Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (102 page)

The region was not unfavourable. The marshy soil proved quite fertile, especially in the area of Dithmarschen north of the Elbe estuary, which supported 40,000 inhabitants by the mid-sixteenth century or twice the population density of central Switzerland.
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Dithmarschen had already been made a county in the Carolingian era, but lordly control was always weak, even after the count’s rights were transferred to the archbishop of Bremen in 1180. The inhabitants were only obliged to pay a small fee on the accession of each archbishop. Communal self-government had already emerged by the eleventh century thanks to the need to cooperate to maintain the dykes and other flood defences. The introduction of a parish structure during the thirteenth century provided a framework to construct more effective common institutions. Each parish sent representatives to a common assembly, codified in the charter of 1447, which confirmed a typically communal form of a 48-member council balanced by a general assembly representing a federation of around 20 parishes. Already termed
Universitas terrae Dithmarciae
by its inhabitants in 1283, this peasant republic demonstrated its potency by repelling attempts by the count of Holstein to assert lordly authority in 1319 and 1404.

Dithmarschen’s influence peaked in the century after consolidating its government in 1447. The emperor treated it as an imperial fief, summoning the peasants to send representatives to royal assemblies in the 1430s and again to the Reichstag in 1496. However, like the royal towns, the peasants found that the Empire’s growing status hierarchy made interaction with formal institutions difficult. Moreover, Frederick III wanted to extend his influence into northern Germany and saw the region’s lords as more obvious partners who could be integrated more closely within the Empire by elevation as imperial princes. To this end, he elevated Holstein’s count to a duke and recognized his territorial ambitions by formally enfeoffing him with Dithmarschen in 1474.

The peasants demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of imperial politics by protesting to Pope Sixtus IV that the emperor was undermining the imperial church, on the grounds that their county belonged to the archbishopric of Bremen. Frederick was
forced to rescind his enfeoffment in 1481. The Danish king had inherited Holstein’s claim and now saw an opportunity to advance his territory to the Elbe, which would allow him to tax the lucrative river trade. Employing a ruthless mercenary band, the Black Guard, he invaded, only to be routed at the battle of Hemmingstedt on 17 February 1500 by the peasants, who exploited their local knowledge to pole-vault across the marshes and trap the invaders.
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However, what had been advantageous turned to Dithmarschen’s detriment by the mid-sixteenth century. Their relative isolation left them without natural allies, unlike either the Swiss or Dutch. In particular, the absence of any indigenous town deprived them of connections to the Empire’s urban networks. Neighbours resented them as wreckers and pirates, luring coastal shipping into their treacherous shallows. The Hansa accordingly rejected their application for membership. A renewed Danish invasion triumphed in 1559, though the king was obliged to leave the inhabitants considerable autonomy.

Frisia

Frisia, immediately to the west of Dithmarschen, shared similar origins, but exhibited less coherence, despite articulating an identity around ‘Frisian freedom’. The region had been conquered by the Franks around the mid-eighth century, but was granted its own laws and largely left to look after itself. It was not until the Staufer era that a concerted effort was made to integrate the region more firmly within the Empire, a move encouraged by the general migration north and east into previously underpopulated areas. The Staufers’ first choice of ruler, the bishop of Utrecht, was killed by the Frisians in battle in 1227. The region was then assigned to Holland, whose Count William became one of the contenders for the German crown after 1247. His attempt – and his reign – ended when his horse crashed through the ice and he was captured and killed by the Frisians in January 1256. His successor as count managed to conquer West Frisia by 1289. Control remained difficult into the fourteenth century, and West Frisia passed along with Holland to Burgundy in 1433.

Frisia’s fragmentation was part of the gradual process of demarcating clearer territorial jurisdictions across the late medieval Empire. Regions without lords either had to find their own place in the hierarchy or
risked incorporation within another territory. Frisia’s eastern edge became the county of Oldenburg, whose ruler benefited from kinship with the Danish king after the mid-fifteenth century. While Oldenburg evolved as a conventional lordship, several other communities were settled by colonists between the lower Weser and the mouth of the Elbe, and they, like Dithmarschen’s peasants, were able to secure greater self-governance under the loose superior jurisdiction of Bremen’s archbishop. The community of Stedingen was the most westerly, sited on the Weser north of Bremen and inhabited by around 12,000–15,000 people who were personally free but under the archbishop’s suzerainty. The need to cooperate to maintain flood defences forged this community around 1200, but its attempt to escape the archbishop entirely foundered after 1207 as he was not prepared to grant the same freedoms as those secured in Dithmarschen. Lordly control was asserted using a crusade after 1232, the same method then being employed further east along the Baltic shore. Stedingen’s inhabitants were defeated in 1234 and their community was divided by Oldenburg and the archbishopric of Bremen. The fate of the remaining four communities was mixed. Rüstingen was physically split asunder by an inundation in 1314, with half subsequently absorbed into Oldenburg, while the western part became the lordship of Jever. Wursten on the marshes north of Bremerhaven fell under the archbishop’s control during the 1520s. Kehdingen was a 47-kilometre long marsh along the lower Elbe, which passed to Bremen along with the rest of the county of Stade in 1236. Four campaigns finally forced its inhabitants to accept the bishop’s rule, though he allowed them to retain considerable autonomy. Along with the other marsh communities, Kehdingen became the fourth (peasant) Estate in Bremen’s territorial assembly in 1397. Although excluded from representation during the 1590s, the peasants continued to claim rights to participate. Hadeln differed from the other communities in that it had been settled much earlier and was part of Saxony. Like the others, it asserted greater autonomy during the thirteenth century, but more successfully because the old Saxon duchy fragmented. Hadeln was a 300-square-kilometre self-governing peasant republic with its own law and assembly by the fifteenth century, and it preserved this directly under the emperor after 1689. Charles VI ceded Hadeln in 1731 to Hanover in return for Hanoverian recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction changing Habsburg inheritance law.
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Only East Frisia retained communal government into the eighteenth century. As with other peasant communities, there was a tendency for village leaders to emerge as hereditary chiefs and gradually acquire the status of lesser nobility from the thirteenth century. Although they feuded amongst themselves, the Frisian chiefs accepted the Brok family as pre-eminent from the mid-fourteenth century until 1464, when they were succeeded by the Cirksena, who ruled until 1744. The Cirksena had likewise risen from village leaders, but benefited from Frederick III’s policy of integrating the northern periphery by granting titles to local notables. The Cirksena were made imperial counts (1464) and later princes (1654), but the bulk of the population remained free householders enfranchised through possession of qualifying farmsteads. Householders dominated the East Frisian Estates, which also included the port of Emden, the small towns of Aurich and Norden, and a handful of knights who, unlike those elsewhere, were independent landowners rather than the count’s feudatories. The Estates bargained for constitutional guarantees in 1595 and 1611. Mirroring Frederick III’s policy, Rudolf II endorsed these treaties to tie East Frisia’s own constitution to that of the Empire and so stopped it slipping under Dutch influence.
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The Cirksena periodically tried to expand their influence by espousing the cause of the villagers who were disenfranchised by lacking qualifying property. Confessional differences added to political tensions as Emden embraced Calvinism while the rest of the population adhered to Lutheranism. Problems grew after 1665 as the Cirksena adopted a different lifestyle and political behaviour in an attempt to join other imperial princes as social equals. Imperial intervention barely held the balance between the competing interests, including renewed external interference from the Dutch, Danes and neighbouring Welf dukes, and the bishop of Münster. Brandenburg-Prussia exploited these difficulties to establish a permanent military presence in Emden after 1682. Tension spilled over into civil war between 1725 and 1727, splitting the Estates before the radical Emden faction was defeated and the previous status quo restored. Prussia accepted this situation when it annexed East Frisia in 1744 following an inheritance pact with the last Cirksena. The friction seriously impaired functioning governance, rendering the Estates incapable of effective action and thereby essentially disempowering the communes, which had lost their main forum for action.
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The Swiss Confederation

The Swiss Confederation went further than any of these examples by separating from the Empire as an independent state (
Map 16
). Like the peasant communities of the north-west, those of the Empire’s long Alpine strip were also favoured by geography, though of a very different kind. The mountains allowed varied forms of agriculture and animal husbandry, sustaining a modest population that did not need to move since others travelled through their lands, which lay across the routes between Burgundy, Germany and Italy. Control of vital passes made the Alpine communities strategically important to all medieval monarchs and helps explain the rich ecclesiastical endowments in this region, which included the archbishopric of Salzburg, the bishoprics of Basel, Chur, Brixen and Trent, and important abbeys like St Gallen and Einsiedeln.

The mountain ridges made lateral communications often very difficult and encouraged a wide variety of communities, including numerous small and medium-sized towns and different kinds of villages, as well as lay and spiritual lordships. Apart from the local bishops, the senior lords tended to be busy elsewhere, creating scope for local self-rule, similar to that encountered in the North Sea marshes. Like the Frisians, local communities developed a myth of ancient freedoms that were in fact quite new, dating mainly to the twelfth century. Jurisdiction followed natural features like valleys, helping to shape how communities engaged with each other. Central and western Switzerland saw the development of incorporated valleys (
Talschaften
), which in turn formed the basis of what were later called ‘cantons’.
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By contrast, communal forms developed within lordly lesser jurisdictions in Rhetia, Vorarlberg and the Tirol in the eastern Alps, where judges’ circuits formed the basis for districts. Both the cantons and districts established management committees to coordinate common activities and represent the inhabitants in dealings with outsiders.

There is a tendency to lose sight of this diversity in favour of the stirring story of hardy Swiss mountaineers, such as William Tell, overthrowing Habsburg lordship and establishing what is widely interpreted as one of the modern world’s first democracies.
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In fact, the William Tell story only surfaced around 1470, long after Swiss communities acquired self-governance. The process of emancipation involved some
communities asserting their own control over others, broadly similar to the dominance of Italian cities over their hinterlands. Meanwhile, the complexity of settlement patterns led to differing forms of engagement with local and more distant lords, including the emperor, any one of whom might be an ally rather than an enemy under some circumstances.

Moreover, the formation of communal governance in the Alps needs to be placed in the wider context of the Empire’s reorganization along feudal and territorial lines, which, by the thirteenth century, increasingly compelled previously ‘peripheral’ areas to define their own status and relationship to more distant communities. In particular, the fragmentation of the old duchy of Swabia ended the political unit previously containing much of the Alps, including the former Roman province of Rhetia. The extinction of the Zähringen dukes in 1218 led to the emancipation of Bern and Zürich as imperial cities, especially as the Staufers saw the granting of political immediacy as a way to prevent key Alpine routes falling into the hands of potential rivals amongst the Empire’s princely elite. To this end, Henry (VII) bought up the Habsburgs’ claims from the Zähringen inheritance to exercise jurisdiction over the Uri and Schwyz valleys in 1231 and 1240, since these gave access to the newly pioneered St Gotthard Pass, opened in 1230. Like Bern and Zürich, the valleys became part of the royal lands under direct Staufer protection, but with communal self-government.

Much of the conflict that emerged by the late thirteenth century was not against feudalism, but involved disputes over the exercise of stewardship rights (
Vogteirechte
) associated with management of the crown lands in the wake of the Staufers’ demise. These disputes often pitted local nobles against more powerful outsiders like the Habsburgs who wanted to control the powerful abbeys of Einsiedeln and Engelberg. The abbeys and towns pursued their own interests in these conflicts, such as Zürich and Bern, which asserted control over their own hinterlands. Meanwhile, the economic transformation of the Alpine valleys across 1200–1400 involved smallholders being dispossessed by cattle ranchers expanding their operations to feed populations in the growing Lombard cities.
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