Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (39 page)

Poland, Hungary and Bohemia in the Later Middle Ages

Poland and Hungary underwent considerable internal change, accelerated by the devastation wrought by the brief but terrible Mongol invasions during the 1240s, which claimed the lives of a third of all Hungarians. Hungary already adopted a more formal form of mixed monarchy in 1220. This included significant political rights to the nobles, who, by now, exercised hereditary control of the counties, and established regular diets, or assemblies, where they and representatives from leading towns discussed policy with the king. On the Arpads’ extinction, Hungary passed to a branch of the extensive Angevin family between 1308 and 1387, which made similar concessions to secure their acceptance in Poland where the Piasts died out in 1370.
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Polish nobles asserted new powers to escape Angevin rule in 1386, giving their crown to Prince Jogaila, who ruled Lithuania, Europe’s largest surviving pagan country, on the condition he accept Christianity. Jogaila’s family, the Jagiellons, ruled until 1572, but the union between Poland and Lithuania persisted beyond until the state was partitioned off Europe’s map by Austria, Prussia and Russia between 1772 and 1795. Renewal of the union at Lublin in 1569 gave the Commonwealth its definitive shape as an elective monarchy. This was much broader than that in the Empire, while the Polish nobles (the
szlachta
) had a far more coherent and integrative ideology than their more hierarchically organized German counterparts, whose electoral rights were restricted to a tiny elite. The number of Polish noble electors rose from 6,000 in 1573 to 20,000 by 1587. Very few of them had landed titles like German nobles; instead they derived status from possession of hereditary royal offices with provincial responsibility. This bound them to the monarchy and helped ensure that the otherwise unwieldy Commonwealth remained a significant European power into the later seventeenth century.
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Hungarian nobles rejected a possible union with Poland in 1387, instead choosing Emperor Charles IV’s younger son, Sigismund, as
their king, thereby associating their kingdom with the Luxembourgs, who had ruled Bohemia since 1310 and the Empire as a whole since 1346. Sigismund’s problems with his elder brother Wenzel delayed his succession in Bohemia until 1419, by which time it had become ungovernable through the Hussite insurrection. Although designated Sigismund’s heirs in 1438, the Habsburgs soon lost both Hungary and Bohemia, opening a three-way struggle after 1468 that meshed with a revolt of the Austrian nobility. Hungarian influence in eastern Austria was not broken until 1490.
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The growing Ottoman threat encouraged east-central European nobles to accept monarchical unions as offering prospects for a more coordinated response. Hungary and Poland were linked by personal union from 1370 to 1387 and 1440 to 1444, as were Hungary and Bohemia from 1444 to 1457 and 1490 to 1526. The multiplicity of these connections and the frequency with which they changed reveals the relative openness of the situation immediately east of the Empire, as well as how Bohemian, Austrian and Silesian nobles had political and familial interests stretching across east-central Europe, and also west into Germany. The coincidence of Habsburg rule in the Empire, Bohemia and Hungary with the arrival of the Ottomans in the 1520s did not end these connections, but nonetheless radically altered the wider context, as we shall see shortly.

Denmark

Before we follow developments into early modernity, we need to conclude coverage of the Middle Ages by examining the situation to the north and north-west of the Empire. Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia remained beyond the Frankish world, though contacts deepened as the Saxons embraced Christianity from the 780s, allowing missionary work to extend northwards. The Franks and early Ottonians cooperated with the Abodrites along the lower Elbe to contain Viking raiding, while Henry I established a bridgehead to the north by conquering Schleswig in 934. The conversion of the Danish chieftain Harald Bluetooth then stabilized the northern frontier and opened possible cooperation to Christianize the Wends through the Hamburg-Bremen missions. Cooperation peaked in negotiations from 1025 to 1027 between Conrad II and Knut, the last and greatest of the Viking kings who
temporarily united Denmark and England and extended control into Norway and the Vistula estuary. Knut sealed the alliance by attending Conrad’s coronation in Rome in March 1027. Like the earlier agreements made by Otto III around 1000, this was sufficiently ambiguous to allow both parties to interpret it to suit their domestic audiences. Conrad ceded Schleswig to Denmark in 1036, but by then Knut’s empire was already fragmenting following his death the previous year.

Knut’s successors abandoned their cooperation with the Hamburg-Bremen mission and established their own ecclesiastical and dynastic ties to France, Hungary and Poland during the mid-eleventh century. However, the Danish monarchy’s status as first among equals left it vulnerable to succession disputes. Thus, like those of east-central Europe, Danish rulers were often prepared to trade nominal submission to imperial suzerainty in return for the political capital of imperial recognition as kings.
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Unfortunately, this could also bring risks for the Empire, demonstrated after 1146 when renewed Danish civil war spilled south across the Elbe as the rival claimants sought recognition and support in Germany.

The resulting prolonged, if intermittent, conflict eventually demarcated the Danish-imperial frontier, not along geographical or ethnic lines, but according to which master local lords eventually recognized. The Staufers relied heavily on the cooperation of their marcher lords, notably Frederick I, who gave Henry ‘the Lion’, duke of Saxony, a free hand to intervene in the Danish conflict. Henry promoted his own vassals, like the count of Holstein, who secured control of the North Sea coast between the Elbe and Schleswig. These political ambitions were a further factor adding to the violence of German migration into this region, as well as fuelling the Wendish Crusade after 1147. The situation grew more complex still with Henry’s rebellion against Frederick after 1180. Frederick sought to regain control by awarding ducal titles to the remaining Abodrite and Veletian princes, thereby integrating their possessions of Mecklenburg and Pomerania within the Empire as imperial fiefs in 1181. The Staufer–Welf civil war interrupted this after 1198 by allowing Denmark to displace imperial influence across Mecklenburg and most of Pomerania and Holstein. Eventually, an alliance of north German and Wendish princes and towns defeated the Danes at Bornhöved in July 1227, forcing them to return the area north of the Elbe. Thereafter, Denmark remained confined to its peninsula and islands, allowing Lübeck
and other newly founded towns to expand as the Hanseatic League.
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The newly minted Wendish dukes re-emerged as imperial vassals, with the Abodrite line ruling Mecklenburg until 1918, while the Veletians survived in Pomerania until 1637 (acquiring Rügen in 1325).

England

Many German and English writers were fond of expressing a common Anglo-Saxon-Germanic heritage prior to 1914, but in fact this largely disappeared after the Saxon migrations of late antiquity. Important contacts remained, especially with the renewed missionary activity promoted by the Carolingians, who often relied on qualified monks from the British Isles, like St Boniface, but otherwise England and the Empire evolved separately. While a sense of Saxon heritage may have played a part, both countries were sufficiently distant not to be immediate competitors. Ironically, this opened possibilities for royal marriages which, like Byzantine-imperial matches, were intended mainly to impress a domestic audience and avoid antagonizing a king’s nobles by tying him to one local family. Otto I married Alfred the Great’s granddaughter, Edith of Wessex, while Henry III married Gunhild, daughter of Knut of Denmark-England. Edith’s and Knut’s deaths ended any chances of a lasting alliance in both cases.
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By contrast, connections in the high Middle Ages were more significant, if less celebrated in the nineteenth century. Emperor Henry V married Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England, in 1114 as a deliberate attempt to forge an alliance with the Anglo-Norman dynasty ruling much of Britain since 1066. It was hoped this would outflank a Franco-papal alliance threatening the Empire towards the end of the Investiture Dispute. A huge dowry of 10,000 pounds of silver was an added inducement, especially as this was paid upfront and financed Henry’s Italian expedition in 1111. Matilda was accorded the rare honour of being crowned German queen ahead of her marriage. Despite the Investiture Dispute, the Empire’s prestige was sufficient to attract English interest. After her husband’s death in 1125, Matilda returned to England, where she was known as ‘the Empress’. She triumphed over her English opponents and, through her second marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, established the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England-Normandy until 1399.
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Matilda’s namesake and granddaughter married Henry ‘the Lion’ in 1168, forging a lasting alliance with the powerful Welf family based in Saxony and drawing English and imperial politics into closer contact. Henry sought shelter with his in-laws after his defeat by Frederick I in 1180 and found strong backing from his brother-in-law, Richard the Lionheart, who became English king in 1189. Richard used his crusading expedition to support Welf and Sicilian opposition to the Staufers in Italy. Having been shipwrecked on his return journey, Richard was apprehended in 1192 by the duke of Austria, whom he had offended in the Holy Land; allegedly he was disguised as a kitchen servant and caught holding a roast chicken. The duke handed him over to Emperor Henry VI in what was the first meeting of English and German monarchs. Henry extorted a huge ransom, racking up the price when he received a counter-offer from Richard’s rival brother John, who was willing to pay to have him remain imprisoned. Eventually, Richard transferred 150,000 silver marks (weighing nearly 16 tons) and accepted imperial suzerainty over England in February 1194. The latter concession has caused some speculation, but Henry VI received several such nominal submissions from distant kingdoms without ever being in a position to convert these into effective control. The act’s significance lay in the prestige accruing to Henry and the fact that Richard was bound not to assist his enemies. More practically, the huge ransom financed Henry’s successful conquest of Sicily.
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Unsurprisingly, the Plantagenets financed Otto IV, son of Henry the Lion and grandson of England’s Henry II, in his bid to displace the Staufers through the double election of 1198. In addition to kinship with the Welfs, the Plantagenets wanted to halt the French, who were now Staufer allies and busy conquering most of Normandy. The Anglo-Welf alliance came to grief in the Welfs’ ignominious flight from the victorious French at Bouvines in 1214. As was becoming common practice, international tensions were defused by another dynastic marriage: Frederick II took Isabella, sister of England’s Henry III, as his third wife in 1235 as part of a general reconciliation extending to rehabilitation of the Welfs in northern Germany. England was thus linked to the Staufers at the height of their final conflict with the papacy.

The marriage enabled Henry III’s younger brother, Richard, earl of Cornwall, to present himself as the Staufer’s successor. His bid for the German throne has often been dismissed as quixotic, while his bribes
and concessions to secure election in January 1257 make him appear weak. In fact, Richard was both serious and quite successful. By 1258 he was prepared to abandon Plantagenet claims to Normandy if this would secure his German throne.
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England remained an attractive ally after Richard’s death in 1272, thanks to its growing trade with north-west Europe and its potential to hold France in check. England’s more centralized monarchy also enjoyed significant tax revenues, enabling it to pay subsidies in 1294 and offer them in 1338. Four electors picked Edward III as anti-king against Charles IV in January 1348, but they had failed to consult Edward and he wisely declined to become involved. Thereafter, English relations with the Empire conformed to the emerging European pattern of interacting as nascent sovereign states, apart from Henry VIII’s brief candidacy in the 1519 imperial election.

CONVERGENCE AND DISTINCTION AFTER 1490

The Centre

Two related processes transformed the Empire’s internal composition around 1490. Constitutional reforms arranged the different levels of authority more clearly along a single, hierarchical order, distinguishing some spatial jurisdictions as superior to others. The superior jurisdictions associated with the status of imperial Estate now emerged as distinct territories. Lesser, mediate jurisdictions were subordinated as subdivisions within these territories. This process of greater distinction has been labelled ‘territorialization’ and will be discussed at greater length later (
pp. 365–77
and
408–16
). It simultaneously embedded the territories more deeply within the Empire, because each owed its rights and status through recognition from the other territorial authorities. In short, status was mutually agreed rather than self-determined, and thus tied to continued membership of the Empire rather than offering the basis for sovereign independence. Consequently, both processes contributed towards delineating the Empire’s outer frontiers by distinguishing those lordships and towns embedded within the status hierarchy more clearly from those under the suzerainty of other European monarchs.

These processes of convergence and distinction proceeded unevenly across the Empire’s three principal kingdoms, Germany, Italy and Burgundy. Crucially, they coincided with the new form of imperial rule perfected by the Habsburgs, which relied on an expanded territorial base under the emperor’s direct control. Territorialization was significantly boosted by the Habsburgs’ desire to insulate their possessions from the new common institutions being created by the parallel process of imperial reform (see
pp. 396–408)
.