Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (16 page)

Sigismund’s decisive intervention demonstrated the continued potency of the imperial ideal, whilst also showing how much had changed since Henry III ended the earlier schism in 1046. Whereas Henry had acted unilaterally, Sigismund had to consider other kings and the multiple influences within the church. First, he allied himself
with the conciliarists who had convened a general council in Pisa and elected their own pope in 1409 in defiance of both Avignon and Rome. Having won support to convene his own council in Constance in November 1414, Sigismund outmanoeuvred all three popes, who either abdicated or were deposed by 1417, allowing the church to be reunited under the reform-minded Pope Martin V.
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The Great Schism greatly weakened the papacy, which now confronted the more radical conciliarists who chose Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy in 1439 as what proved to be the last anti-pope. Although conciliarism fizzled out with his abdication ten years later, the renewed schism extended the time for European monarchs to bargain concessions from the Roman papacy. This proved particularly important for the Empire, where monarchical authority was shifting from reliance on imperial prerogatives to the direct control of extensive dynastic possessions – a method perfected by the Habsburgs, who ruled the Empire from 1438 with only a single break until its demise in 1806. The Vienna Concordat secured by Frederick III on 17 February 1448 joined that of Worms from 1122 as the fundamental document regulating the imperial church until 1803. It did not go as far as its French equivalent in halting all papal taxes within the realm, but nonetheless curtailed papal influence over appointments at all levels of the Empire’s church hierarchy. Unlike the nationalized Gallican church in France, there was no single
ecclesia Germania
. Instead, other leading princes negotiated their own concordats on the Viennese model between the 1450s and 1470s to cover the lesser clergy within their jurisdictions.

Nonetheless, conciliarism had fostered greater cohesion amongst what were increasingly regarded as national episcopates, including that in Germany. A synod of German bishops at Mainz in 1455 drew up the first
Gravamina nationis Germanicae
, or complaints of the German church, to be presented to the pope. The issues were taken up at the Empire’s assembly in 1458, and subsequent Gravamina became integral elements of imperial politics, especially because they often served imperial interests in the continuing disputes with the papacy over jurisdictions in northern Italy.
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Habsburg-Papal Relations

Sigismund’s success in ending the Great Schism in 1417 appeared to reset papal-imperial relations to the era of Charles IV. Sigismund was the first German monarch to go to Italy after the fiasco of Ruprecht’s abortive Roman expedition in 1401–2. His imperial coronation on 31 May 1433 was the first since 1220 by a universally accepted pope and represented the culmination of two-year’s peaceful presence in Italy. The Vienna Concordat smoothed the way for Frederick III’s imperial coronation on 19 March 1452, which proved to be the last in Rome.
¹⁴²
It was also the last occasion on which an emperor performed Strator service for a pope. The ceremony was already at odds with the new political balance, as the Habsburgs were amassing what would soon become the largest personal possessions held by any imperial family and which provided an entirely new basis for imperial authority.

The new reality was obvious with Habsburg involvement in the Italian Wars, which opened in 1494 with a French attempt to supplant imperial influence over northern Italy whilst asserting direct control of the south. French ambitions were first checked by Frederick III’s son and successor, Maximilian I, and then completely reversed by his great-grandson, Charles V, who was both Spanish king and emperor by 1519. Charles’s power far exceeded even that of Henry VI, enabling the Habsburgs to complete the process under way intermittently since the 1130s and remove papal involvement from the imperial title. Already in 1508 the pope agreed that Maximilian I could simply assume the title Elected Emperor when the way over the Alps to his coronation was blocked by his Franco-Venetian enemies. That year, Lupold von Bebenburg’s most important treatise on the imperial title appeared in book form, using the newly invented print media that now disseminated the arguments behind the fourteenth-century constitutional changes. Meanwhile, the Empire was undergoing a fundamental transformation through rapid institutional growth, consolidating its definitive, early modern form as a mixed monarchy in which the emperor shared power with an increasingly finely graduated hierarchy of princes, lords and cities collectively known as the imperial Estates (see
pp. 402–21
). The formalization of new forms of representation in the imperial diet (Reichstag) around 1490 distinguished the members of the Empire more clearly. Popes continued to send legates to participate in the
Reichstag into the 1540s, but already before the Protestant Reformation made them unwelcome it was becoming obvious they were merely representatives of a foreign potentate.
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Nonetheless, the Habsburgs were not ready to sever all ties to the papacy. Arriving in the Empire from Spain in 1521, Charles V rejected the calls of evangelical reformers to purge Rome of what they considered the Anti-Christ. There was no return to the earlier imperial intervention to reform the church. Instead, Charles responded in line with the division between secular and spiritual responsibility that had slowly emerged since the Worms Concordat. The Reformation was dealt with as an issue of public order, with doctrinal questions left to the papacy (see
pp. 108–17
). The pope’s reluctance to compromise on doctrine made Charles’s position extremely difficult in the Empire, while both clashed in Italy over conflicting territorial ambitions. The low point was the infamous sack of Rome by imperial troops on 6 May 1527, an event still commemorated annually at the memorial to the 147 Swiss Guards killed defending the Vatican.
¹⁴⁴

Chastised, Pope Clement VII crowned Charles as emperor in Bologna on 24 February 1530 in the last such ceremony where a pontiff officiated (see
Plate 7
). The venue was chosen to fit with Charles’s campaign, but was still staged with great pomp and was intended to assist efforts to conclude the Italian Wars with a successful peace. Charles’s triumphal entry into the city presented him as a victorious Roman emperor.
¹⁴⁵
Charles obtained papal recognition in 1531 that his younger brother, Ferdinand, would succeed him directly without a coronation. By the time this occurred in 1558, Ferdinand had already concluded the Peace of Augsburg (1555) accepting Lutheranism alongside Catholicism as an official religion in the Empire. Ferdinand I’s accession provided the first opportunity since the Reformation to alter the emperor’s place in the imperial constitution. Protestants wanted to strike the clause committing the emperor to act as
advocatus ecclesiae
, and substitute an obligation to uphold the Peace of Augsburg. The Catholic imperial Estates eventually persuaded them to retain the original language. At Maximilian II’s election as king of the Romans in 1562 this was reworded as general protection of the Christian church, omitting any reference to the papacy; a formula retained thereafter, though clearly interpreted along more traditional lines by the still Catholic Habsburgs.
¹⁴⁶

The imperial and German royal titles had been merged, consolidat
ing the change of 1508 and ensuring the undisputed assumption of imperial prerogatives immediately upon election. There was now a single coronation, conducted by the archbishop of Cologne, who had generally presided over German royal coronations since the Carolingian kings and whose role was accepted even by the Protestant imperial Estates. Ferdinand IV’s coronation as king of the Romans in 1653 made liturgical concessions to Protestantism, and merely required the monarch to respect rather than obey the pope.
¹⁴⁷
The ceremonial alterations freed the emperor from the need to go to Rome, removing a major reason for cooperation with the papacy at a time when both were struggling to redefine their roles in a rapidly changing international order.

It was politically impossible for the emperor to cooperate unconditionally with the Counter-Reformation agenda embraced by the papacy at the Council of Trent (1545–63). The constitutional rights secured by Lutherans in the Peace of Augsburg were part of the Empire’s increasingly elaborate web of collective liberties that could only be altered through mutual agreement. The Habsburgs managed the Empire by presenting themselves as impartial guardians of all liberties, whilst remaining personally Catholic and imposing their faith on their own direct subjects. While the pope applauded Habsburg efforts in their own lands, even zealous emperors like Ferdinand II were heavily criticized for not capitalizing on moments of military strength to rescind all Protestant rights in the Empire (see
pp. 125–7
). France and especially Spain (which became independent of Habsburg Austria in 1558) displaced the emperor as the pope’s primary international champions.
¹⁴⁸

The pope’s influence in the Empire declined sharply, and efforts to influence a more zealous Catholic line by delaying recognition of Ferdinand III’s accession in 1637 failed to inconvenience the emperor. From 1641 publication of papal decrees in the Habsburgs’ own lands required the emperor’s permission, and a year later demands for papal book censorship were rejected on the grounds that this was a sovereign right of all monarchs. The papal reform of holy days was ignored, because this interfered with events important to the political calendar. More momentously, the pope’s protest when the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 was already pre-empted by a clause asserting the treaty’s validity regardless of what the pontiff thought.
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The last papal–imperial clash – and the first since 1527 – occurred in 1708–9 when Austrian troops invaded the Papal States to assert
Habsburg and imperial feudal jurisdictions in Italy over the pontiff’s counter-claims. There were also tense moments in the late eighteenth century when Emperor Joseph II championed the dissolution of the Jesuit order and secularized hundreds of Austrian monasteries. However, Joseph and Pope Pius VI also exchanged official visits in 1782–3.
¹⁵⁰
Relations were never quite those of equal sovereign states. Vestiges of the shared past lingered beyond the Empire’s demise in 1806, especially as the papacy generally now saw Austria as a more reliable protector than France, which was tainted with revolution after 1789. Concern for his traditional place as head of universal Catholicism prevented Pius IX from assuming the leadership of a liberal united Italy in 1848 as this would have entailed declaring war on Austria, which still controlled most of the north. Austria allowed thousands of its troops to serve as volunteers in the papal army until 1870, and did the same in the ill-fated Catholic-imperial project of Archduke Maximilian in Mexico between 1864 and 1867. Pius IX performed a symbolic translation of the old Empire in 1860 by reworking the still-official prayers for the
Imperator Romanorum
to one explicitly for the Habsburg emperor. Finally, Austria retained a formal veto in papal elections until 1904.
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As we shall see, these lingering connections were typical of the Empire’s legacy in later European history.

2

Christendom

THE CHRISTIAN MISSION

Christendom and Christianization

The early Middle Ages recognized Christianity (faith) and Christians (believers), but had no geographic concept of Christendom. Faith began with baptism (christening). The role of kings, lords and bishops was to oversee this, and to enforce observance of holy days and other outward markers of inner belief. The slogan ‘defence of Christendom’ (
defensio Christianitatis
) emerged during the ninth century in response to the Muslim Arab threat, especially in southern Europe, and it identified the wider lay community beyond the church (
ecclesia
) which the emperor should defend. Christendom only assumed closer associations with Europe through Gregory VII’s promotion of the papacy as sole and exclusive leader of all Christians, reducing the emperor to being mere ruler of the largest Christian kingdom. The geographic demarcation was consolidated by the First Crusade of 1095 and those that followed, which involved military expeditions against what was regarded as an eastern ‘other’.
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The Empire’s southern reaches encompassed Italy, including Rome into the eleventh century. The absence of a religious boundary in the west contributed to the lack of clear demarcation between the Empire and what became France. Differences were sharper with the pagan Scandinavians, Slavs and Magyars to the north and east. An extensive belt of pagan peoples across south-east Europe separated the Empire from its Christian counterpart in Byzantium – a major factor in the ability of both empires to ignore each other. Thus, though geographically
located in the heart of what is now considered Europe, the Empire lay on the northern and eastern edges of Latin Christianity, and provided the principal means by which that faith penetrated these regions.

A sense of east–west distinctions was already present in the inhabitants’ myths of origins. The Franks considered themselves descendants of Noah’s son Japheth, and thought the Slavs stemmed from another of Noah’s sons, Ham.
²
The Slavs worshipped forest and sky gods, practised bigamy, cremation and other customs totally alien to Christians, such as digging their houses into the ground in contrast to the wooden-post construction used by the Franks. Slavs had little affinity for Christian practices and regarded tithes as tribute to an alien, unwanted god. Even those willing to embrace Christianity encountered significant cultural barriers. The boundaries between past and present in Slavic culture were more fluid than among Christians accustomed to the Bible’s linear chronology. The refusal of Christian priests to baptize ancestors made no sense to Slavs.
³