Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (44 page)

Theorists and rulers never resolved the contradictions inherent in their descriptions of Estates society, but their continued efforts embedded these categories deeply within social consciousness and legal practice.
¹⁸
A further factor was that the three Estates were largely self-recruiting. Even the clergy, who were expected to be celibate, were often not in practice for much of the Middle Ages, while the Reformation endorsed marriage for Protestant clerics and led to the emergence of dynasties of pastors where son followed father into the calling.
¹⁹
This pattern was still more pronounced for the nobility and commons, where a father’s status determined that of his family. Vertical social mobility was generally much more restricted than geographical mobility through migration. Peter Eppelmann (aka Melander), a peasant from Nassau, became Count Holzapfel and commander of the imperial
army during the Thirty Years War, but such examples were both rare and often perceived as transgressive. Melander was unusually well educated and many of his relations were pastors or public officials, while he enjoyed aristocratic patronage from an early age.
²⁰
Generally, upwards mobility required several generations to achieve, delayed of course by the reluctance of superior groups to accept newcomers.

Status and Place

Around 5–10 per cent of the population fell outside the boundaries of Estates society by early modernity, because they lacked a fixed abode. The linkage of status to domicile was common throughout Latin Europe, but assumed a distinct form in the Empire thanks to its specific social and political developments during the high and later Middle Ages. Consequently, the identity of social groups became irretrievably entwined with the Empire’s political and legal fabric. This was most pronounced in Germany thanks to the greater integration of territorialized authority within the overarching legal framework. As a result there were profound political and social consequences for the Empire and for the identity of its inhabitants.

Estates were not national, in the sense that there was no single ‘imperial’ clergy, nobility or commons. Instead, there were Paderborn clergy, Hessian nobles, Bavarian peasants, and a multitude of other groups defined by both place and social status, often subdividing further as, for example, not just Saxon burghers, but those of Leipzig, Dresden and other towns. In each case, their identity came to be expressed through shared rights incorporated in law and anchored in turn through their recognition in other charters or privileges associated with their community’s relationship to the Empire.

This relationship was mutually reinforcing thanks to the difficulties each group experienced in defining and defending its identity. For example, late fifteenth-century German nobles tried to define their own status more clearly by emphasizing their ancestry, marriage and record of participation in tournaments, rather than be defined by privileges granted by their prince, such as tax exemptions, tithes and hunting rights. Self-determination was employed because nobles could not prevent their prince granting similar privileges to other groups. However, princes could also prove long and illustrious pedigrees, possessed
superior resources, and were able to transform tournaments into lavish baroque spectacles that by 1600 were focused on their own courts and carefully choreographed to emphasize their own superior status and political agendas. The Empire’s multilayered political structure offered alternative security for distinct privileges, since groups and communities could obtain recognition of their status from those superior to their own immediate lords. For example, the inhabitants of numerous towns during the high Middle Ages obtained charters from the emperor granting them corporate privileges that their own lords were unable to revoke.
²¹
The diffuse distribution of authority through the Empire thus reflected and reinforced decentralized, multilayered social distinctions. The social hierarchy was complex and fragmented, like the political structure that offered multiple sources to legitimate corporate rights.

The emergence of burghers as legally distinct, privileged inhabitants of towns was the most important change in the third Estate across the Middle Ages. This process also underscores the significance of place in the wider elaboration of social distinctions, because burgher status was encouraged by aspects of communal living unrelated to the socio-economic functions of commoners, as well as being an expression of political self-assertion and people’s desire for greater control of their own destinies. Although burghers were collectively recognized as a distinct Estate by early modernity, they shared the late medieval characteristic of the other Estates in being fragmented by place, with each community having its own local and specific rights. These were not portable; therefore if someone moved to another town, they had to apply (and usually pay) for recognition as a burgher there.

While burghers were generally considered socially superior to peasants, their exact relationship to both the commons and to the other two traditional Estates remained unclear. The politicized slogan of the ‘common man’ (
gemeiner Mann
) emerged around 1500, embracing peasants and burghers without removing all distinctions between them.
²²
Throughout the later Middle Ages and early modernity, individuals sought special marks of distinction through forms of address or the right to wear particular clothes, often usurping the privileges of more prestigious groups that in turn would then invent new ways of elevating themselves.
²³
The spread of writing encouraged greater efforts to fix distinctions through elaborate laws, tables of ranks regulating hierarchies of titles, and sumptuary legislation defining what each corporate
group should wear. Gender differences added complexity. A burgher’s wife was socially superior to a man from a status group below burgher’s rank, like a day labourer. If she was his employer, she might also exercise authority over him. Yet, as a woman, she was decidedly inferior in other respects, notably her ability to represent herself in a law court – something denied Saxon women until 1838 for instance.
²⁴
Even perceptive commentators chose to ignore these contradictions. As late as 1795, the lawyer Johann Pütter wrote ‘people of the same Estate can differ in rank and status without the Estate thereby losing its unity’.
²⁵

Classes?

By the late eighteenth century, the subdivision of Estates into corporate groups had assumed greater significance than the overall conception of a tripartite social order. Communities and groups cherished their corporate privileges because these offered time-hallowed protections for distinctive identities increasingly threatened by new forces of homogenization during this period.

Social mobility increased through the employment opportunities provided by expanding state administration. Governments possessed greater ability to revise established legal arrangements in the interests of fiscal-military efficiency, and to intrude into previously autonomous social spheres, establishing more direct relationships with all inhabitants regardless of their social status. Princely taxation increasingly targeted wealth rather than exempting status. Brandenburg-Prussia, for instance, experimented with graduated poll taxes in 1677 and 1679. Civil and military hierarchies were restructured according to their members’ seniority of service in official ranks, rather than status determined by their birth. Many German territories issued patents of nobility rewarding commoners, who could then insert the predicative
von
(‘of’) into their names even without owning a landed estate. The Austrian army automatically ennobled any officer awarded the Maria Theresa medal instituted in 1757, while commoners with 30 years’ service were invited to apply for ennoblement.
²⁶
Meanwhile, economic changes and the proletarianization of many tasks through the spread of wage labour also levelled old distinctions whilst forging new ones. Elements of a class society were certainly emerging as people were marked by their relationship to production rather than social function.
²⁷

New arguments emerged that could serve to legitimate the removal of hallowed status distinctions. Social criticism was scarcely new. Medieval clerics already attacked noble privileges and their basis in violence as immoral, while the twelfth to early sixteenth centuries saw repeated bursts of popular anticlericalism fuelled by resentment at the often stark contrast between the lifestyle of clergy and their Christian ideals. However, the popular basis of such criticism broadened during the sixteenth century and focused more sharply on the obstacles to upward social mobility. For example, burghers tried to claim nobility on the basis of education and other achievements.
²⁸
The criticism gradually shifted from this or that group being unworthy of its privileges to a more fundamental critique of Estates society. The growing emphasis on human reason in philosophical arguments from the late seventeenth century undermined faith in a divinely ordained human order. By the late eighteenth century, burghers increasingly renounced efforts to join the nobility and instead claimed moral superiority for their own ‘bourgeois’ culture. Political attitudes changed in line with this. Whereas authorities had been regarded as guardians of an idealized static social order into the eighteenth century, increasingly they were seen by some as motors of potentially beneficial changes through their ability to revise or overturn existing legal arrangements. As we shall see (
pp. 639–45
), such demands for change clashed with those who saw the Empire as a legal order protecting entrenched rights.

Family

Much of the late medieval and early modern legislation in the Empire focused on delineating rights associated with marriage, parenthood, legitimacy, property-ownership and inheritance. Changes in these aspects of social structure were also to have profound implications for the Empire’s political order. The predominant form amongst the free population in 800 was the kindred or clan comprising a fairly large group of relations cooperating for mutual support and protection. Clan ties overrode those of marriage and nuclear families. For example, a wife could seek support from her kindred if her husband abused her or wanted a divorce.

These kindreds have entered history by the names of their ‘founder’, whose first name was applied by later genealogists as a family name for
an age when such things were unknown. Thus, the Carolingians are Charlemagne’s descendants, while the Liudolfinger (in turn ancestors of the Ottonians) are traced from Liudolf, who founded Gandersheim abbey in the ninth century (see
pp. 82
and
86
). Kindreds were indeed distinguished by common naming patterns – all the males in the Salian family were called Conrad or Henry.
²⁹
Nonetheless, kindreds in fact operated through consanguinity and not patrilinear descent. Property could be bequeathed to any legitimate son or brother or even to more distant relations. Individual prestige, reputation and influence were all more important than immediate descent, though the latter was certainly important amongst royalty. There was little sense of an ancestral home, as royal service required the elite to move throughout the Frankish realm, while conquests and royal gifts gave them land scattered across wide areas.

The word ‘family’ (
familia
) was not determined primarily by blood or marriage ties before the twelfth century. Instead, it was most frequently used to denote the unfree workers and others economically dependent on a manor for whom the lord was legally responsible.
³⁰
Monogamous marriage was already a church ideal by the ninth century and praised as an indissoluble union of two consenting adults. Changes in the twelfth century made it a sacrament requiring clerical involvement to be legally binding and therefore easier for the authorities to regulate. The proportion of the population married officially in church remained small prior to a renewed emphasis on marriage as the basis for a godly household following the Reformation. It was at this point that the German word
Familie
gained common currency to denote the nucleated family of parents and children as the social ideal.

The changing attitudes towards marriage reflected its growing social and political importance. More distinct patrilineal families emerged around 1000, as tracing a single line of descent through fathers and sons assumed greater significance than consanguinity. This process took at least two more centuries to complete. Matrilineal descent remained significant into the twelfth century. For example, the chronicler Wipo regarded Henry III’s connections through his mother to Charlemagne as more significant than his more immediate relationship to his father, Conrad II. Likewise, it was politically important for Conrad III to be able to demonstrate ties to the former Salian line of kings through his mother Agnes, daughter of Henry IV. Consanguinity also
served aristocratic political interests into the late twelfth century. Brothers and sisters could be pulled from church careers and redeployed in the wider interests of the kindred to breed sufficient heirs when required. In an age of deficient medicine and the frequent violent premature death of males, this made perfect evolutionary sense. The larger group had better overall survival chances than narrower strategies based on nucleated families.
³¹

Frederick II used the expression ‘House of Staufer’ (
domus Stoffensis
) only once (1247) in over two thousand surviving documents.
³²
However, things were already beginning to shift by then and cooperation between siblings declined noticeably from the 1230s. While kindreds had the advantage of numbers, they often suffered from indiscipline as each member pursued his own ambitions. Internal rivalries could be destructive, as the Carolingians’ civil wars demonstrated from the 840s. Discipline could be imposed through subordinating individual interests to an ideal of the family as dynasty transcending the generations. This entailed acceptance of a stricter hierarchy of loyalties through a culture of self-restraint and deference to a paterfamilias. Patrilinealism and the seniority of the firstborn son provided a way to regulate subordination and determine the options each family member would be allowed to pursue. This explains the continued importance of the imperial church in providing suitable accommodation for the aristocracy’s unmarried children. Paternalism was supposed to compensate for individuals’ self-sacrifice as the senior head of the family employed his influence and connections to safeguard the material well-being and status of junior family members.