Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (42 page)

Charles adjusted Burgundy’s relationship in the Burgundian Treaty agreed on 26 June 1548 as part of the wide-ranging measures passed at his controversial Armoured Reichstag at Augsburg. The treaty was endorsed by the Reichstag and ratified by all 17 Burgundian provinces. It secured Burgundy’s autonomy on Habsburg terms. Kreis boundaries were adjusted to remove the provinces of Utrecht, Overijssel and Drenthe (all acquired after 1524) from Westphalia and include them within the Burgundian Kreis instead, consolidating that region as exclusively Habsburg territory. Nonetheless, Burgundy remained an imperial Estate, but with only three votes in the Reichstag, because the Habsburgs chose not to claim additional votes for all 17 provinces. Burgundy
was removed from the Reichskammergericht’s jurisdiction, but Burgundians still had to contribute taxes towards its maintenance. Additionally, Burgundy was assessed for other imperial taxes at three times the rate paid by the electorates. Although sounding impressive, this was actually modest considering Burgundy contained Europe’s richest cities.
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Spain would later claim that the Burgundian Treaty obliged the Empire to defend Burgundy, including against the northern (Dutch) provinces, which rebelled in 1566. The Austrian Habsburgs, however, generally excused themselves by referring to an adjustment in the Empire’s defence structure in 1555 which had made any such assistance dependent on the agreement of the Reichstag: neither Austria nor the other German princes had any enthusiasm for being drawn into Spain’s problems. The German princes were concerned involvement would unpick their own compromise laboriously agreed only a few years before in the Religious Peace of Augsburg. Spanish military efforts stalled by 1579, leading to the secession of the seven northern provinces as a Protestant republic. The Dutch negotiated international alliances and acted like a fully independent state. Renewed efforts to crush their revolt failed after 1621, prompting Spain to recognize Dutch independence as part of the Westphalian peace settlement in 1648. In practice, full separation from the Empire took longer, since Spain simply renounced its authority over the seven Dutch provinces in a separate treaty not signed by either the emperor or the other imperial Estates. The emperor recognized Dutch neutrality in 1653, meaning exemption from any obligation to assist the Empire in future wars. This was ratified by the Reichstag only in 1728. In practice, the Dutch Republic maintained its own garrisons in strategic lower Rhenish towns until 1679. It was also a close ally of Austria for much of the eighteenth century, while its leading political family, the House of Orange, was closely related to German imperial princes, notably in Nassau and Brandenburg-Prussia.
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The truncated Burgundian Kreis remained part of the Empire, passing from Spain to Austria in 1714, which held it under the same terms as agreed in 1548 until it was overrun by revolutionary France in 1794.

The southern section of Burgundy, known as Franche Comté, was conquered by France in 1679 in what was one of the largest territorial losses suffered by the Empire during early modernity. France
meanwhile encroached on Lorraine, which lay between Franche Comté and the rest of the Burgundian Netherlands. The three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun were weakened by the emancipation of their episcopal towns and the loss of imperial patronage following the Staufers’ demise in 1254. Metz already accepted French vassalage in 1296. France assumed protectorate rights over the other two bishoprics during the fourteenth century, annexing them in 1552. As we have seen, Charles was unable to reverse this despite his costly siege of Metz, and the Empire acknowledged their loss in 1648.

All three bishoprics had land scattered across Lorraine, allowing France to increase pressure on Lorraine’s dukes to accept vassalage. Charles V and France agreed the Treaty of Nuremberg in August 1542, accepting that Lorraine was ‘free and unincorporated’ in either of their realms. Henceforth, the duchy was exempt from any of the fiscal and military obligations created by imperial reform. However, the treaty also declared it under the Empire’s eternal protection, while the duke remained an imperial vassal through his possession of Pont-à-Mousson, as well as subordinate to the French king on account of the duchy of Bar. Lorraine’s dukes sought prestige and autonomy by engaging in both French and imperial politics since – like Savoy – their possessions were too small for a fully independent existence in an international environment still governed by hierarchical political thinking. The emperor raised the minor fief of Nomeny to a margraviate in 1567 to give the duke of Lorraine a full vote in the Reichstag. Growing French pressure in the 1630s and again after 1679 appeared a far greater threat than the relatively light constraints imposed by membership of the Empire. Lorraine’s dukes accordingly allied themselves primarily with the Habsburgs and sought places for their sons in the imperial church. Lorraine was denied the recognition as royalty accorded Prussia and Savoy at the Utrecht congress ending the War of the Spanish Succession. In response, its dukes merged their family with the Habsburgs through the marriage of Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen in 1736, though Austria was then obliged to sacrifice Lorraine itself as part of a wider peace settlement with France in 1738. Lorraine’s formal representation in the Empire was transferred from Nomeny to the tiny lordship of Falkenstein, partly to secure Habsburg influence but also reflecting a wider reluctance within the Empire to accept the consequences of real political changes.
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The process of Swiss independence was even longer than that of the Dutch. Most of what became Switzerland originated in Carolingian Burgundy, but the three future cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden (whose alliance of 1291 is usually considered the country’s birthday) initially belonged to the duchy of Swabia. There was never a single Switzerland before the nineteenth century, but instead a multitude of towns, lordships and rural communities bound through a complex web of alliances (see
pp. 585–91
). Medieval emperors visited fairly frequently on their way between the Empire’s three main kingdoms. Most Swiss communities secured exemption from the Reichskammergericht’s jurisdiction in 1499, but nonetheless remained part of the Empire and were still summoned to the Reichstag during the early sixteenth century. They continued to pay fees for the confirmation of their privileges at the accession of each new emperor. As late as 1644, Bern completed a new city gate adorned with the imperial coat of arms, while the emperor addressed the Swiss as his ‘loyal subjects’. The Swiss were proud of their privileged autonomy, which they did not express in terms of modern sovereignty.

Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, the Peace of Westphalia did not confirm Swiss independence, but merely extended the privileges of 1499 to the city of Basel, which only joined the Confederation in 1501.
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Austria renounced jurisdiction over some Alpine communities in 1652, but retained some rights, as well as over Konstanz, which it had annexed in 1548. Change was gradual and was hindered by the difficulties in deciding whether sovereignty lay with the individual communities, the cantons or the Confederation as a whole. Solothurn stopped requiring its citizens to swear loyalty to the Empire only in 1681. Other symbolic ties like coats of arms were not removed until around 1700. Meanwhile, the incorporation of the French-speaking areas of Fribourg (1454) and Solothurn (1481) diluted Germanness. The spread of French culture, exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contributed to this in the eighteenth century. Whereas sixteenth-century Swiss had tended to see themselves as one of several German ‘nations’ within the Empire, their descendants two centuries later voiced a more distinct identity around the concept of Helvetica: the ideal of the moral and unpretentious Swiss in contrast to the petty and immoral German princely courts.

The French Revolutionary Wars saw the Confederation reorganized
as the French-backed Helvetic Republic in 1798. Nonetheless, it was still considered necessary five years later for France to compel the Empire to acknowledge formally that Switzerland was an independent state.
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The difficulty in identifying an exact date for Swiss independence is typical of the Empire’s relations with what eventually became separate European states. Although conquest had played a significant part in many cases during the early Middle Ages, for most of the Empire’s existence imperial jurisdiction had not meant ‘foreign domination’, but a relatively benign association with what was still regarded as a common political order composed of many communities. It is to the question of identities within that order that we turn in the next chapter.

5

Identities

IDENTITY AND BELONGING

Nations and Nationalism

The Empire disappeared at the point in European history generally considered to be the birth of modern nationalism. This coincidence is often related in older accounts arguing that the Empire’s demise was barely registered by its inhabitants, who had long since transferred their loyalties to national states. The classic conservative interpretation of European history presented the continent’s peoples as predetermined by language, ethnicity and culture. Archaeology, ethnology, linguistics and other specialist disciplines emerging after 1800 all provided corroborating evidence in the form of distinctive pottery, customs and root words. Political history was written as a story of each people’s search for a viable framework to claim their place as a distinct country. States ruling ‘mixed’ populations were viewed suspiciously and apt to be condemned as ‘artificial’, unless they were imperial states ruling supposedly inferior non-European peoples elsewhere. German historians were convinced of the continuous existence of
Deutschtum
since antiquity, but usually believed the Empire had failed to provide the necessary framework for this to flourish.
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Later twentieth-century historians were more aware how previous generations had, with terrible results, manipulated evidence to convey false continuities and to claim parts of Europe as ‘historic’ homelands. Several influential writers dismissed the entire idea of pre-modern national identities, arguing that nationalism is a modern, ‘artificial’ ideology associated with mass politics of the industrial age.
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Evidence
advanced previously for continuity was now dismissed as marginal or exceptional. The most that was conceded was that a tiny military and clerical elite articulated a narrow view of themselves as a ‘people’ to bind warlord and followers through a common myth of origins.

Regnal Identities and the Empire

Such insights have been developed to argue that pre-modern identity was ‘regnal’, focused on a monarchy, rather than defined by the essentialist ‘blood and soil’ criteria advanced by nineteenth-century nationalists.
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It is certainly easier to research the process of identification through the symbols and arguments employed to foster identity than to reconstruct individuals’ subjective self-definition.
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The medieval French monarchy made considerable efforts to foster loyalty, already projecting the family’s own patron saint as a model for all subjects in the eleventh century – a strategy also employed in Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and Kievan Rus. Central holy places were endowed to assist this, like Westminster Abbey in England, or St Denis in France. Royal institutions, like the court, justice, taxes and war-making, also all focused attention on a common political centre.
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The argument that pre-modern identities were regnal shares much with older arguments that Europe’s states were products of centralizing processes largely driven by kings. As we have seen, such interpretations have distorted the Empire’s history, because later generations have looked for centres and institutions that did not exist.

The Empire’s inhabitants did not lack elements that could encourage a shared identity. While the actual Roman legacy was confined to the south and south-west, it was spread in its revised Holy Roman form by Charlemagne and his successors. For much of the early Middle Ages the Empire was simply the
regnum
, whereas all other kingdoms required some qualification limiting them to a specific people, as in the kingdom of the Lombards.
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In this sense, the Empire was a more elastic and inclusive concept than more centralized monarchies like France. Latin served as a single elite language transcending vernacular dialects. Roman Christianity provided a common belief system, as well as much of the conceptual language required to discuss morality, politics and justice. Migration, especially after the eleventh century, spread people and ideas across the Empire. The political elite often travelled great
distances to attend assemblies or participate in coronations and military campaigns. Distance was no barrier to the spread of other common institutions like monastic orders or the imperial church. There was great variety in socio-economic forms, but this was scarcely unique in medieval Europe, while there were no fundamental divisions between ethnic groups, such as those between steppe nomads and settled populations found in Russia or China.

These factors suggest there was nothing inevitable about the Empire’s peoples eventually building multiple, distinct ‘national’ identities around notions of language, culture and ethnicity, most of which were indeed constructed precisely for this purpose only much later. The real difference between the Empire and more centralized monarchies was certainly political, but not how ‘political’ is customarily understood. Centralized monarchies fostered ‘national’ identities by selecting elements that made their regnal identity plausible and desirable. This always entailed excluding aspects hindering this, hence the use of language, culture and (after the Reformation) religion to distinguish ‘loyal subjects’ from ‘suspect foreigners’. The Empire never attempted this, because it was always superior to any one kingdom and hence always contained more than one ‘people’. The story of identification within the Empire was never one of failed efforts to forge a single (German) national identity. Rather, it was always a process through which communities and groups formed their own particular identities through securing a legally recognized autonomous position within the wider imperial framework.