Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (26 page)

Clergy, especially in border areas, placed innumerable petty obstacles in the way of ordinary folk exercising their religious freedoms. Mixed marriages were regarded as divided houses, and individuals were often pressured to convert. Nonetheless, pragmatism generally prevailed. A fifth of marriages in Osnabrück were cross-confessional, while Protestants joined Catholic religious processions and in a few communities different congregations even shared the same church. Official policy remained toleration not tolerance, suffering minorities as a political and legal necessity. Attitudes did change during the later eighteenth century, notably following Joseph II’s patent in 1781, which allowed greater equality and was adopted by most other German governments between 1785 and the 1840s.

THE IMPERIAL CHURCH DURING EARLY MODERNITY

Size

The register prepared for the 1521 Reichstag in Worms recorded 3 ecclesiastical electors, 4 archbishops, 46 bishops and 83 lesser prelates, compared to 180 secular lords. By 1792 only 3 electors, 1 archbishop, 29 bishops and prince abbots, and 40 prelates remained, alongside 165 secular Estates. This decline is only partly attributable to the Reformation, which merely accelerated the existing trend for secular rulers to incorporate the material assets of church fiefs within their own territories. Many of the ecclesiastical Estates listed in the 1521 register were already disappearing this way, including 15 bishoprics. While the Reformation added new theological arguments for this, political changes associated with imperial reform were equally important, because they tied the status of imperial Estates more clearly to imperial fiscal and military obligations. Many prelates voluntarily accepted incorporation within secular jurisdiction in the hope of escaping these obligations.
¹⁴²
Thus, all ‘secularization’ up to 1552 involved a reduction from immediate to mediate status by removing a fief’s political rights. By contrast, the
Peace of Westphalia sanctioned the secularization of two archbishoprics and six bishoprics by converting them into secular duchies with full political rights and obligations.

Movement was not only in one direction. Some ecclesiastical territories emancipated themselves from secular influence, notably the bishopric of Speyer that had been under the Palatinate’s protection from 1396 to 1552, though it did lose all its mediate monasteries and two-thirds of its churches and benefices in the process. Twelve prelates were promoted to princely rank, while a few mediate monasteries bought out their secular protectors to become full immediate Estates.
¹⁴³

As Speyer’s experience indicates, losses amongst mediate church property were far greater. Protestant rulers in the Palatinate, Württemberg, Hessen, Ansbach and elsewhere suppressed religious houses that lacked full immediacy yet had been vibrant parts of Catholic cultural and political life – often for centuries. Nonetheless, many Catholic institutions survived in Protestant territories. Magdeburg retained half its convents and a fifth of its monasteries after its conversion to a secular duchy by the Peace of Westphalia. The bishopric of Lübeck even remained part of the imperial church, despite its official designation as a Lutheran territory permanently assigned to Holstein-Gottorp. Three imperial convents likewise remained within the imperial church as Lutheran institutions, because Protestant princely families valued them for their unmarried daughters. Altogether, there were still 78 mediate foundations and 209 abbeys worth 2.87 million florins in annual revenue east of the Rhine in 1802, in addition to hundreds of monasteries, mainly in Catholic territories. The 73 immediate ecclesiastical Estates controlled 95,000 square kilometres, with nearly 3.2 million subjects generating 18.16 million florins of annual revenue.
¹⁴⁴

Social Composition

This vast wealth extended the political influence of the Empire’s aristocracy, which held virtually all the roughly one thousand cathedral and abbey benefices and dominated the imperial church. The geographical distribution of church lands reflected their origins in the areas of densest population, which had supported higher concentrations of lordships since the Middle Ages. The majority of the counts and knights were in the same regions as the surviving church lands:
Westphalia, the Rhineland, and the Upper Rhine–Main nexus across Swabia and Franconia. Election as bishop automatically elevated the successful candidate to full princely rank, and so was especially attractive for the knights who otherwise remained disadvantaged by the Empire’s hierarchical distribution of political rights. The knights provided a third of all early modern prince-bishops, with the Schönborn family being the most successful, twice securing election in the premier see of Mainz.
¹⁴⁵
Aristocratic domination was already well advanced in the Middle Ages and was strengthened during early modernity by additional barriers, such as requiring canons to prove they had 16 noble ancestors. Of the 166 archbishops in the Empire between 900 and 1500, only 4 are known to have been commoners, while there were only 120 known commoners among the 2,074 German bishops from the seventh to fifteenth centuries. This proportion remained broadly the same with 332 nobles, 10 commoners and 5 foreigners serving as archbishops or bishops between 1500 and 1803.
¹⁴⁶

Unfortunately for the knights and counts, the princes also had long pedigrees. The Wittelsbachs emerged as strong contenders to be archbishops or bishops, especially once Protestants officially disqualified themselves by their faith after 1555. The papacy relaxed the rules prohibiting the accumulation of bishoprics to prevent these falling into Protestant hands. The Bavarian Duke Ernst secured Cologne and four bishoprics in the late sixteenth century, while his relation Clemens August was known as ‘Mr Five Churches’ for securing a similar number around 150 years later.
¹⁴⁷
The accumulation of bishoprics was often welcomed by cathedral canons, because it could link a weaker bishopric to a more powerful one, such as Münster to Cologne, or allow neighbours to cooperate, like Bamberg and Würzburg.

Such unions remained temporary with each bishopric retaining its own administration. This apparent failure to participate in wider institutional development attracted criticism after 1648, especially from Protestants and Enlightened thinkers who complained about the ‘dead hand’ of the church tying up valuable resources that might be put to better uses. These arguments for renewed secularization grew stronger after 1740, because they appeared to offer a way to defuse Austro-Prussian tension, or to improve the viability of the middling principalities, all at the expense of their ecclesiastical neighbours. Some later historians accepted this discussion at face value and presented the imperial
church as a fossilized medieval relic.
¹⁴⁸
In practice, the internal development of the church lands was broadly similar to that of the secular territories and included many of the measures advocated by Enlightened thinkers. Unfortunately, this meant the church lands were also not the benevolent backwaters claimed by some Catholics, as all of them established their own armies and many participated in the same European wars as the secular princes.
¹⁴⁹

Political reform was supplemented by a grass-roots movement for spiritual renewal across Catholic Germany from the 1760s. This faltered in the 1770s, but recovered renewed vigour in response to Joseph II’s suppression of 700 mediate monasteries in the Habsburg lands and curtailment of the spiritual jurisdiction of several south German prince-bishops after 1782.
¹⁵⁰
Renewal and reform became known as Febronism after the pseudonym adopted by the Trier suffragan bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim in a manifesto published in 1763. Hontheim asked the pope to settle the remaining Protestant Gravamina, or formal complaints, to permit the reunification of all German Christians within a national church. The anti-papal element deepened as several bishops called for an end to all-papal jurisdiction and the recall of the papal nuncios in Vienna, Cologne and Luzern. This contributed to the alienation of all those whom Febronism hoped to enlist as supporters, including the largely conservative Catholic peasantry who opposed many of the bishops’ social reforms. The association of Febronist bishops with Prussia’s League of Princes in 1785 angered Joseph II and left the imperial church politically vulnerable by the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792.
¹⁵¹

Carl Theodor von Dalberg was prominent in these efforts to defend the imperial church. He came from a family of imperial knights that had owned estates between Speyer and Oppenheim since the fourteenth century and was related to the influential Metternich, Stadion and von der Leyen families. Having been a cathedral canon for ten years, Dalberg rose in the service of the elector of Mainz to become his successor as imperial arch-chancellor and head of the Empire’s church in 1802. His promotion came precisely at a time when the world he loved was coming to an end through the demise of the three interrelated institutions of the imperial church, imperial knights and imperial constitution. Dalberg struggled amidst rapidly changing circumstances to preserve the old order, remaining optimistic (his critics say naive) despite what
appear with hindsight to have been impossible odds. Napoleon Bonaparte used him to legitimate his reorganization of Germany between 1802 and 1806. Dalberg’s lavish flattery of Napoleon did nothing to deflect accusations of treachery and led to his being made a scapegoat for the end of the Empire.
¹⁵²

In fact, the imperial church’s fate was sealed by arrangements under the Peace of Campo Formio accompanying Austria’s surrender of the left bank of the Rhine to France in 1797. Secular princes who lost possessions were to be compensated at the expense of church lands east of the Rhine. The Habsburgs hoped to limit the damage, but the process gathered its own momentum in the wake of further French victories culminating in a final, extensive wave of secularization between 1802 and 1803. This went far beyond all previous changes, irrevocably changing the Empire by effectively destroying the imperial church. Only Dalberg’s electorate was relocated, to the former bishopric of Regensburg, while Mergentheim and Heitersheim remained in the hands of the Teutonic Order and Knights of St John as preserves of the German aristocracy. The rest of the imperial church passed into secular hands, including its mediate properties. Austria alone seized property worth 15 million florins, while Württemberg suppressed 95 abbeys, converting them into barracks, schools, mental hospitals, government offices and palaces to accommodate the secular lords of the lands it had also annexed by 1806. The former Augustinian monastery at Oberndorf became an arms factory, later famous for producing the Mauser rifle.
¹⁵³
Property, artworks and records were scattered or destroyed, and 18 Catholic universities closed, though most of the wealth was used initially to provide pensions for the former imperial clergy.
¹⁵⁴

Dalberg saved his principality by acting as a figurehead of the 16 princes who left the Empire through a pact with Napoleon in July 1806, precipitating Emperor Francis II’s abdication three weeks later (see
Plate 31
). Dalberg was rewarded with additional territory and the title of Grand Duke of Frankfurt, but was obliged to accept Napoleon’s stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as his designated successor. Austria assumed the Teutonic Grand Master title, but the Knights of St John were eliminated as a political element entirely in 1805. Dalberg became the Empire’s executor, working hard to reorganize the Catholic church and redefine its relations to the now sovereign principalities. He was hindered by laws passed by the Reichstag in 1803 exempting Austria and
Prussia from future imperial concordats with the papacy. Prussia annexed most of the Westphalian bishoprics in 1802, reorganizing them without reference to the pope. Meanwhile, the papacy rebuffed Dalberg’s overtures on behalf of the rest of the Empire after 1803, because it saw him as continuing Febronism. Bavaria fanned papal suspicions, hoping as it did to obtain the autonomy enjoyed by Austria and Prussia. Other princes made their own arrangements, reducing Dalberg’s supporters to those whose lands were too small or poor to support their own bishops. The project failed. Dalberg’s death in 1817 cleared the way for the papacy to agree concordats with the surviving sovereign states, thereby participating in the Empire’s demise by adjusting to the federalization of Germany, which was left without a national church.
¹⁵⁵
However, this story was not simply one of loss, since the imperial church’s destruction freed energies and resources that fuelled the dynamism of German Catholicism in the nineteenth century.

3

Sovereignty

THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

Not Beyond Metz

For three miserable months in the autumn of 1552, Charles V besieged Metz with the largest army he ever commanded. The French had taken the city five months earlier in agreement with the Protestant princes opposing Charles’s unpopular solution to the Empire’s religious tension. The princes had already forced his younger brother Ferdinand to agree the Peace of Passau on 31 July. Charles needed a major victory to restore prestige. Instead, he suffered his worst defeat. With his forces reduced by disease and desertion, he finally abandoned the siege of Metz on 1 January 1553. The outcome demonstrated clear limits to imperial authority and hastened the political process culminating in the Peace of Augsburg two years later.
¹

These limits had already been marked symbolically during the siege by the French defenders, who taunted Charles by displaying an image of the imperial eagle chained between two pillars and the motto
Non ultra Metas
– a clever double pun, literally meaning ‘not beyond Metz’, but also ‘not exceeding proper limits’, since
Metas
could mean both ‘Metz’ and ‘boundary’. The design mocked the motif invented at Charles’s accession in Spain in 1516, but which drew on ideas already expressed by Dante. According to ancient legend, Hercules had marked the limits to the known world by placing pillars either side of the Straits of Gibraltar. As part of their pseudo-genealogy, Habsburg apologists claimed Hercules along with other suitable heroes as Charles’s direct ancestors. In 1519 the motto
plus ultra
(‘still further’) was added to the
device showing the two pillars to symbolize both the traditional view of the Empire as encompassing Christian civilization and the new vision associated with Spain, which was then conquering its New World imperium in Mexico and Peru (see
Plate 10
).