Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (19 page)

The ‘Imperial Church System’

Before exploring the impact of the Reformation, we need to turn from the imperial church’s structure to its place in medieval imperial politics. The monarch’s influence over senior clerical appointments was a key royal prerogative that assumed even greater significance with the Ottonian kings after 919. Despite widespread clerical concubinage, the senior clergy were still celibate and lived under rules distinguishing
them from the laity. As such, they could not pass their benefices directly to sons or relations, and so did not exhibit the trend to hereditary possession that was a constant feature of secular jurisdictions in the Empire. Consequently, the Ottonians saw the senior clergy as potentially more reliable partners than the great secular lords. Growing reliance on the imperial clergy changed the episcopate from the cosmopolitan, learned monks of the Carolingian era to a more aristocratic, politically engaged group, and created what has been termed the ‘imperial church system’ (
Reichskirchensystem
).
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This label remains useful provided we remember that the political use of the imperial church was never a coherent policy.
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Much depended on circumstances and personalities. Kings had to respect local interests, not simply through the formal requirements of canon law, but because ignoring these usually caused trouble. Two-thirds of eleventh-century bishops were either born in their see or had served there prior to appointment. Bishops ‘married’ their church, displaying a sense of transpersonal office by the eleventh century and seeking to raise their see’s prestige through cathedral-building, relic-collecting and territorial acquisitions. Simultaneously, the old ideal of the monk-like bishop was displaced around 1050 by a new model of the energetic shepherd actively promoting his flock’s welfare.
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The itinerant royal chapel was central to the king’s influence. Established under the Carolingians to provide religious services at court, it was developed by Otto I from the 950s to test the loyalty of his secular vassals by encouraging them to send their sons there to be educated. Soon, those who showed promise were rewarded with the next vacant bishopric or abbey. Turnover was relatively high, offering numerous opportunities: Henry II installed at least 42 bishops across his 22-year reign.
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The practice peaked under Henry III when half of all bishops emerged from the chapel. Capacity expanded with the foundation in 1050 as an additional training school of the St Simon and St Jude monastery at the royal palace in Goslar, Lower Saxony. Connections to royalty did not automatically make bishops more reliable partners. Kinship was at least as important, with families directly related to the king providing a quarter of both senior secular lords and bishops in the eleventh century. In the longer term, the monarchy was a victim of its own success. Royal patronage of the church increased the attractions of clerical appointments for lords, who began expecting appointments.
The later Salians were unable – or possibly unwilling – to open the episcopate to the new class of unfree vassals called
ministeriales
who emerged in the eleventh century and might have provided a counterweight to aristocratic influence.
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The demographic and economic expansion from 950 was another factor behind royal patronage, because kings saw senior clergy as ideal agents to tap the growing resources. This explains why the later Ottonian and Salian kings accelerated the transfer of crown lands to the imperial church and entrusted senior clergy with new secular powers like mint and market rights, and jurisdiction for crime and public order. Far from representing a dissipation of central authority, this entailed the replacement of relatively inefficient direct management by a more productive partnership with the imperial church. Henry II began donating imperial abbeys to bishops whose sees overlay duchies where royal control was weak. For example, Bishop Meinward of Paderborn received several abbeys, strengthening him relative to the powerful duke of Saxony. The bishops of Metz, Toul and Verdun were likewise patronized as counterweights to the duke of Upper Lorraine. Italian bishops had already acquired county jurisdictions by the early tenth century, and this was extended by Henry II to Germany, where 54 counties had transferred into episcopal hands by 1056.
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This explains why the early Salians saw no danger in the cause of ‘church liberty’ emerging from eleventh-century reform, since it appeared to free valuable assets from the influence of potentially difficult secular lords. Bishops also welcomed the greater powers that assisted their conscription of peasant labour and the resources needed for cathedral construction. The invention of new techniques like frame construction increased the scale of both buildings and clerical ambitions. Within four days of arriving in Paderborn in 1009, Meinward ordered the half-finished cathedral to be demolished and resumed on a grander scale. Meanwhile, his colleague in Mainz embarked on a lavish construction programme to underpin his claim as Germany’s senior churchman. Bishops also adopted the new royal symbolism that had been introduced by Otto II by representing themselves in sculpture and pictures as seated on thrones.
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Episcopal and royal splendour were still mutually reinforcing at this point, and kings participated fully in the building boom. Henry III dramatically expanded Speyer Cathedral, making it the largest religious building north of the Alps in the
mid-eleventh century and setting aside 189 square metres of the nave for the royal tomb. The symmetry of royal and ecclesiastical power was symbolized by the addition of two towers of equal height and a throne room above the western portico from where the emperor could see the mass; these modifications were replicated in many other cathedrals.
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Relations were not always so harmonious, even before the Investiture Dispute beginning in the 1070s. The most notorious case involved the rivalry of archbishop Anno II of Cologne, archbishop Adelbert of Hamburg-Bremen and Bishop Heinrich II of Augsburg during the regency for Henry IV (1056–65), and underscores the importance of personalities in imperial politics. Anno wanted to assert his own, exclusive control and persuaded the young king to inspect a boat moored outside the royal palace at Kaiserswerth on an island in the Rhine on 31 March 1062. No sooner was the king aboard than Anno’s co-conspirators cast off. Henry tried to escape by jumping overboard, but was fished out by Count Ekbert of Brunswick, and the boat sailed to Cologne, allegedly for the king’s safety.
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Secular lords did not always cooperate with imperial bishops, as illustrated in the defeat of Adelbert’s plans to revive Hamburg-Bremen’s earlier role as sole archbishopric for the Baltic and Scandinavia. He used his influence in the regency to acquire additional benefices and planned to incorporate 12 north German bishoprics within his jurisdiction. The Saxon lords compelled Henry IV to oblige Adelbert to relinquish two-thirds of his assets to their two leaders in 1066. The significance of Adelbert’s alienation of secular support was revealed later that year by the largest Slav rising since 983. Antagonized by Adelbert’s missionary zeal, the pagan Wends burned Hamburg and Schleswig, stoned Christians in Ratzeburg, and murdered one of their own princes who had cooperated.
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The Imperial Church after the Investiture Dispute

The Investiture Dispute changed how the church related to the emperor, but it did not diminish the church’s political role. The re-emergence of the monk-bishop ideal challenged political appointments, but it made little difference, as the aristocracy retained the best access to education and continued to dominate senior church positions. The Worms Concordat of 1122 confirmed that local clergy and laity were to participate
in selecting their bishop. In practice, the wider population was excluded by the twelfth century through the emergence of cathedral and abbey chapters composed of lay canons, or senior clergy who had not taken full vows and who managed their church’s secular affairs. The royal chapel lost much of its political significance, since the way to become a bishop now lay through winning influence in the relevant chapter. This contrasted with the situation in France, where the king had displaced the chapters’ role in selection by the later Middle Ages.
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Although the Worms Concordat allowed the king to be present at elections, it was scarcely possible to coordinate royal movements with the death and succession of individual bishops. Conrad III’s presence is documented for only eight of the 36 episcopal elections during his reign, while Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ was present at just 18 of the 94 elections under his kingship. Nonetheless, monarchs retained considerable influence, sending envoys to express their views and, less directly, through their ability to favour clients with appointments as canons. They were aided by the generational shift around 1140 as the imperial church passed into the hands of men who had not participated in the Investiture Dispute and who viewed royal influence more pragmatically.

This explains why the transfer of secular jurisdictions to the imperial church resumed with even greater force under the Staufers, who enfeoffed favoured bishops with not merely counties but also ducal powers after 1168. The new relationship was codified in a general charter favouring what were now explicitly called ‘ecclesiastical princes’, which was issued in April 1220.
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This consolidated church lands as a distinct category of imperial fief held by senior clerics elected by their abbey or cathedral chapter. Like their hereditary secular counterparts, ecclesiastical lords only exercised their privileges once the emperor confirmed them in office. Their secular authority rested on the clutch of jurisdictions and material assets acquired over time and now permanently associated with their abbey or diocese. These jurisdictions were extensive, collectively covering a third of the German kingdom, but they remained fiefs held immediately under the emperor’s authority and entailed obligations to support him with advice, troops and other assistance. Simultaneously, the ecclesiastical lords exercised spiritual jurisdictions that generally extended far beyond their own lands and across neighbouring fiefs held by hereditary secular lords. These
spiritual jurisdictions were bolstered by the ongoing incorporation of parishes within diocesan control and included powers to supervise local clergy and religious practice.

Abbots and bishops participated in the general trend to territorialize rights through clearer, more exclusive demarcation of jurisdictions under way from the thirteenth century. However, unlike their secular counterparts, they suffered from the Staufer’s demise around 1250, because the persistence of weaker monarchs into the fourteenth century reduced the flow of patronage and benefices. Abbeys with nuns were especially hard hit, with many disappearing during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through incorporation within the domains of their secular protectors.
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Many abbeys and bishoprics now appeared under-resourced compared to the larger secular fiefs. Secular lords tried to curtail spiritual jurisdiction where this conflicted with their own powers to adjudicate criminal behaviour, especially as the growing significance on personal piety and morality from the thirteenth century changed how many misdemeanours were perceived. Ecclesiastical lords frequently lost lands that they had previously pawned to secular neighbours to avoid insolvency. Some ecclesiastical lords agreed treaties of protection, whereby secular lords assumed various functions on their behalf, including honouring their obligations as imperial vassals. Over time, such agreements eroded the ecclesiastical lords’ immediacy and by the later fifteenth century 15 bishoprics, including Brandenburg and Meissen, were well on their way to being fully incorporated within secular principalities.

Colonization

Efforts to rebuild ecclesiastical structures in north-eastern Germany after 983 were wrecked by the renewed Slav rising of 1066. Expansion of the Empire and imperial church only resumed around 1140, but this time it continued until virtually the entire southern Baltic shore had been Christianized and incorporated within the Empire. The extensive forests and underpopulated regions east of the Elbe had attracted western settlers since at least the eighth century, but the movement only became general and coordinated after 1100. Acutely aware that Germany had lost out in the European scramble to steal other peoples’ lands, nineteenth-century historians adopted the language of high
imperialism to present this migration as a legitimate ‘drive to the east’ (
Drang nach Osten  
) to colonize ‘virgin land’ and spread a supposedly superior culture.
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In fact, eastwards migration was part of a much wider movement of peoples throughout the Empire, which included forest clearance, marsh drainage, land reclamation and urbanization, all frequently in areas already viewed as ‘settled’. People were moving elsewhere in Europe at the same time, such as Spaniards crossing into Arab lands south of the river Ebro, or southern Italians settling in Sicily after its conquest by the Normans.
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The initial impetus came from the more densely populated areas of Holland, Flanders and the Lower Rhine, from where people were already moving around 1100 into the western Saxon lands around Bremen. Flemings and Dutch also continued east across the Elbe into the eastern Saxon areas of Altmark and Brandenburg during the twelfth century, and were later joined by further waves of Saxon and Westphalian migrants. Hessians and Thuringians from central Germany moved east into the area between the Elbe and the middle Saale, settling the region that would later become electoral Saxony. Altogether, 400,000 people crossed the Elbe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, causing an eightfold increase in the population of the region immediately beyond, compared to a 39 per cent increase over the next 250 years.
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Meanwhile, south Germans joined migrants from Luxembourg and the Moselle region in crossing Hungary to settle in Transylvania in the late twelfth century. Saxons, Rhinelanders and Thuringians also headed north to the Baltic coast, while Italians crossed the Alps to live in Germany. New Polish towns attracted Germans, Italians, Jews, Armenians and Tartars, while Polish settlers headed into Lithuania, Prussia and later Russia.