Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (47 page)

Other languages in the Empire withered through failing to establish a written form. Prussian, Kashubian and Polabian all died out by 1700, though Sorbian continues to the present day thanks to its use by the Lusatian Estates, which adopted it as the official language of Protestant education in their territory. Romansh disappeared in the Vorarlberg, but survived in neighbouring Rhetia. Likewise, Slovene died out in Styria, but developed a written form in parts of Hungary, as had Yiddish already much earlier. Czech was written from the thirteenth century and thrived from the 1390s thanks to its use in imperial administration under the Luxembourgs and subsequent place within Hussitism. Thus, while German was linked to the Empire, the Empire itself was multilingual. The Golden Bull of 1356 specified German, Latin, Upper Italian and Czech as imperial administrative languages. The imperial chancellery used the language of the intended recipients from about 1370. Although German became the primary language after 1620, the Reichshofrat continued using Italian in its dealings with imperial Italy.
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Language was already politically sensitive before the Empire standardized official communication. Migration since the twelfth century sharpened language and ethnicity as factors shaping identity and demarcating access to resources in the areas of recent western settlement beyond the Elbe. Subsequent population growth added pressure by the 1320s when north German towns like Brunswick revised their guild regulations to exclude Wends and other non-German speakers.
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These distinctions continued to matter in daily life in these regions, but dissipated as use of the Slavic languages decreased.

Culture

It was not until the ‘culture wars’ of the high Renaissance that language moved closer to its modern role as a key determinant of national identity. Renewed tensions with the papacy around 1400 contributed to this, as did the renegotiation of imperial-papal relations through the concordats of the later fifteenth century (see
pp. 72–3
). Critiques of papal corruption blended with the interests of Humanists in articulating national origins and identity, because words and other outward manifestations like clothing were regarded as indicative of inner morality and character. Tropes that had already appeared in the thirteenth century emerged now in more virulent form. German was supposedly the most ancient and purest language and a general marker of cultural superiority over the
Welsch
; this was a blanket pejorative term for all ‘Latin’ foreigners, chiefly French and Italians, but also including on occasion Poles, Hungarians and others.

Criticism of cultural and sartorial values was an expression of deeper anxieties stirred by greater social mobility and the perceived erosion of the status distinctions delineating corporate groups. These pressures were most acute in towns. One manifestation was the series of sumptuary laws regulating clothing, such as that issued in Leipzig in 1452 which restricted the use of styles and fabrics in an attempt to stop servants being mistaken for masters. Another ordinance, from 1431, targeted an unauthorized group counterculture by forbidding journeymen to wear shoes of a common distinctive colour.
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Efforts to regulate appearance stimulated the discussion of whether there was – or should be – a distinctive national dress. Conrad Celtis called for imperial legislation to encourage a more ‘German’ appearance. Germans allegedly wore smart, restrained and simple clothes reflecting their honesty and integrity. By contrast, the
Welsch
were slovenly and promiscuous, especially – of course – their women, who sported low-cut, garish dresses, jewellery and ridiculous hairstyles. Hans Weigel’s illustrated
Costume Book
published in 1577 depicted a soberly dressed woman from Metz in contrast to a brightly attired French woman in a deliberate attempt to demonstrate that Metz was still ‘German’ despite having been captured by France in 1552 (see
Plate 18
).

The discussion of national costume reveals the difficulties that Germans encountered in trying to define their identity through culture and
ethnicity. Intellectuals could not agree whether they should don allegedly authentic Germanic garb or current fashions more in line with their present needs. In short, there was no actual national dress. As the Leipzig city council remarked in 1595, ‘the clothes the people of the German nation wear almost always change from one year to the next’.
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The same was true for other aspects of culture like painting, music, literature and architecture, all of which exhibited regional more than national characteristics. Beyond trumpeting the invention of printing as the Germans’ gift to humanity, there was little else intellectuals agreed on as distinctly national about German culture.
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All these efforts missed the point. It was the Empire’s inclusive diversity that made it distinctive and enabled its numerous inhabitants to identify with it.

Nowhere is this clearer than in attitudes to German-speakers beyond the Empire. In early modernity there was a wider German-speaking cultural community, which extended along the Baltic shore through Polish Prussia and Courland into Estonia and beyond. However, none of these peoples were considered politically German, despite some of them living in places once associated with the Empire that in no way was considered a ‘Greater Germany’. The Baltic Germans likewise found it easier and more expedient to identify with their home province, while those in Poland regarded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as guarantor of their own identity and rights.
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Humanism

The Humanist discussion of national identity raised consciousness of the distinction between the Empire’s traditional transnational character and its more specific association with Germany. Central to this debate was the rediscovery of Tacitus’s
Germania
, written in AD 98. Few in the Empire had read it before a manuscript copy was taken to Rome in 1451 and then rapidly disseminated through Humanist intellectual exchange. A Latin printed edition appeared in 1470, followed by a German translation in 1526. The book’s impact was magnified by the dearth of information on the early Germans. Tacitus in fact never visited Germania, but wrote an informed, fairly even-handed description of the German tribes, including the sensational story of Arminius (Hermann), who defeated Quinctilius Varus’s Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9.
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Like all sophisticated texts,
Germania
could be read in multiple ways. Italian Humanists seized on Tacitus’s description of German vices of excessive eating and drinking as corroborating existing stereotypes. The German response was mixed. One strand took an anti-Roman course, exemplified by Ulrich von Hutten, who played on Tacitus’ depiction of Germans as noble savages defeating decadent Romans in his own anti-papal polemics of the early sixteenth century. Combined with those advocating linguistic and cultural purity, this line of argument rapidly developed the trend to articulate a distinct German national identity in opposition to similar identities voiced elsewhere in Europe. The experience of the church council at Constance (1414–18) already fostered a sense of a
Germania nacio
, which grew as a rallying cry against both papal tax demands and the Ottoman threat. The Reformation added impetus, but Hutten’s critique was much broader than Luther’s better-known
Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation
(1520), which was limited to church reform.
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These discussions made a lasting impact through providing concepts and images to express the new national idea. The female figure of Germania had appeared as a captive Amazon on Roman coins, but was reinvented by Maximilian I ‘as mother of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ in the early sixteenth century. She remained the embodiment of the Empire as virtuous and pacific, reappearing as a symbol of Liberty during the 1848 Revolution before becoming militarized as a bloodthirsty Fury in the late nineteenth century.
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Meanwhile, thanks to Tacitus, German Humanists were able to remind their Italian counterparts that the Romans had never conquered Germany, whereas the Germans had plundered Rome. The coincidence of this discussion with the renewed sack of that city by Charles V’s army in 1527 seemed to underscore their point, but it was not until 1643 that Hermann Conring drew the full, logical conclusions and rejected any connection between Rome and the Empire, arguing that the ancient Roman empire had collapsed long before Charlemagne was crowned emperor. However, for most people Tacitus simply proved the long-standing argument of imperial translation that the Germans, as conquerors of Rome, were its worthy imperial successors.

These arguments caused considerable problems for Protestants, who realized that the logic of anti-Romanism opened them to charges of being unpatriotic. The Roman Catholic Humanist Johannes Cochlaeus
directly accused Luther of this, because his depiction of the pope as Anti-Christ challenged the legitimacy of imperial rule and its glorious tradition of defending the church. The Protestant theologian Philipp Melanchthon and the historian Johannes Schleiden responded by explicitly embracing imperial translation to support their calls for the emperor to renew the church by embracing the Reformation. The idealization of medieval emperors continued to serve Protestant agendas into the mid-seventeenth century by implying criticism of the current Habsburg emperors as beholden to the pope. In short, the Empire was too much part of Protestant Germans’ identity to be jettisoned in their break with Rome. Instead, Protestant intellectuals and princes tried to appropriate ‘German’ language and culture as their own and to present Catholics as unpatriotic. In practice, their efforts fell far short of what later generations expected of true Germans. The Fruitful Society (
Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft
), established in 1617, was the most famous of these national cultural endeavours. Although dedicated to the purity of the German language, it accepted Scots, Swedes, Italians and others as members and published most of its works in Latin.
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German Freedom

Mutual accusations of lack of patriotism peaked during the Thirty Years War, with Protestants accusing Catholics of selling the Empire to Spanish Jesuits and the pope, while Catholics blamed Protestants for inviting in Danish, Swedish and French invaders. The fact that both sides claimed to be upholding the imperial constitution drew attention to this as a possible bridge between them. The funeral sermon for Archbishop-Elector Anselm Casimir of Mainz in 1647 noted that it would have been politically advantageous for him to have accepted an alliance offer from France, yet he had remained steadfastly loyal to the emperor and Empire. The elector’s Lutheran neighbour, the landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt, praised him as a ‘true patriot’ for his efforts at the Westphalian peace congress to persuade Catholic hardliners to offer Protestants more acceptable terms to end the war.
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While it might require modification, all believed the constitution offered the best protection for their ‘German freedom’. This was broadly similar to other aristocratic expressions of freedom such as Polish and Hungarian ‘liberty’, ‘free-born Englishmen’ and
la liberté de la France
. All combined demands for autonomy with claims to participate in politics. Those constituting the political ‘nation’ should be free to pursue their lives without undue royal interference, yet were entitled to share government with the king. There were other concepts of freedom, but it would be wrong to divide these into rival ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ forms.
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Neither was inherently more progressive or democratic. Civic freedom often led to oligarchy, while supposedly ‘aristocratic’ arguments could promote republican government (see
pp. 519–22
,
533–62
and
594–602
). Symbols and arguments remained open to a variety of uses prior to the emergence of a more rigid left–right ideological spectrum after the French Revolution of 1789.

The Humanist articulation of German identity extrapolated ‘liberties’ from Tacitus’s account of the Germans as an unconquered, free people. The parallel process of imperial reform provided a new institutional framework to embed these into the imperial constitution. Crucially, this entailed that German freedom depended on belonging to the Empire rather than emancipation from it. This was a major factor blunting any potential for Protestantism to become a separatist political movement. Furthermore, it ensured that freedom was expressed as specific
liberties
, not uniform, equal and universal
Liberty
. Finally, it bound together the imperial Estates and the corporate social groups, since all were mutually dependent in maintaining the Empire as the collective guarantor of their own special status.

It was this combination that made German freedom distinct from its equivalents in other countries, where writers claimed or invented broader underlying ‘common’ liberties, such as ‘national law’ (
ius patrium
) in France or ‘the common custom of the realm’ emerging in early seventeenth-century England. Some German writers embraced elements of this, like Conring in the early seventeenth century, or the historian Jacob Paul von Gundling around one hundred years later. However, they still inverted the standard pattern: rather than championing an underlying set of universal freedoms, they celebrated the Empire as an overarching system protecting numerous local and specific liberties. To most Germans, a universal system of freedoms was equated with tyranny since it threatened their cherished distinctiveness.
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