Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (30 page)

The Most Christian King

A factor in Austria’s accommodation with Russia was the growth of France as a western European great power. France shared common roots with the Empire in the Carolingian realm. The Treaty of Verdun (843), which divided the Empire into three kingdoms (West Francia, East Francia and Lotharingia), was celebrated later as the foundation of France and Germany, but at the time there was no sense that this had created separate countries. Reunification efforts continued into the 880s, while ties amongst the elite persisted across the Rhine long after that. Distinctions became clearer as the Ottonians succeeded the defunct eastern Carolingian royal line in 919. The meeting between the Ottonian Henry I and the ‘French’ King Rudolf I near Sedan in 935 was carefully choreographed to stress parity – something that was repeated during further royal summits in 1006–7. However, none of the monarchs involved held the imperial title at the time of the meetings.
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Common origins allowed French kings to claim the imperial tradition themselves. King Lothar reacted angrily to Otto I’s imperial coronation in 962, while the Capetian family ruling France after 987 were prepared to recognize Byzantium’s imperial title if this would secure an anti-Ottonian alliance. From the tenth century onwards, French writers Frenchified Charlemagne and the Franks, stressing an unbroken line of Christian kings since Clovis. They disputed the concept of imperial translation, instead presenting the empire as a
Carolingian creation always centred on Paris, not Aachen. A central feature was the myth that Charlemagne had gone to Jerusalem and brought back the relics of St Denis to found a Parisian monastery – a story vigorously propagated by the monks to assert their house as home to French royal and national identity. Unable to ignore Ottonian possession of the actual imperial title, they sought to reduce the emperor’s role to protecting the pope, judging the emperor’s actions according to the current state of Franco-papal relations.
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The initial goal was to maintain parity with the former East Frankish realm, but after 1100 French writers increasingly distinguished between the German kingdom as a foreign country and the imperial title that they claimed for their own king. However, some went further, arguing that, as direct heir to the Franks, the French king should rule all former Frankish territory, including Germany. The victory of King Philip II Augustus over Otto IV at Bouvines in 1214 decided the Welf–Staufer civil war and appeared to make France the arbiter of imperial affairs. Philip’s troops carried the
Oriflamme
, the blood-red banner of St Denis abbey that was traditionally considered Charlemagne’s own flag, while their superiority appeared confirmed by their capture of Otto’s imperial standard in the battle.
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Heavy French involvement in the Crusades after 1095 added interest, because the emperor was widely regarded as the Crusaders’ ‘natural’ leader. French observers interpreted the prolonged absence of a crowned emperor between 1251 and 1311 as a factor in the failure of later crusading ventures.
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Opposition to individual emperors remained contingent on specific circumstances, not principled objections to the idea of the Empire. For instance, action against Henry VII stemmed from a desire to protect French interests in Italy and the belief that the pope had crowned the wrong king as emperor. Prayers for the emperor continued in France and Spain into the fourteenth century. French kings made serious efforts to secure the imperial title in 1273–4, 1308, 1313 and 1324–8. Charles Valois, brother of Philip IV, even married the granddaughter of Baldwin II, the last Latin emperor of Byzantium, in the hope of reuniting the eastern and western empires. These attempts failed, but thanks to their growing power, French kings did assert themselves as the papacy’s protectors by the late thirteenth century. The propagandists of Philip Augustus already presented him as Charlemagne’s true heir. ‘Augustus’ was in fact a nickname given the king
by Rigord, a senior monk of St Denis, to celebrate Philip’s appropriately ‘imperial’ expansion of monarchical authority across France. Rigord also repeatedly referred to him as ‘Most Christian King’ (
rex Christianissimus
), a rank chosen to outflank the imperial title by emphasizing the French monarch’s special mission. This title was later confirmed by the pope, while further papal concessions since the twelfth century cemented the separate identity of the French church.
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Failure to obtain the imperial title encouraged the assertion that the French monarchy already possessed imperial, in the sense of sovereign, powers. Charlemagne had been a great king before his imperial coronation. This became the standard argument into the mid-seventeenth century, serving to justify continued bids to obtain the title, and to deflect any criticism when these attempts failed. The belief in both the independence of the French monarchy and its continued membership of a single, universal Christian order did not strike contemporaries as contradictory. While later nationalist writers played up the former whilst ignoring the latter, late medieval and early modern opinion was in fact strikingly modern: twenty-first-century France is clearly still a sovereign country despite being part of the European Union.
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The myth of Charlemagne helped inspire Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494, especially as his immediate target, Naples, claimed the defunct title of king of Jerusalem since 1477. François I had more concrete imperial ambitions, securing papal backing and canvassing German support from 1516. In his attempt to cover all the ideological bases he claimed Trojan descent, presented himself as embodying Roman virtues, and argued that French and Germans shared common Frankish ancestry. He pushed universalism to its logical conclusion: the title was not a purely German possession, but open to all worthy candidates. However, the process of becoming emperor was by now firmly associated with election as German king. The German electors regarded Charlemagne and the Franks as their own, exclusive ancestors and rejected François’ overtures in favour of Charles V.
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Louis XIV and his advisor, Cardinal Mazarin, made the last attempt at securing the imperial title, following Ferdinand III’s death in 1657. Mazarin backed the candidacy of the duke of Pfalz-Neuburg as a stalking horse to test German support for Louis. But the primary motive was to prevent another Austrian Habsburg emperor who might involve the Empire in France’s ongoing war (since 1635) with Spain. The ploy
contributed to what became the longest imperial interregnum since 1494–1507, but failed to prevent the election of Leopold I in 1658. Speculation about another French candidacy persisted into the 1670s, but was rendered irrelevant by Leopold’s longevity (he died in 1705). French diplomats swiftly fell back on arguments advanced since the 1640s that their king was the German princes’ natural ally in defending their constitutional liberties against the threat of ‘imperial absolutism’.
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The abandonment of direct imperial ambitions inevitably led to assertions that France was already superior. The experience of civil war between 1562 and 1598 had produced new arguments for strong royal rule as the foundation of a stable social and political order. French writers increasingly drew disparaging contrasts with the Empire, which they presented as declining from an (allegedly) hereditary monarchy under Charlemagne’s ‘French’ rule into a degenerately elective one under the Germans. It was no longer an empire, but merely a sorry shadow of one, whereas the continuous line of Christian French kings had existed beyond the combined span of republican and imperial Rome. France was a divine monarchy, with its king chosen by God through hereditary succession. As the Sun King, Louis outshone any other ruler. Thanks to his Christian credentials and practical power, he, not the emperor, was the natural arbiter of Europe.
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French pretensions to be Europe’s arbiter foundered in a series of wars between 1667 and 1714. Louis achieved the long-standing French goal of keeping Spain and Austria apart by defeating Habsburg claims to the entire Spanish succession after 1700. Yet by the Sun King’s death in 1715 it was clear that most diplomats favoured ideas of a power balance rather than a single peacekeeper (see
pp. 170–76
). France also struggled to assert itself as arbiter of the Empire’s internal balance, because it proved hard to find a reliable German partner to facilitate intervention. Bavaria was preferred since the 1620s as suitably Catholic and large enough that, with help, it could serve as a counterweight to the Austrian Habsburgs. Franco-Bavarian cooperation intensified when Charles VI’s death without a male heir in October 1740 broke the line of Habsburg rulers since 1438 and opened the War of the Austrian Succession, lasting until 1748. Carl Albrecht of Bavaria was eventually elected as Charles VII with French backing in 1742. His brief reign of just under three years proved a disastrous failure for both Bavaria and the Empire.
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The setback encouraged the French foreign
minister, the Marquis d’Argenson, to propose federalizing Germany and Italy by reorganizing them into fewer, larger territories in 1745. The plan was opposed by Prussia and Savoy, who saw greater opportunities for themselves through preserving the old order. Austria’s recovery of the imperial title through Francis I’s election later in 1745 ended d’Argenson’s scheme.
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A Fool’s Hat?

Habsburg statesmen realized long before this point that the imperial title no longer meant what it had done in the Middle Ages. Following successful wars against the Ottomans, by 1699 the Habsburgs had more land outside the Empire than within it, inevitably changing how they regarded the imperial title. Plans to raise Austria to a kingdom had been abandoned in 1623. Nonetheless, the term ‘Austrian monarchy’ was employed from 1703 as a vague yet suitably regal designation for the Habsburg lands, which in fact included several genuine kingdoms: Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Naples (between 1714 and 1735), plus Galicia, annexed from Poland in 1772, and nominal claims to Jerusalem.
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These developments raised questions about the continued utility of the imperial title, especially as the Habsburgs survived without it between 1740 and 1745 during the international War of the Austrian Succession. They felt betrayed by the failure of the imperial Estates to back them against France, Bavaria and their allies. Francis I’s wife, Maria Theresa, took an especially dim view, calling the imperial crown a ‘fool’s hat’, refusing to be crowned empress and referring to her husband’s coronation in 1745 as a ‘Punch and Judy Show’ (
Kaspar Theater
). These misgivings persisted even when their son Joseph II succeeded his father in 1765. Joseph described the position of emperor as ‘a ghost of an honorific power’ and was quickly frustrated by the imperial constitution, which was indeed functioning to constrain Habsburg management of the Empire as French diplomats hoped.
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Historians have often cited these comments as evidence for the Empire’s supposed irrelevance after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. However, Francis I’s advisors replied to his questions on 7 March 1749 by stressing that the imperial title was a ‘brilliant symbol of the highest political honour in the West . . . bringing precedence ahead of all other powers’ (see
Plate 7
).
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The entire Habsburg government – including the
imperial couple – were convinced that the loss of the imperial title in 1740 had been disastrous, and resolved to defend the Empire’s internal political hierarchy since this gave Austria a privileged position and helped maintain its international influence. Austria was obliged to concede ceremonial parity with France in 1757 as part of an anti-Prussian alliance. Even the French Revolutionaries remained sufficiently status conscious to get this confirmed in 1797 and 1801. The imperial title was now the sole marker of this pre-eminence and the Habsburgs clung to earlier arguments that all others calling themselves ‘emperors’ were really only ‘kings’.
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For the Habsburgs, both the Empire and Europe as a whole were hierarchical political systems. These arguments were useful in putting upstarts like Prussia in their place, and were backed by many of the smaller imperial Estates, which felt any levelling of the established order would lead to the kind of federalism proposed by d’Argenson, thereby threatening their autonomy.

Having found Prussia an unreliable German partner after 1740, France switched to an Austrian alliance in 1756, lasting until the Revolutionary Wars after 1792. The resulting Seven Years War (1756–63) failed to eliminate Prussia as challenger to Austria. The French envoy to the Reichstag after 1763 identified the other imperial Estates as ‘inert resources’ (
forces mortes
), which France should preserve from both Austria and Prussia to prevent either German great power from dominating central Europe.
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The French public failed to appreciate the subtleties of this policy, seeing only surface aspects like the arrival of the unpopular Austrian princess, Marie-Antoinette, as symbolizing their country’s humiliating association with its long-standing enemy. Few were interested in the complexities of imperial politics, and those that were believed the Empire could not be reformed without destroying it.
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French hostility grew after 1789 when some German princes sheltered the émigrés fleeing the Revolution. The Girondin and Jacobin factions were both disappointed by their failure to replace their country’s established ties to German princes with a new alliance with the ‘German nation’. Revolutionary policy became ever more extreme as it departed from accepted diplomatic norms. French policy-makers now considered the Westphalian settlement as ‘absurd’, while still using it in negotiations to further their goals. Even this lost its relevance once advocates among the French revolutionaries of ‘natural frontiers’ seized
power in Paris by 1795, intending to annex the entire left bank of the Rhine to France.
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