Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (33 page)

As a collective actor, the Empire approached war with Christian neighbours on a similar basis to breaches of its own internal ‘public peace’ declared in 1495. Rather than escalating conflict through an imperative to mobilize, imperial law sought to minimize violence by forbidding imperial Estates to assist those disturbing the peace. Acting through the Empire’s new supreme courts, the emperor could issue ‘advocates’ mandates’, identifying lawbreakers as ‘enemies of the Empire’ (
Reichsfeinde
). Although imperial Estates were required to assist in restoring peace, this system effectively ruled out mobilization for offensive war. Moreover, it drew on established medieval practices by requiring incremental action proceeding first with public warnings to desist, before force could be used. This process has often been mistaken
for wilful inaction and has made it hard to identify if and when the Empire moved from peace to war in particular circumstances.

The Reichstag at Speyer declared France an enemy of the Empire in 1544, but this exceptional act rested on that country’s temporary alliance with the Ottomans and was not repeated.
¹⁰³
The emperor continued to use advocates’ mandates against Christian enemies, including during the Thirty Years War and the conflicts against Louis XIV after 1672. The declaration of ‘imperial war’ (
Reichskrieg
) by the Reichstag against France on 11 February 1689 represented a significant innovation. The Empire had already mobilized to repel the French invasion of the Palatinate in 1688, but by expressly drawing on the 1544 precedent the new declaration sought to rally moral and material support by placing France on a par with the Ottomans. The practice was repeated in 1702, 1733, 1793 and 1799, in each case following actual mobilization through advocates’ mandates and other, more decentralized constitutional mechanisms.

Formal ‘imperial war’ was a useful tool for the Habsburgs in steering the imperial Estates to support their objectives, but as a powerful symbol of collective action for the Empire’s ‘conservation, security and well-being’ it also stood in stark contrast to the search for personal
gloire
exemplified by Louis XIV’s belligerence.
¹⁰⁴
Military action was also collective. Rather than create a single, permanent army, the Empire raised forces when needed by drawing on troops provided by the imperial Estates. Imperial law thus sanctioned the militarization of the Empire’s principalities, giving their rulers a vested interest in preserving the overall constitutional framework as the legal basis for their own military power.

However, the authority to raise troops and taxes from their own subjects also allowed princes to engage as individual actors in the new European politics. Other monarchs always needed troops and were often prepared to pay for German assistance by promising money and influence to help princes achieve their own objectives. This created considerable public-order problems during the early sixteenth century as soldiers were discharged at the end of each campaign, often subsisting as marauders through the winter until hired again in the following spring. The provision of troops to both sides in the French and Dutch civil wars from the 1560s also threatened to drag the Empire into these conflicts. The Reichstag legislated through the 1560s and 1570s to
assert control through the imperial Estates, who were empowered to restrict their subjects’ service as mercenaries and to coordinate police action against marauders. These changes entrenched the monopoly of ‘extraterritorial violence’ in the hands of the imperial Estates as part of their ‘German freedom’, whilst preserving the collective structure by banning any military action harmful to the emperor or Empire.
¹⁰⁵

As with the right of Reformation from 1555, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 simply incorporated this military authority in modified form rather than granting new powers. The principal change was to explicitly deny military authority to mediate nobles, towns and territorial assemblies. This has been widely misunderstood. The standard verdict was that ‘the Empire in its old sense had ceased to exist’ because ‘every authority was emperor in its own territory’.
¹⁰⁶
In fact, the princes did not receive new powers to make alliances; their dealings with outside powers remained constrained by the obligation not to harm the emperor or Empire. In practice, their engagement in European relations varied according to their inclination, material resources, geographical location and status within the Empire’s constitutional order. The really significant change was that this order was increasingly at odds with the evolving sovereign state system. The gradual acceptance of Bodin’s idea of indivisible sovereignty detached it from social status, shrinking the circle of legitimate public actors from all lords to just mutually recognized states. By contrast, princely status remained both social and political within the Empire’s internal hierarchy. As imperial Estates, princes possessed only shares of the Empire’s fragmented sovereignty, expressed as ‘territorial sovereignty’ (
Landeshoheit
), which remained circumscribed by imperial law and the emperor’s formal position as their feudal overlord. Thus, in an international order increasingly characterized by independent states, princes occupied an anomalous position of being neither fully sovereign yet clearly something more than the aristocrats of western countries.

This explains the intensity of princely involvement in European wars and diplomacy from the late seventeenth century when all the larger principalities developed permanent armies and maintained envoys in major European capitals. There was ‘an epidemic of desires and aspirations for a royal title’, since this alone was now equated with sovereignty: being an elector or duke was no longer enough.
¹⁰⁷
Arguably this contributed to international instability, either indirectly through the
provision of auxiliaries, or through direct intervention as belligerents like Saxony, Prussia and Hanover in the Great Northern War. However, even more centralized European states were scarcely better at curbing autonomous violence by their subjects, whether in the form of the English and Dutch armed trading companies or the colonial militias which, for example, triggered the French and Indian War in 1754. Perhaps more remarkable still was the fact that, despite being the most heavily armed part of Europe, the Empire did not fragment into the kind of warlordism characterizing China after 1911.
¹⁰⁸

The Empire and European Peace

A Holy Roman emperor was no longer expected to act as Europe’s policeman by the later sixteenth century, but there was still scope for the emperor as peacemaker. Such action was often in the Empire’s interests, as well as in tune with the traditional imperial ideal. Although repeated efforts to resolve the Dutch civil wars failed, Maximilian II brokered an end to the Danish-Swedish War of 1563–70, securing 50 years of peace for northern Germany.
¹⁰⁹

The Westphalian settlement explicitly linked the Empire’s internal equilibrium to wider European peace through its combination of constitutional changes within an international settlement.
¹¹⁰
The ‘German freedom’ of the imperial Estates was formalized to prevent the emperor converting the Empire into a centralized state capable of threatening its neighbours. Immediate practical conditions shaped this more than theoretical considerations. The Peace of Westphalia forbade Austria from assisting Spain, which remained at war with France until 1659. The unsettled conditions along the Empire’s western frontier encouraged Elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn of Mainz and like-minded princes to seek a wider international alliance to guarantee the Westphalian settlement and secure permanent peace. When these efforts faltered around 1672, Schönborn and others tried interposing themselves as a neutral ‘third party’ to prevent the Empire being dragged into the wars against France.
¹¹¹

These efforts generally ran counter to the interests of the Habsburgs, who managed to scupper them by presenting the princes as dupes of the deceitful French. Nonetheless, the option of formal
Reichsmediation
collectively through the Reichstag retained considerable moral weight
since it was first proposed in 1524 as a way of ending Charles V’s war with France. Ferdinand III recovered Habsburg influence lost earlier in the Thirty Years War by inviting the imperial Estates to participate in the Westphalian peace congress. The Reichstag’s permanence after 1663 offered further possibilities, because the presence of envoys from most European states gave it the character of an international congress.
¹¹²
Offers to mediate were made in each subsequent major war, but were always frustrated by Habsburg opposition and the growing ceremonial difficulties posed by the discrepancies between imperial Estates and European sovereigns.

The Empire’s limitations as an active peacemaker did not diminish interest in its place in the continent’s tranquillity, especially amongst those dissatisfied with the free-market approach to peace that relied on a supposedly self-regulating ‘balance of power’. Because the Empire had represented an idealized universal order during the Middle Ages, it should not surprise us that writers after the sixteenth century also saw the Empire as a model for a common European system. Prominent exponents included the political philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf, the Abbé St Pierre, William Penn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Their proposals involved states surrendering at least part of their sovereignty to one or more common institutions inspired by the Reichstag and the Empire’s supreme courts. They offered a positive assessment of the Empire at a time when others felt it was in terminal decline.
¹¹³
Yet their idealized discussions bore little resemblance to the Empire’s political and social realities. Peace in the Empire remained rooted in pre-modern methods of consensus-seeking and the defence of corporate rights, in contrast to the new ideals of sovereignty, individual rights and (after 1789) popular control of hegemonic state power.

PART II

Belonging

4

Lands

THE EMPIRE AND ITS LANDS

Core and Periphery

The Empire was never a unitary state with a homogeneous population, but instead a patchwork of lands and peoples under an uneven and changing imperial jurisdiction. This chapter outlines how and when different parts of Europe were associated with the Empire, arguing that its political core was not necessarily its geographical one. Empires and imperial expansion are usually explained through the core–periphery model. The Roman, Ottoman, Russian and British empires are presented as expanding outwards through the conquest or control of other lands. An empire is thus defined by the dominance of a core over more peripheral territory that is only loosely integrated or kept entirely separate. The core is usually considered more highly organized, economically developed and militarily superior to the often less densely populated periphery. This relationship also appears to explain collapse through the law of diminishing returns, with further conquests bringing additional administrative and security costs that outweigh gains in resources.

The Empire only loosely fits this model, contributing to the speculation already noted in the introduction of whether it was really imperial. The Franks were not, in fact, unusual in appearing more ‘backward’ than the late Roman societies they conquered in Gaul and parts of Italy. The same has been said of the Mongols during the thirteenth century or the Manchus in China after 1644. However, the Carolingians and their successors (with the partial exception of the Ottonians)
generally disdained the more urbanized, densely populated Italy in favour of remaining north of the Alps. Aachen and Rome were only two of several important sites in a realm that remained characterized by multiple centres rather than a single core. The original Frankish heartland had stretched from the Loire valley eastwards to Frankfurt, and from Aachen in the north southwards into Provence and (later) Lombardy. This region was fragmented three ways by the ninth-century partitions, while the imperial title migrated among the Frankish successor kingdoms before finally coming to rest in Germany under Otto I. Ottonian rule shifted political geography northwards into Saxony without entirely displacing the significance of earlier centres. The focus moved south-west to the Middle Rhine under the Salians and then also to Italy with the Staufers, before shifting back to the Rhineland in the later thirteenth century. Luxembourg rule moved the imperial title to Bohemia, before it came to reside in Austria under the Habsburgs, though again without completely overshadowing established centres like Aachen, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Regensburg.

This movement suggests we should re-imagine the interrelationship of the Empire’s territories according to their degree of openness to the emperor’s authority, rather than as a fixed pattern of control.
¹
We can label ‘king’s country’ the areas which elsewhere correspond to a core, provided we recognize that their identity changed during the Empire’s history. The Franks merged relatively quickly with other elites and thereafter the Empire never had a single ‘imperial people’ akin to the position of the Manchus in China or Anglo-Saxons in the British empire. Instead, king’s country was defined legally through prerogatives allowing the emperor to exploit particular resources to sustain his rule. While these properties were concentrated in certain regions, there were always some scattered elsewhere to enable him to roam more widely. Personal royal possessions assumed greater importance, becoming what can be called more properly ‘dynastic territories’ from the fourteenth century. These ultimately replaced properties associated with imperial prerogatives and constituted the king’s country of late medieval and early modern emperors. Throughout, king’s country was never contiguous, as a glance at a map of Habsburg possessions will readily show.