Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (41 page)

The political relationship in the Saxon-Polish and Hanoverian-
British unions was the reverse of that in the Habsburg union, since in both cases the ruler’s new royal status outranked his position as an electoral prince of the Empire. Both Poland and Britain were larger and richer than the electorates and their own internal politics and international interests soon became their new rulers’ primary concern. The Saxon union was extinguished in the political realignment following the Seven Years War, but the Hanoverian-British one continued until 1837. Neither union was popular amongst its inhabitants. Most Britons regarded Hanover as a strategic liability, while Poles suspected the Saxons of pursuing separate interests. Britons and Poles travelled to Germany on grand tours and to study at the numerous German universities in the eighteenth century. Most professed a dislike of the Empire’s society as hierarchical and exclusive in contrast to their own (idealized) inclusive participatory culture and distinctive liberties. Britain and Hanover developed important scientific, artistic and cultural links during the eighteenth century, but Hanoverians did not feel ‘British’, nor vice versa. Hanover’s economy remained agrarian and failed to benefit from Britain’s industrial take-off in the nineteenth century.

The South

Italy is often assumed to have ‘played no active or meaningful role in the early modern Reich’.
⁸⁰
Habsburg intervention south of the Alps is presented as selfish manipulation of residual imperial prerogatives to advance purely dynastic territorial goals.
⁸¹
Important connections were certainly severed by 1530: there were no more imperial coronation journeys to Rome, while the title of ‘king of Italy’ was dropped during the sixteenth century, though emperors continued to list royal titles for Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia and (after 1700) Spain. The Habsburgs certainly used every opportunity to strengthen their own territorial possessions in Italy and this periodically caused disquiet amongst the imperial Estates north of the Alps who felt they were being dragged into unwanted conflicts. As we have seen (
pp. 194
), except for Savoy, Italian territories were excluded from most of the new institutions created by imperial reform around 1490.

The sense of separation is reinforced by the standard interpretation of Italian history from the Renaissance to the nineteenth-century
process of national unification known as the
Risorgimento
. Like its German equivalent, this historiography presents a story of national fragmentation into separate states like Milan, Savoy-Piedmont, Tuscany and Venice. Fragmentation is likewise blamed for social and cultural stagnation and the aristocratization of urban life, the retreat of the
popolo
(middling burghers) from civic government, and the debilitating effects of factionalism – something already noted by outsiders, exemplified by Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
. While German historians blamed German disunity on the Empire, Italians attributed theirs to foreign domination, beginning in the Italian Wars of 1494–1559. Any remaining connections to the Empire are subsumed within this narrative as manifestations of notionally alien, self-serving Austrian and Spanish Habsburg rule.

Later writers generally interpreted fragmentation in dynastic terms, seeing hereditary possession as the prime determinant of political order. In fact, imperial Italy remained a land of fiefs like Germany. In this sense, the Empire really did represent a barrier to the kind of national unification desired by many Italians after 1815. This explains their celebration of Napoleon, who might otherwise have been condemned as a foreign oppressor yet laid the preconditions for later unity by sweeping away the old imperial order.
⁸²

Late fifteenth-century Italy possessed two feudal networks that had grown with the Empire. The oldest contained the ‘Latin fiefs’ (
feuda Latina
) across northern and central Italy and defined the limits of imperial Italy. There were six large crown fiefs, of which five (Milan, Mantua, Savoy-Piedmont, Genoa and Tuscany) were products of the Luxembourgs’ recognition of urban oligarchs as imperial princes during the fourteenth century. Charles V reasserted imperial jurisdiction over Tuscany in 1530, retrieving it from the pope, who had generally held it since the death of Matilda of Canossa in 1115. Parma-Piacenza was a product of the Italian Wars, only established in 1545 for a branch of the Farnese family. There were another 200 to 250 lesser fiefs (
feuda minora
) in four thick belts around Genoa: Liguria, Langhe, Lunigiana and Valle di Pregola. These were held by 50 to 70 families, including the Gonzaga, Carretto, Malaspina, Scarampi, Pico, Pallavicino, Doria and Spinola, whose names read like a roll call of some of the Habsburgs’ most important courtiers.
⁸³

The second network was that of the papacy, which emerged during
the twelfth century in competition to the imperial system: Habsburg officials claimed in 1709 that two-thirds of the pope’s 296 fiefs had been usurped from the Empire. Most indeed originated in the jurisdictions established by the Carolingians and Ottonians. Concentrated in central Italy, most were small with a total population of only 223,000 in about 1700.
⁸⁴
In addition, the pope claimed feudal jurisdiction over Naples and Sicily since his recognition of the Normans in 1054, confirmed when Sicily-Naples was elevated as a kingdom in 1130. Spain accepted these arrangements when it acquired Naples during the Italian Wars, continuing the tradition of presenting a white horse to the pope each year as a sign of submission.
⁸⁵

The partition of the Habsburg lands in 1558 created a third, Spanish, network by assigning Milan to Spain. King Wenzel had already granted Milan superiority over several surrounding fiefs in 1396. Spain exploited this to secure the supply route known as the Spanish Road linking Iberia by sea to Genoa and thence through Lombardy, across the Alps and down the Rhine to its battlefront in the Netherlands against the Dutch rebels after 1566.
⁸⁶

The persistence of the imperial feudal network ensured that Italian lords remained the emperor’s vassals, even though they were excluded from the Reichstag, the Kreise and other institutions emerging around 1500. They were, however, subordinate to the Reichshofrat, the new supreme court established to safeguard imperial prerogatives. A special Italian section was created once the court became fully operational after 1559. The 1,500 cases from Italy were only a fraction of the 140,000 handled between then and 1806, but the number of Italian applicants nonetheless rose across this period.
⁸⁷
Many cases involved jurisdictional disputes, but others involved a wide range of issues and allowed the Reichshofrat to check local abuses of power.

The transition to Habsburg imperial rule did not change the practice of naming local lords as imperial vicars to safeguard the emperor’s interests and enforce court verdicts. Maximilian II reluctantly empowered his cousin Philip II of Spain as duke of Milan to implement Reichshofrat decisions across imperial Italy. Philip took this responsibility seriously, for he still regarded himself as an imperial prince, but his son Philip III was more concerned with purely Spanish interests and abused his position as commissioner in a long-running case involving abuses in Finale, Liguria, by the marquis of Carretto. Concerned to
protect the Spanish Road, Philip III occupied Finale in 1602 and was eventually enfeoffed with it by Emperor Matthias in 1617. However, Spain was not prepared to challenge imperial jurisdiction openly, because it legitimated its own superior position in Lombardy. A decade later, Ferdinand II ignored Spanish interests in order to uphold his prerogative as feudal overlord in the disputed Mantuan Succession (1627–31).
⁸⁸

In 1545 Italian vassals were removed from the register developed during imperial reform to distribute fiscal and military obligations. However, this simply reflected their general exclusion from the German kingdom’s new institutions, not from the wider imperial framework. They were disadvantaged relative to the Germans in lacking an assembly through which they could debate and possibly control assistance. Instead, each vassal was directly required to assist when summoned by the emperor. Italian vassals provided substantial support in all of Austria’s conflicts until 1797, notably the Long Turkish War of 1593–1606 when Mantua’s contingent included Claudio Monteverdi.
⁸⁹
Such assistance is generally ignored when assessing the Empire, because it bypassed the Reichstag and other institutions and went directly to the Habsburg army and treasury. Yet its legal basis rested on the network of imperial fiefs and it was additional to the recruits and taxes sent by the Habsburgs’ own Italian territories.

The acquisition of Milan from the disputed Spanish succession in 1714 eliminated the irritant of the separate Spanish feudal jurisdiction and led to the appointment of a new commissioner based in Milan to uphold the emperor’s prerogatives throughout imperial Italy. The absence of an Italian equivalent to the Reichstag gave the emperor greater scope to use his prerogatives to suit himself. Charles VI retained Tuscany as a Habsburg possession at the extinction of the Medici dynasty in 1737. Titles and even small fiefs were traded or sold to obtain political and military support, with Torriglia in Liguria being raised as an additional crown fief in 1761.
⁹⁰

In one of history’s lesser known ironies, Savoy, champion of Italian unification, in fact emerged from the kingdom of Burgundy and between 1361 and 1797 was formally part of Germany. This, of course, did not prevent its ruling family, the Humbertines, from pursuing territorial ambitions south of the Alps. Later national perspectives make little sense given that Savoy also encroached on what is now
Switzerland, held land that is now part of France, and claimed royal status through tenuous links to Cyprus.
⁹¹
The Savoyard use of the slogan ‘Liberty of Italy’ was similar to calls for ‘German freedom’ in that it was anti-Habsburg rather than directly anti-imperial. Savoy used its position as imperial vicar in Italy since the late sixteenth century to create its own suzerainty over surrounding minor lordships, similar to Spain’s exploitation of Milan’s superior jurisdiction. The need to prevent Savoy defecting to France during the Nine Years War (1688–97) obliged Leopold I to confer the semi-regal status of grand duke in 1696. The House of Savoy became full royalty in the settlement ending the War of the Spanish Succession, which awarded it Sicily in 1713. Subsequent Austrian pressure forced the Humbertines to trade this for Sardinia in 1720, placing them in a position roughly equivalent to the Hohenzollerns in holding land within the Empire but also a sovereign kingdom beyond it.

Savoy’s position within the former German kingdom was not entirely meaningless, since it sustained influence within the Empire. Cooperation with Charles V was instrumental in Duke Emanuel Filiberto’s recovery of his possessions in 1559 after 23 years of French occupation. Savoy’s dukes either attended in person or sent a representative to every Reichstag between 1541 and 1714, and they accepted jurisdiction of the Empire’s other supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, over themselves as imperial Estates. Even after their elevation as sovereign kings, Savoy’s rulers continued to pay feudal dues on behalf of their imperial fiefs. They remained interested in imperial politics. Duke Charles Emanuel I was a serious candidate for the Bohemian crown in 1619, while the family pushed after 1788 to receive a new electoral title, securing Prussian backing for this ambition. The overall situation of imperial Italy and Savoy thus remained relatively stable until the shock of the French Revolutionary Wars saw both severed from the Empire in 1797. Now styled the House of Savoy, the Humbertines were restored in 1814 and eventually became monarchs of united Italy between 1861 and 1946.
⁹²

The West

The Empire’s western frontier lacks a single national story to give it coherence, as no modern state chose to claim the old Lotharingian-Burgundian heritage. As with Italy, ties between this area and the
Empire are generally written from the perspective of Habsburg rather than imperial history. This is understandable since the Habsburgs secured the bulk of ducal Burgundy by 1493 and appropriated elements of its culture, notably the heraldic Order of the Golden Fleece. Unlike the acquisition of Hungary, the Burgundian inheritance expanded the Empire, because Frederick III enfeoffed his son Maximilian with all the Burgundian lands in 1478, including those recently acquired like Flanders and Artois, which were formerly French fiefs. Charles V, himself born in Ghent, continued Burgundy’s expansion by adding seven Lower Rhenish and Frisian fiefs, creating a complex of 17 provinces by 1536 stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland.

Charles’s action integrated the far north-west, a long-standing region ‘distant from the king’, more firmly within the Empire. Moreover, the entire Burgundian lands were included in the institutions created by imperial reform, including coming under Reichskammergericht jurisdiction and inclusion in the Kreis structure by 1512. Accordingly, Burgundians paid imperial taxes and were included in the imperial register of obligations compiled in 1521. Ulterior motives operated throughout, because the Habsburgs were concerned to include their new possessions within the Empire’s new collective security system to defend them against further French attacks. However, they also sought to insulate Burgundy like other direct Habsburg possessions from the imperial Estates’ influence. These policies also pandered to local interests, which the Habsburgs were keen to cultivate to consolidate their authority as Burgundy’s rulers. Burgundians already resented the heavy taxes introduced by their own dukes before 1477 and had little interest in additional obligations towards the Empire.