Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (46 page)

The rapid development of cartography from the fifteenth century made a profound impact by providing a ready image of territorially defined political power. Maps now showed political boundaries as well as natural features and towns. The members of the House of Savoy celebrated its elevation to ducal rank in 1416 with a huge cake in the shape of their territory.
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Maps became increasingly detailed as cartographers struggled to meet their governments’ desire to survey and quantify. From 1763 to 1787 the Austrian army prepared a 5,400-sheet map of all Habsburg territory. Although this was never published, the government issued a single-sheet map to all primary schools in 1781.
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Such maps greatly influenced how the Empire appeared in later historical atlases. Nothing underscores the nineteenth-century interpretation
more clearly: the Empire is a multicoloured patchwork of dynastic territories compared to the solid blocks of colour used for other, supposedly more centralized states. Yet most maps produced prior to 1806 showed the Empire with clear outer boundaries divided into the Kreise, its official regional subdivisions. Territories were often named and sometimes also marked, but did not dominate. Written descriptions followed these conventions.
⁵⁰
The Empire remained a common fatherland composed of numerous, lesser homelands.

6

Nation

OF THE GERMAN NATION

Political Influences

Italians and Burgundians identified with the Empire to varying degrees, but only the Germans associated it with their nation. Much has been made of the addition of the words ‘of the German Nation’ to the title ‘Holy Roman Empire’.
¹
Appearing in 1474, this combination was used more frequently after 1512 without becoming the Empire’s official title – despite numerous later claims to the contrary. Protestants were far more likely than Catholics to add ‘of the German Nation’ when discussing the Empire, but even their use was inconsistent. Only one in nine official documents issued after 1560 included any reference to Germany, usually referring simply to ‘the Empire’.

This chapter argues that the absence of a single political centre in the Empire complicated the definition of German national identity, encouraging several, often antagonistic versions of Germanness by the eighteenth century. This contributed to the richness of German identity, which was not restricted by linguistic or artistic criteria but instead was defined primarily politically. Later sections explore how the Empire was represented symbolically and how far its other, non-German-speaking inhabitants identified with it, as well as demonstrating the continued strength of older, broader political identities relative to narrower, more essentialist concepts of nationalism emerging around 1800.

The subsequent description of the Empire as simply ‘Germany’ stems from attempts to trace German history in national terms. Various national birthdays have been suggested, with the events surrounding
the first partition of the Carolingian realm being the favourite. The chronicler Nithard recorded the Strasbourg oath sworn by Carolingian nobles in 842 in both Old High German and Old French versions. The tripartite division (East Francia, West Francia, Lotharingia) enacted the following year through the Treaty of Verdun appears to confirm the end of Charlemagne’s Empire and its replacement by French and German kingdoms (
Map 2
). Other historians favour the Treaty of Mersen from 870 since this redrew the map in a more modern form by dividing most of Lotharingia between the East and West Frankish kingdoms. The extinction of the eastern Carolingians and their replacement in 919 by the Ottonians was also interpreted later as the true birth of the German monarchy. In this narrative, Otto I’s coronation in 962 becomes the start of an entirely new, greater German empire.
²

All these claims work by projecting later developments deep into the past. For example, Louis the Pious’s son Louis II, who ruled East Francia after 843, only received the sobriquet ‘the German’ in Heinrich von Bünau’s history of the Empire published in 1739.
³
Louis II was certainly known to contemporaries as
rex Germaniae
(king of Germany) while his brother Charles ‘the Bald’ was
rex Galliae
(king of Gaul), but it is unclear what these meant beyond distinguishing different parts of what many believed was still a common Frankish realm. The West Frankish king Lothar, the penultimate western Carolingian, attacked Aachen in the summer of 978. Otto II and his wife only just managed to escape. Lothar celebrated his coup by having the imperial eagle on the palace roof turned to face east instead of west. Writers either side of the Rhine interpreted this in partisan terms, displaying a sense of cultural differences, but nonetheless still focusing these on ‘their’ king in the form of the regnal identities discussed in the previous chapter.
⁴
The sense of difference did not end references to a broader Frankish heritage, which was invoked by emperors into the twelfth century and remained part of most discussions of the Empire’s identity long after that.

The terms
Germani
(Germans) and
Teutonici
(Teutons) were not original self-designations, but labels applied by outsiders to the inhabitants of what later became known as Germany. The Romans used
Germani
to refer to all those northern peoples they did not want to conquer. The term gained renewed currency through its employment by (Latin-trained) missionaries entering this area from the seventh
century. Missionaries also spread the use of the term
Teutonici
, derived from
lingua Theodisca
, which in turn stemmed from the Old German
thiot
, meaning ‘people’; hence those who spoke a local vernacular rather than Latin. In reality, the inhabitants spoke a variety of Indo-European languages, while they saw themselves as distinct tribes or peoples.
⁵
By then, western writers were also employing the term
Alemanni
from the name of the tribe closest to them. In time, this evolved into the French and Spanish words for Germany (
Allemagne
,
Alemania
), while the Alemanni themselves became ‘Swabians’.

The renewed engagement of northerners in Italian affairs from the mid-tenth century, after around 60 years’ relative absence, embedded these designations. By 1000, Italians were likely to generalize all northerners as
Teutonici
. The Ottonians appear to have embraced the label and carried it back over the Alps where it contributed to the gradual use of the term
regnum teutonicorum
.
⁶
The concept was politically expedient, enabling both the Ottonians and their Salian successors to disarm potential criticism that they were not really Carolingian Franks by presenting themselves as rulers of all peoples inhabiting the realm north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. To them, the ‘German kingdom’ was not synonymous with the Empire, which remained greater and included other kingdoms in Italy, Burgundy and Bohemia. The reduction of the Empire to Germany came from the Salians’ papal opponents, as Gregory VII sought to belittle Henry IV by reducing him to merely a German king. Without abandoning claims to be emperors of a far greater realm, both the later Salians and the Staufers found identification with Germany also useful in countering papal actions. The ‘German’ king and his subjects were equal sufferers at the hands of a perfidious pope whose excommunication and interdict affected them all. This helps explain why John XXII went a step further in his attempts to belittle Louis IV by calling him ‘the Bavarian’.

The multicentred character of imperial governance inhibited the kind of focused regnal identities forming around English, French, Polish or Hungarian monarchs. Henry II and Charlemagne were canonized in 1146 and 1165 respectively without either of them gaining universal recognition as German or imperial patron saints. Writers in the Empire favoured strength in numbers, with the Empire’s numerous saints and political centres as its distinguishing characteristic. Nonetheless, the wider sense of the Empire continued to become more closely associated
with German identity after 1250. This requires qualification before proceeding, since it should not be misconstrued as arguing there was a single, wider ‘Germanic’ civilization based either politically on the Empire or on alleged commonalities of language, law or economic forms.
⁷

It is also a paradox that the decades between 1251 and 1311, when German kings were not crowned emperors, were those of the growing association between the Empire and German identity. The Staufers’ demise stimulated discussions of German identity at a time when it was also becoming clearer that Europe was subdividing into kingdoms each associated with a distinct people.
⁸
Writers were concerned that Germans should not lose imperial prestige while their kings were unwilling or unable to be crowned emperor. What later generations interpreted as weakness actually strengthened the ideological associations between German identity and the Empire. A relatively distant king-emperor could be attractive as a monarch who did not impose heavy burdens on his subjects. The absence of a single, stable political core freed the monarchy from being tied to any one part of Germany, enabling all regions to identify with it. This explains the growing interest in ideas of imperial translation of the Empire as inheritor of ancient Rome, ideas that were disentangled from papal critique and employed to assert that Germans were distinct from Europeans through their association with the imperial title and its pan-Christian mission. These discussions already elaborated all the tropes that found full expression two centuries later in Humanist writings: Germans demonstrated their virtues through their martial prowess, amply justifying their claim to be Christendom’s defenders. In this way, the concept of imperial translation became the Empire’s myth of origins, substituting for the more focused stories elsewhere, like the myths around the Goths in Sweden or the Sarmatians in Poland.

Language

Association with the Empire defined ‘Germany’ and ‘German identity’ politically, enabling both to continue including peoples of other languages and cultures. Likewise, electoral status made the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier all Germans despite their possessions being located in what was, historically, ancient Gaul. The Humanist Sebas
tian Münster’s
Cosmographia
, published in Basel in 1544, presented a historical-geographical description of Germany in which the word
Teütschland
was synonymous throughout with the Empire regardless of the language on the ground. Johann Jacob Moser argued that French-and Italian-speaking Savoy ‘belongs to Germany’ through its incorporation within the German kingdom dating back to 1361, and he also used ‘German’ as shorthand for imperial.
⁹

Germany remained a land of many languages, while political and linguistic boundaries never aligned. Some ninth-century texts were written in Frankish, like the Fulda translation of the Gospel that became the basis of the 6,000-line
Heiland
poem recounting Jesus’s life in Old Saxon. Nonetheless, Latin remained the dominant written language until the emergence of Middle High German in the twelfth century. Eastward migration and conquest greatly complicated matters, with the number of dialects identified subsequently rising from 12 between 1150 and 1250 to 18 across the following 250 years. Notably, the spread of New High German northwards from southern Germany after 1350 displaced northern Low German, which developed subsequently in the north-west as Dutch, a word itself of course deriving from
Deutsch
.
¹⁰

The linkage between Germany and the Empire was reinforced by the gradual displacement of Latin by German as an administrative language from the thirteenth century, about two centuries before English replaced either Latin or French for political and administrative communication in England.
¹¹
The public peace proclaimed at Mainz in 1235 was the first significant constitutional document issued for the entire Empire in German. By 1300 German was increasingly used for charters, reflecting the larger number of laity holding office rather than clergy proficient in Latin. German accounted for half the documents produced by the Upper Bavarian chancellery across the first 25 years after its adoption in 1290. The use of Latin was reduced to technical and legal terms, except in Habsburg administration, where it continued to be used to communicate with Hungarians for the next four centuries. The administrative use of German helped to standardize it well ahead of the language reforms promoted by eighteenth-century intellectuals. The numerous lordly and civic authorities between Nuremberg, Eger, Würzburg and Regensburg began corresponding in a common, south German form after the mid-fourteenth century. This was adopted
by the imperial chancellery in 1464 and thereafter by territorial governments like that of electoral Saxony. The advent of printing around 1450 accelerated this, because imperial institutions rapidly exploited the new media to distribute laws, decisions and information across the Empire. Luther’s famous German Bible had to be retranslated into Low German to reach Baltic coast readers, but the imperial chancellery style was already adopted by north German territorial administrations around 1500 thanks to their communication with the Reichstag and other institutions. This contrasts with the problems of standardizing Italian. Despite the identification of the Tuscan dialect with Italian high culture since the Renaissance and its subsequent dissemination through printed literature, it failed to establish itself as the predominant form until official measures imposed after Italian unification in 1861.