Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (45 page)

One sign of the spread of dynasticism was how twelfth-and thirteenth-century chroniclers began tracing royal genealogies to structure their accounts. The line of Saxon aristocrats ruling as kings after 919 was dubbed Ottonians from the succession of three Ottos by 1002. Early twelfth-century chroniclers named the next line of kings as the Salians (
reges Salici
) from their origins amongst the
Salfranken
, the Franks living in the Rhineland, once forming the western part of the original Franconia, which was distinguished through its use of Salic law. The family were already known locally as the Wormsers by 982 after their main possessions in the diocese of Worms.
³³

Association of family and place was partly a reflection of much wider trends. The growth in population since the eleventh century
encouraged the use of more stable ‘family’ names to help identify people more easily. Another factor was a significant reduction in the diversity of first names after about 1100 as parents chose from a fairly restricted repertoire of those of well-known saints and monarchs. The transition from one to two names was completed between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries amongst the urban population and adopted by the early fifteenth century in the countryside. Initially, individuals took either their father’s or mother’s first name as their surname, but increasingly geographic origins or occupation were used instead.
³⁴
Aristocrats and nobles were always associated with place. Common patronage of monasteries already provided a focal point for kindreds, serving as a common burial place and way to preserve collective memory. The Salians initially used Worms Cathedral before shifting to Speyer, which they expanded after 1024 with the accession of their first Holy Roman emperor, Conrad II. Swabian nobles established family monasteries after the mid-eleventh century, followed by those in Bavaria around fifty years later.

The cause of ‘church liberty’ weakened some of these associations during the later eleventh century, while the practice of replacing earth and timber castles with more durable and expensive stone constructions provided alternative, secular sites.
³⁵
Count Lothar, the future Lothar III, was known as von Supplinburg after his castle in Saxony. The Staufers derived their name from the Hohenstaufen castle built in 1079 to consolidate their new position as dukes of Swabia. The Habsburgs assumed their name around 1090 from their castle Habichtsburg built about seventy years earlier in what is now the Swiss canton of Aargau. Over time, these locations assumed almost mystical status as ancestral homes, though by the end of the Empire few nobles could actually trace such long lineages directly.

PLACE

Boundaries

The assumption of a castle or town name to identify a family linked its members with a specific location. However, people also identified with larger geographical areas. These were always human constructs, as
there is nothing ‘natural’ about frontiers. The choice of markers like rivers or mountain ranges always involved the demarcation of power and the desire to control resources, as well as emotional attachment and feelings that can affect someone who has left a place or perhaps never even been there.
³⁶
Place can assume significance beyond material considerations, notably through identification as a holy site. Size is not predetermined as it depends on how far the balance between population and space is socially and politically viable. Exactly how much space a community feels is justified depends on not only what they actually require, but how much they feel entitled to and can maintain without too much cost.

As
Chapter 4
has indicated, the Empire’s external and internal boundaries changed considerably across its history. The internal changes were probably more significant than the external expansion and contraction, since they reflected how power and identity became increasingly concentrated in more numerous hierarchically ordered and territorially bounded units. Whereas medieval travellers encountered the Empire as they moved between the fixed points of human settlement, those during the eighteenth century experienced it as they crossed clear internal boundaries marked by customs posts and sentry boxes.

To an extent this simply reflected broader European trends. Frontiers remained open transitional zones into the thirteenth century, which allowed inhabitants to identify with powers either side according to circumstances. Given the absence of mutually recognized sovereignty, central authorities viewed frontiers as one-sided limits where their own power finished without paying too much attention to arrangements beyond.
³⁷

Hierarchy mattered more politically than geographical boundaries. Authority was defined as chains of vassalage primarily linking people rather than places. This reflects the higher value placed on controlling people rather than land, which remained relatively plentiful into the eleventh century. Without machinery, command over people represented the only way to exploit land. Huge areas of forest, marsh and unfertile upland remained largely uninhabited into the eleventh century and often beyond.

Nonetheless, people were already associated with specific places by the ninth century. The Lombards believed their name derived from Wotan, but their control of the Po valley since the late sixth century
gave that region its lasting designation as Lombardy. The Pomeranians were the ‘People from the Sea’ whose presence named the southern Baltic shore between the Elbe and Oder rivers. Likewise, all the major German regions derive their names from association with a tribal identity around 800: Bavaria, Franconia, Frisia, Swabia, Saxony, Swabia and Thuringia. Their inhabitants distinguished both ethnic and political (jurisdictional) boundaries by the tenth century, with the latter being more important in marking identity.
³⁸

Community

Identification with these larger units remained relatively weak into the late Middle Ages, at least outside the elites, whereas attachment to smaller communities was already strong much earlier. Pre-modern Europe contained many communities, both real and imagined, and varying in size from Christendom through kingdoms, towns, villages to monasteries, manors and castles.
³⁹
Some communities were itinerant, but most were defined through the permanent concentration of people in a specific place.

Even isolated communities were connected somehow to others, so that all should be considered porous rather than fully closed. Nonetheless, common needs and activities focused collective identity. Many communities had an economic function, such as the manors of the early Middle Ages, or the towns of Italy and those founded in Germany from the eleventh century as market centres. Most forms of production required people to work together. Communal living brought numerous practical problems requiring people to collaborate; for example, fire safety or maintenance of drainage ditches. Christian worship was a communal activity. Already in the eighth century the church fostered the belief that individual sins endangered the wider community.
⁴⁰
Other theological developments strengthened this, notably the concept of purgatory, which required the living to pray to speed the passage of souls to heaven. The development of more robust parish structures by the twelfth century provided a framework to engage the community in the maintenance of their church and participation in its activities. The pace accelerated considerably with the Reformation, which sharpened the distinctiveness of local religious practices, particularly in Germany, where different confessional groups often lived in relative proximity.
The form of rituals, use of prayer, internal decoration of churches and the timing and sound of their bells all became important markers of community.

Identity was expressed through symbols, flags, coats of arms and civic colours, adopted with increasing elaboration from the high Middle Ages. Early chronicles are largely by clerics recounting the deeds of kings with varying levels of approval. However, it was common by the eleventh century for monks to compile lists of abbots or bishops to demonstrate the continuity and purity of local religious practice. They were joined by secular chroniclers during the later Middle Ages who traced the origins of their home town, often in considerable detail. Most were commoners, but they proclaimed the ‘nobility’ of their own town, boasting a lineage equal to that of any aristocrat. Other, more personal documents also testify to individuals’ identification with specific places, such as nuns writing for the edification of their community, or Jewish memory books of local martyrs.
⁴¹

The growing size and density of settlements also helped sharpen their identities, as did the way they became embedded in wider political jurisdictions. Most of the Empire’s settlements had acquired some form of self-government by the high Middle Ages. Pressure on resources contributed to sharper internal and external demarcation. Fences and walls served practical defensive purposes, but also marked each community’s outer extent and the internal subdivision of its assets. These changes were accompanied by new conceptions of property, distinguishing that owned collectively from that belonging to individuals.
⁴²

Individuals’ identity followed the generally hierarchical structure of all social, political and religious organization in the Empire. Each person had multiple identities. Exactly what these meant cannot be determined except in the rare cases where we have personal testimony, but their general shape can be discerned. There were the familial and social identities already discussed. Larger towns had craft guilds, lay spiritual fraternities and neighbourhoods all providing more local foci for identity within the wider sense of community. Horizontal solidarity was more prominent in some circumstances, such as within guilds engaged in friendly competition in civic sports, or during periods of political or economic tension. However, many communal activities were also designed to stress internal hierarchies, such as the social distinctions displayed in seating arrangements in churches, or through the
processional order employed during religious festivals. Community might be celebrated as a special homely place (
Heimat
) offering warmth, security, familiarity and rootedness, but it was not open to everyone on equal terms. Merely being born in a specific place did not automatically guarantee full membership, since this often rested on the kind of privileges associated with the social Estates. Possession of such privileges was no guarantee of their continued enjoyment, since membership of a community also depended on observing its rules.
⁴³

Multilayered Identities

Higher authorities viewed communal identity with ambivalence. Internal solidarity could prompt a community to combine against its lord, such as the German episcopal towns of Bremen and Cologne, which threw off their bishops’ jurisdiction during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, it also enhanced cohesion and enabled communities to discharge their obligations, such as providing taxes or soldiers. Communal identity coalesced during the twelfth century as other spatial distinctions sharpened in the Empire through the gradual territorialization of lordly jurisdictions.

This process will be explored at greater length later (
pp. 365–77
), but for now it is important to note that only one side of it usually receives attention in histories of the Empire. The demarcation of clearer territorial jurisdictions indeed fragmented power, yet this was never solely a centrifugal process inevitably replacing the Empire with smaller, sovereign principalities after 1806. Rather, the demarcation of clearer jurisdictions within the Empire was accompanied by their greater integration within a common legal and political framework.

The Empire’s significance is demonstrated by how its internal political hierarchy enabled people to relate themselves and their community to their wider environment. Writing in the early eleventh century, Hermann the Lame used the first-person plural ‘our’ for his own abbey in relation to others in the region, for his fellow Swabians when dealing with the rest of the Empire, and for Germans in discussing interaction with outsiders.
⁴⁴
The monks who compiled lists of local bishops and abbots often combined these with parallel sequences of emperors, increasingly using both to write histories of their diocese as part of the Empire (See
Plate 16
).
⁴⁵
The growing clarity of secular jurisdictions and their
increasing significance for daily life provided another focus that displaced attachment to the larger, less clear, old ‘tribal’ areas as a secondary, more distant regional identity.

Secular jurisdictions were increasingly territorialized in the sense that specific powers and prerogatives came to rest in hereditary rule over an area and its inhabitants. The Franks already had a sense of
patria
as their Christian kingdom providing a common homeland for distinct groups of inhabitants.
⁴⁶
This persisted in a general sense throughout the Middle Ages, but assumed a new form during the sixteenth century as territorial identities sharpened rapidly. The growing use of
patria
for territory helped transform the idea of
terra
(territory) from a bundle of sometimes disparate possessions held by a common ruler into a distinct and geographically bounded entity. All levels of society engaged in this, because all used a similar language of the ‘common good’ to claim the moral high ground when expressing their objectives (see
pp. 498–503
). Confessionalization reinforced this by associating each German territory with a specific form of Christianity, considerably widening the earlier regnal identity built around saints patronized by the ruling family to include other specific religious practices. Humanist scholars recovered or invented tribal identities to buttress what were in fact often spatially much smaller territorial identities. For example, writers serving the Hohenzollerns tried to appropriate the Teutonic past as a way of fostering an anti-Polish Prussian identity.
⁴⁷
Territorial coats of arms and army uniforms provided further markers during the eighteenth century.