Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (100 page)

Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ demanded that Italian lords and cities return imperial regalia at the assembly in Roncaglia in November 1158. However, he was prepared to transfer privileges back to those cities that supported him, like Pavia, Cremona, Como and Lodi. Local tensions between these cities and their own rivals prompted Milan to establish an alliance with Piacenza, Brescia and Tortona in 1159, which proved the precursor to Italy’s most powerful civic group, the Lombard League (
Lega Lombarda
). Events fitted the pattern of imperial intervention in Italy since 1077 with the emperor becoming mired in local and regional disputes. Conflict escalated as he had to reward allies, defend his honour and avenge setbacks. Milan was besieged at the instigation of the archbishop of Cologne, Rainald of Dassel, whom Barbarossa had appointed as legate in Italy. Once captured in March 1162, Milan was razed and even its churches were demolished, their holy relics being carried off in triumph to Cologne.
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With Milan temporarily eliminated, the emperor’s civic partners had little reason to continue their collaboration and soon resented his tax demands. In March 1167 Cremona and Pavia formed the Lombard League, which swiftly expanded to include Bergamo, Brescia, Mantua, Padua, Venice, Verona, Vicenza, and Romagnol towns such as Bologna and Ferrara. The organization was backed by Pope Alexander III, who gave his name to the League’s new fortress of Alessandria, built in 1168 to block imperial control of the Po valley. However, the League never encompassed all Lombard cities, as local rivalries drove many into the imperial camp, including Milan, which was rebuilt in 1167. Verona formed its own, generally anti-imperial group to the east, while the Tuscan towns combined on a similar basis to the south.

Barbarossa accepted the impossibility of defeating the League by agreeing a six-year truce in 1177, which was extended as the compromise Peace of Konstanz in June 1183. The cities accepted continued
imperial overlordship in return for confirmation of their communal autonomy and recognition of their League. The good working relationship persisted until the imperial civil war following the double election of 1198. Self-interest trumped corporate solidarity as Milan and its allies backed Otto IV, while Cremona and its associates supported the Staufers. Milan established a new Lombard League in March 1226, which became a significant factor in the renewed round of imperial-papal conflicts lasting into the 1250s. However, centrifugal forces grew with the rise of the signori, who saw control of communal government as a means to extend local hegemony. The Staufers’ demise removed the emperor as a factor in north Italian politics for nearly three-quarters of a century, during which civic solidarity was further eroded by the continued growth of more despotic governments.

German Civic Leagues

Few German cities matched their Italian counterparts’ control of their immediate hinterlands, and they were much more dependent on good relations with lords and other neighbours to secure the free flow of food and trade. Meanwhile, the Staufers’ promotion of a more numerous princely elite created a different political environment in which many German towns felt acutely vulnerable. Most towns were clustered in the Rhineland, Wetterau and Swabia, the areas where lordly jurisdiction was most fragmented and complex. This was both an opportunity and a threat. Fragmented jurisdictions could open possibilities for greater civic autonomy, especially for episcopal towns to escape their bishops’ control. However, proximity to multiple lords increased the chances for friction and antagonism. North German towns faced different challenges. Although there were fewer lords in their immediate vicinity, the long-distance trade required by these towns crossed multiple lordly jurisdictions and brought them into contact with powers outside the Empire, like Sweden and Russia. The Staufers’ preoccupation with Italy and south-west Germany forced northern towns to find alternative ways to protect their interests.

The result was a diverging pattern of civic alliances. The northern towns gradually combined as the Hanseatic League (
Hansa
), the largest civic alliance anywhere in medieval Europe (
Map 21
). Centred on Lübeck, which itself had only been founded 17 years earlier, the Hansa
developed after 1160 as a means to protect specific trade routes, such as that between Lübeck and Novgorod. It broadened in the thirteenth century into a federated network as trade criss-crossed between cities establishing closer ties, like that between Hamburg and Lübeck after 1241.
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Writing at a time of heightened global competition with Britain, nineteenth-and early twentieth-century German historians presented the Hansa as the economic and cultural representatives of their nation, while more recent writers by contrast consider the League as offering an alternative to centralized state formation.
⁴³

The Hansa’s reach was certainly impressive, for it absorbed the Westphalian and Lower Saxon civic leagues (both formed 1246), as well as the Wendish alliance of south Baltic towns. By 1300, its trade network encompassed 2 million square kilometres and 15 million people, half of whom were outside the Empire. The core area extended for 1,500 kilometres of coastline from Flanders to Finland, with links up major rivers to inland cities like Cologne, Goslar and Magdeburg.
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The Hansa began using its collective weight after 1277 to force kings and princes to grant favourable trading concessions, leading to a series of struggles after 1388 with England, Russia and the count of Flanders. The core group of Wendish cities around Lübeck were foremost in promoting these conflicts, often against the wishes of other members. Meanwhile, individual cities used their new wealth to buy out local lords, who sold their jurisdictions to the city councils. For example, in 1392 Hamburg bought out the count of Schauenburg, who claimed the old rights over the city once exercised by the archbishop of Bremen. This enabled Hamburg, Lübeck and some other cities to become ‘free’ like episcopal cities that had escaped their bishops’ control.

Lübeck was relatively unusual in securing the additional status of an imperial city in 1226, though it did not attend imperial assemblies at this point.
⁴⁵
The emperor rarely appeared in the north and was not regarded as a natural partner. Although still part of the Empire, the Hanseatic towns did not participate in its politics or contribute to imperial reform. However, they did not create much of an alternative either, remaining only a loose alliance until the 1470s, when they belatedly established more formal structures, including an assembly. The extended membership and diverse trading interests made it difficult to find common ground. Few members were prepared to help others engaged in what usually appeared to be distant, local disputes.

Civic leagues emerged elsewhere in Germany around the same time as the Hansa, but with different characteristics. The initial catalyst was Frederick II’s absence in Italy, which saw the formation of the first Rhenish League in 1226 around Mainz, Bingen, Worms and Speyer, all episcopal towns seeking to widen their autonomy. The royal towns of Frankfurt, Gelnhausen and Friedberg also joined, giving the organization a compact geographical focus on the Rhine–Main nexus.
⁴⁶
The emperor’s initial response was broadly hostile, and civic leagues were banned by the charter granted to princes in 1231. However, in practice leagues were still tolerated and even encouraged as ways of securing the public peace through regional cooperation. The Wetterau urban league was established on this basis in 1232, comprising Wetzlar and the three royal towns from the first Rhenish League. The promulgation of an imperial public peace three years later gave such organizations firmer legal footing, while the growing disorder following the appearance of anti-kings in 1246–7 encouraged cooperation for mutual protection.
⁴⁷

A second Rhenish League was established by Mainz and Worms in February 1254 with a ten-year charter (
Map 20
). Within a year it had been joined by over 100 towns across the Rhineland, Westphalia, and southern, central and northern Germany, including territorial towns that joined with lordly permission; Ladenburg was even ordered to by the bishop of Worms. Eight ecclesiastical and 12 secular princes also joined, while William of Holland endorsed the organization in 1255, hoping to bolster his relatively weak royal rule. Richard of Cornwall followed his example after his election in 1257, enhancing the organization’s legitimacy and imparting something of the cross-status character displayed later by the Swabian League. Unlike that organization, the Rhenish League remained dominated by the cities and failed to establish a formal infrastructure. Indeed, it exemplified the weaknesses inherent in all the Empire’s civic leagues, whose rapid initial expansion diluted coherence and undermined unity.
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Nonetheless, the Rhenish League demonstrated that such organizations could prove potent, at least when faced with common threats. Already in September 1254 it besieged Ingelheim castle to punish Werner von Bolanden, a knight who had broken the public peace, and in October 1256 it inflicted similar treatment on Count Dieter of Katzenelnbogen.

Like the Staufers, Richard of Cornwall chose his allies according to
their respect for established socio-political norms and their support for specific royal policies, and his collaboration with the cities was not an attempt to escape dependency on the princes (see
pp. 378–9
). Moreover, unlike in Italy, there were 105 royal towns on crown lands by the 1270s, which provided the monarch with more immediate urban partners. Here, Richard acted just like other lords, expecting his towns to back him in return for protection and sanctions for communal freedoms. Subsequently, Rudolf I’s reorganization of the crown lands threatened some towns which did not want to exchange their previous direct relationship to the monarch for the supervision of a bailiff appointed from amongst local lords who might have their own, more threatening agendas. The rapid succession of kings after 1291 undermined stable royal patronage further, as well as creating a generally more disturbed political environment. The result was a wave of new regional civic alliances, all formally identified with upholding the public peace: Thuringian (1303), Swabian (1312), Upper Lusatian (1346), Alsatian (1354), Rhenish (1381) and Lower Saxon (1382).
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The greatest of these was the Swabian Civic League established by Ulm on 4 July 1376. By 1385, some 40 mainly royal towns had joined the League.

The leagues offered a practical way to preserve the peace on which their members’ trade and food supplies depended. However, they could lead to problems for the emperor, who was forced to decide between his continued support for their efforts and the backing of strong princes opposed to the cities. Württemberg’s defeat of the Swabian towns at Altheim in February 1372 was both a catalyst for the Swabian Civic League and a factor behind Charles IV’s reappraisal of his efforts to recover the crown lands.
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The final break came in 1377 when the royal cities refused to pay homage to Charles’s son Wenzel, the newly elected king of the Romans, in protest against the imposition of new taxes and the pawning of four towns to Bavaria. Charles could not ignore such open defiance and began hostilities by devastating the area around Ulm. Despite backing from Bavaria and Württemberg, royal forces were defeated at Reutlingen later in 1377, forcing Charles to promise not to pawn further towns. Relations soon broke down again after Wenzel’s accession in 1378, because he continued to insist on the new taxes, and failed to restrain the knightly Lion’s Society (
Löwengesellschaft
), which had emerged from the former royal bailiwick in the Wetterau and had attacked Frankfurt.

In response, the Swabians strengthened their organization by adopting the classic elements of a late medieval union: regular assemblies taking decisions by majority vote and acting as a court. They also mirrored the electors’ alliance in expressing allegiance to the Empire as a transpersonal monarchy whilst opposing Wenzel as king. This was a potentially powerful ideology, since it offered a way to transcend localism and regionalism by linking the welfare of individual communities with that of the Empire. The Swabians prefigured the later Kreis Associations by forging alliances en bloc with the Rhenish (1381) and Lower Saxon (1382) civic leagues, as well as with the Swiss Confederates (1385). These developments appeared doubly threatening to lords, because they occurred during the aftermath of the Black Death, which saw peasants threatening to migrate to towns unless they were granted greater social and economic freedoms. Renewed fighting had already developed after 1381 between individual towns and the weaker, minor lords. The unrest was a major factor in the growing resentment of Wenzel’s perceived misgovernment of the Empire. Wenzel attempted to resolve this by promulgating another public peace, at Nuremberg in 1383. The towns objected to the king’s insistence that they join this individually, rather than collectively, and they forced the princes to recognize the Swabian Civic League as a formal partner in 1384.

Two City Wars

As with the second Rhenish Civic League in the mid-thirteenth century, the potency of the Swabian Civic League attracted some princes, notably the archbishop of Salzburg. The archbishop secretly became its ally to protect himself while he pursued his own policy of incorporating rich religious houses, like Berchtesgaden priory, leading to war with the Bavarian duke in 1387. Emboldened by the recent victory of their Swiss allies over a Habsburg army at Sempach (July 1386), the Swabians felt obliged to back the archbishop, opening what became the First City War (
Städtekrieg
) in 1388–9.
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This was waged in the typical late medieval manner. None of the belligerents were able to sustain large forces for long, restricting most operations to raids against economic assets, such as sorties by citizens to burn a lord’s villages. The townsfolk’s willingness to meet the princes in battle proved their undoing: they were defeated by Count Eberhard II of Württemberg at Döffingen
(August 1388) and by Count Palatine Ruprecht II at Worms (November 1388). A new, general public peace was proclaimed at Eger in May 1389, obliging the disbandment of the Swabian and Rhenish civic leagues and banning such organizations in future.