Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (20 page)

Each group brought its own legal system, though most lived under what was called ‘German law’. This was always an amalgam of different elements, some originating in Flanders. Each successive wave of migrants transformed this law as they moved further east, creating entirely new elements unknown in the west. Certain broad patterns existed through the influence of Lübeck, Magdeburg and other important cities, providing models for the laws of new eastern settlements.
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The legal arrangements help explain why people moved. Although the impetus came from areas with high population density, migration was not primarily a product of overpopulation. As Flemish migrants
put it: ‘We want to go east together . . . there’ll be a better life there.’
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The new laws included better property rights, lower inheritance dues and reduced feudal obligations. Migrants faced considerable hardship, as expressed by the thirteenth-century German proverb
Tod-Not-Brot  
: the first generation found death, the second experienced want, but the third finally got bread. The greater personal freedoms were guaranteed by eastern lords who used them to attract settlers to their sparsely inhabited domains. Slav lords participated in this, like the Polish Prince Henryk the Bearded of Silesia, who called on 10,000 Germans to settle 400 new villages he established in 1205.
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Newcomers almost always faced mistrust, not least because they enjoyed privileges denied indigenous inhabitants, who remained tied to manorial farms. Assimilation was also slowed by the successive arrival of fresh migrants. Areas experiencing significant initial settlement were transformed, such as Brandenburg, where already by 1220 Slavic-speaking Wends were only a third of the population. Migrants had generally merged with the indigenous population by the fifteenth century, though some Slavic areas retained their distinct identity, most notably the Sorbs, who remain a distinct group today around Bautzen and Cottbus in eastern Germany. Germans comprised only 40 per cent of Prussia’s population, while Slovenes predominated in Krain and Lower Styria. Assimilation could work in the other direction. Germans arriving in rural parts of Prussia and Poland became Polonized, and though they predominated in the towns, this was not invariably the case and by the sixteenth century, German was no longer understood in Cracow. Descendants of medieval settlers often reacted with hostility when a new wave of German eastwards migration began in the eighteenth century.
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The initial phase of colonization was accompanied by considerable violence, reinforcing a sense of a frontier and contributing to the lasting contradistinction between German and Slavic identities. The arrival of additional labour reduced the dependency of frontier communities on slave raiding, whereas those Slav communities still further east continued attacks for captives. Coupled with factors like material and technological differences, this fostered the self-perception among German communities of their inherent cultural superiority.
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The Northern Crusades

Animosities were inflamed by the new language of holy war accompanying the Empire’s eastwards expansion. Popes already blessed warriors and their weapons in the tenth century and from 1053 offered remission from sin to men fighting their enemies. Initially, these indulgences were granted to those fighting the Normans, but from 1064 they were extended to campaigns against Muslims. Gregory VII prepared the ground for what became the crusades by stigmatizing his enemies as heretics. The ideologically charged Investiture Dispute nurtured new ideas about violence, involving sharper distinctions between Christendom as a realm of peace where killing was condemned as murder, and an external world where exterminating infidels glorified God and Christians dying in combat became martyrs directly entering heaven.

The most concrete expression of these beliefs were the new military orders whose members combined monastic vows with the duty to protect pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. The Templars are perhaps the best remembered today, but never had a significant presence in the Empire, in contrast to the Hospitallers, who were founded in 1099 and known in the Empire as the
Johanniter
, or Knights of St John. They established their first German house at Duisburg in 1150, and were followed by the Teutonic Order formed in the Holy Land in 1190, which had seven houses in the Lower Rhine by 1261.
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The crushing defeat by the Turks at Manzikert in 1071 forced the Byzantine emperor to call on the despised Latins for assistance. The first full crusade was eventually proclaimed by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095. The initial part of the ambitious programme was achieved with surprising ease when Jerusalem was recovered after 463 years of Muslim rule in 1099, leading to the establishment of a new crusader state in the Holy Land. The second goal of reunifying the eastern and western churches quickly foundered on the pope’s insistence on supremacy over Constantinople’s patriarch. By 1105, the papacy was actively encouraging the Normans to conquer Byzantium, a redirection of resources that ultimately contributed to the failure of the entire crusading enterprise over the following three centuries.
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Crusader ideology was employed against western Christian opponents already in 1102 when Pope Paschalis II backed one of Henry IV’s
opponents in a struggle over the bishopric of Cambrai; this was one of the many local conflicts characterizing the confused final phase of the Investiture Dispute. The ideology was employed more extensively by Gregory IX and Innocent IV, who redirected armies bound for the Holy Land to fight Frederick II in the final stage of the papacy’s conflict with the Staufers.

Outside Italy, crusader ideology assisted the Empire’s expansion. What became known as the Northern Crusades opened as a second front declared by the pope in 1147 to attack the Wends and other Slavs north of the Elbe. The initiative lay with Count Adolf II of Holstein, who began by evicting Slavs from Wagria and replacing them with Flemish and German settlers, many of whom helped found the new town of Lübeck in 1143. Official sanction as a crusade attracted Germans, Danes, Poles and some Bohemians to Adolf’s army, allowing him to greatly expand operations. ‘Indulgences on this front could be won at a lower cost and in a fraction of the time necessary to complete a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.’
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The cooperation of the Polish and Pomeranian dukes proved crucial to success. These Slavic princes were engaged in Christianizing their own lands as a means to enhance their authority and possessions. Their involvement expanded the scope of the Northern Crusades from the area immediately north of the Elbe eastwards along the Baltic shore through Prussia and into modern Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Much of this region had been conquered by 1224, assisted by the pope’s sanction of the Knights of the Sword, a new military order who soon became rulers of the area north of Riga, known as Livonia.

The heathen Prussians were driven from the Vistula estuary in the later eleventh century, only to spread across the Polish duchy of Masovia, prompting Duke Conrad to appeal for aid in 1226. The call was answered by the Teutonic Order, which had transferred to fight in Hungary only to be expelled in 1225 for being out of control. Operations were temporarily dislocated by the devastating Mongol invasion of Poland in 1240–41, which eliminated much of the Polish elite. Although the Mongols soon retreated, Pope Innocent IV had been persuaded to proclaim a permanent Baltic crusade in 1245, legitimizing regular recruitment for the Teutonic Order. Four hard-fought campaigns secured Prussia by 1280.
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The emperor was hardly involved in either colonization or the
Northern Crusades, which, together, achieved the largest expansion of the Empire since Charlemagne. Although Frederick II issued his own authorization to the Teutonic Knights, the Order acted independently in carving out its own state, which eventually succumbed to a resurgent Poland around 1500 (see
pp. 209–11
). Secularization of the Order’s territory in Prussia by the (then) relatively insignificant Hohenzollern dynasty in 1525 did not affect its other possessions, which were grouped into 12 bailiwicks across the Rhineland, south and central Germany, and Austria. The Order retained its crusader privileges, making membership highly attractive for German nobles. Any land donated to it was immediately freed from previous debts. The senior Grand Master remained based in Germany and had been raised to the status of imperial prince in 1494, followed by his counterpart in the Knights of St John in 1548. These elevations integrated both Orders and their leaders into the imperial church, with their lands becoming immediate imperial fiefs, though the Knights of St John remained part of an international organization based in Malta. The Teutonic Grand Master remained Catholic, but the Order accepted Protestant nobles after the Reformation.
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The Hussites

A century after the Northern Crusades, the Empire engaged in a final, internal crusade, against Bohemian Hussitism, the most important heretical movement prior to the Reformation, as well as the largest popular rising prior to the Peasants War of 1524–6. The late medieval concern for individual belief intersected with the growth of written culture to make heresy easier to identify as deviance from approved texts and practices. The Hussites took inspiration from Jan Hus, the rector of Prague University who was treacherously burned at the stake in 1415 after the Luxembourg monarch Sigismund reneged on a promised safe conduct to present Hus’s case at the Council of Constance (1414–18). Although the Hussites established their own national church in 1417, their movement soon split into millennialist Taborites, operating from the town of Tabor, and moderate Utraquists, named after their practice of communion ‘in both kinds’ (
sub utraque specie  
), bread and wine. Opposition to Sigismund’s accession as Bohemian king in 1419 briefly reunited the factions and led to their conquest of most of the kingdom.

Sigismund received papal indulgences for five major expeditions between 1420 and 1431. Most crusaders came from Germany, Holland and Hungary (where Sigismund was also king), despite the appeal being directed throughout Christendom. A 3,000-strong English detachment arrived on the continent in 1427, but they were redirected to fight Jeanne d’Arc in the Hundred Years War – a further indication of the manipulation of indulgences to advance secular goals. The imperial counter-attacks were repulsed by the Hussites’ determination and superior tactics, but also because the emperor was simultaneously engaged in defending Hungary against renewed Turkish invasion.

Eventually, the situation was defused through the
Compacta
of 1436 between the Bohemian Catholic elite and the Utraquists, who formed the majority of the population. Utraquist practices were tolerated in return for their formal submission to Rome. The defeat was greater for the papacy than for the Empire. For the first time, the pope had allowed heretics to present their case and made significant concessions. Sigismund’s rule was secure in Bohemia, while the episode provided a significant boost to constitutional reform, eventually giving the Empire its definitive shape around 1500. Bohemia remained within the Empire despite its distinctive religious arrangements and even the accession of an openly Utraquist king, George Podibrad, in 1458.
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THE EMPEROR AS JEWISH ADVOCATE

The Jews and the Empire

The story of the Jews in the Empire is much like imperial history generally: far from perfect, occasionally tragic, but generally more benign than that of other places or times. Although marginalized in most accounts, their history reveals much about the Empire’s social and political order. Charlemagne revived late Roman imperial patronage of the Jews, who had retained legal recognition in most of the Germanic successor kingdoms since the fall of western Rome in the late fifth century. Jews made significant contributions to Carolingian artistic and commercial development, particularly through their roles as intermediaries in selling captive Slavs as slave soldiers to Iberian Muslim armies. There were around 20,000 Ashkenazi Jews in the Empire north of the
Alps in 1000, mainly in Mainz, Worms and other Rhenish episcopal towns.
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The Carolingian and Ottonian elite remained ambivalent, conscious that Jews and Christians shared the Old Testament, yet only Jews could read the original Hebrew text.
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Imperial protection was inconsistent. Otto II often assigned powers over Jews to bishops as part of broader privileges intended to boost the development of cathedral towns. Adverse circumstances could prompt punitive measures against Jews, notably under Henry II, who was decidedly less tolerant. Two thousand Jews were expelled from Mainz in 1012, though the decree was revoked the following year.
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The most significant step came in 1090 when Henry IV issued a general privilege to Jews modelled on those granted to individuals by Louis II over two centuries earlier. Probably prompted by the significant growth in the Jewish population in Worms and Speyer, Henry assumed the position of
Advocatis Imperatoris Judaica
, or general protector of all Jews in the Empire. This established arrangements that persisted until the Empire’s demise in 1806. The safeguarding of Jewish economic, legal and religious rights was reserved as an imperial prerogative, linking imperial prestige to effective protection. Like other arrangements in the Empire, implementation varied according to circumstances, while protection rights were often devolved along with other privileges to more local figures. Enforcement became less consistent, but over time Jewish privileges were woven into the general web of imperial law, affording Jews by early modernity a surprising degree of autonomous protection.