Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (101 page)

The episode confirmed what many citizens already knew: princes were unreliable allies liable to wreck civic harmony. However, the complexity of local-regional-imperial interactions inhibited political polarization along status lines. Cities continued to cooperate during Wenzel’s last decade and the reign of his successor, Ruprecht, but they refrained from further formal alliances. However, they also joined forces with princes against local common threats. The Swabians even combined with Eberhard II of Württemberg, despite his earlier role as royal tax collector, when they felt threatened by the local knights. Meanwhile, the Wetterau, Swabian and Alsatian towns joined Mainz and various south German princes in the Marbach League against Ruprecht in September 1405.
⁵²

Open alliances became possible again with the accession in 1410 of Sigismund, who saw civic and knightly associations as substitutes for a territorial base in the Empire. However, the emperor still appeared a fairly distant and unreliable partner for towns that faced continued encroachment from powerful princes like those in the Palatinate, Württemberg and Ansbach, who were consolidating their jurisdictions more clearly along territorial lines. The 1440s saw the establishment of a new Swabian Civic League, along with a separate alliance of Lake Constance towns and a Franconian group led by Nuremberg. The result was another City War in Swabia in 1449–50, leading to the collapse of the civic league in that region in 1454, while the Franconians fought slightly more successfully against Margrave Albrecht Achilles of Bayreuth from 1449 to 1453.
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The short-term consequence was renewed burgher–noble antagonism. In the medium term, the violence helped propel imperial reform to find a more effective way of resolving conflict. This, in turn, ultimately ended civic emancipation and princely encroachment by stabilizing the identity and jurisdictions of the imperial cities and principalities that were collectively recognized as imperial Estates.

Integration in Imperial Institutions

The Second City War already indicated that a balance was emerging between the princes and the royal cities. Albrecht Achilles was unable
to breach Nuremberg’s impressive new fortified ring studded with 123 towers.
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Perhaps more significantly, Bavaria refrained from joining the margrave, preferring instead more peaceful means to extend its influence by negotiating treaties of protection with several towns. Increasingly, princes realized that their own territorial towns could replace the credit and consumer facilities offered by the imperial cities, making these less attractive targets. The improving agrarian situation eased tensions by discouraging land flight. With a few exceptions like Württemberg, princes abandoned attempts to subdue free and imperial towns in favour of developing those on their own lands, consolidating the Empire’s diversified urban landscape.

Meanwhile, the gathering pace of imperial reform provided royal towns with an alternative to civic leagues. A key factor in Nuremberg’s defiance of the Bayreuth margrave was that its annual revenue was far higher than his. Already in the 1420s, Sigismund and the electors looked to cities as valuable contributors to the common military effort against the Hussites and continued to do so as the Ottoman menace loomed throughout the century. By 1471, most royal towns sent representatives to each royal assembly, holding their own civic congress (
Städtetag
) as part of the proceedings. This provided the nucleus of what became the civic corpus as the Reichstag took shape around 1495, by which point the stronger monarchy of the Habsburgs appeared to offer cities a much more reliable partner. By participating in the common institutions, the royal towns now fully became
imperial cities
, as well as imperial Estates.

Their imperial status now trumped residual solidarity with other towns, which were now more firmly reduced to mediate elements of princely territories. The process remained in flux between about 1480 and 1555 as the status of individual cities like Trier fluctuated until they clearly accepted or rejected the burdens associated with Reichstag representation. Many city councils had doubts about embracing the new institutions, especially as they felt the official distribution of tax quotas favoured the electors and princes. In fact, the assessments were a reasonable reflection of the underdeveloped state of many principalities’ finances relative to those of leading cities. The cities were unable to prevent the princes using the Reichstag to force through anti-monopoly legislation in 1512 contrary to the interests of their leading merchants. Religious differences added to the tensions once 60 of
the 65 active imperial cities embraced Protestantism after 1524, renewing lordly suspicions of townsfolk as subversives.
⁵⁵

Although these trends temporarily forged renewed solidarity with the inhabitants of territorial towns, they also opened new rifts amongst the burghers of the imperial cities. The Reformation often split populations along socio-economic lines, with the poor converting in Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg and Dinkelsbühl, while the patricians remained Catholic. The resultant unrest provided Charles V with the excuse to annex Konstanz and rewrite the constitutions of 27 other imperial cities between 1548 and 1552. Article 27 of the 1555 Religious Peace denied imperial cities the full right of Reformation, fixing their confessional character whilst providing some safeguards for dissenting minorities. By 1618, 35 were largely Protestant, while 20 were predominantly Catholic, but virtually all had significant minorities. Sectarianism fused with socio-economic problems to cause public disorder in Augsburg, Aachen, Kaufbeuren, Dinkelsb-hl and, most notoriously, Donauwörth, where Bavarian intervention to restore peace became one of the incidents cited by the Palatinate to justify establishing the Protestant Union. The problems of the late sixteenth century encouraged an introspective conservatism intended to reduce the risks of further intervention. Meanwhile, the improved effectiveness of the imperial courts during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided cities with more peaceful ways to defuse their internal problems whilst preserving their autonomy.

Continued attachment to the Empire was reinforced by the absence of any viable alternative. The Hansa failed to match either the political centralization of their royal trading partners like Denmark and England or the institutional integration provided by imperial reform. Their loose federation was unable to prevent the stronger members stealing economic opportunities from their weaker neighbours. The Flanders towns transferred with most of Burgundy to the Habsburgs in 1477. Leading north German members like Hamburg, Cologne and Goslar participated in the new imperial institutions emerging around 1500. Notably, the Kreis structure offered a new way of regulating relations with neighbouring princes in northern Germany, while the Reichstag’s development also served to integrate this region into the Empire. Although 63 Hanseatic towns agreed to federate with the Empire in 1557, full integration was delayed by their reluctance to accept the
burdens of Turkish defence, which grew significantly during the second half of the sixteenth century (see
pp. 445–62
). Meanwhile, Russian and Swedish expansion along the southern Baltic shore both exposed the dangers and reduced the Hansa towns to those in the Empire.

Several leading towns advocated closer involvement with imperial institutions, especially as Rudolf II’s political alignment with Spain served their economic interests, which were suffering from English competition. In 1597 Rudolf banned the English Merchant Adventurers from trading in the Empire. England retaliated by no longer recognizing the Hansa after 1602, causing a split as Hamburg and other cities wanted to continue trading with the Merchant Adventurers. By 1604, only 14 cities still paid Hanseatic membership dues. The downward spiral reduced collective weight, further encouraging engagement with the Empire as an alternative. The Hansa attempted to remain neutral during the Thirty Years War, but only the heavily fortified cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck managed this, thanks also to their importance as financial and diplomatic centres for all sides. The Hansa were confirmed as a legal corporation in 1648, but were now viewed suspiciously by other imperial cities. Growing threats from Denmark and Sweden encouraged Hamburg and Bremen to secure their autonomy by formal recognition as imperial cities after 1654. They were simply too important to fall under the jurisdiction of a foreign power. By contrast, applications from other Hansa towns were all rejected in the 1640s, and these were allowed to slip into the status of territorial towns. Münster, Erfurt, Magdeburg and Brunswick were all bombarded into submission when they refused. By 1667 the Hansa was essentially defunct.
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The imperial cities stabilized as 13 Catholic, 34 Protestant and 4 bi-confessional cities, of which 31 were in the old imperial heartland of south-west Germany. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) consolidated their position as imperial Estates, while reform of collective defence and the development of Kreis Associations removed any incentive for separate civic leagues. Rather than seeking independence as sovereign republics, imperial cities asserted their corporate status as ‘noble’, meaning free and elevated above both their own subjects and other, territorial towns.
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PEASANTS AND THE ‘COMMON MAN’

Communalism

The cities’ rejection of a broader alliance with rural inhabitants was another factor in the integration of the former within the Empire’s status hierarchy. The construction of a broader socio-political order based on the horizontal, associative aspects of communities has been labelled ‘communalism’ and has been claimed as late medieval Germany’s ‘third way’ to modernity between absolutist territorial state-building and the construction of a homogeneous national state.
⁵⁸
Communalism was a specifically late medieval–early modern form of egalitarianism that was collective in that it focused on the community, rather than the individual. Freedom was expressed and celebrated collectively through communal gatherings and festivals, and by verbal and visual reminders of the community’s traditions and identity. All this originated in the communal self-government emerging in the Empire’s towns and villages during the high Middle Ages. It was a movement of ordinary folk seeking a better life amidst often harsh and adverse circumstances, and it emerged pragmatically and well before the rediscovery of classical Greek civic democracy by Humanist scholars during the Renaissance. Communalism extended individual communal self-government by using the same practices to federate multiple communities, effectively building state-like organizations from the ground up.

As with all aspects of communal development, it is important not to romanticize or exaggerate communalism. As we have seen (
pp. 510–22
), communal government contained vertical as well as horizontal elements through its basis in the enfranchisement of (largely male) householders and its exclusion or marginalization of the poor, unmarried and recently arrived. Communities might indeed unite in the face of external threats, but these could also divide them. Harmony was often fabricated, or achieved through peer pressure and the punishment of ‘deviance’. Moreover, the communal ideal of freedom remained one of emancipation rather than empowerment: it was freedom
from
dependency and threat.
⁵⁹
Communal freedom was often voiced in antagonistic terms similar to what later ages would term the rhetoric of class war. Yet it lacked the abstract concepts of liberty and equality
used by, for example, the American and French revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century. Although capable of innovation, communal movements were not seeking to build a brave new society according to a grand blueprint, but instead defended an idealized version of their existing order against perceived threats.

Communal forms derived strength from face-to-face interaction within communities. This restricted wider structures to federal forms, since only these allowed each community to preserve its own identity and purpose. The preceding examination of civic leagues has already revealed the free-rider problem inhibiting their development into more durable political forms. Cities might be vulnerable, but they were usually better protected, larger and wealthier than villages. Standing alone did not appear as daunting as it might for rural inhabitants. This generally restricted communalism to the areas of non-nucleated settlement, like hamlets and scattered farmsteads. The formation of some overarching governance in such areas was often the only way their inhabitants could combat natural hazards and external threats. Non-nucleated settlement tended to be located in regions where other geographic features also favoured communalism rather than lordship. Communalism thrived on the Empire’s economic and political periphery amongst communities sufficiently wealthy to be viable, but not rich enough to attract raiders or encourage involvement in wider politics.

Dithmarschen

One such region was the coastal strip from Flanders to the Danish peninsula (
Map 22
). Unlike the areas further east along the Baltic, the North Sea coast was incorporated relatively early into the Empire, but remained politically peripheral and underpopulated. It was included in the county and, later, parish structures, but was never a major area of interest to the lay or spiritual elite. A mix of lordly and communal elements emerged, with the former predominating in Flanders in the west and the latter to the east in Frisia.
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While towns developed in Flanders, the more northerly and easterly areas saw smaller self-governing communities emerge through lordly absenteeism. Lords were few and more interested in affairs elsewhere. They delegated supervision to stewards and other intermediaries. Over time, these supervisory powers were transferred to locals, or lapsed altogether. Local people wanted
autonomy, not the absence of all protection or recognition from existing authorities. The Empire’s multilayered structure allowed them to achieve their goals through securing imperial sanction for their special status.