlemagne. After a short period when he shared the throne with his brother, he became sole Frankish ruler in 771 and retained that role until his death in 814. After inheriting a domain considerably greater in extent than presentday France, he spent almost the entire period of his rule extending the borders of his lands through conquests. In fact, nothing so characterized his sway over the Frankish kingdom as did his restless energy, as he moved from one frontier to another

securing his holdings. Perhaps that this was so should have constituted no surprise. Like every Carolingian monarch, he was first of all a war chief. The pattern that typified his career involved a thrusting forward in all directions: to the Elbe in the northeast against the heathen Saxons where the wars assumed something of the characteristics of a Christian crusade; into Bohemia and Hungary against the fierce Avars in the east; into the northern half of what is today Yugoslavia in the southeast against Byzantine forces; and in the south across the Pyrenees into Spain against the Moslems. By the end of his reign most of continental Europe west of the Elbe was united under Frankish rule.

12

The motivation for the expenditure of so much energy to domi-

nate so great an empire must have been complex in nature. In many ways, Charlemagne was still atypical German tribal king. According to Einhard, his biographer, he enjoyed the roughhouse of vigorous young warriors. He loved also the barbarous old "Song of Deeds" rendered in Germanic dialect. He was man of lusty appetites. He was fond of relaxing, dining, swimming, hunting, and spending time with his court and family.

And yet, apparently, Charlemagne believed sincerely that

he was far more than an ordinary Germanic king; he saw himself as the protector of orthodox Christianity in Europe. He believed

that it was his duty to extend and consolidate Christianity, and was quite willing to extend it by the sword if necessary. Moreover, he apparently desired to reestablish in some form

the might of Rome that had faded away, if in a somewhat different shape; many of the lands he had subdued had never been a part of the old Roman Empire. In fact, one of the great-

est historical importances of Charlemagne's rule was that

he did much to revive the ideal of empire and this ideal stood in medieval Europe for universal rule and obedience. It was thus in part due to the work of Charlemagne that, in the Middle Ages, a criterion of universality in Europe overlay a reality of localistic and microcosmic political, social and economic organization.

The ideal of universality was given an enormous reinforcement

by signal events transpiring during Charlemagne's reign. As the Frankish ruler surged back and forth across Europe, in

799 he was in Paderborn to subdue the rebellious Saxons. Only a year later he was in Italy for a campaign against Byzantine

forces south of Rome. At the beginning of the year 800 he

had settled in to winter at Rome and put down rebellious factions

there who threatened the local political control of the Papal See? By this historical juncture, Charlemagne was hailed commonly as the ruler most "supreme in the world and the mightiest in Europe." Therefore, on Christmas Day in the year 800 Charlemagne was recognized as the champion of Christianity in the basilica of Saint Peter in Rome when the grateful Pope, Leo III, crowned him "pious Augustus."4 The scene must have been a dramatic one, and has often been described:

On the most holy day of the Nativity of the Lord, as the 13

King arose from praying at Mass before the tomb of the blessed apostle Peter, Pope Leo placed a crown on his head and all the Roman people cried out, "To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-giving Emperor

of the Romans, life and victory." And after the laudation he was adored by the Pope in the manner of the ancient princes and, the title of patrician being set aside, he was called Emperor and Augustus.”

The bestowal of the title "Augustus" on Charlemagne suggests that the coronation in the year 800 was in some vaguely undefined way related to the ancient Roman empire. As it turned out, not long after 800, arguments began in Europe over whether the crowning involved a renewal or a transference of the empire of Rome. Such arguments missed the most important significance of the event. Most significantly, throughout the Middle Ages thereafter, the notion that Charlemagne's rule constituted

some sort of a link with the heritage of Rome continued to find wide acceptance. It is thus not surprising that most historians have seen the establishment of the Carolingian Empire

as a "central feature" of European history between the fall of Rome in the West and the emergence of feudal monarchies in the thirteenth century.© This is not to say that the Roman Empire was truly recreated in the year 800. The hard political facts of the time reveal that the Pope needed protection and

thus devised the coronation in his own interests more than in those of Charlemagne. The event in itself thus had relatively

little short-term historical importance and exercised very

little impact during the great Frankish ruler's life. It is only in terms of the perpetuation of a universalistic imperial ideal that it takes on any significance.

Besides marking the enhancement and perpetuation of the idea of Empire, the rule of Charlemagne marks the end of

a long period of transition beginning in the early fourth century with the reigns of the Roman emperors Diocletian and Constantine. In at least vague outlines a distinctly European civilization

had appeared and the last important vestiges of the ancient world had disappeared. The center of civilizational gravity in Europe had moved north of the Alps. A civilization clinging to the trade routes of the Mediterranean basin had been displaced at the center stage of historical events. It had been replaced

by a landlocked continental civilization with its core to be 14

found in Austrasian lands located between the Rhine, Meuse

and Moselle rivers.’ The result of the historical forces at work in Charlemagne's time, therefore, was the inevitable emergence of a new economic and social order, based on land rather than control of land and sea trade routes.

In many ways, the rule of Charlemagne was also an ending as much as it was a beginning, thus taking on the Janus-faced aspects of looking forward and backward simultaneously. His reign marked the culmination of the period during which there was little separation between the future territories of France

and Germany. The whole notion of attempting to weld the continent into a single political and cultural unit espoused by him was more reminiscent of Rome than of a Europe where different peoples coalesced into different nations as they would

in the future. Such a concept of empire was, thus, in many ways anachronistic in an historical epoch when, as French

historian Marc Bloch has pointed out, over the whole of Europe population density had greatly dropped off since Roman times.

In fact, during Charlemagne's day, even the most important towns had no more than a few thousand inhabitants, "and waste land, gardens, even fields and pastures encroached on all sides

amongst the houses." It was, in actuality, a society in which agriculture was a great "devourer of space." Consequently, the obstacles to human communication were many, and far greater than in the heyday of Latin Empire, as the old Roman roads went to wrack and ruin among vastly scattered human groupings. Thus it was, as indicated earlier, that the ideal of universality failed to mesh in practical ways with the reality

of a localistic and microcosmically organized Europe. No more than a hundred years after Charlemagne the structure of Europe was permanently and irretrievably altered in ways

far removed from the edifice of Rome.

Moreover, the Frankish Empire was still only a part of Europe physically. It did not even encompass all the areas of Germanic

settlement and certain Christian communities, like those in

Spain, opposed the Franks' claim to be the universalistic champions of Christendom by turning against Frankish Christian

leadership.? In summing up the Frankish impact, it must be noted that, for about a century, a kind of rough uniformity was imposed upon the Frankish Kingdom. This uniformity meant that there was one ruling class produced owning a basical15

ly similar outlook and with fairly common interests. This

ruling class inhabited a wide area that included what was later to become Germany. This tendency toward uniformity also was at work in the Church producing a commonness of practice

and expression of dogma in the clerical hierarchy that had

not been typical of earlier centuries. Thereafter, the elements of coherence provided by Carolingian rule were set off against the tendencies toward divergence appearing in the ninth and

tenth centuries. As the Germans advanced eastward across the Elbe in later centuries, both in Church and state, they carried with them the common Frankish institutions. From a Frankish kernel a rough external framework of history took

form and grew over the period 800 to 1200. The result of

Frankish expansiveness in Europe was the production of an area impregnated with Frankish ideas and institutions. The Frankish institutions, implanted in wider and yet wider areas and spread most effectively through Church propaganda, laid the foundation stones for the future.

In many ways, Carolingian society was a clerical society. The

general tone was set by the clergy. The clergy performed

many more important functions than they had in Merovingian times. Indeed, when Charlemagne sent out envoys to supervise the local administration in the provinces, he relied particularly on bishops and abbots to accomplish the task. In royal court, the "secretariat" was staffed by the clergy because they formed

the literate class in medieval society. Religion came to be the primary molder of social standards. Charlemagne's own belief that a sound religious organization had to dominate if the state was to prosper became typical of the expanded Frankish institutions. Thus, with the Carolingians, religion

became and remained a force in society and the tradition endured. The German emperors of the tenth and eleventh centuries would continue the notion, and it would eventually bring them into conflict with a resurgent papacy, that one of the universal-

istic duties of the secular ruler was to continue the work of religion as a social force, a force moving and transforming society. And this conception originated with Charlemagne.

From 804, signs of the eventual decline of the Frankish imperium

had already commenced to appear. 10 The unified structure of the Carolingian state, with its counts and bishops spread over the domain acting as agents of royal control, was based 16

upon conquest and expansion. But after 804 conquests diminished. The obvious thread of Frankish power that ran through

the period until 804 seems to dissolve into a welter of civil wars, dynastic conflicts and complex intrigues. The empire constructed by Charlemagne turned out to be a failure; it simply evaporated leaving behind it no direct inheritance. Why this was so has to do with these major factors: (1) the

end of expansionist successes revealing that there was no solid foundation in that wide domain to hold off adversity; (2) the lack, despite the imperial title, of any real imperial machinery;

and (3) the lack of the sort of efficient bureaucratic devices of the kind developed earlier by the Romans that were necessary

to the proper operation of a vast domain. Thus, the Frankish idea of an empire, independent of the papacy, continued to exist, but lost practical significance for the time being under the rule of Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious. Contrastingly, the pontificate of Nicholas I (858-867) in the middle of the ninth century saw the rapid development of a papal theory of empire. This theory held that the Empire was an instrument of the Church and thus subject to papal direction. Thus, when the ideal of universalistic control on the part of the secular rulers was revived later on by German claimants like Henry IV or Frederick IJ it was bound to bring these German rulers into direct conflict with the papal tradition launched under Nicholas I. The legacy of the immediate post-Charlemagne period therefore was two conflicting theories of empire, potentially contradictory ideas of a papal and a secular realm, and these theories were bound to be at loggerheads at some time in the future.

17

CHAPTER TWO CIVIL CONFLICT, PARTITION, AND DISINTEGRATION

The period after Charlemagne in the Frankish lands was typified by civil war and disruption. Even during the reign of the great

King's son Louis, there was much internal struggle over the division of the patrimony. Louis had fathered a wolf pack of sons, each of which served his own interests. The result was a civil war raging from one end of the Carolingian Empire

to the other. Louis at one point was deposed (833) and then

once more restored (835). In the 840's, after the death of Louis, the three sons took up the battle in earnest. There were originally four sons who could have been considered for

the patrimony and, after Pepin was set aside, the struggle boiled down to a fight between the eldest, Lothair, who had been the victim of territorial settlements earlier made at his expense by his father; Charles the Bald, who had been assign-

ed the western region; and Louis the German, who had been

placed in charge of the eastern region. Charles and Louis allied themselves against the eldest brother. At Strassburg,

in 842, in the presence of their troops, Charles and Louis took an oath of friendship. The linguistic differences between the eastern and western areas of the Frankish kingdoms, as they had begun an ethnic split preceding an eventual political one,

are evident in the "Oath of Strassburg". Louis the German

and Charles the Bald pronounced the formal vows in languages not their own so that the troops led by the other brother could understand. Hence, Louis' oath came out in a form easily recognized as old French while Charles the Bald used a clearly Germanic language.

The period of civil war finally ended when, in the famous Treaty

of Verdun (843), the burial of the idea of a united Frankish empire took place. The Treaty was a simple division. Charles the Bald received essentially what was the basis of modern

France. Louis received lands east of the Rhine, including 18

territories that today are part of the modern state of Austria

as well as Germany, and Lothair received territory in the center, a chimney-shaped domain stretching from the North Sea down to a broad Italian base ending below Rome. The Treaty of Verdun was one of those historical turning points that was recognized as significant not only by historians much

later, but by contemporaries as well. One contemporary ob-

server, Florus of Lyon, wrote prophetically that, henceforward there was not to be an emperor, or a king, but only "kinglets."

Florus was a bit premature, but his description came close

to describing what was the actuality of later medieval Germany. In many ways, the Treaty of Verdun recognized what was already actual fact; it accepted the coexistence of independent states.

The Treaty of Verdun also marked a new beginning. As yet, there was still no Germany or France in the later sense. And

the treaty held territorially with some force until the death

of Lothair in 855 when, again following the Frankish law of equal division rather than the rule of primogeniture, the lands of Lothair were partitioned in a quite decisive fashion. This further division of 855 constituted a particularly low point in the efficacy of the imperial ideal, for Louis II owned the

title of "emperor" at that time and, since he had received only Italian lands as his inherited share, was often referred to simply as the "Emperor of Italy." Thus, at this juncture,

there is a clear indication that the imperial dignity of Charlemagne amounted to little more than an Italian kingship. The territory of Lotharingia (Lorraine), the original middle inherit-

ance north of the Alps, passed into the hands of a German ruler in 879. The Carolingian dynasty in the east lasted another three generations after Louis the German before finally dying

out in 911.

These early years of German history pointed up certain develop-

ments that were to become familiarly associated with the

Germans in later centuries. For example, the amount of land under the control of Louis and his successors varied constantly.

In part of the empire local strong men declared themselves rulers with none to deny them. Weak central government, the widespread fragmentation of authority, allowed those who dared to seize power to achieve success in a great many Situations. One of the results of this tendency was that certain areas became independent for a time, only to slip under the 19

control of the ruler once again. Periodic time spans of independ-

ence enhanced localism and increased the taste for greater freedom of action in the future. The German rulers were as incapable as the others of taking control over their kingdoms

and generally they were weak into the tenth century. The natural leaders in an increasingly decentralized system were various powerful bishops, counts whose families had originally

been installed in authority by Charlemagne, and dukes descended

from former tribal leaders. The result was little more than a shadow kingdom, where the eastern part of Charlemagne's

kingdom had been. In fact, the kingdoms of the late ninth century in Europe generally were, in the words of one historian, no more than an "illusion, because everywhere life was becoming

more and more localized, and, in this hour, the crumbling of

royal crowns had scarcely more concrete worth than the imperial device."3

Of those factors turning monarchies into shadow kingdoms by far the most important was the wave of invasions breaking over Carolingian lands in the ninth century. The raids tended to bring a rapid setback to the Carolingian economy as a whole.

Before 804, the economy had been expanding. After 804, it was contracting. Whole areas were depopulated and returned

to nature. The aristocracy, beginning to see its wealth shrinking, commenced to use its powers to oppress the poor and plunder

royal lands where rulers were too weak to stop them.* Thus, the general results of invasion in the ninth century were down-

ward population trends, decline in agriculture, and loss of wealth.

The raids of foreign invaders came to Carolingian lands from different directions. From the North came Viking incursions. From the South came the Saracens. And from the east came the Magyars. The Saracen raids were the longest in duration,

but were essentially piratical onslaughts and affected only the Mediterranean world. The Magyars (Hungarians) were no more capable of systematic siege than the Saracens, but had an important impact on Germanic lands. Appearing as bands of rapidly moving horsemen, they swept into Germany, where there were few fortified towns, and desolated the country-

side. They first arrived in 862. But regular attacks did not begin until the end of the ninth century. They swept into Bavaria in 900 and into Saxony in 906. This was the apex of their influ20

ence in Germanic territories. Thereafter, the number of their attacks declined until their final ouster from German lands in 955.

In the late ninth century the rivers of Europe became "Viking

Highways." The migrations of these fierce men of the sea, who had been turned out from their own shores by poverty

of the land and the rigor of the seasons to find an altered means of existence, were set into motion by a combination of forces.

Most important among them, the historians of the Vikings

believe, was probably relative over population.

The raids of the fierce Northmen were widespread initially and the towns of the Rhineland and northern Germany were frequent targets.” Cologne and Trier felt the impact of such attacks in this era. But the Germans were a bit luckier than

their western neighbors with respect to the Vikings. After 855, the Norsemen concentrated their destructive efforts in the valleys of the Loire and the Seine and began to abandon the waters of the Rhine. As can be seen in this brief description, one of the most serious features of these waves of invasion was that they were more

or less simultaneous. At the same time, there is little doubt that the incursions of the Norsemen were the most serious and that Carolingian lands west of the Rhine suffered the most. Consequently, in France more than Germany, the invasions meant that there had to be a new beginning. Consequently,

the old dukes or margraves of Germany in the east who had owned powers more extensive than the prerogatives given the counts by Charlemagne tended to keep those powers more completely than did their counterparts west of the Rhine.®

Given the extent of the chaos of the late ninth and early tenth

centuries, therefore, there is no really coherent history yet

of a German kingdom. Until 955, there was no certainty whatever that a coherent Germany would emerge as a recognizable

territorial unit. For years, there was even the possibility of

north and south Germany proceeding along completely separate paths, even as there was a possibility that Lorraine, Burgundy, and Swabia would form together into a massive central kingdom which would deprive any potential Germanic unit of its western

provinces. Thus would the future physiognomy of the whole 21

German state have been altered. Because of this uncertain situation, therefore, when the terms "Italy, France and Germany"

are used in these pages, they are in the fullest sense "mere geographic expressions," employed only because the author's

and readers' purposes are suited thereby. The reality is that the political focal point of each area was increasingly centered

in diverse regions, in counties, duchies, and other units the histories of which are typified by great dissimilarity. ’ This makes the real history of the period from around 850 to 1050 infinitely complex. Yet, in all this complexity, we can begin

to see the tendencies toward differential development in France,

Italy, and Germany. And from that development emerged at least an outline of a German kingdom, the outlines we will

now describe.

22

CHAPTER THREE FROM SHADOW KING TO GERMAN DYNASTY

Of all the lands that had once been part of the Frankish domains,

Germany was the first to recover from the period of postCarolingian anarchy. As implied by what has been presented in the immediately preceding pages, the explanation for this when contrasted with the situation of France and Italy during the same time frame likely lies primarily in the fact that Germany suffered as a whole less from the disorganizing impact

of barbarian invasions. Yet this differential development resulted also because of characteristic dissimilarities in the socioeconomic structures of the eastern and western halves of the old Carolingian monarchy. Feudalism was more highly developed in France than Germany. Dependence on the heavily

armed "Frankish Knight," who exacted a price in terms of independence for his services, was much less the practice in the east where the core of the armies was made of up peasant

freemen. The powerful dukes and counts mentioned in the

last chapter rejected vassalage and feudal ties to a much greater

degree than west of the Rhine. There was also in Germany

a marked tribal differentiation which means that armies were summoned, instead of through the feudal levy, people by people

and ethnic group by ethnic group. The slower development of feudalism in the eastern lands prevented the fractioning of public power among feudatories. Instead of the at least thirty distinct territorial divisions one finds in France at the beginning of the tenth century, the German area was composed

of five great duchies. These were: Franconia; Swabia; Thuringia; Saxony; and Bavaria. Of these, the small duchy of Thuringia was merged with Saxony after 908.! It is fairly

evident that these duchies were the descendents of independent

pre-Frankish Germanic tribes. It has thus been tempting for some historians to see them simply as a "resurrection of the ancient Germanic nations."2 The truth was actually a bit more complex than that. In the eastern Carolingian kingdom what 23

had happened was that the dukes had used the special powers given them under the existing scheme of government to build upon the old tribal spirit of independence and thus entrench their powers.

Because of this special set of circumstances, because in each region the flow of events had thrown up leaders of power and authority, the dukes of Germany were in a position to solidify their German kingdom when the last pale Carolingian of the

German branch, Louis the Child, ruled in the early tenth century.? During his brief rule, Louis had been unable to defend

the realm and his short reign had suffered from the inability

to hold back the Norse and Magyars. The great dukes had

organized their local defenses better, and those few victories

won were theirs. With the death of that last Carolingian in 911, the German duchies decided to break permanently with the West. The dukes asserted the electoral principle and picked one of their warrior chieftans, Conrad I, Duke of Franconia (ruled 911-918), to serve as King. From that time forward, through a mixture of hereditary and elective procedures (the new ruler was always "elected," although most of the time he was the son of the former King), the crown usually remained in German hands. This can not be said, however, to have marked an important immediate change in the history of the German monarchy. Conrad was unable to exercize any effective author-

ity over the various dukes and he ruled for only eight years. It is true that he aspired to the realities of kingship, but was

unsuccessful in establishing them over his fellow dukes. Upon his death in 918 the crown passed to the house of Saxony (later to be called the "Ottonians" by historians) where it remained for over a century.

In 918, Conrad, on his deathbed, selected as king his former Chief foe, Henry I "the Fowler," Duke of Saxony. The reason for this final curious act is not known. Perhaps it was no more than a last bitter gesture of capitulation. Perhaps it represented

a statesmanlike hope that Henry, despite the fact that he was a former foe, was best suited to lead the Germans. At any rate, eventually, the German dukes assented to Conrad's

dying choice and "elected" Henry. With all of its relative powerlessness, however, it must be said that the rule of Conrad

was something of a watershed in that the Carolingians had been left behind. And he was raised to the throne by those 24

equal in status to himself, thus firmly establishing the electoral principle. At the time of Conrad's demise, the dukes had become

a new and quite influential factor upon the political scene. It is often written that the rule of Henry the Fowler marks the actual beginning of the medieval German monarchy. More-

over, there were some impressive conquests during Henry's kingship. In a series of campaigns he set up marches against the Slavs and reconquered Charlemagne's "Dane-Mark." All along the frontiers he scattered lines of fortifications (burgs) which became the nuclei of later cities. In point of fact, however, he was little more able than his predecessor in inhibiting the independent tendencies of the dukes. And yet there was no question that the German monarchy would survive these relatively powerless rulers. There was no possibility even

at the death of Conrad that the east Frankish lands would disintegrate into a number of principalities. In 918 the need for a king was assumed by all crucial parties. At the same time, there was also no possibility of eradicating the power of the duchies. Hence, the great issue of German medieval history had been joined; regionalism versus unity was emerging as a theme underlying political development. Henry the Fowler made the decision that he was a duke himself

and would have to rule as a "first among equals." His aim was not to destroy the duchies that had risen to considerable power in the previous twenty years, but rather to give them

a standardized niche in the government, a powerful place, but still subordinate to the monarchy. To the extent that he was successful during his kingship, Henry owed that success

to the fact that he led the dukes in shaping the resistance

to the Magyars. In fact, it can be said of the Saxon monarchy

that it successfully repelled the invasions that continued to threaten Germany, attacks from the Magyars in the southeast and the Slavic Wends in the northeast.

As it dealt with the dukes, the new Saxon dynasty proceeded

step by step. Although Henry did not automatically obtain control over the whole territory, he claimed the entire old kingdom of the eastern Franks. Despite his title as "King," however, his realm scarcely reached beyond the confines of Saxony. The duchies of Bavaria and Swabia did not even send representatives to the royal ceremonies that made him ruler.

Henry I therefore concentrated initially on Swabia. His aim 25

there was to reassert royal control by regaining dominance

over the Church, in the manner of Carolingian times, and over holdings to which he had dynastic claims. Moreover, he wished to reassert royal influence over the counts instead of letting them become dependent upon the dukes. And as for the dukes,

it was his desire to reestablish the king's right to nominate the lords and ducal territories, thus breaking up the pattern

of hereditary succession in the duchies. By skillful maneuvering, Henry was able to exact acknowledgement of his sovereignty from Swabia and then Bavaria.

The overall pattern of the tenth century in Germany is fairly clear. The German king usually made no attempt to suppress the duchies directly. That this was the case is probably due

to the Saxon rulers' recognition of the fact that some sort

of more localized authority than that which could be exercised by a distant king was necessary given the socioeconomic infra-

structure of the time. Instead, it was their aim to tie the dukes more directly to the monarchy. In addition to steps

taken to accomplish this, the crown turned more and more the Church. Henry granted property to bishops and convened

synods. This was essentially the policy, too, of Henry's successor Otto I.

The second ruler of the Saxon line, Otto I (936-973), is usually regarded as one of the most powerful of the medieval kings.

It is the common judgment of historians that both Henry I and Otto I, given the limitations of their time, built quite well.* Part of this judgment is reached by contrasting the German monarchical edifice directly with France during that era. France, by the end of Otto's regime, had seen the Carolingian structure of government crumbling. Throughout the period, the Carolingian ruler west of the Rhine was weak and occupied

with local problems. Only in the east had the dissolution of

the state been avoided.

Given the above-described contast, it is easy to overestimate

the extent of Ottonian attainment. Otto had continued his father's Swabian policies with some success in Bavaria. And, as indicated, it was Otto even more than his father who had returned to the old Carolingian policy of relying on the Church. The need for greater dependence on the Church for military and other aid appeared to have been driven home with Otto 26

by a major revolt in Bavaria against his overlordship transpiring

between 953-955, following an earlier rising. After 955, he began to develop the Church in Germany as a pillar of the monarchy.

Otto's policy with regard to the Church was the logical course of action to follow for several reasons. First, the clergy consti-

tuted a body of the only learned men available during that

day. They had thus retained something of the old Roman idea of a respublica, a notion more or less equivalent to the modern idea of the state. The Church was therefore the prime supporter

of the idea of a kingdom. Moreover, the bishops tended to

do better economically when not subject to the exactions local lords could make upon them, but were, rather, asked to pay homage to a distant and less burdensome king. Lastly, again

the situation in Germany contasted dramatically with that in France. West of the Rhine, most of the bishoprics and abbeys had passed under the control of local feudal lords. In Germany,

royal control over the Church remained the rule from 938 and, in fact, was essentially unchallenged after 975. Hence, all bishoprics were "royal" as were eighty-five abbeys in 951. These churchly lands thereafter formed enclaves within the duchies, entities through which the ruler could exercise his power on the local level. In this way bonds of alliance were forged between the German kings, on the one hand, and German bishops and abbots on the other. By the end of the tenth century

about three-quarters of the army of the German ruler was provided by the German abbeys and bishoprics and only the remaining one-quarter by the secular lords.

The reign of Otto I, when viewed in terms of our account thus far, sounds very much like a success story. But his successes, as indicated earlier, can be exaggerated. If he built soundly, it must be remembered that his royal edifice did not, despite the fact that it was the strongest monarchy of its day, weather the test of time. The various methods to weaken the duchies had included, in addition to those mentioned earlier, bringing in relatives of his own from outside, deposing the sitting ruler (as in the case of Bavaria during 953), and replacing that ruler with other more loyal members of the ducal family. Placing

the duchies in the hands of members of Otto's own family proved to be no long-term solution, however, for it only created

new dynastic rivalries. Otto's reliance on the Church tended 27

to establish a secular aristocracy that had little to do in terms of duties assigned it by the crown. That aristocracy was thus able to use its time to withdraw into isolation and concentrate upon building up its estates. Moreover, to rely on the Church was to rely on bishops and abbots who were the sons of those same great noble families that were withdrawing into isolation. Lastly, weakening the authority of the dukes at the local level

hampered the development of effective local government. Administratively, the kingdom of Otto I can be said to be one

of the last effective revivals of Carolingian administrative techniques. It was thus a regime built upon the methods of the past which worked relatively well for a time. At the same time, however, it did not adjust well to the changing medieval conditions. In essence, paradoxically, tendencies that would be a source of weakness in the future were a source of strength

in the present of the tenth century; Carolingian methods of government gave the King an extent of power owned by no other ruler in Western Christendom in the 950s.

In sum, the Ottonian dynasty was able to use the quick recovery of Germany from anarchy to build for itself a position of preponderance among the European kingdoms of its day. In the east, Otto had defeated the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955 and, thereafter, they ceased to be a serious threat to Germany. Important-

ly too, Otto's victory on the banks of the River Lech in 955 made him into "Otto the Great." According to a contemporary chronicler, he was even proclaimed "Emperor" in his hour of triumph by the victorious army.® This was a step beyond the term "King of the Teutons" which had been in use since

920.’ Whether Widukind the Saxon's account is entirely accurate

is questionable. Most medieval chroniclers were not beyond excessively lionizing and distorting their subjects. But it is probably true that, as early as 955, Otto I was seen to be the equal of an emperor in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Otto's status was further reinforced by the fact that, once the Hungarian incursions were checked at Lechfeld, he went on the offensive, thrusting beyond the Elbe River toward the Oder. Otto also revived what seem to be plans originally devised

by Henry the Fowler to move into Italy. He first appeared in Italy during 951. On 31 March of that year, while celebrating

Easter at Aachen, Otto made the fateful decision to travel to Italy. He was able to do this because Germany was more 28

or less secure from attack for the first time in quite a long time. Otto likely wanted to make the difficult journey to

Italy in 951 and to return thereafter because his rule was based

in its forms upon that of Charlemagne. Naturally, the rule

of the great Carolingian emperor provided a compelling prece-

dent. Moreover, Otto desired lasting control over parts of

the whole Frankish Middle Kingdom in Burgundy and Lorraine.

The imperial crown was the traditional prerequisite for ruling

that territory. It must be remembered too that, for rulers

of the tenth and eleventh Centuries, the idea of a successful nation-state did not excite. But an empire of the Roman kind was indeed an enlivening prospect. Participation in Italian affairs was thus considered an essential aspect of one's journey toward empire.

The ducal revolt of 935-55 in Germany kept Otto from pursuing

any Italian advantage gained in 951. But, in 961, he again appeared in Italy in answer to an appeal for aid by Pope John XII, who saw his temporal power threatened by an aggressive Italian secular lord. Otto repelled the aggression and proceeded

south to Rome where he was crowned (962) "Emperor" by

the Pope, receiving the title "Imperator et Augustus," renewing,

as heir of the East Carolingians, the tradition of Carolingian empire, a tradition which had been in abeyance for some time. This act underscored German claims to permanent control over all non-Byzantine lands in Italy.

The Empire thus reconstituted therefore bears some striking

similarities to that of Charlemagne. This has caused some historians to draw parallels between the coronation of 962 and that of 800. Yet there are too many fundamental differences to do that with any success. The tumultuous events of the ninth century had destroyed any real universal significance

of the crown.8 To claim that Otto saw the coronation as a marking of himself as the rightful descendent of Charlemagne

is probably inaccurate, despite the fact that, as asserted, he

could not but be aware of Carolingian precendents. It is more likely that he saw the crowning as a simple, rightful confirmation of his Italian victories. The evident proof of this is to be found

in the fact that Otto made no attempt to extend his sway

over all the old Frankish lands; there was no hint of a movement

to dominate France. Instead, the new empire never implied more than rule over Germany, Italy, and, for a period, Burgundy. 29

The core of Charlemagne's empire had remained to the west

of the Rhine. The center of gravity of Otto's domain was to its east. The imperial title, seen in the context of the tenth

century, was little more than a natural consequence of the fact that Germany was the first European area to recover from late-Carolingian anarchy.

Perhaps the most important legacy of the coronation of 962, besides the lasting title of Emperor which was passed on from ruler to ruler in Germany until the, by then, shadowy empire was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806, was the special relationship Otto and his successors had with the Pope. This relationship was not so important in Otto's time; the papacy

of the tenth century was in practically every way at a low ebb. The basis of Otto's empire was conquest. And the real importance of Otto's conquests was that he passed on to succeeding German kings a tendency to take on more than they could

achieve. The extent of Germanic conquest, in a time when communications were difficult or impossible, gave the German

rulers a domain too vast to rule effectively. Otto and his

successors fatefully became concerned with strategically and logistically difficult matters like securing Provence to have better access to Italy. They also became concerned with forcing the popes to concede that no papal elections were valid unless approved by the German emperor, thus underlining the fact that, in the German view, the Church should be subordinate to the Empire in Italy and Germany.

In sum, during the reign of Otto I, the major themes appearing in the later history of the Saxons and Salians were developed. These were: a tendency for the German nobles to rise against authority; the tendency to seek support of the Church to further imperial policy; and the attempt to control the papacy, thus to be forced to "protect" Italy. The later Saxons continued policies generally in line with those

instituted by Otto I. They expanded the kingdom somewhat in the northeast, thus producing Germanization there at Slavic

expense and laying the foundation of Central European history

for later generations.” But, most importantly, they devoted much time to keeping Italy subdued. The German rulers con-

stantly interfered in the affairs of the papacy. But in Italian affairs they were often not as effective as they would have 30

liked to be. From the reign of Otto I, the eastern frontier was hardly ever at peace. Inevitably, this diverted the emperor's

attention from Italy and even Germany itself. In Italy, therefore, the German rulers were unable to impede the Norman

occupation of Sicily and the lower peninsula. Otto II's campaign

there during the three years beginning in 980 turned out to

be a disaster. And, typically, as soon as he was out of Germany, there were fresh revolts along the Slavic and Danish borders. In Italy also, a period of economic revival played into the hands

of the knights of the countryside who worked to throw off the feudal overlordship of the emperors so that they could

exploit their own lands more successfully. In the Italian towns,

new and powerful commercial classes arose who wished to use the bishops to implement their policies. But, since the knights were primarily vassals of the bishops, their policies were largely anti-episcopal. This socioeconomic revolution in northern Italy in time became a political revolution aimed at dislodging German rule.

In Germany, despite Ottonian policies aimed at achieving the

contrary result, the Saxon rulers faced rebellions from the dukes. These were usually put down, but the German lords showed tendencies to become more and more independent. The dukes and some lesser nobles even made their realms heredi-

tary. The power of the emperors over the German bishops

also increased steadily since the emperors were able to retain the privilege of "electing" bishops. This process of ecclesiastical

election thus became the linchpin of imperial power. And as the Germans pushed to the east, rather than entrusting

any greater amount of power to the dukes in the new territories,

they created bishoprics as outposts against the Slavs. These then were the tendencies under Otto II (ruled 973 to 983) and Otto III (983 to 1002).

Under Otto III, the tendency for the German ruler to spend

even more time in Italy became quite apparent, for the influence

of Charlemagne upon Otto was also enormous. Otto adopted manners that were in fact more southern than northern. But the social revolution in Italian lands had seen the rise to power of new classes that struggled constantly to better their position against existing authorities. And because the German government relied on the bishops the tendencies toward revolt there 31

were often turned against the bishops. The revolts even took on the tone of yearnings for an Italian national government.

And when Otto III died in 1002 at the age of twenty-two, before

his dreams of a revived Roman Empire could be realized, an Italian party elected an Italian king. This move by the Italians was quickly thwarted by the new German king, Henry II. But the tendency toward social agitation set in an anti-imperial mode was well-established.

In 1024, when the Saxon ruler Henry II died, a new dynasty, the Salian or Franconian house, was established in Germany. It ruled over the Empire until 1125 and became involved in several developments that greatly shaped later German history. It was during this next era of Germany's history that the contradiction between the two notions of Germany discussed in this

work began to bear bitter fruit for the German kings. That

this was so resulted primarily from the fact that social agitation in the Empire merged with a sweeping reform movement beginning in the Church's monastic houses and surging upward until

it reached the papacy. This reform movement, then, as well as becoming the vehicle for understandable purely religious grievances, also became the pretext for opposition to the German bishops, who were acting as agents of the Empire in northern Italy, arising among the knights and towns. It also served

as the pretext for opposition to the German ruler appearing

among the territorial lords north of the Alps. This whole process, which in the long term proved to be so damaging to the kingship

in Germany during the eleventh century, is known to us in

the pages of history as the "Investiture Controversy."

32

CHAPTER FOUR THE INVESTITURE CONTROVERSY

At the beginning of the Salian dynasty in 1024, both imperial and papal authorities shared the notion that God had divided the government of the Church between popes, bishops, and kings. Unfortunately, no precise lines were ever drawn concern-

ing where the powers and responsibilities of one began and the other ended. When Henry II (ruled 1002-1024) had come to the throne in 1002, a man assumed the dignity of empire

who had been educated for a career among the clergy. His

early training helped shape his policies. He was more diligent in exercising control over the Church, and he used his prerogative of giving out ecclesiastical holdings as a way of building his own power base. One of the ways Henry chose to increase the loyalty of the bishops was by awarding abbeys to various bishoprics. This practice naturally produced episcopal enthusiasm for the crown in Germany. In sum, Henry's ecclesiastical

policy was an effective one. He received the enthusiastic

support of the bishops while making them far more dependent upon him than on a distant papacy in Rome. It is perhaps a sign of Henry's times that, although he carried out crusade-like campaigns (Christian-versus-heathen) against the Slavic peoples

to the east with the aim of Christianizing them, these were not technically crusades. To be a crusade in the sense that the later campaigns to the Holy Land were, the war ethic would have had to be transferred from the person of the ruler

and have been made the expression’ of central Church directives. !

The traditions of the Ottonianum in the eleventh century, therefore, would appear to have given predominance to the secular ruler in German churchly affairs. There were, however, aspects of Church theory that carried within them something of a religious time-bornb steadily ticking away only to explode among later emperors. The essential component of that time33

bomb can be seen in the fact that, in the eleventh century, pro-papal writers developed concepts antagonistic to the kind of policies taking shape under Henry II. These writers came

to hold that civil power, divinely bestowed, was delegated to secular rulers through the Church. The emperors, and those writers supporting them, held that the German rulers possessed

from God the theoretical warrant for decisive intervention in almost all ecclesiastical affairs except the purely sacramental. Hence, in the developing eleventh-century view of potential Church reformers, Conrad II (ruled from 1024 to 1039), the first ruler of the Salian house, carried on simonical

practices. Among these, some papal writers held, were the

arbitrary installation and deposition of bishops as well as the oppression of free monasteries. And the pro-imperial writers, even while sometimes censuring the most extreme of the German

ruler's practices, upheld the ideal that the king was exercising royal control in this world by diverting through human hands

the power of God himself .4

Over the long term, therefore, by denouncing the right of the German ruler to appoint bishops, reformers in the Church cut the ground from beneath both the secularized episcopacy

and the imperial government. To understand how this transpired,

one must examine the changes taking place in the Church during the late ninth and tenth centuries. At the beginning of the period, the popes had little or no power over the bishops.

The centralized structure of the medieval Church had nearly disintegrated. The See of Saint Peter was itself in the hands of Roman nobles who tended to buy, sell, or dominate the privilege of determining who would wear the papal robes. There was thus little regard for the spiritual significance of the papacy.

As has been revealed thus far in these pages, the clergy had become deeply involved in the secular processes of feudalism

outside of Rome and especially in Germany. When the Emperor

himself did not practice "lay investiture," the local nobles did by appointing bishops and clerics, so that they might control

the Church lands and benefit directly from revenues they

produced. Celibacy was nearly unknown in many _ regions although officially decreed by the Church. Many clergymen raised families and arranged for the succession of their own

children to what became essentially hereditary benefices. It was upon this situation of financial and other less-thanspiritual arrangements that the Cluniac reform intruded massively in the eleventh century. 34

Until the time of the Cluniac reform movement, the coronation

of the German king followed an order strikingly similar to that followed when a prelate of the Church was ordained. Through the ceremony the King was accepted by the Church as its defender. Thus, the King became something of an ecclesi-

astic by the rite of coronation.* In this fashion the Saxon Henry Il and his Salian successor were unconsecrated prelates of the Church in the accepted view held widely at that time.

They were regarded as uniting in their persons full secular power with ecclesiastical authority. Hence, as _ the lord of

Churches and monasteries, the German ruler consistently transferred Church properties back and forth and even used in ceremonies an Imperial Cross supposedly charged with vast spiritual powers and incorporating fragments within it of the original cross upon which Christ was crucified... A German crowned head-of-state accustomed to such churchly prerogatives, and

used to practicing lay investiture as a natural corollary of

such practices, was bound to run afoul of any reform movement at work in the Church.

With simony and religious pluralism rampant in the Church, and with secular figures so strong among the clergy, it was

little wonder that there were cries for reform. Hence, the powerful monastic order of Cluny in Burgundy was able to

spearhead a movement for such reform through its dependencies

and affiliates, with striking success. At the same time, the Cluniac monks who were to enact reforms had been able to see the work of the "pontifical king," his investing ‘of bishops with "the rod of virtue and equity", close at hand.© This was so because Cluniac monks were closely involved with the govern-

ment of the Salian dynasty. The reform work of Cluny was

thus made easier because of its political connections and because it was the largest, best endowed, and most prestigious monastic system in Europe. It enjoyed the admiration of eleventh-century churchmen and secular figures alike. The vision of religious life developed at Cluny was not an original

one; it was an intensification of Benedictine monastic forms

as they had come to exist by the ninth century. The actual beginnings of the monastery at Cluny in. 910 were modest, but within a century it had become a leading monastic house

in Europe. Its success can be partly attributed to the fact

that it had obtained immunity from both lay and ecclesiastical 35

interference, as well as to the fact that it was directly subject to the Pope. This direct responsibility to the papacy, an institution which was until the mid-eleventh century in a condition of nearly complete decrepitude, worked to the advantage of Cluny also. The order was thus able to work out the elements of its reform program in virtual independence.

The basic elements of the Cluniac reform were: (1) to recentral-

ize the Church and, in a connected vein, to strengthen the

papacy; (2) to establish the celibacy of the clergy; (3) to elimi-

nate secular influence over Church lands; (4) to eliminate lay influence over investiture and the selection of popes; and (5) to remove the secular role in the administration of Church revenues.

The Cluniac movement entered Germany from Burgundy and Lorraine at the beginning of the eleventh century. The first Salian ruler, Conrad II (ruled from 1024 to 1039), was a harsh soldier and a reasonably effective administrator who favored the reform as did his son, Henry III (ruled 1039 to 1056). It appears that both rulers thought of the reform as a wave sweeping over Europe and completing its Christianization. Contemporaries often thought of Henry IJ as a monk in worldly garb. It did not occur to Henry that his love for appearing in public to forgive all his enemies and his adoption of monastic attitudes were practices containing any anomalies. And yet he believed

absolutely that he had received an office at his coronation that had full sacramental weight. He therefore never doubted that he had full spiritual authority to bestow the symbols of

ecclesiastical office on bishops and abbots and to direct Church

affairs. He did not doubt for a moment that he was Christ's representative in Germany to a greater degree than was the

Pope. The persistence of his attitude was made easier by

the fact that, in 1045, there were no less than three rival popes in Rome. Henry moved to depose two claimants and conferred the honor upon Bishop Suidger of Bamberg, who reigned as

Clement II. Thus, ironically, began a line of reform popes culminating in Gregory VII.

Even as the early Salians were developing the view that the Cluniac reform was religiously beneficial in their own country,

however, the agitation against German rule in northern Italy was merging with that same reform movement in the Church. 36

By attacking the right of German rulers to appoint bishops, which was denounced as "simony," the agitators began to cut the ground from beneath imperial government. Milan soon

enough became the center of the movement. There the so-called "Patarini" (the "“rag-pickers"), who were actually knights and

the middle-classes of the towns, agitated for greater control of their own affairs.’ The papacy in the person of Victor I took the side of the Patarini against the German-controlled

bishops. In this fashion the whole way in which Italy had been managed under the Empire was thrown into question. Hence, by 1056, there were present in Italy all the elements making for rebellion against imperial control. In Germany also, events were moving in a quite similar direction, if more slowly. Since 955, the imperial government had grown more reliant on the bishops and more estranged from the dukes. The relative weakness of feudalism in Germany had enfeebled the dukes in their Struggle with the crown. Over the long term, however, unlike

France where, eventually, the feudal lords were drawn into line behind their princes, in Germany free classes, both noble and peasant, created a solid basis of national wealth that made the lesser nobility more capable of independence than their feudal counterparts west of the Rhine.®

As it turned out, in Germany, the free classes remained free and were quite jealous of their liberties. Vassalage, which became the hallmark of the feudal system in France, became in Germany a sign of servitude. The success of the monarchy

in restricting the dukes left the aristocracy beneath them,

and above the peasants, free to develop its position in an inde-

pendent direction. Thus the Ottonians had failed to reduce the intermediate levels of the aristocracy as they fought to weaken the dukes. This failing became apparent under the Salians when the reform movement altered the balance of power in favor of the aristocracy. The vast majority of the new monastic houses founded in Germany in the century after Otto I's death, something over 500 establishments, were more

attached to the intermediate aristocracy than they were to royal control. In this way, the unity of the German church, formerly under the more or less direct control of the ruler and thus a main pillar of royal policy, had been destroyed. When the issue of control over the Church arose in the eleventh

century as part of the papal-imperial struggle, these German 37

aristocratic founders placed their houses under papal protection rather, as once would have been the case, than seeking it from the Emperor.

Perhaps to compensate for the slow, and from the imperial point of view negative, change in the organization of the monas-

tic houses of Germany and the manner of control over those houses, the Salian dynasty tried to develop greater royal power in Germany by establishing a new class of administrators from among their own unfree dependents, the ministeriales. These

ministeriales were set to rule over "royal" castles in various territories. This new class quickly rose in importance within the imperial scheme of things and acted as the main agents of royal policy throughout Germany after their initial employment during the rule of Conrad 1.9 The policy of employing and preferring ministeriales alienated an already disgruntled aristocracy even further and caused aristocratic opposition to mount rapidly. The complaint was heard often and loudly by mid-century that the King listened only to low-born counsel-

lors amoung the ministeriales instead of, more properly, to the high-born of the realm who, in their not surprising view,

should have acted as his major advisors.

All of these elements making for the solidification of the broad revolutionary front against imperial control were coalescing

by the death of Henry III in 1056. As it turned out, the rule

of Henry II marked the apex of secular control over the Church in Germany. It was shortly after 1056 that the reform movement fostered by Henry Il and Henry III turned against the crown

in a decisive and open fashion. Some writers have argued

that the movement now known as the Cluniac reform, a religious

movement that appeared as a new and high wind blowing ill for the Empire after 1056, was based solely on the desire for

greater moral rectitude in religious matters. Others have disagreed, holding that the reform was also political insofar as it wished to free secular life from the worse excesses of feudalism and the gratuitous violence of secular lords.!O The conflict between Cluny and Empire came to a head because

of the weakening of the German monarchy after the death

of Henry III when his son Henry IV was a minor. It came to a point of crisis because the Germanic concept of the private ownership of the Church as part of the property of the lord of the land threatened under the Saxon dynasty, and then the 38

first three Salians, to reduce the Church to little more than an instrument of national Germany policy. The weakness of royal control during Henry IV's minority allowed all the revolu-

tionary tendencies just discussed in these pages to have free

play. The result of the resultant relative imperial power vacuum during Henry's minority was a sudden crystallization of a broad revolutionary front of anti-imperial forces.

The opposition of the revolutionary religious front brought down the order launched with the restoration of the Empire under Otto I in 962. That this would be the case was still not completely apparent in 1075 when the Salian Emperor Henry IV (ruled 1056-1106 but King in fact only after 1065) was, to all outward appearances, still the most powerful ruler in Europe. Henry IV still believed with some reason that he was the "Head of the Church" in the way Henry III and been before him. He appeared as the guardian of religious establishments and the protector of the poor. And Henry also seemed to have

been a truly religious man like other emperors before him, devoted to his relics he revered like "the cross filled with

the Lord's wood."!! This relic was, quite likely, believed to have had within it splinters of the "original cross" upon which Christ was crucified. Typically, for that time, like previous Salians, he conceived of his office as being superior to all

ecclesiastical offices in his realm.

In 1073, Gregory VII (whose given name was Hildebrand) came

to the throne of Peter and, in his person, pulled together the

novel and radical religious ideas of his day; he was the summation in many ways of the Cluniac reform movement. His work

of synthesis formed a total program of revolution in Church and Empire. As Pope Gregory, he attempted to implement these doctrines and inaugurated a struggle between Pope and Emperor which shook the medieval world. Immediately after his elevation to the throne of Peter, in 1073, Gregory drew upon his years of research in canon law to produce a statement of papal power, the Dictatus Papae. The Dictatus Papae asserted that the Roman Church had been founded by God alone,

that only the Pope held universal authority in Europe, and that only the Pope could depose, reinstate, or transfer bishops. The Pope was said to be beyond the judgment of any human being. It was also claimed that no one could be a true Christian unless he agreed with the Pope. Finally, it was asserted that 39

only the Pope could use the imperial insignia and that he there-

fore had the right to depose earthly emperors by virtue of his authority given by God. "All" earthly emperors rather naturally included the Salians.

The Dictatus Papae was a sensational and extremely radical document in view of its comprehensiveness and intransigence. Moreover, it contradicted the prevailing world order. Papal power had been in abeyance for two hundred years and the great bishoprics and abbeys of western Europe, had flourished

with little or no assistance from Rome. It was quickly felt throughout Europe in at least some quarters that Gregory's program was imprudent and a threat to the established way

of life. The churchmen and kings of Europe learned very rapidly,

however, that Gregory intended to carry out the program of Dictatus Papae. His desire to make the papacy supreme was

almost a mania.

In 1073, Henry IV was again involved in civil war with Saxony

in full rebellion. The aroused nobility and peasantry of the north were supported by dissident aristocrats in the rest of the realm. By 1075, Henry IV had won a complete victory (on 9 June 1075 the royal forces slaughtered thousands of Saxon

soldiers) and the rebel leaders of the aristocracy had been humbled. The beaten nobles were humiliated in public and imprisoned for six months. The way now appeared to be open

for the creation of real central authority in the lands of the Salians. It was at this critical juncture that the German ruler received the papal decree against lay investiture. Flushed with his great triumph over the nobility, Henry decided to take the strongest possible stance in replying to Gregory. Consequently, at the beginning of 1076, the clerical scholars in residence at the royal court prepared a letter. The missive was sent in the king's name to Rome. It damned "Hildebrand,"

insisting that he was a "false monk." It was in actuality a

quite literate defense of the prevailing world order. The Emperor also called his bishops to a meeting at Worms and induced them to condemn Gregory.!2

Gregory VII appears to have expected the sort of reply he was sent by Henry. He was not afraid of the imperial army,

because he had found new and powerful allies to help him in Italy in the new Norman rulers of southern Italy and Sicily. 40

Hence, acting with characteristic speed and determination, Gregory deposed and excommunicated Henry and sent papal

agents into Germany to stir the ashes of rebellion in hope of discovering a revolutionary Phoenix there in the person of disgruntled lords. The immediate impact of the papal deposi-

tion caused a stunning collapse of royal power, for Gregory had in excommunicating Henry absolved his subjects from their oaths of fealty. Moreover, Henry had severely miscalculat-

ed the strength of his support in joining battle with Gregory and was forced to retreat as early as October of 1076.13 This retreat resulted from the fact that at least two-thirds of Henry's

armies came from the bishops in control of ecclesiastical lands. Now, since these ecclesiastics of the Empire also feared excommunication and the consequent risk to office and status, they backed away from the German ruler they had previously support-

ed wholeheartedly. By the end of 1076, the King had found

himself almast completely isolated and, at Gregory's suggestion,

the nobility of Germany had set in motion the constitutional process of electing a new ruler from outside the Salian dynastic

line. The clerics of the court convinced the King-Emperor of the Salians that only his surrender to Gregory and the seeking of papal forgiveness could save his throne. He therefore decided

to go to Italy in the year 1077 to seek absolution. Haste was indeed necessary; Gregory had announced his intention of going to Germany and presiding at the assembly of the German nobility

in Augsburg. Moreover, this meeting had been called for the purpose of formally divesting Henry of the crown and replacing him with a newly-elected ruler.

At this point began a melodramatic race. Henry rushed southward in the company of only a handful of retainers. Simultaneously, Gregory made his way northward, traveling in a slower and more ceremonial manner. The race was won by Henry. He encountered the Pope in northern Italy at the fortress of Canossa near Modena. The events which transpired at Canossa

in the winter of 1077 constitute one of the dramas of such

magnitude in European history that playwrights and painters have been moved by the events over the centuries to depict

them many times. With the usual exaggeration, the royal

chroniclers described how Henry stood in the snow for three days until at last the Pope gave his absolution. Obviously, Gregory doubted with good reason that Henry was actually all that penitent. But no priest, and especially the "Vicar of 41

Christ on Earth," could refuse the comforts of absolution to a confessed sinner. Hence, reluctantly and in fear that devout opinion in Europe would have moved against him had he refrained

from so doing, Gregory was in the end forced to give Henry

the audience he sought. Henry for his part set his seal to a document promising, among other things, that he would do no harm to the Pope and that his protection would be given

to Gregory wherever the Pope might travel.!4

On the surface of things, Canossa appears to have been a great victory for the Pope, with the Emperor of the Germans, Burgundy, and northern Italy lying prostrate in the snow waiting for three days to kiss the feet of the "Holy Father." Yet both contemporaries and modern writers have debated the question of whether it was Gregory or Henry who realized the greatest

advantage. Canossa restored the German crown to Henry, but it also dealt a fatal blow to the idea of the theocratic kingship. Substance had also been given to the claims of Dictatus Papae that the Roman Church was founded by God

alone and the Pope had the right to judge and depose the crowned heads of Europe.

Gregory did not emerge unscathed, for his position was not

as untainted as it had been before Canossa. The rulers of western Europe now had been put on their guard against the Pope. Many had been forced to doubt the moral and properly religious standards of a papacy which had forced an able ruler into a miserable position for primarily political reasons. In sum, the impact of Canossa was both positive and negative for Gregory in Europe. It signaled the resurgence of papal

leadership over the European kingdoms, but it also set in motion a long process of disillusionment with the Church and controver-

Sy over it that ended two and a quarter centuries later in the

humiliation of the medieval papacy.

When Henry returned to Germany, he again faced rebellion. Gregory, whose hatred was relentless, had written the German

dukes instructing them to elect another ruler. Accordingly, Rudolf of Swabia was elevated by them and approved by Gregory

with the words: "Rome gave Peter his crown; Peter bestows one on Rudolf."!5 Similarly, Henry discovered a north Italian bishop who was willing to take the gamble of being installed as anti-Pope. Gregory had, in fact, forgiven Henry at Canossa 42

and should have recognized him, as a direct consequence of that forgiveness, to be the legitimate ruler once again. But the Pope had secretly encouraged Rudolf and now waited three years before making public his choice between the two aspirants

to the imperial throne. In the meantime, Henry continued to invest ecclesiastics and found contemporaries to defend

his acts on the grounds that the ruler acted in the ceremonies purely secularly as "Head of the People."16 The renewed practice of investiture was also justified historically on the grounds that the Carolingians had done it without Church interference over a vast stretch of time.!’ The upshot of all this was that, once more, this time in 1080, Gregory VII excommunicated Henry and proclaimed Rudolf the rightful ruler of Germany. This time, however, Henry was not abandoned in his homeland. The local bishops now feared the Pope's motives more than they feared the pangs of excommunication. They sided with Henry, met in Synod, and deposed Gregory, having replaced him with an anti-pope (Clement III). There were now, respectively, two popes and two king-emperors claiming the same throne.

Of the two contestants for the imperial dignity, Henry proved

the stronger. He confronted Rudolf on a field of arms and the antiruler was slain. Henry IV then moved to invade Italy,

and the Pope found himself with few allies except for the Normans. For several years the Normans protected Rome

from Henry's assaults. Then, in 1084, the city wearied of its Norman guardians, who tended to act more like conquerors than allies. Pope Gregory was then forced to flee to the south where he died in 1085 and Henry IV entered Rome with his antipope.

To the end, Gregory had maintained his fervent Cluniac position. In a famous letter to Bishop Hermann of Metz (15 March 1081) he had contended that royal power was originated by "murderers

and thugs” and that the leaders of states continued to "place themselves in the power of devils." In the whole history of the world, held the Pope, scarcely half a dozen kings had avoided

the damnation of their souls.!8 But now the man some had called the "Holy Satan" was dead. It might have been reasonable

at this time to assume that the Investiture Contest would come to an end, to run down and simply expire because of 43

the absence of the Cluniac reform's foremost champion. Such, however, was not to be the case.

To be sure, after Gregory's death, papal determination began to slacken a bit. One of Gregory's successors, Urban II (pontificate from 1088-1099), was also a Cluniac monk and continued official support of Gregory's policies. At the same time, he attempted to find a way out of the long war of attrition between

the Pope and the Empire. Urban is, of course, best known for his attempt to unite a fractious Europe that had taken sides during the Investiture Controversy through the device of assuming spiritual leadership over the First Crusade. But the German ruler did not join the initial crusade and the Investi-

ture Contest continued. In fact, somewhat ironically, not one of the major kings of western Europe took part in the first great international adventure to the Holy Land because,

besides Henry, William Rufus of England and Philip I of France had all been placed under the ban of excommunication by that juncture because of clashes with the papacy.

In Germany, following the short-lived triumph of 1084, Henry was unable to subdue rebellious forces in his own domain. His

enemies, in alliance with the papacy, eventually won over Henry's own sons to their side. Henry essentially lost control of both Italy and Germany. In 1104, the princes elected the young Henry as their new King, Henry V, without the consent of his father. In 1106, Henry IV died and his son gained control of the throne.

During the reign of Henry V, a new generation of Cardinals came to dominate papal government. This generation regarded the German Investiture Controversy as an unfortunate vestige of an age which had now passed into history. These churchmen

examined a_ short-term similar controversy in England (1103-1107) and resurrected the solution to that separate crisis as an answer to the more enduring problem in Germany. By the Concordat of Worms (1122), signed between Pope Calixtus

II and Henry V, the Emperor abandoned lay investiture. This marked the official discarding of the now discredited doctrine of the theocratic kingship. The German ruler, however, was

allowed to require the homage of bishcps and abbots in his domains before they were invested with their offices. This granted to the German monarch a practical veto over the 44

appointment of German ecclesiastics. The whole compromise

was reflected in a new investiture ceremony. The spiritual consecration of the candidate was performed by the Pope or his legate and was represented by a staff and ring handed to the newly-designated ecclesiastic. The temporal power inherent in the posts given was symbolically portrayed by a

scepter given to the Emperor or his representative. In Germany,

lay investiture preceded spiritual consecration. In Italy, the

reverse was true.

Whatever concessions on the part of the Pope there were to

be seen in this compromise did the German ruler little practical

good. The Investiture Controversy had actually been a civil war, with many European-wide overtones, lasting for half a century. And it had brought about such vast changes in the German political and social structure that the King-Emperor of Germany was unable to take full advantage of papal conces-

sions. In many areas within Germany the great dukes had gained semi-autonomy. It turned out to be the dukes, rather than the monarch, who benefited from the Concordat's grant

of jurisdiction over ecclesiastical appointments in their duchies.

In the Rhineland, the great bishops themselves had become territorial princes who yearned to break free of homage to the rulers. It was not long before it became evident that the emperors had erred in granting the Popes the right to select new bishops in Italy and to bestow upon them their spiritual offices. The German rulers lost almost all control over the north Italian bishoprics in very short order. And as has been indicated, those bishops had been the main support of German attempts to hold control over northern Italy. Hence, as far as Henry V and his successors were concerned, the Concordat of Worms had the long-term impact of giving them only the privilege of appointing bishops in the lands belonging to their own families.

At a time when the French and English monarchs were working assiduously at consolidating their royal power and centralizing

their feudal monarchies, the Salian rulers had wasted much of their strength in the struggle with the pontiffs of Rome and their allies. The result was a cataclysmic decline in the German crown's traditional domination over the resources and personnel of the Church. This decline also transpired in other areas of their rule. Many of the ministeriales upon 45

whom royal government had depended now proved unreliable.

They took advantage of the long civil war to grasp personal control of the royal castles they had been set to guard. Many of them became lords in their own right and, by the early twelfth century, they commonly married into old noble families. This combined with the tremendous growth in the territorial sover-

eignty of the dukes and other great lords to produce a highly decentralized German polity. It is little wonder that generations of German historians have fixed upon the period of 1075 to 1122 as that particular era in medieval history assuring Germany

would not form a national state until the nineteenth century.

For later intensely nationalistic German historians, it was

seen as the most "tragic" of many tragic episodes in German history in that it interfered with the "natural" march toward nationhood.

The great struggle over the issue of investiture was the most important turning-point in the history of medieval Germany between the time of Charlemagne and that of Martin Luther.

It was as important in German history as was the Norman conquest in the history of England. Whether one sees it as tragic or not, it is hard to deny that it was as important for the German lands as were the Crusades for all Europe. The issues taking decisive shape in the controversy can clearly be seen to have developed in the reigns of Henry IV's predeces-

sors. But it was during his period of imperial sway that the controversy takes on the distinct shape of a separate historical

era. The fact that it formed an historical watershed can be seen in what followed it in time. The decentralization of power

brought on by the Investiture Contest was greatly aided by

the first extensive feudalization of Germany, which thereafter

resembled more closely other feudalized areas. Moreover,

to insure the continued weakness of the monarchy, the nobility perpetuated the electoral nature of the German kingship and,

in fact, strengthened the aspects of it tending to limit the monarch. On the death of Henry V in 1125 the German ruler

was chosen by the princes, given no meaningful resources outside his own duchy, and prevented from exercising any real political power outside his own lands. By 1152, royal power in Germany had actually been in a very real abeyance for about one-quarter of a century. Culturally and politically, Germany fell behind

its European counterparts during the Investiture Contest. It never caught up again, despite some illusory surges forward, during the rest of the Middle Ages. 46

CHAPTER FIVE THE REVIVAL AND DECLINE OF IMPERIAL POWER

(1152 - 1291)

One of the central features of German history during the twelfth century was the extensive social transformation that was taking

place, based on a considerable increase in population. | One of the basic changes was demographic. There appears to have been a high rate of mobility in the rural populations. As people

moved across space and time, class distinctions were being

multiplied and a large number of new class levels were emerging

with the effect of making society more complex in structure. As far as political organization was concerned, these social

changes required new forms of government at the levels of German society. It was characteristic that the formation of altered governmental structures was most difficult at the imperial levels.

Immediately following the reign of Henry V the prize of Empire had really not been worth having. No sooner had the Investiture

Controversy subsided than strife broke out between two of the German princely houses. One was the House of Guelf, which had its strongest German base in Saxony. The other was the House of Ghibelline, which bore the dynastic name Hohenstaufen. The Hohenstaufen were based in Swabia and had strong support from southern Germany. The term "Guelf" is a form of "Welf," the Hohenstaufen enemy in Germany's

original appellation, and was the form used in Italy to refer to the similar anti-imperial party there. Ghibelline was a term developed in Italy after the Italian form of the German place name Waiblingen, a Hohenstaufen possession. The Guelfs tended to be more parochial in their interests and the Ghibellines

tried to carry on the imperial tradition of the Ottonians with the tendency to be involved in Italy reasserting itself. Guelf parochialism probably resulted from the fact that they were 47

usually the opposition party and thus out of power. This meant

that they had to take up a position that was different from the "ins." On the one occasion when a Guelf was elected Emper-

or, instead of clinging to traditional Guelf parochialism, he

tended to follow the policies of the old imperial tradition instead tothe extent that his actions were indistinguishable from those

of a Ghibelline.

The intense rivalry between Guelfs and Ghibellines arose after

the death of the Salian ruler Henry V, for he left no heir for the consideration of the electors. The election of 1125 was dominated by the propapal forces who opposed the closest relative of Henry, Frederick of Swabia, because he appeared to be a strong man capable of posing renewed threats to the papacy. In Frederick's place, Lothair of Supplinburg, a bitter

foe of the Salians, was elected to Empire. Lothair (ruled 1125-1137) proved to be a weak monarch who deferred to the bishops and the papacy in most things. Lothair was then succeeded by Conrad III of Hohenstaufen (ruled 1137-1152). As

far as securing a new form of government to fit the altered times described earlier, the rule of Conrad was a lamentable failure. He had tried in vain to appease the families who opposed

him and to suppress endemic feuds between them. He had also tried to oblige the papacy and had gone on a crusade to please the Pope, only to return from it defeated with his prestige reduced. When Conrad died in 1152, according to a contempo-

rary chronicler, Germany was nearly at that stage when it was ready "to be ruined by misfortune.">

It was at this juncture that the princes and bishops of Germany got together and elected Frederick of Hohenstaufen, who was Conrad's nephew. The almost unanimous choice was determined by the charismatic personal qualities of the man. The princes and prelates of the realm this time had picked a strong ruler,

perhaps in mutual realization that order had to be restored in the realm and a new form of government devised to meet

altered societal situations.

Frederick's first plan to meet the needs of the time was simple;

he decided to follow in the footsteps of Conrad. But that scheme was unsatisfactory. Conrad had been dominated by the papacy and had spent much time in civil war. During the previous half century, the great German princes had steadily 48

increased their territorial sovereignty. And the Guelf-Ghibelline feud continued unabated. The Guelf Duke of Saxony remained

the implacable enemy of the Hohenstaufen. Therefore, in

the summer of 1156, Frederick decided to abandon the scheme of simple continuity and set out upon a new course. By 1156,

Frederick I (sometimes called by the Italian nickname "Barbarossa" because of his red beard) had apparently decided

on making the Empire a reality again. If Barbarossa could hope to assert control over the great princes, he needed to have greater resources. His only hope of gaining these resources

lay in controlling the rich towns of northern Italy and taxing them heavily. Allof his policies, thereafter, appear to have been

related to securing dominance of the peninsula. Naturally

enough, given his new policy line, he made his first campaign

to Italy in 1154-1155.

Frederick's kingship in Germany was initially based upon the

idea that he was a strict and impartial dispenser of justice.

This was simply the application of an ancient Germanic concep-

tion; the ruler's duty was to protect the rights of his subjects. Involved in this was a traditional conception of a passive kingship, which the German nobility greatly preferred, with perhaps the addition of just enough leadership to bring order.4

This conception of a passive kingship could only prove effective

in a limited social world. It would work as long as the ruler was the head of a relatively small number of noble families,

perhaps no more than a few hundred.- But, by 1150, the gradual addition of ministeriales to the nobility had greatly expanded

the numbers of people considered to have noble ranking.

Frederick appears to have appreciated the fact that this situation was now in flux and thus presented an opportunity for new imperial policy directions. Frederick of Hohenstaufen decided to take a novel course, to establish his imperial administration

based on three areas -- Lombardy, Swabia and Burgundy.

In these areas, he planned to have the churches and monasteries, the manors and estates, administered and ruled by his personal servants and officials. In the present day, Lombardy is a part of Italy, Burgundy is in France, the Rhineland is in West Ger-

many, and the southern portions of old Swabia are currently in Switzerland. But these are post-medieval distinctions which do not appear to be very logical when applied to the Middle Ages, when such territories had not become so clearly ethnically 49

defined and when the recent nationalisms of the modern era had not developed. For Frederick there was a logic in envisaging

a single territorial entity based on these three locations. The key to his notion was the fact that they were all linked by Alpine passes. Seen in terms of the territorial conceptions of the Middle Ages, Frederick's grand design was thus not fantastic and had a realistic geographical basis.© If it had materialized, there would have emerged in Europe a fairly centralized state which could have been, at least by the standards of the twelfth century, fairly cohesive and based on control of those Alpine routes to Italy.

Before he could move toward this innovative design, however,

Barbarossa had to settle internal problems in Germany. He felt that an emperor should not be simply primus inter pares (a first among equals), but that he ought to be of infinitely higher rank than kings and dukes. He did not believe it was necessary to render the dukes powerless to accomplish this. He actually wanted the German ducal families to serve as strong and respected territorial lords under him. True to his policy, he even supported his potential rival Henry the Lion, of Saxony, in his territorial demands upon Bavaria, and in his

fight against rebellious nobles and cities in Saxon lands.

Frederick continued such support as long as a truce between Guelfs and Ghibellines held, and allowed Henry the Lion to build up a territorial state in Saxony even as he aimed himself at builidng up a much more ambitious state of his own in the area designated by the grand design. /

Frederick pursued innumerable methods in order to enlarge his holdings and in order to connect his scattered possessions. Frederick I was also an indefatigable castle-constructor. These

were administered by his own ministerales. And they were to be the base for power in the new "territorial state" of his master design. Thus, one of the concepts Frederick developed

was fairly modern in form. He wished to create a "tightly

organized state in a geographically defined region." Yet this fairly modern concept, his "Great Design," was contradicted,

in a kind of dualism much more typical of the medieval political mind than the modern one, by his continued dreams of a "Holy

Roman Empire" and thus domination of Italy. He therefore solicited support from Italian lawyers to find in Roman law

reinforcement for his imperial claims. These lawyers attempted 50

to apply Justinian's famous law to contemporary conditions. It is useful to remember here that Justinian had, when he ruled Byzantium, been quasi-omnipotent and his person nearly divine, as he blended roles to some extent occupied distinctly in the west by Emperor and Pope. He had been supreme legislator

in the east; his word was law. Barbarossa's Italian lawyers now discovered, not surprisingly, that a status similar to that enjoyed by Justinian in his day should apply in the twelfth

century to Barbarossa. Such legal arguments probably added more to Frederick's prestige than they did to his actual power for they were obviously not in agreement with those advanced by papal legal experts.

As Frederick entered northern Italy, he discovered that three

parties were at odds there: the imperial party, the fiercely

independent city-states, and the Pope. Barbarossa's first visit to Italian lands indicated to him that he and the Pope were natural allies against the city-states and their notions of inde-

pendent self-government. The Pope was not so certain. A

fierce debate was waged in papal circles concerning whether the papacy ought to become pro-Hohenstaufen or support the

Italian city-states. It was a difficult decision to make. The rising towns of Northern Italy were notorious for their frequent

confrontations with churchmen. The Pope did not desire an activist, anti-papal civil government in Rome. At this point, those opposed to Frederick tried to foment a split between Rome and the German ruler by creating an incident. Hence, a papal legate addressing Frederick's court in 1157 claimed that the emperors received their power directly from the Pope. This notion was presented to a young and ambitious ruler who

had once broken into a rage when told that there hung in Rome's Lateran Church a portrait showing his uncle Conrad receiving

a crown from the Pope and that, beneath the painting, there was an inscription claiming Conrad to be a "vassal" of the pontiff. In 1159, this same Cardinal, who had intentionally stirred Barbarossa's wrath only two years before, succeeded to the papacy and took the name Alexander III. The die was thus cast for another long and bitter imperial-papal struggle. During the period 1158 to 1162, an imperial army roamed around northern and central Italy seeking to impose Barbarossa's control.

But the defeat of a town did not insure its loyalty. Often, as soon as the imperial army had departed, the town would 51

rebel against its imperial administrator. After one such rebellion

in 1162 Frederick ordered the destruction of Milan. Part of the problem connected to such incidents in Italy was the usual resentment one might expect to find in reaction to foreign conquest and this was expressed in an allied resistance group formed by 1167 called the "Lombard League." The Lombards

suffered under the exactions and corruption of imperial adminis-

trators. Hence, periodically, the towns of Italy refused to pay taxes, a refusal given cohesive form once the League exist-

ed, and tried to expel Barbarossa's agents. For a few years the Emperor managed to subject some Italian cities to his absolute authority, but it became clear that Frederick needed further military help from Germany. But according to Bar-

barossa's great design, those parts of Germany which did not form projected sections of his envisaged central kingdom were supposed to be left alone for the most part. Now, however, the protracted struggle in Italy placed the Emperor in a position

where he needed help from Germany at the very time that Pope Alexander's anti-imperial cause was making progress. Frederick thus began a persecution of Alexander's followers in Germany and pressured others to provide the needed sup-

port. 10 But generally the lords at home chose the side of the Emperor as long as the Guelf-Ghibelline truce in Germany lasted. In this way the papal-imperial struggle continued. The alliance

of the papacy and the towns, having taken the form of the Lombard League, simply proved too much for Frederick in Northern Italy. In 1174 the armies of the Lombard League inflicted a decisive defeat on the imperial forces at Legano. At that point, Frederick decided to cut his losses. He sued for peace and Alexander, having gained his goal of keeping the Hohenstaufen dynasty out of Italy, forgave the Emperor his indiscretions of the past. In 1183 the Peace of Constance allowed Barbarossa to save face.

Even as he was losing his hold on Northern Italy, Barbarossa had not completely neglected Germany. Yet Henry the Lion

of Saxony had used the years of relative peace to build up his own strength in Bavaria and North Germany. Henry's power and influence had reached such a peak that he stood out from the other German princes. In fact, he was well embarked upon independent state-building in Saxony and had been busy there 52

subduing rebellious vassals of his own who had often conspired

to form coalitions against him. Inevitably, he clashed with Barbarossa openly in 1176 when Henry refused to give the

Emperor requested aid against the Lombard League. Refusal to serve the Emperor violated the old feudal and new imperial concepts of public duty. Consequently, as soon as Frederick

settled his Italian affairs, he proceeded against Henry the Lion. Frederick inaugurated a great feudal trial against his

Guelph enemy, charging him with failure to render military service and other felonies. The princes were not reluctant to see the great duke of Saxony brought low, for, with his state-building in Saxony and possible aggressive designs connect-

ed with that process, he seemed to many princes a greater threat than the loose imperial control imposed by a respected

Barbarossa. When Henry did not appear before the federal court, Frederick placed him under the ban of Empire and confis-

cated his possessions. Henry was then driven out of Saxony and Bavaria. He was left with his eastern principalities, which

were not underthe jurisdiction of the imperial crown. The Wittelsbachs were given the Bavarian inheritance and retained it into the twentieth century (actually until the end of World War I). However, the German princes proved strong enough

to indicate to Frederick that he could not absorb certain of Henry's other lands; they were parcelled out instead to the other German dukes. This formed a decisive juncture in the

course of affairs. When the Emperor was unable to use feudal

law to increase his power, he turned down a different road than the pathway toward centralized power that was being followed in England and soon would be traversed in France.

In the last years of his life Frederick finally abandoned the prodigious efforts to create his great design for a cohesive

State and took up the cross of the crusader instead. On

10 June 1190 the crusading army of which he was a part, greatly

reduced by hunger, heat and combat, had crossed the border

into the Christian state of Armenia to rest from defending themselves against the Seljuk Turks. Frederick Barbarossa had ridden ahead with a small retinue and reached a river valley by midday. According to the various differing accounts

of the circumstances most likely to have been involved, he was trying to refresh himself in the waters of a swiftly-moving river when he fell into a very strong current and drowned.!2 53

When the Emperor Barbarossa died, he was able to expire with the knowledge that his son would have the resources to achieve the triumph of imperial power he had not been able to achieve

himself. By an unexpected combination of circumstances, Frederick's son, who had already been crowned Henry VI before

Barbarossa's departure on the Third Crusade, found himself the ruler of Norman Sicily. And at this point in the Middle Ages, Norman Sicily was one of the wealthiest countries in the Mediterranean World. Four years before his death Barbaros-

sa had married his son to a Norman Sicilian princess. At the

time, this step did not appear particularly significant. The princess, Constance, seemed to have had little chance of inherit-

ing the throne. But in 1189 there were unexpected deaths

in her family. She then inherited the Norman Sicilian crown and, thereby, her husband, Henry of Hohenstaufen, came into possession of the kind of domain Barbarossa had striven unsuc-

cessfully for three decades to obtain by force of arms. But in many ways this windfall too was the result of the work of Barbarossa.

If it had not been for Frederick's reputation as one of the greatest rulers in all Christendom, the Norman Sicilian king, traditional ally of the papacy against the German emperor, would never have agreed to such a marriage in the first place. It is typical of the non-nationalistic medieval mind-set that Barbarossa's long struggle with the Pope did not in any fashion lessen the

intense popular enthusiasm he invoked even among neutral papalcalled allies.him Writing of his reign uncle,of Otto Preising,3 had "Frederick, mosthis famous theofAugusti." And this sort of enthusiasm was expressed for his reign through-

out his life and long afterward. He became a folk hero in Germany, a kind of messianic figure. In Thuringia stands the imposing Kyffhaeuser mountain. Legend came to have it that

Barbarossa never died but really was only asleep in a deep cavern inside the mountain. Through the centuries his red beard had supposedly grown through the table at which he sat. One day, the prophecy foretold, ravens that constantly circled the peak would stop flying and Frederick would emerge to restore the "glory" of the German medieval empire.

During the nineteenth century, this legend cast a spell over the German public during a very nationalistic time. It became so ridiculous in the shape and frequency of its telling that 54

even so ardant a nationalist as the Prussian historian Heinrich

von Treitschke felt it necessary to dissociate himself from

it.14 Curiously, many such stories when traced to their origins were originally connected with Barbarossa's grandson, Frederick Il. Somehow, at a later date, the splendors of the two became intermingled in the popular mind. And, apparently, the Kyffhaeuser legend was revived by a nineteenth-century romantic poet named Friedrich Ruechert. The reality of Barbarossa's reign was that, although the Emperor Frederick I left a reasonable base upon which to build up both

Empire and Germanic kingdom, he fell far short of realizing his great design. And his son was unlikely to revive the idea, tied as he was by marriage to Italian affairs. Unfortunately,

too, his son, Henry VI, was lacking in the magnanimous qualities of personality that made his father so widely respected. Henry

was cold, deliberate, ruthless, a schemer, and a bully. It took him until 1194 to enter into full possession of southern Italy.

He was then able to obtain the imperial coronation by the Pope. Thereafter, he attacked the northern cities of Italy, which rose toimpede him as they had his father, and scored some successes. Henry's task was made harder because he

appeared unable to refrain from making extravagant announcements of how the Hohenstaufen family eventually would achieve Supremacy over Europe. He also faced open rebellion in Germany as a result of his high-handed policies. Both the German princes and the pontiffs of Rome found him to be even more threatening than his father. The papacy discovered suddenly that it was on the verge of being surrounded by the Hohenstaufen power it had fought for twenty years to keep out of Italy. In Germany, Henry the Lion of Saxony, who had returned from

exile in England, once more raised the standard of rebellion. Joined by some of the German princes, the Lion led a rebellion

that Henry was initially unable to overcome. However, in time the Emperor subdued the situation in Germany and, at the height of his power, Henry VI controlled it, northern Italy, and Sicily as well. The papacy was thus surrounded and impotent. Henry, it appeared, had a great design of his own. With several fleets at his disposal, he aspired to control the Mediterranean and hoped to incorporate territories of the Byzantine Empire into his domains. He also conceived a scheme to turn

his realm into a hereditary empire based on primogeniture. 55

He offered to the dukes of Germany unlimited rights of inheritance in their own lands if they would put aside their electoral privileges and recognize the fact that the imperial crown was the permanent possession of the Hohenstaufen family. Moreover,

he wished to include the Sicilian holdings within the Empire permanently. At this historical juncture, Sicily and the Empire were united only through his own person and the marriage he had made with Constance. His own great design therefore was to establish one realm stretching all the way from Sicily

and the Mediterranean to the Baltic and North Seas. Most of these schemes were fated to remain merely dreams. Since his hereditary plan failed, he resorted in time to old methods; he had his baby son crowned German King (1196) while he retained the throne of Empire. One year later, rather suddenly,

the Emperor died. Immediately, German power collapsed everywhere in Italy. North of the Alps the Guelf rebellion broke out anew.

The sudden death of Barbarossa, and the equally sudden demise

of his son not that many years later, were strokes of fortune

favoring the enemies of Hohenstaufen. It has thus been difficult for many modern German historians, again strongly influenced by their intense German nationalism, to refrain from bemoaning the fate of Henry VI, his early death, and the resultant decline

of imperial strength. More properly, it should be noted that, if Henry VI's death was so calamitous to imperial fortunes, then that situation demonstrates more than anything else the

lack of proper administrative institutions to provide continuity. It reveals too great a reliance on a necessarily highly talented

and charismatic ruler. That imperial power could vanish so suddenly when Henry VI died highlighted the overly heavy reliance of the institutions of Empire on the abilities of one man. It also disclosed that the machinery of Empire was built to support a system far too offhand, unsystematic and personal to be lastingly effective.

At the point of Henry VI's sudden death the papacy was about to undergo a sudden change that would have a considerable

impact on the effective power of the emperors. It became

a tradition in the history of the medieval papacy for the cardinals to alternate weak and strong popes when they selected new pontiffs after the deaths of former ones. Since the death

of Alexander II in 1181, the papal chair had been filled by 56

weak "Vicars of Christ." Hence, during 1198, in a return to strength, the cardinals' choice fell upon the ablest member

of their number, Lothario Conti, who became Innocent III (pontiff

from 1198 to 1216). Innocent was in many ways made in the model of Gregory VII. He believed in the "spiritual sword" held high and superior to the "earthly sword," in the subordination of monarchies by the Church. Yet, unlike Gregory VII,

he proceeded more circumspectly and was something of a master of diplomacy.

Young Frederick of Hohenstaufen was born in 1194 and Innocent III became Pope in 1198 in a world that was undergoing visible changes. The period of the crusades which had, to some extent, exemplified the spirit of a Europe acting above the boundaries of kingdoms, was coming to a close. The Fourth Crusade was

yet to come, but it would be directed against the Christian empire of Byzantium. In some apparent ways the modern powers of Europe were beginning to take shape.

In this altered society of Western Europe, Innocent III desired to direct new forces into channels likely to restore ecclesiastical influence. When Innocent III died, exhausted from his work, papal power had been reaffirmed in Europe. The necessary foundation of his work was the reconstruction of the administration of the Church. The reforms Innocent introduced all through his pontificate were summed up and confirmed by the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The Council set the

number of Christian sacraments at seven. It stressed that

only a bishop could perform confirmation and ordination of priests. The Council also decreed that every member of the Church was to confess his sins to a priest and to receive the

Eucharist at least once a year and actually as often as was

humanly possible. This amounted to a reassertion of the authority of the priesthood over the laity and was intended to challenge heresy directly.

Generally speaking, the pontificate of Innocent III witnessed a broad increase of the legal powers of the papacy. The Roman pontificate became, in effect, the high court of Christendom.

The tightening of the administrative system of the Church

and the increase in the centralized control had the immediate

impact of improving the quality of both lower and higher clergy.

All that was positive. However, the vast administrative struc57

ture of the papal monarchy, like that of any government in Europe, needed large infusions of funds to keep working. More-

over, the Pope needed to find money to support military and diplomatic ventures he had launched to deal with the secular powers of Europe. Thus, new methods of Church taxation had to be developed and these new incomes gave the Pope the added resources he needed to become involved in the complexities of European politics.

A prime necessity for the freedom of papal action in Europe was the security of the papacy in Rome. From the beginning of his pontificate, Innocent had worked hard to strengthen papal control over the city of Rome and over the Papal States. It was, after all, a very violent world as one Chronicler's account

of the activities of Henry VI had indicated. When Frederick II was an infant, his father, in characteristic fashion, had set out for Germany, as mentioned earlier, in 1196; he meant to obtain his child's selection as "King" there and thus make

him natural heir to the throne as Emperor-elect. This was accomplished. But while Henry was gone, it became evident

that even his famed ferocious cruelty had not stamped out Sicilian resistance to his rule. There was an island revolt. Henry VI returned the following year to stamp it out. The Emperor then treated the rebellion's leaders with such harshness,

according to contemporary chroniclers, that he shocked even

the dull public sensibilities of an age accustomed to great cruelty. One Richard of Acera was dragged through the streets of Capua. Then, still living, was hung by his feet for two days before being strangled. Other leaders were tortured to death

in the presence of Henry and his wife, one Count Giordano

having been put to death on a red-hot iron throne with a red-hot crown placed on his head and hammered into place with nails. !> Even allowing for the possible exaggeration built into medieval

chronicles, it was apparent that such extreme behavior on the part of avaricious secular lords threatened both laymen and people of the Church alike at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries. Thus, it was quite important that Innocent establish his security in Rome and his authority over the eternal city. And he had accomplished this through diligent efforts by 1205.

Once he was secure at home, Innocent was able to devote his political talents to relations with the northern monarchs. 58

The so-called "imperial business," as papal circles termed their troublesome relations with the Hohenstaufen, was the most pressing matter at hand. It is understandable that Henry VI had terrified the papacy as he had terrified the inhabitants

of Sicily. It was Innocent's intention, therefore, to separate the Kingdom of Sicily from Germany once more and preclude

the papacy's ever again being faced with such a dire threat to its independence. Innocent was given the opportunity to do just that through the renewal of the Guelf-Ghibelline feud.

On the death of Henry VI, the Hohenstaufens and their supporters

had chosen as Emperor Philip of Swabia (aspired to rule from 1198-1208) to serve because young "King" Frederick of Hohenstaufen had not yet grown to manhood. In fact, much anxiety

had been excited because of the infancy of Frederick II. It was a sentiment recognized by Innocent III when, referring to the Hohenstaufen heir, he quoted Ecclesiastes: "Woe to

thee, O land, whose King is a child."16 The German Guelfs, seeing this situation as providing a fine opportunity to strike, plunged Germany into civil war by ignoring the election of Philip, preferring instead Otto IV of Brunswick (aspired to rule 1198-1218), the son of Henry the Lion. In effect, both Guelfs and Ghibellines were ignoring the rights of the child King Frederick who remained in Sicily with his mother. In this way the whole struggle became more than a renewal of

the Guelf-Ghibelline fight and, in fact, became part of an international conflict. It was attached to the Anglo-French struggle between the Plantagenets of England and Philip Augustus of France. France sided with the Ghibellines and

England with the Guelfs. In fact, Richard the Lion-Hearted of England was involved in the choice of a Guelf because, since he had earlier sworn an oath of homage to Henry VI,

he was considered technically to be an imperial vassal.!7

In the struggle that developed both parties sought the support of Innocent III]. Both sides agreed that only the Pope had the right to make one of the rival aspirants an Emperor. Innocent waited three years to render his decision, intentionally allowing the raging civil war to deplete further the power of the German crown. Finally, in 1200, he handed down his decision. It was

really not a very surprising papal verdict, because Otto the Guelf had indicated that he would respect the borders of the Papal states and Philip had not been willing to make such a vow. Hence, a politically sagacious Innocent III ruled in favor of Otto. 59

In this way Innocent appeared to have removed the German threat to the papacy. However, in 1208, Philip was assassinated

in a personal quarrel and Otto married his daughter. This

placed Otto in a position where he could make an unchallenged claim to the German throne. Almost immediately, Otto dropped his earlier concessions to the papacy and moved upon northern Italy. Thus a developed understanding between the Pope and the Guelfs ended suddenly. In 1210, Inocent placed Otto under

the ban for laying claim to Church property. Innocent's next step, in 1212, was to recognize a teen-aged Frederick II as King of Germany after first realizing a long-term goal of the Roman pontiffs; he had secured from Frederick the promise

that he would abdicate the Sicilian throne once he had established his effective rule in Germany.

Again the international scene had a direct impact on German affairs. Innocent engineered a coalition of monarchs involving Frederick I] and Philip Augustus of France standing against Otto and the weak John I of England (Richard the Lion-Hearted

having died). This could perhaps be noted as the first great clash of alliance systems in European history. The conflict

was eventually decided at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 where Philip Augustus of France inflicted a crushing defeat on Otto. This victory, among other things accomplished, thereby opened

the way for Frederick to gain the German throne. By that time, the dukes of Germany had commenced to see clearly the shift of power factors and had abandoned Otto to rally

around Frederick. Frederick's claims to the throne had indeed

been recognized immediately after Bouvines by the gift of the captured imperial golden eagle from Philip Augustus to

his young ally.18

At the time of Innocent's death in 1216 the Pope was again

firmly convinced that he had reached a solution of the German problem. Frederick Il, a young man Innocent personally admired and trusted, was obtaining the support of the German nobility. And Frederick had given his promise to abdicate the Sicilian Crown. Furthermore, it did not appear as if Germany's rulers, weakened by two decades of concessions involving territorial sovereignty to the German princes during the civil war, would again mount a serious threat to the papacy. Much of the work of Frederick I and Henry VI had been undone by 1216. 60

The settlement of the imperial problem, which Innocent III had thought to be definitive, did not last nearly as long as the Pope had been certain that it would. Frederick had indeed

promised that he would abdicate his rule of Sicily when he gained full recognition from the German princes. Then Otto IV died, clinging to the last to his right to wear the crown and pass on to his brother the emblems and relics of sovereignty,

"the cross, the lance, the crown and the tooth of John the

Baptist". 1? It was the arrangement that had been made with Innocent that counted, however. Frederick was made Emperor. But Frederick Il quickly demonstrated that he had no intention of giving up Naples and Sicily despite his promises to Innocent.

Those were the bases of his power. As it turned out, he was fascinated with the idea of establishing a very real empire based in Italy, and was uninterested in Germany. During his

reign, Frederick II tended to visit his domains north of the Alps only to make sweeping concessions to the German princes, bishops, and towns.

Because of the arrangement he had made with Innocent, Fred-

erick II's relations with the papacy were amicable initially. Innocent's successor was Honorius III (Pontiff from 1216 to

1227). And early in the new pope's pontificate, Frederick

continued in the vein of the agreement with Innocent, granting to the Church exemption from taxation and awarding to bishops

the right to judge clerics without reference to secular courts. During this period, also, it first became apparent that Frederick,

born in Italy to learn Arabic and be a ward of the papacy, was prone to think of himself as more Italian than German. It also became evident, in a related sense, that he cared far more about bringing Italy under his domination than he did about seeing to the maintenance of his power in Germany. Hence, Frederick, the Italian, wanted to make himself the

ruler of all Italy, bringing the Lombardian cities that had successfully resisted Barbarossa under his complete domination. In so doing, he was vague about whether he would recognzie the political authority of the Pope over even the Papal States. By the mid 1220's, however, Frederick was misusing his powers

to dominate the churches in Sicily. Moreover, a new Pope came to the throne in 1227, the vigorous Gregory IX (pontiff

from 1227 to 1241). This new Gregory's ideas resembled closely those those of Innocent III. Already under Honorious Frederick 61

had been reprimanded for not going on a crusade that he had promised to lead. It was thus not likely that his relations with the new pope would be cordial.

By the mid 1220's, therefore, the old Hohenstaufen-papacy

quarrel had become fully activated once more. Frederick

had claimed that his aim of conquering northern Italy would

not endanger the papacy. But the Roman curia distrusted Frederick. For one thing, he hardly seemed a good Christian

in this "most Christian of centuries." The organization of

his court and administration seemed informed by the shapes of oriental despotism. The strong influence of the Arabs and Greeks he had grown up among were to be seen in him as well.

It appeared to some that this great soldier, this author of a formidable treatise on falconry, this patron of the arts and sciences, considered himself to be a man who could operate outside the usual ethical standards of Latin Christianity. Hence,

apart from a few truces, the imperial-papal struggle lasted until Frederick's death. In essence, it was a rivalry for supremacy in Italy and control over the churches within the Empire, particularly those in Sicily.

The points of contention by Emperor and Pope were often mere pretexts, obscuring the real issues of power and control. Typically, the initial skirmishing between Frederick and the

papacy was over a matter not directly related to the central issue of power. In order to gain the support of Innocent III while he was struggling to take possession of the imperial crown, Frederick had vowed to go on a crusade. But he later became reluctant to make good on his vow because he was eager to carry out his territorial designs in northern Italy instead. He therefore postponed the crusade for a number of years. Pope Gregory reacted to this promise unfulfilled by moving, at the outset of his pontificate, to excommunicate the Emperor for his abrupt termination of agreed-upon crusading plans. Then, the following year, while under papal ban, Frederick resumed the crusade on his own initiative. The defiant departure

of Frederick for the Holy Land despite the fact that he was under papal ban, leaving the Pope in the dark as to his plans, caused an outbreak of papal fury. Pope Gregory condemned the Emperor for leaving "without penance and without absolution. . .and without anyone's knowing for certain whither he sailed."20

62

Frederick's behavior in the Holy Land was, to the papacy,

most suspect for a leader of Christendom. Once in the Holy Land, instead of making war on the infidel, he negotiated with the Sultan and established unusually friendly relations with the supposed foe. After all, he had long admired the flattery and subservience with which rulers were treated in Moslem

countries. The Papacy, as might have been expected, was

further angered by the fact that Frederick, the suspect Christian, allowed his court chroniclers to commit the sacrilege

of drawing flattering parallels between the Emperor's life and the life of Christ. It was soon apparent enough that this man was clearly only going through the motions of fighting

the fight of Western Christendom against the infidel.

Given all the proof he had of Frederick's ambitions and his peculiar brand of Christianity, the Pope moved to action. A papal army invaded Frederick's lands. The Emperor quickly returned from the Holy Land, defeated the invading armies and arranged a truce with the Pope, making the concession that the papal throne could rule over churches in Italy if Gregory

would remove the papal ban on him. The truce lasted only

until 1235, however, when the Lombard cities, in their traditional

manner, rebelled against the German Emperor. Frederick's passage to Germany was now placed in danger. The Pope, however, supported the Lombards fiercely as he fought to break the encirclement of the Papal States by the Emperor. Rapidly, the struggle engulfed most of the Italian peninsula. In 1239, Frederick won a great victory over the Lombard League and his mastery of the whole peninsula became a distinct possibility. The Italian cities were no longer as united against imper-

ial domination as they had been in the time of Frederick Barbarossa. In many northern Italian cities, there were now families who had become Ghibellines, people who believed that Italian unity was a beneficial aim and could be better accomplished under the Emperor than under the Pope. The Pope was aided by all the traditional Guelf elements -- the Lombard League, the city-state of Genoa, Venice and various Guelf strongholds in Italy. The Pope, of course, also put into action the spiritual resources of his office. Frederick was excommunicated again and denounced as a heretic (actually, given his attitude towards

Moslems and other independent tendencies in religious thought, there were grounds for this). The papacy trotted out its whole list of poisonous labels ("vipers," "scorpions," 63

etc.) and applied them to the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Frederick was perhaps less worried about the kind of religious sanctions

the Pope could bring into action than any ruler of his time.

He therefore gave the astounding order to his admiral to sink or capture any ship bringing churchmen to Rome for the papal council. This act convinced the Pope that only the most extreme measures could succeed against this man a contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris, called stupor mundi ("the wonder of the

world"). .

Gregory died in 1241 and was succeeded by Innocent IV (pontiff

from 1243 to 1254). Innocent was an equally bitter opponent of the Emperor. Unable to achieve his designs in Italy, Innocent

fled to France to hold a Church council at Lyons and there preach a crusade against Frederick. The Pope had considerable support in his efforts. Frederick had turned some of the more pious against him when he murdered churchmen and had often offended the moral sensibilities of Christendom. And perhaps

his personal beliefs, which came close to being outside the Christian faith altogether, infuriated many in the Christian world as did his high-handed actions taken against men of the Church. Hence, Innocent IV took the quite unusual step of declaring a crusade within Europe itself, instead of being aimed at the usual targets in the Holy Land, and this crusade

was against the person of the Emperor. This was indeed quite a departure from the original concept of a crusade but, under the circumstances, there appeared to the Pope to have been no alternative.

The anti-Hohenstaufen crusade was reinforced by Innocent IV's placing all of Frederick's lands under anathema of the Church and offering them to whomever could conquer them. These steps resulted in rapid consequences within Germany. There were numerous defections in German lands as the war spread north of the Alps. Many bishops and many princes desert-

ed the Emperor. Several anti-kings proclaimed themselves to be the new ruler. The Pope even urged the Islamic Sultan to become an ally of the anti-imperial forces. And this final struggle continued from 1245 until 1250 when Frederick died with neither side having secured a clear-cut victory.

The impact of Frederick's rule on the permanent German situa-

tion was at least as decisive as his immediate predecessors. 64

Frederick had appeared in Germany for the first time during 1212. In 1220, eager that the German crown remain in the hands of his family, he successfully had his young son Henry elected King of Germany. Henry VII thereafter was entrusted by his father to the care of Swabian ministeriales while the Emperor busied himself with his Italian ambitions. This group of ministeriales in time came to wield a considerable influence

over Henry. After 1220, since his son was still a minor,

Frederick left Germany under two regents and spent the next fifteen years in the south. By 1230, Henry had come of age and initiated policies of his own. Frederick had made so many concessions to individual principalities prior to his departure in 1220 that most of the intervening time under the regents had been concerned with petty local quarrels as centralized power decayed in Germany.

During the period of the regency, the problems of an absentee ruler were well illustrated by German relations with the newly ambitious Kingdom of Denmark. In Denmark, King Waldemar Il had taken advantage of the fact that Frederick had, during his long conflict with his Guelf opponent for the throne, Otto IV, been greatly in need of assistance in the north of his German kingdom. Hence, with the concurrence of the German princes, he had signed a treaty with Waldemar recognizing the Dane's Claims to certain North Elbian territories. The German counts of that region were compelled, reluctantly, to submit to Danish overlordship. Thereafter, there were serious rebellious acts on the part of those local lords, such as the kidnapping of the

Danish King by one of the counts in 1223.4! This incident eventually developed into a war of resistance with north German

counts, nobles, and cities cooperating to defeat the Danes

and oust them from their dominant Baltic position.22 Signifi-

cantly, the decisive action to oust the Danes was taken by a combination of sovereign German rulers and independent polities without any direct participation by the Emperor.

By 1230, when young Henry came of age, he was ready to take

Charge of the government in Germany and initiate his own administrative policies. Henry attempted to solidify his power by forming an alliance with rising bourgeois elements in opposi-

tion to the various dukes and counts. This policy differed essentially from that of his father. Therefore, Frederick II soon found that his son had moved into open rebellion against 65

his own imperial authority. In 1235, Frederick, allied with the German princes, subdued his son and had him imprisoned until his death. Two years after, Frederick had another son, Conrad, elected King. This time he retained greater control

over German affairs and made more frequent trips north of the Alps until 1245. Then, for the last five critical years of his rule, he once again let domination of the northern German lands slip from his grasp.

In the manner described, Frederick's German policies strengthen-

ed throughout his reign the particularistic tendencies present in German life. In his relations with the princes, Frederick continued the policies of his Hohenstaufen predecessors. Both Barbarossa and Henry VI had bestowed favors on the great lords and had helped them enhance their power at the expense of lesser nobles and the cities. This was done so that Germany's

princes would provide aid in the various Italian projects of the emperors. After the death of Henry VI, during the period of civil wars (1198-1214), the princes acquired further privileges

and prestige. Germany was in fact becoming the land of the "little kings," a domain of lords both secular and ecclesiastic, who acted more or less like sovereign rulers in their own limited

lands.

In seeking their support in 1220, Frederick accorded certain

privileges to the abbots, bishops and archbishops of the Empire.

Before, the fiefs held by these lords had been simple royal

grants without various territorial rights. Now these bishoprics and abbacies were given full territorial rights, the privileges of making tolls and controlling passage through their lands,

as well as other domain's prerogatives.

Twelve years later, when Frederick was seeking the support of many princes, he gave them various rights over striking coins, regulating commerce, establishing their own courts,

and building or controlling fortifications within their own territories. Most important, the decree granted them almost unlimit-

ed rights of justice. In this way Frederick, so that he could pursue his designs in Italy, granted to the German princes nearly complete and unhampered ability to establish their own legal systems. Thus was undermined the basis for both royal justice

and the extension of common law. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the main efforts of the rulers of England 66

and France in their drives to assert royal prerogatives were directed toward the extension of royal justice. These British and French monarchs had rightly calculated that royal justice

constituted the mainstay of their increasing governmental power, as well as excellent sources of revenue to help strengthen

the crown. Yet, with the decrees of 1220 and 1232, it was

demonstrated that Germany was set upon an absolutely different path. The splintering of Germany, long under way, had therefore become a legal reality by 1232.

This all does not mean that Frederick completely abandoned all hope of control over Germany. In Sicily, he had tried to

create something of a centralized administration based on

royal agents in the manner of his Norman predecessors, who were designated to administer the island in the name of an often-absent Frederick. It is possible that the Emperor meant to establish a similar system in Germany, to lay there a foundation meant to transform the Empire north of the Alps from

an uncentralized to a centralized administration. In 1235, he had the famous Landfriedengesetz (Decree on the Mainten-

ance of Internal Peace) promulgated at an imperial diet at Mainz. This law sought to maintain peace among the territorial

lords. It proposed instituting an imperial judge, appointed by the Emperor on a yearly basis and given the duty of supervis-

ing all legal matters in the Empire. The decree was full of clauses reassuring the territorial lords of their rights. At the same time, it contained various signposts pointing helpfully

toward the establishment of a strong central administrative

agency. It is very difficult in this instance to ascertain whether

Frederick was merely trying to retain some lost aspects of

royal justice or, rather, hoping to establish a single legal system.

Whatever its intent, the Decree on Internal Peace was yet

another element, as it worked out over time, helping to push

Germany toward the territorial divisions known as Kleinstaeaterei (territory divided into many small particularistic states) because

the elements in it reaffirming princely territoriality became the most important ones.

During the last years of Frederick's life, the Pope's crusade

continued against him, although mostly as a propaganda war. In 1250, in severe ill health, he had just defended the borders of Sicily against an army organized by Innocent IV and his allies. But once again the tides of fortune shifted. It seemed 67

that many of the secular princes of the West, tired of endless papal demands for money to carry on the Pope's fight against

the Hohenstaufen, were about to move into support of the Emperor. Frederick, it appeared, might well have been at the juncture at the threshold of realizing his dream empire.

Suddenly, he encountered some sort of infection his weakened constitution could not repel and he died of a persistent attack of dysentery on 13 December 1250.

Frederick's passing, as was the case with his grandfather, gave rise to a multitude of legends. Some men of the Church, having heard so often during his life that Frederick was in actuality

the Anti-Christ, only reluctantly came to accept the idea that he was, in fact, dead.23 Innocent IV, for his part, was profoundly relieved at the news, as were many other churchmen.2* In time, nearly all those who doubted it finally came

to accept the fact that the Emperor had died, for one could go to Palermo and see there the royal final resting place. He was entombed in the cathedral in that city next to his parents. His sarcophagus reflected artistically only Byzantine,

Islamic, and eastern symbols.2> It is perhaps proper in terms

of the life he had lived that little German influence is seen in the design of his tomb.

With the death of Frederick, the medieval empire fell into rapid decline. The period from Frederick's death in 1250 to the election of Rudolf of Habsburg in 1273 is usually called "the Interregnum," signifying that there was no effective ruler.

Frederick's son, Conrad IV (ruled 1250-1254), sought to assume the inheritance. He entered Italy in 1251 to confront Innocent IV and his supporters. At that point Rome attempted to win

the upper Italian cities to the Pope's side once more and to incorporate Sicily into papal holdings. Hence, Conrad was drawn by necessity deeper into the south. In 1253, Naples fell to Conrad after a long siege. And when Conrad seemed assured of victory in 1254, he suddenly died of a fever. His body, which was to be conveyed to Palermo, was burnt in Messina. Innocent IV died the same year. Manfred, Frederick's illigetimate son, followed Conrad in 1254. He gained Sicily, but was powerless north of the Alps. Ultimately, the papacy,

in desperation, offered the Sicilian crown to the brother of Louis IX of France, Charles of Anjou, who arrived in Italy with a formidable army and in a rapid campaign defeated and 68

killed Manfred (1266). Two years later, in 1268, Conrad's young

son, the fifteen-year-old Conradin, appeared in southern Italy with a small army. He was easily routed by Charles of Anjou. Conradin, now turned sixteen, was brought in chains to Naples. After a short trial, the "last of the vipers" was executed with

papal permission in the market place at Naples. The grand dreams of the Hohenstaufen line had ended ignominiously.

The impact north of the Alps of all these events transpiring in Italy was to throw Germany into disorder. There was little influence exerted there by such presumptive emperors as Alphon-

so of Castile who, although calling himself King of Germany, dared not leave Spain because of local political considerations. Splintering of political power continued. Dukes, abbots, cities, and knights ripped away for themselves great chunks of the Hohenstaufen holdings. As this process continued, in many areas decaying territorial units were fragmented into yet smaller ones. Even the lesser nobles gathered for themselves territorial rights. The Empire began to shrink. Italy was lost. Rebellion grew in Burgundy and elsewhere.

Historians have long debated whether the loss of Italy was a detriment or a blessing in disguise for German rulers. Undoubtedly, during the two and a half centuries since the Ottonians had commenced their Italian adventures, Germany had

obtained much wealth and cultural benefits. Nevertheless,

the conditions in medieval Europe made an Empire stretching from Sicily to the Baltic a practical impossibility. What happened after 1250 was more logical in terms of a long-range historical process; the Hohenstaufens were destroyed and Germany was left a mass of territorial fragments.

The Empire had declined. But it was not forgotten. In the 1270s, it was one of those paradoxical happenstances that often come to pass in history that the seemingly moribund idea of Empire was reinstituted by a Pope, after the Popes had fought the emperors for so long to destroy the Empire. Gregory X, early in the decade, urged the Germans to elect a ruler and even threatened to appoint one himself if the princes

could not re-establish order in their lands. This surprising policy shift was the result of momentary political considerations.

The Pope had suddenly come to see the Empire as a possible counterbalance to the burgeoning strength of Charles of Anjou, 69

who had assumed more power in Italy than could be tolerated in terms of papal interests.

The eventual result of this papal urging was the election of Rudolf I of Habsburg (ruled 1273-1291), the first of that house to assume the imperial dignity. This new king, although relatively strong in some ways, was more a symbolic than actual ruler.

His main importance lies in the successful expansion of his Hausmacht (domestic possessions), establishing a new basis of power to replace the Hohenstaufens in Swabia, Alsace, and Northern Switzerland. But, importantly and unlike the Hohenstaufen dynasty, he sought a more limited territorial base. Thus was ushered in a time that was an odd mixture of the old and the new. The Hohenstaufen dynasty was effec-

tively finished, its territories in central and southwestern Germany were political debris. New tensions, more territorially

limited, developed. These involved Habsburgs in Austria set against Luxemburgs in Bohemia, arrayed against Wittelsbachs in Baravia, and so forth. A period of dynastic rivalries ensued, behind which the disorders that were the natural legacy of the Interregnum continued. Thus the tone of the later Middle Ages in Germany was set.

70

CHAPTER SIX GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

(1291 - 1517)

The European history of the period immediately after Rudolf

was characterized by the conflict between France and the papacy, a conflict resulting in the humiliation of the popes of Rome. This Franco-papal history need not concern us greatly

here. As indicated, the picture in Germany was already one of disorder and the disorders continued. The Electors of Empire

found it necessary to consider the successor to Rudolf upon

his death and self-interest, as usual, was their guide. And by this juncture, the German or "Roman" ruler was particularly

dependent upon his relationship to the Electors.

The history of the origin of the College of Electors is obscure and is likely "to remain the object of various theories."! One theory was already developed by the thirteenth century, which

had it that the Electors who picked the new emperor were

those men who held the most important imperial offices. The ecclesiastical Electors were the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne and had been made the "Chancellors" of the kingdoms of Germany, Burgundy and Italy. The secular Electors, the Count Palantine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia (this claim to office having been disputed by Bavaria as late as 1289) were, respectively, "Imperial Lord High Steward, Marshal, Chamberlain, and Cup Bearer of Empire." Later holders of theories explaining

the origins of the College have found this notion insufficient and have offered instead that it was a more natural progression of events that produced "the seven;" this dignity's assumption was based on who held actual power and had become the primary heir of the strength of the older "tribes" when those old duchies began to break down. 71

At any rate, the number of electors was fixed at seven by 1257. The tradition of the Electoral College's selecting the new ruler personally led to endless intrigues and bribery over time. The institution was designed better to bring on further power struggles among the great dynastic houses than it was to provide orderly continuity for governments. This became especially apparent in the generations after Rudolf I. A harmful

rivalry among the great nobles shifted the crown back and

forth from family to family. There was little political stability

as self-interest became the primary motive underlying the choices made by the Electors. That this was so was demonstrated in 1292 when Rudolf's son was bypassed in favor of a poor count, Adolf of Nassau (ruled 1292-1297). When Adolf tried

to improve his originally very weak position, by use of the old tools of conquest and bribery, the disgruntled Electors moved against him and he was killed. Again the Electors return-

ed to the Habsburg line in the person this time of Albert I (ruled 1298-1308), who tried to counteract the territorial ambitions of the princes and attempted as well to move the German situation into the international arena; he confronted Edward of England and Pope Boniface VIII at the side of King Philip "the Fair" of France.2 Albert's unending greed for land gradually

antagonized the lords of Germany and, in time, they went

to war with him as they had with so many of his predecessors. In 1308, however, it was his nephew, John, who with three companions murdered him for personal rather than political motives.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, France had the benefit of particularly powerful rulers while Germany was seemingly constantly torn by civil war. This imbalance gave France the opportunity to interfere in Germany toward the end of the Middle Ages. The French monarchy did so in 1308 when Philip IV of France even went so far as to hope that his own brother, Charles of Valois, could be elected to the throne of Germany. The scheme failed and a compromise

choice, Henry VII (1308-1313), Duke of Luxemburg and technical-

ly a vassal of the King of France, came to the throne. And Henry tried to re-enter Italian affairs in much the same way as the Ottonians and Hohenstaufen by becoming involved in the Guelf-Ghibelline struggle in the peninsula. His motives, however, were a bit different than those of earlier emperors.

This was the initial period of the so-called Babylonian Captivity 72

of the papacy. Henry was a German prince, but he had received

a French education. His language was French. Moreover, as Duke of Luxemburg he was technically a vassal of the French

king. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church saw the popes, who were French rather than Italian during this period, taking up residence in France, in the city of Avignon, unable and/or

unwilling to return to the traditional throne in Rome. The

French pontiff of Henry's day hoped to regain a firm control of the papal territories in Italy with the German emperor acting as his intermediary. And Henry was ready to seize the opportunity.

When Henry invaded Italy, he was momentarily hailed by both

factions. Apparently, both sides hoped that he could bring peace to troubled territories. With his sentiments aroused by this common hope, the famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote his well-known DE MONARCHIA. DE MONARCHIA, of course, advocated the imperial solution for Italy's problems. Thus it was that, in 1312, Henry VII, in the manner of Otto

the Great, was crowned Emperor in Rome. This was but a brief revival of old imperial glories, however, for matters had gone too far in another direction to resuscitate the dream of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. The Italian cities quickly tired of their new overlord and rebelled against him in alliance with

the King of Naples. Henry, then, as had previous German rulers, found the Italian climate less than salubrious and died

suddenly in 1313.

The death of Henry VII was followed by yet another period of civil war in Germany. The imperial crown was again sought by rival dynasties. The Luxemberg-Bohemian faction, deeply involved in a rivalry with the Habsburgs, typified in many ways the basic dilemma of the medieval German situation, for this dynasty represented a land in Bohemia that was not really German. Actually, the Bohemian territory was typified by mixed settlement. It was Slavic in many villages, Germanic in some villages and towns. Demographically, it was more

Slavic in the east and more German in the west. Scholars

have argued about it, but German immigration there was probably not yet as heavy as it would be by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.? Typically, therefore, the situation was muddled and a civil war of eight years' duration took place before Louis IV (ruled 1314-1347) emerged as sole ruler. A byproduct 73

of all this was that Habsburg pretensions to Empire were laid low for over a century.

Louis also became involved in Italy and so enraged Pope John XXII, whose political ambitions remind one strongly of Innocent lil, that John placed the Emperor under the now familiar ban of excommunication. Instead of forsaking this excommunicated ruler, as in the days of the Hohenstaufen, however, the dukes and cities in Germany, with the notable exception of the Habsburgs, rallied to the support of Louis. In various German towns, citizens forced clerics to read Mass in spite of a papal Interdict. Urged on by his local Franciscans, King Louis in 1324 charged the Pope with crimes and heresy and demanded a Church council be convened to try him. To reinforce his position, Louis gathered at his court leaders of various anti-papal factions and theologians with "new ideas," who unleashed a war of pamphlets against

John XXII. The most influential of these court writers was Marsiglio of Padua, author of DEFENDER OF THE PEACE in which he had suggested that the Church ought not hold any

property and ought not attempt to exercise secular power

in the manner of the geat medieval pontiffs.

The antipapal forces actively sought to implement the ideas

of Marsiglio. The Italian Ghibellines took Rome and proceeded

to set up a republican government. They then invited Louis

to come to Italy to take up the imperial crown. Louis, his

possessions secure north of the Alps, made the journey to Italy and received imperial coronation (1328), although with a different twist; he was given the crown not by the Pope, asintimes past, but rather by the chieftain of the local republican government, Sciarra Colonna. The coronation, rather like the Popes' now time-worn weapons of excommunication and anathema,

had come to have little meaning in the context of the midfourteenth century. Even though Louis and his supporters estab-

lished an antipope, the propapal forces retook Rome, forced Louis to go back north, and reinstalled John XXII (although the papal headquarters were not now in Rome but rather in the French city of Avignon and John was a French rather than an Italian pope). Thereafter, although he often vowed he would return to Rome, Louis remained in the north.

The major consequence of Louis’ rule inGermany was the secularization of the imperial crown. There were continued papal 74

pronouncements against Louis, the Pope demanding a Canossa-

like humiliation of the German ruler. As before, however,

the German princes ignored a papacy that was "French" rather

than "Italian." They proceeded to secularize the concept of imperial elections. Before this time, the elected rulers of Germany had been unable to aspire to imperial prerogatives,

had not been looked upon as emperors until crowned by a pontiff

in Rome. In 1338, however, the electoral princes proclaimed

that "the tradition and constitution of the German Empire" gave to the Electors the right to bestow both imperial title

as well as full imperial powers. The words "royal" and "imperial"

were now used for the first time to distinguish between the Kingdom of Germany and the Empire. Then, after rejecting all papal accusations against their Emperor and commanding that the Mass be read everywhere in the Empire in defiance of papal Interdict, the princes promulgated a revised electoral law that took from the Pope even the last shred of his preroga-

tives. Henceforth, it was asserted, no papal agreement was required for a candidate chosen by the Electors to carry the

royal and imperial title.2 The document explaining all of this demonstrates the impact of both mysticism and the teachings of Marsiglio, for it argued that the powers and titles of a ruler came from God and not the Pope.

It was typical of Germany's medieval history that this unanimity

displayed against the Pope did not last very long. Internal

jealousies reappeared once the papacy had been confronted. Louis’ tendencies to expand his dynastic holding annoyed the princes and particularly the Luxemburg faction, headed by a new and ambitious leader in Charles of Bohemia. Civil war seemed about to erupt once more when, as Charles had rallied dissidents and been elected anti-king in 1346 by five of the Electors, Louis IV died on a hunting expedition in 1347. The Stage was thus cleared for the rule of Charles of Bohemia.

Charles IV (ruled 1347-1378), of the Bohemian Luxemburg dynasty, was the last strong medieval king in Germany. Charles, as was the case with so many of the strong rulers of the Middle

Ages, was a quite ruthless man. This was demonstrated by, among other things, the fact that, after the death of his predecessor when Charles was not immediately proclaimed ruler, he felt it expedient to begin handing out bribes and favors. To obtain the necessary resources to do this, the young king 75

seized the opportunity given him by one of the frequent upsurges of anti-Jewish persecution in medieval Germany. He appropriated the property of Jews who had been killed during the outbreaks and awarded it to his supporters. He also demanded "protection"

money from Jews in his domains who had been left alive. He even went beyond that practice to the regular selling of pardons to some of those lords apparently responsible for the massacres of Jews.

In politics, Charles was a realist. He was willing to break with past tradition and ready to forego the futile attempt to revive dead glories by greatly restricting his activities in Italy. Unlike past emperors, he did not see fit to struggle with the Pope over the Italian peninsula. Instead, he tried to work in harmony with the papal government because he appeared to realize, and this was novel in medieval German history, that the Empire and the papacy were interdependent

institutions and that one was in for a time of ill fortune without the support of the other. Thus, in April of 1355, Charles was crowned Emperor by the papal legate and, in a novel manner,

that crowning did not stimulate his ambitions to rule Italy

as had so often been the case in the past when similar coronations transpired.

In both foreign affairs and internal affairs, Charles of Bohemia

was interested in imposing order and a sense of legality on existing conditions, provided that such arrangements did not diminish the power of his dynasty. This sense of realism meant

that, in the kingdom at large, he accepted as permanent the increasing power of the Electors. In actual fact, he turned the electoral college into a royal cabinet with the king acting as something of a Prime Minister. To carry out this role he traveled extensively. According to the Magdeburg Chronicle, On one occasion at Mainz, the Emperor assured the princes, in good diplomatic fashion, that what they advised him was

proper to do was far more important than any of the laws currently in use in any of the towns.* While thus traveling

about among the princes, he emphasized again and again the importance of the public order and, in 1349, even had everyone in Franconia swear an oath against all those who would act

"against the public peace." He commonly ordered people to join a proclaimed Public Peace, as he did in 1357 with the archbishops of Trier and Mainz.®

76

It is thus obvious that public tranquility was very important

to Charles and this is the spirit that informs his famous Golden Bull of 1356. The Golden Bull has often been considered the first written constitution of the German kingdom. The document itself begins with a lengthy preamble and solemn introduction,

and then one main theme appears. The basic notion that the disunity of Empire and the disorder among its princes is to be healed by the unity of the Seven Electors (the Electors being the pillars of Empire) runs throughout. The main subject and purpose of the Bull is thus agreement and proper order surrounding royal elections, so that continuity in the polity could finally be achieved. This made judicial what had thus far developed only in practice: a fundamentally "oligarchic tendency comprising a dualism between emperor and Empire, which was embodied both in the person and the office of the German king and in the electors." What is seen fully developed in this historic document is a problem that becomes endemic in German history, the quandry of dualism. This dual authority between princes and King-Emperor had become fully developed. The role of the ruler himself, described most properly by the compound term "King-Emperor," thus embodied a troubling

and contradictory dualism. And this had become the case in Germany even as greater unity was becoming the norm in other European polities.

It is noteworthy that, in the Golden Bull, no mention is made

of papal agreement to a crowning. The essential thrust of the document in practice was that it granted additional power to the seven Electors, making them more or less completely sovereign and removing the remaining checks on their authority

that had been included in the decrees of Frederick II. The Electors were thus promoted to a status high above that of other territorial lords. They were not "regents" who were to meet with the King once a year in the spring to discuss problems of government. In the event of his absence or death they were to supervise administration of the kingdom. Particu-

larly did this give power to the Court of the Palatinate and the Duke of Saxony who, in the kinds of cases just described, became "Vicars of Empire."8

The Empire described in the Golden Bull was a pluralistic organism

of forces, channels of power, institutions and estates, at the apex of which was fixed the King-Emperor. At the same time, 77

the Empire was oligarchical, and not a unitary state at all. Below the ruler, but in some respects next to him, were the Electors. All of this ensured that Germany, unlike England or France of that time, was not an emerging national state. And that would remain the basic pattern of German history until the advent of "Modern Times" in the sixteenth century

and, actually, far beyond.

By the death of Charles in 1378, Europe had entered upon a period of political chaos and disintegration and thus it remained until 1410. There was a papal schism in the Church which

split Christianity into two warring camps and, for a period

of time, three rival camps. The Hundred Years' War between England and France, despite several long truces, brought those two countries near to the point of exhaustion. Germany fared little better in those years. There were more feuds, split elec-

tions over the kingship and, at one point, some three kings purported to be the "true" rulers of German lands. And, most importantly, new power nuclei formed in the Germanic terri-

tories.

First among these new nuclei were the territorial states. Follow-

ing the pattern set by Italian city-states, they developed into Staendestaaten ("states based on estates") rather than polities

grounded in one of the old feudal arrangements. In a state

of this sort, a group of people making up the society -- clergy, bourgeoisie, nobility, and sometimes peasants -were treated as groups or "estates." This meant that territorial states like Bavaria or Saxony could use this system to become more central-

ized even as decentralization shaped the German kingship

in the broader context.

The rising cities were also important; they multiplied and prospered during this period. Around 1200, there had been

an estimated 250 towns with their own municipal administrations

in the Empire north of the Alps. By 1300, there were some 811. By 1450, some 3000 existed. In the course of the rise of these towns, friction developed between town authorities and local nobles. To defend themselves, the cities resorted to the formation of leagues of towns and cities -- such as the "Rhenish" (formed 1254) and "Swabian" Leagues -- and these associations became sufficiently powerful so that the nobles had to form their own leagues as counterbalances. And 78

yet, although during the fourteenth centuries the towns reached the height of their commercial power and political independence,

they did not combine to threaten in any meaningful way the political dominance of territorial lords.

The main reason the leagues of towns did not try to wrest political control from territorial lords was that they were

essentially motivated by commercial and not political issues. A prime example of this was to be seen in the Hanseatic League,

which reached its high point in the fourteenth century. The “Hanse," named in terms of a word that apparently meant something like a merchant association or a body of merchant

men, was formed about 1358. The Hanseatic League developed as part of the late medieval Germanic colonization of the east and was based on an ever-renewed series of agreements between towns. During its best days in the mid-fifteenth century, these

towns numbered approximately eighty. Although most of the

treaties were short-term in nature, piracy and the threats of the princes held the Hanse together. The League stretched

its commercial territory all the way from Novgorod, deep

inside present-day Russia, to Bruges in Flanders. It included cities in Sweden and Holland so that, although its core was north German, it was yet another Germanic institution that went beyond Germanic borders.

Yet another rising Germanic force only vaguely connected to the institutions of Empire was to be found in the Teutonic Knights. 10 During the fourteenth century also, the Teutonic Knights reached the peak of their influence. The knights had been founded in 1190. At the time of the Third Crusade, some

German lords formed a military order to fight in the Holy

Land. But within thirty years, they had transferred their area of operations from the mid-East to Germany's eastern frontiers, and they came to play a leading role in the Drang nach Osten (the "eastward drive" into Slavic lands begun a century before).

In this process, the original spiritual ideals of the order were subordinated to political goals; the Knights became fundamentally a state within the guise of a religious order. Yet their monas-

tic form imbued them with corporate efficiency and fanatic zeal. This greatly contributed to their long string of victories. They conquered Prussia from indigenous Slavs and ruled it until the late fifteenth century. Their eastward advance was finally stopped shortly after 1400 at Tannenberg by the Poles. 79

In many ways the Teutonic Knights constituted one of the most highly successful variants over the long term of the institu-

tionalized piety of the twelfth century, although in the end they had turned their military powers as often against the Catholic Poles as any heathen enemy.!1

All of these separate elements demonstrated that Germany had reached the demise of the Middle Ages. New ideas and nuclei of power were emerging to build the foundations for early modern times. The Empire, for all practical purposes, was dead, and even its coexistent German kingdom had lost most of its reason for existence; it had not been able to develop

an efficient center of power and administration. The great nobles had cemented the cornerstones of their political domination. The Hanse, the Teutonic Knights and dynasties like the Habsburgs and Bohemians had given Germany a more eastern

orientation, thus forsaking to an extent former spheres of influence up and down the Rhine. Lastly, the rising bourgeois

Classes in the towns demonstrated new secular interests, accumulated wealth and built universities. The greater diversity

did much thereafter, during the fifteenth century, to lay the

groundwork for the social and religious upheaval of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

During the fifteenth century, much that was characteristic of the medieval Empire was disappearing. The Teutonic Knights and the Hanse lost strength. The power of the Church, knight-

hood, and the Emperor diminished. The dominant themes of

what is usually regarded as the last century of the Middle Ages in the Empire were: (1) the Hussite Rebellion against the Church with its prototype nationalistic and Protestant overtones; (2) the further consolidation of the particularistic

Kleinstaeaterei; and (3) the rapid rise of the Habsburg dynasty. In the person of Albert II, who ruled only one year (1448-1449),

the Habsburgs finally regained the crown of Empire. They were to retain it essentially without interruption until Napoleon vanquished the Empire forever in 1806. The general rule under the Habsburgs during the rest of the century was to show little interest in Germany. Frederick III of Habsburg (ruled 1440-1493)

hardly ever left his Austrian lands. He was interested only in furthering the acquisition of lands for his dynasty that could be taken directly and permanently into their holdings. Thus ruled in name by an Emperor who was without interest in its 80

affairs, Germany moved even further toward national disintegration. Kleinstaeaterei now really came into their own.

Maximilian I (ruled 1493-1519) was the Habsburg ruler when the Reformation began in 1517. By his day, the larger territorial

units had achieved their almost-complete sovereignty. The

territorial lords, in a way that foreshadowed the political side of the Protestant Reformation, tried to gain whatever influence

they could over the Church within each region. Each lord was finding that he could no longer rely on feudal lands or

knights. Emperor and prince alike began to hire mercenaries to maintain their power. These political changes were paralleled by social changes. These social alterations were, in turn, impelled by discoveries and exploitation of mineral wealth,

primitive but essential manufacturing, and the appearance of the first influential banking institutions.

It was thus a time of massive change, but Maximilian increasingly demonstrated during his last years his lack of political realism.

Maximilian in no way perceived the significance of the antiRoman outburst and of the controversy over the practice of granting indulgences, involving the Saxon monk Martin Luther,

that raged through Germany from 1517. Most importantly,

he misjudged the strength of the political, social, and economic forces that precipitated the Lutheran movement. It was perhaps

typical of the whole history of Empire that Maximilian, at so critical a time, was so unrealistic in his perceptions of political, social, economic and religious reality. Had he or his immediate predecessors ever really been concerned about Germany, instead of their own dynastic interests, then much of the steam might have been taken out of the Lutheran reform movement. However, Maximilian was primarily concerned with persuading the Electors to choose his grandson, Charles, as King of Germany and Emperor during his last days. This task was made difficult because Charles of Habsburg was already King of Spain. In this way the Reformation, with its splintering impact in Christendom and its enhancement of the independence of the princes and lords of Germany, was only a logical outcome of the thrust

toward diversity, rather than the drive toward greater unity

seen in England and France, that had been codified in Germany by the Golden Bull of 1356. There would be no German state until the nineteenth century.

81

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE OVERLAPPING CONCEPTS | Medieval German Monarchy and Medieval "Roman" Empire

A great many historians have gone to considerable effort to let us know that the medieval world was a far different place than the contemporary world in which we live. These writers have often observed that people of that era saw things in ways nearly incomprehensible to modern man, that the medieval mind-set was in many ways determined by a complex set of notions

not easily explainable in terms of today's usually materialistic preconceptions. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has expressed this notion well in his general comments characterizing the

whole age. |

To the world when it was half a thousand years younger

the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked

than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between

adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. .. . For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance. .. were equally attended by a thousand formal-

ities. . . All things presented themselves to the mind in violent contrasts and impressive forms, lent a tone

of excitement and of passion to everyday life and tended

to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair

and pious tenderness which characterized life in the Middle Ages. |

More recently, in another historical work of a similar depth of perception, but limited in its scope microcosmically, the French writer Le Roy Ladurie demonstrated that even the ordinary medieval man's concepts of space and time differed 82

greatly from that of modern man. There were no clocks in that era. Therefore, the passages of the minutes of the day could better be expressed by "the time it takes to say two Pater Nosters" or, for longer periods, in terms of distance as in "the time it takes to travel a league." Harvests and agricultural work had to provide points of reference as did the

ecclesiastical division of the year into "All Saints, Christmas, Carnival and Lent, Palm Sunday, Easter, Whitsun, Ascension Day" etc. Space was limited to physical perception, especially that of the hand and arm.2

Given these basic medieval differences of perception present in everyday life, shown by Huizinga and Ladurie in their writings,

it should provoke little wonder that the medieval German

political concepts of Empire and Kingdom are so very difficult

for the modern mind to fathom, conditioned as it is to the

modern national state, clearly defined in territorial, nationalistic and ethnic terms. Simply stated, a factor that has greatly complicated the question

of "Where is Germany?" historically for scholars has been the existence of the "Roman Empire of the German Nation," usually referred to as the "Holy Roman Empire." From 962

to 1806, most of the rulers of Germany and, later on, of Austria, also bore the title "Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire." There were obvious territorial contradictions involved in this dualism. As kings of Germany, these rulers claimed sway over certain

lands (although even these never appeared to be absolutely set for that long as the example of Frederick II's negotiations with Denmark in Chapter Five have indicated) lying north of

the Alps. When the same men wore the distinct crown of Emper-

or, these rulers were claiming land both north and south of the Alps. Moreover, in a typically universalistic medieval political concept, made paradoxical for the modern mind because

it was so vast a notion in an historical epoch when societal forces appeared to have been so inclined toward localistic situations, the Emperor claimed universal sovereignty over all Christendom as well as specific control of political situations both north and south of the Alps. Hence, the Empire included

many lands where German was not spoken. Contrastingly, once the Germanic peoples began to expand toward the East in the east-Elbian surge, there were many lands where German was spoken that were outside the Empire. Thus, the boundaries 83

of both Kingdom and Empire in the Middle Ages gave little clue as to what should be a modern German state. This, of course, helped to ensure that there would be no modern German state.

Like all historical concepts, these dualistic ideas changed through time. Beginning with the Carolingian era, Italy had

occupied a place of varying importance in the medieval idea of Empire. The concept of imperium itself and the importance

of Italy were quite vaguely conceptualized for the century after Charlemagne. It was in the era of the Ottonians that these ideas began to solidify again., With Otto HI, who listened much to his Churchman advisor Gerbert (eventually to become

Pope Sylvester III), the concept of Empire saw full revival.

Otto III made the city of Rome his place of imperial residence.

His view of Empire apparently was influenced by both the ancient Roman and the Carolingian empires. In his concept the Empire was an Imperium Christianum, meaning that the Empire was both the protector and expander of Christendom. Hence, the Ottonian Empire was universal in its aims. There is some suggestion in this also of the Byzantine model where the Emperor had acted both as sovereign and the responsible leader of the societas Christiana. The sum of all these influences was a principle of universality in which Otto III's aims were identified with those of the universal Church.?

Otto's concepts of universality were not pursued with equal force by his immediate successors. Instead, they tended to think of the domain as essentially Teutonic or, in some instances,

as later-day Frankish. Then, with the early Salians, Conrad II and his son Henry III, the vague political concept of universal-

ity was revived. It is, however, with the Hohenstaufen that

the idea really assumed its definitive form. The Hohenstaufen ignored the traditions going back to the time of Charlemagne, traditions holding that the popes owned rights in the city of

Rome and the Italian peninsula. At the most conservative,

it can be assumed that the Hohenstaufen aspired to a universal empire of Christendom always subject to continuous expansion.

It is readily seen that these emperors considered control of the city of Rome as absolutely necessary to their aims. Barbarossa, once in Rome, even asserted in an expression of these ideas in 1157 that by "the grace of Divine Providence we hold the governance of the city and the world."4 Later, when con84

sidering whether the emperors owed their thrones to the Pope in a kind of lord-vassal relationship or not, Barbarossa clearly expressed this idea once more. He said that his German kingdom was held through his election by the princes and the Empire

from "God alone." For this reason, he argued, if the Pope

held that he had given Barbarossa the crown as a fief (beneficium), then the pontitt contradicted biblical teaching and was an apparent liar.

It can be seen that, in the mind of Frederick Barbarossa, no distinction existed between the Roman empire of antiquity, the Frankish Empire, or the Holy Roman Empire of his own day. His "Grand Design," although it might appear to us to run counter to his universalistic ambitions, was aimed primarily

at giving him a territorial base so that he could dominate an Empire that was his by gift of God and by descent of historical tradition. For Barbarossa the old Roman Empire, the Imperium

Romanorum, had simply shifted across the Alps to become

the first Imperium Francorum and then had, by his day, simply transformed, and not much real transformation was actually necessary, into an Imperium Tentonicorum. He saw all imperial law promulgated in the various areas of the Empire as equally valid. He expressed an extreme linear thesis of the unbroken continuity of imperial rights; if Roman emperors and Charlemagne could enter laws into the body of imperial law in their day, then Barbarossa should not hesitate to order that his own laws take their place alongside those of his predecessors.©

Frederick's concepts of empire were further developed by

Henry VI and came nearest their realization under Frederick Il. Therefore, under the Hohenstaufen, the concepts of universality, of absolute sovereignty, and of sacredness characteriz-

ing while justifying their rule, were continuous. Moreover, the continuation of the notion that the Emperor ought to rule Rome, if ever successfully enacted, would have reduced the Pope to little more than an imperial bishop with his seat in

the "eternal city."

Naturally, as we have seen, the concepts of the Hohenstaufen sent the Popes in haste to canon law to find theoretical justification for opposing imperial universality and scurrying to find

political alliances to reject Hohenstaufen aggressiveness.

Naturally, also, the Italian communes found the German concepts 85

of universality and their sweeping claims threatening to their independence and fought the form these ideals took in practice as fiercely as possible.

In sum, throughout the High and Later Middle Ages, the King of Germany was also the Emperor of the so-called "Holy Roman Empire." These were two royal overlordships and they were by no means all German. It is thus misleading to write in any way of one entity in the Middle Ages without writing of the other, because of the existence of the idea of Empire overlapping

the idea of kingdom. Hence, royal policy in the "Kingdom of Germany" did not obtain the same overriding importance

that royal policy did in medieval France or England. The German

monarch's policies were often weak and remote. Moreover,

the policies of the German princes always formed a continuing counterpoint.

German royal weakness throughout the period we have just Surveyed was not total or continuously expressed; it ebbed

and flowed in stages. And most of this ebb and flow of weakness

was connected to Italy and the continuing Italian adventure. Certainly there were good practical reasons why the Saxon, Salian and Hohenstaufen rulers should be attracted to Italian lands. There was the advantage to be drawn from an ancient and obviously more literate empire existing to the south of the Alps. There was the apparent advantage of the cash-flow

from the imperial towns of northern Italy. But overriding

all other motives was the idea of the sacred universalism of Empire.

The various expeditions and sojourns south of the Alps brought far more in the way of negative experiences than any benefits.

These negative experiences involved military defeats, papal censures, ruinous expenditures, untimely royal deaths, and, most important of all, extended absences from the German homeland in the north in pursuit of alluring southern regions too alien, independent, or civilized to be absorbed. During the Middle Ages, powerful German duchies and rising dynastic families vied for pre-eminence. Germany was thereby deprived of the single center around which a future state could develop. And, in time, these centrifugal tendencies were reinforced by the religious split of the Reformation. 86

If the Germany of just before the Lutheran reform era is compared to a great machine that moves like a locomotive along the tracks of time, it can be seen as a greatly diversified and urbanizing society rolling along on institutional wheels of makeshift or primitive manufacture. It was much undergoverned. Violence was endemic. The machine only continued to roll on because that endemic violent behavior was discontinuous. Social disharmony and political regionalism were the most pronounced characteristics. The only common or uniting factors were to be found in the developed shared language, noted in

the introduction, and the fact that princes, merchants, and

diplomats crossed numerous boundaries to do business with each other. Moreover, such people as those who traveled were often drawn to one another by kinship or common interests. The most dominant impression to be drawn from all this is that late medieval Germany was a deeply religious society, in which there existed considerable hatred of the papacy, and in which there was increasing consciousness of being German. But his consciousness was far more ready to produce a particularistic religious revolt than it was the kind of united national kingdom seen elsewhere in Europe.

87

NOTES

Preface 1. P. Wolff, WESTERN LANGUAGES: AD 100 to 1500 (London: 1971), pp. 167-168.

Z. P. G. Thielen, DIE VERWALTUNG DES ORDENSSTAATES PREUSSEN (Berlin: 1965), p. 56. 3. E. Schubert, KOENING UND REICH: STUDIEN ZUR SPAET-

MITTELALTERLICHEN DEUTSCHEN VERFASSUNGS-

GESCHICHTE (Munich: 1979), f.n. p. 81.

Chapter One

Il. R. H. Bautier, THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE (London and New York: 1971), pp. 18-39.

2. G. Barraclough, THE CRUCIBLE OF EUROPE: THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1976), p. 12. 3. Eginhard, VIE DE CHARLEMAGNE (Paris: 1947), p. 80. 4, L. Duchesne, LIBER PONTIFICALIS (Paris: 1886-92), Vol. II, p. 7. 5. G. H. Pertz (ed.), ANNALES LAURISSENSE, MOUNUMENTA

GERMANIAE HISTORICA SCRITORES, I, p. 689. Hereafter cited as MGH followed by specific portfolio designation. 6. See, for example, R. Latouche, THE BIRTH OF THE WESTERN ECONOMY, (New York and London: 1967), p. ix.

7. See H. Pirenne, "Un contraste economique: Merovingiens

pp. 223-225. |

et Carolingiens" in REVUE BELGE AT D'HISTORIE, II (1923), 8. Marc Bloch, FEUDAL SOCIETY (Chicago: 1961), pp. 59-87.

9. H. Fichtenau, DAS KAROLINGISCHE IMPERIUM (Zurich:

1949), pp. 32-42. |

88

10. Ibid., p. 192. Chapter Two

1. J. Calmette, LE MONDE FEODAL, rev. edn. (Paris: 1951), p. 113.

2. Ibid., p. 113. 3. Ibid., p. 118. 4. Fichtenau, KAROLINGISCHE IMPERIUM, p. 254.

5. G. Jones, A HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS (New York and Toronto: 1968), p. 224.

6. KF. Lot, R. Pfister, and F.L. Ganshof, LES DESTINEES

DE L'EMPIRE EN OCCIDENT DE 395 a 888 (Paris: 1940-41), p. 578.

7. Barraclough, CRUCIBLE OF EUROPE, p. 83.

Chapter Three 1. G. Tellen, KOENIGTUM UND STAEMMEIN DER WERDZEIT DES DEUTSCHEN REICHES (Weimar: 1939), p. 12.

2. J. J. Thompson, FEUDAL GERMANY (Chicago: 1928), p. 299,

3. G. Barraclough, THE ORIGINS OF MODERN GERMANY (New York: 1946), pp. 19-22.

4. See, for example, C. W. Previte Orton, OUTLINES OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: 1924), p. 168.

5. L. Reynaud, LES ORIGINES DE L'INFLUENCE FRANCAISE EN ALLEMAGNE (Paris: 1913), pp. 140-141, 180.

6. Widukind, RES GESTAE SAXONICAE, (Leipzig: 1894), Vol. Ill, p. 49. 7. MGH, SCRIPTORES, XXX, 2, Vo. I, p. 742.

8. For an evaluation see H. Grundmann, DETRANCHTUNGEN ZUR KAISSEROENUNG OTTOS I (Munich: 1962), Vol. IL.

9. F, Dvornik, THE MAKING OF CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE (London: 1949), pp. 9, 62. 89

Chapter Four | 1. Carl Erdmann, DIE ENTSTEHUNG DES KREUZZUGSGEDANKENS (Stuttgart: 1955), p. 95.

2. See Wipo, "The Deeds of Conrad II" in T. Mommsen and

K. Morrison, IMPERIAL LIVES AND LETTERS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY (New York and London: 1962), pp. 52-100.

3. E. Eichmann, "Koenings Und Bischofsweihe" in SITZUNGS-

BERICHTE DER BAYERISCHEN AKADEMIE DER _ WISSENSCHAFTEN (1928), No. 6, pp. 3 ff.

4, E. Kantorowicz, "Mysteries of State" in HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XLVIII (1955), p. 72.

5. P. E, Schramm, HER RSCHAFTZEICHEN UND STAATSSYMBOLIK (Gottingen: 1956), Vol. 1, pp. 511 ff.

6. P.E. Schramm, "Die Kroenung in Deutschland bis zum Beginn des Salischen Hauses (1028)," in ZEITSCHRIFT DER SAVIGNYSIFTUNG FUR RECHTSGESCHICHTE (Kanonistiche Abteilung), XXIV (1935), p. 318.

7. Barraclough, ORIGINS OF MODERN GERMANY, p. 107.

8. Ibid, pp. 89-91. 9, Ibid., pp. 81-82. 10. Abbe U. Beliere, L'TORDRE MONASTIQUE DES ORIGINES SIECLE (Paris: 1921), p. 243.

11. Schramm, HERRSCHAFTZEICHEN, Vol. XXV, p. 461. The "cross" was likely the earlier-mentioned cross venerated by Conrad II. 12. Mommsen and Morrison, LIVES AND LETTERS, p. 147.

13, Ibid., p. 146. ,

14. E. Caspar (ed.), DAS REGISTER GREGORS (Berlin: 1955), Vol. IV, p. 12.

15. Otto Freising, THE DEEDS OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA

(New York: 1953), p. 40. ,

16. TRACTATUS DE INVESTITURA EPISCOPORUM in MGH, LIBELLI DE LITE, Vol. II, p. 502.

90

17. Ibid., p. 500. |

18, Letter is presented in A.H. Matthew, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HILDEBRAND (London: 1910), pp. 292-305.

Chapter Five

1. B.H. Slicker van Bath, THE AGRARIAN HISTORY OF WESTERN EUROPE (London: 1963), p. 79.

2. G. Duby, ECONOMIE ET LA VIE CAMPAGNES (Paris: 1962), Vol. I, p. 214.

3. G.H. Pertz (ed.), GESCHICHTSSCHREIBER DER DEUTSCHEN VORZEIT (Leipzig: 1933), No. 69, p. 60.

4. K.W. Nitzsch, GESCHICHTE DES DEUTSCHEN VOLKES (Leipzig: 1892), Vol. Il, p. 37. 5. O. von Durgen, "Constitutional Reform and Reorganization under the Hohenstaufen" in G. Barraclough (ed.), MEDIEVAL GERMANY (Oxford: 1938), Vol. II, p. 208.

6. H. Buettner, "Die Alpenpasspolitik Friedrich Barbarossas bis zum Jahre 1164-5" in T. Mayer (ed.), GRUNDFRAGEN

243-276, |

DER ALEMANNISCHEN GESCHICHTE (Kontanz: 1955), pp.

7. W. Schlesinger, MITTELDEUTSCHE BEITRAGE ZUR

DEUTSCHEN VERFASSUNGSGESCHICHTE (Gottingen: 1961), p. 234. 8. P. Munz, FREDERICK BARBAROSSA: A STUDY IN MEDIEVAL POLITICS (Ithaca and London: 1969), p. 121. 9. Ibid., pp. 144-186. 10. MGH, CONSTITUTIONES, Vol. I, Numbers 223 ff.

ll. W. von Giesebrecht, GESCHICHTE DER DEUTSCHEN KAISERZEIT, 2nd edn. (Braunschweig: 1877), Vol. V, pp. 512-513. 12. MGH, SCRIPTORES, Vol. V, pp. 91-92.

13. Freising, DEEDS, p. 27.

14, Heinrich von Treitschke, BRIEFE (Leipzig: 1913), Vol. II, p. 369,

15. Georgina Masson, FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN: A LIFE (London: 1957), p. 26. 9]

16. MGH, SCRIPTORES, Vol. XXII, p. 112. , 17, J. Flicker, VON REICHSFUERSTENSTANDE (Innsbruck:

1932), p. 224. |

18. T.C. Van Cleve, THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN: IMMUTATOR MUNDI (Oxford: 1972), p. 95. 19, MGH, CONSTITUTIONES ET ACTA, Vol. II, pp. 51 ff. 20. Ibid... EPISTOLAE SAEC. XII], E REGESTIS PONTIFICUM ROMANORUM LEGUM, Vol. I, Number 831, p. 731. 21. Ibid., DEUTSCHE CHRONIKEN, Vol. II, pp. 620 ff.

22. Ibid., pp. 24-77. 23. Ibid., SCRIPTORES, Vol. XXXII, pp. 455 ff.

24. For their reactions see Ibid., EPISTOLAE SAEC. XIII E PONTIFICIUM ROMANORUM LEGUM, Vol. III, p. 24. .

25. J. Deer, "The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily" in DUMBARTON OAKS STUDIES, Number V (1959),

Chapter Six

1. J. Leuschner, GERMANY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES (Amsterdam and New York: 1980), p. 80.

2. On this see A. Hessel, JAHRBUCH DES DEUTSCHEN

REICHES UNTER KOENING ALBRECHT I VON HABSBURG (Berlin: 1931).

3. E. Wiskemann, CZECHS AND GERMANS (Oxford: 1967), Chapter l. 4. DIE CHRONIKEN DER DEUTSCHEN STADTE VOM 14. BIS INS 16. JAHRHUNDERT (Munich: 1862), Vol. XV, p. 228.

5. Heinz Angemeir, KONINGTUM UND LANDFREIDE IM DEUTSCHEN SPATMITTELALTER (Munich: 1966), p.201.

6. Ibid., p. 403. 7. Leuschner, GERMANY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES, pp. 155-156.

8. Ibid., p. 159. 92

9. The Rhenish League was formed to oppose princely attempts

to exploit its members and help its various component parts

achieve a greater extent of autonomy. 10. On the Hanse, see J. Schildhauer, K. Fritze, and W. Starke, DIE HANSE (Berlin: 1974).

11. On this see P.G. Thielen, "Die Rolle der Uhr im geistlichen und administrativen Alltagsleben der Deutschordenskonventen in Preussen" in STUDIEN ZUR GESCHICHTE DES PREUSSEN-

LANDES: FESTSCHRIFT ERICH KEYSER (Berlin: 1963).

Chapter Seven

1. J. Huizinga, THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES (New York: 1924), pp. 9-10.

2. E.L.R. Ladurie, MONTAILLOU: THE PROMISED LAND OF ERROR (New York: 1978), pp. 277 ff.

3. R. Folz, L'IDEE D'EMPIRE EN OCCIDENT DU VE AU XIV SIECLE (Paris: 1953), pp. 76 ff. 4. MGH, CONSTITUTIONES ET ACTA, Vol. I, p. 224.

5. Ibid., p. 231. 6. On this see A. Brackmann's translated chapter "The Medieval Origins of the National State" in Baraclough, MEDIEVAL GERMANY, Vol. II, pp. 298-299.

93

94

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Otis C. Mitchell is Professor of History and Head of the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. He has degrees from Wichita State University (B.A., 1957), Kansas State College of Pittsburg (M.A., 1960), and the University of Kansas (PH.D.,

1964). He is a member of various scholarly associations. He

has received the Ohio Academy of History's "Outstanding Teach-

er Award" in 1983 and the University of Cincinnati "Mrs. A.B.

Cohen Excellence in University Teaching Award" in 1985,

He has been selected for inclusion in WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA

and WHO'S WHO IN THE WORLD.

His books include HITLER OVER GERMANY (1983) from the

Institute for the Study of Human Issues in Philadelphia, A CONCISE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (editions in 1968 and 1976) from Van Nostrand-Reinhold, THE WORLD

SINCE 1919 (co-authored with Walter C. Langsam in 1972)

from MacMillan, TWO TOTALITARIANS: THE SYSTEMS OF HITLER AND STALIN COMPARED (1965) from W.C. Brown, THE WESTERN CULTURAL WAY (1965) also from Brown, FASCISM: AN INTRODUCTORY PERSPECTIVE (1978) from Moore Publishing, A CONCISE HISTORY OF BRANDENBURG-

PRUSSIA (1980) from the University Press of America, and

THE GREAT EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONARY ERA (1980) from Burgess.

He has also edited and contributed to NAZISM AND THE COMMON MAN (two editions in 1972 and 1981) from Burgess. He

has published various articles and co-translated a sampling of early Hitlerian speeches.

95