Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (49 page)

Images of the emperor diverged under the Habsburgs. Their status as dynasts ruling their own extensive hereditary possessions was represented in magnificent portraits showing them generally full length, but almost always alone, except for collective family portraits. When
shown in their imperial role they were surrounded by the electors or representatives of all the imperial Estates.
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The political changes are further reflected in attempts to fix the increasingly complex status hierarchy in a new device known as the
Quaternionen
, showing the imperial Estates as figures or heraldic devices and first appearing in a fresco created in Frankfurt for Sigismund around 1414. Written descriptions soon spread, followed by printed engravings from the mid-fifteenth century that generally displayed the Estates against a background of a black double eagle. The electors were either omitted or shown as a rank of seven figures at the top. The other status groups followed in sequence below: dukes, margraves, landgraves, burgraves, counts, lords, knights, imperial cities, villages and peasants (see
Plate 19
). The
Quaternionen
were always schematic. There were invariably more in reality than the four members displayed for each group, while the locations presented as villages and peasants were often actually additional towns. Nonetheless, these images remained very popular until about 1600 when they were displaced by more accurate information on the actual composition of the imperial Estates, especially the printed lists of those summoned to the Reichstag, as well as by published maps and descriptions of the Empire.
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Symbolic innovation declined after the mid-sixteenth century, again reflecting the end of imperial reform and the broadly stable character of the Empire’s constitution thereafter. The triumphal arches used by Maximilian II (1570) and Matthias (1612) for their entries into Nuremberg were virtually identical to that erected for Charles V in 1541.
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The scale and scope of artistic patronage certainly broadened under Rudolf II, but much of it was too highbrow and esoteric to serve as effective propaganda. The most enduring creation was a heightened image of the emperor as victorious conqueror of the Turks and defender of the peace, an image that returned with the renewed wars against the Ottomans in the later seventeenth century.
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Habsburg imperial imagery became more overtly Catholic around 1600, leaving no doubt of the emperor’s own faith. However, Ferdinand III already sought to recover the more neutral, cross-confessional position that had been occupied by his predecessors in the mid to late sixteenth century, presenting himself as Solomon symbolizing wisdom and virtue rather than zealotry. Piety was increasingly turned outwards against external enemies, notably Louis XIV, who was criticized as disturbing Christendom’s peace in contrast to the emperor as guarantor of order. Ferdinand
also embraced the new artistic forms associated with the baroque, notably opera, and displayed some talent as a musician and composer himself. However, these innovations increasingly reflected changing taste and Habsburg dynastic objectives but produced no new representations of the Empire.

Locations

Places also acquired symbolic importance through events like royal elections, coronations and assemblies, as well as more permanently as palaces or tombs. It was characteristic of the Empire’s political order that it used multiple locations rather than a single capital. The number of places with imperial associations grew over time, especially with the changes of ruling dynasty into early modernity since each royal family had a different geographical power base. Although some locations fell out of use, many never lost their significance entirely, while others like monasteries or towns unilaterally expressed their attachment to the Empire through furnishing ‘emperor’s halls’ (
Kaisersäle
) and imperial portrait galleries.

Locations of symbolic importance were used throughout the Empire, but the preference for Germany was already obvious under the Carolingians. Aachen in the extreme west of Germany was the favoured royal palace and place of royal coronations for most of the Middle Ages. Charlemagne’s stone throne, as well as the rather more portable Imperial Bible and St Stephen’s Purse, were stored here, while the rest of the insignia travelled with the emperor. After the renewed civil wars around 1100, Henry V stored the insignia in his strong castle of Trifels in the Palatinate. They resumed their travels under the Staufers, before being entrusted to the Cistercian monks at Eussertal monastery until 1273 when they were scattered to various castles except for coronations. The move to more territorially based imperial rule under Charles IV was reflected in the concentration of the insignia, first in St Vitus Cathedral in Prague and then in the Karlstein castle between 1356 and 1421. The Hussite insurrection prompted their removal to Nuremberg, which remained the official repository until the French Revolutionary Wars.

The absence of a permanent capital discouraged the construction of the kind of representational buildings found in other European
monarchies.
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An itinerant emperor needed lots of palaces and could not invest heavily in a single site. Some medieval construction was nevertheless very impressive. Charlemagne and Otto III commissioned deliberately imposing buildings at Aachen, while the Ottonians developed Goslar and the Salians constructed Speyer’s huge cathedral as their royal tomb. The difference only really became noticeable in early modernity when other monarchies built lavish palaces like the Escorial in Spain and Versailles in France or, in Russia’s case, an entirely new capital at St Petersburg. The contrast grew more obvious with the proliferation of fashionable new princely residences at Ludwigsburg, Herrenhausen, Nymphenburg, and elsewhere across Germany. From 1663 the permanent Reichstag continued to meet in Regensburg’s old Gothic town hall, suggesting to some visitors that the Empire was stuck in the distant past (see
Plate 20
). The city’s construction of a new hall immediately next door at the beginning of the eighteenth century accentuated the distinction between old and new.

Print Culture

The early modern media revolution greatly extended the audience for imperial imagery, facilitating the shift from a culture of presentation to one of representation. Elements of presentation continued into the late eighteenth century, but performative acts like coronations and assemblies now reached far more people through their dissemination in the printed word and image. These developments coincided with the Empire’s consolidation as a mixed monarchy, entrenching the decentralization of expressions of identity and inhibiting the emergence of a single, coherent representational culture.

Print culture spread rapidly. Within fifty years of its introduction around 1450 into western Europe by Johannes Gutenberg, 62 German cities operated about two hundred presses and within another 25 years over 11 million books and prints were in circulation. Contrary to received views of Germany as a land of poets and thinkers before the nineteenth century, print played a central role in politics from the outset. Frederick III immediately appreciated the new media’s potential, commissioning 37 works before his death in 1493. His son Maximilian I was a master of spin, publishing a further 129 works within the first seven years of his accession alone.
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A talented writer himself,
Maximilian revived the practice of crowning imperial poets laureate that had previously featured only fitfully in Italy, thereby expanding patronage of Humanist intellectuals and associating imperial power with fashionable art forms. The new imperial institutions matched the emperor’s rush to print. The first printed report from a Reichstag appeared after the 1486 meeting, giving précis of the speeches. A semi-official record of all decisions appeared as the
Corpus Recessum Imperii
after 1501, well ahead of Hansard, which only began recording British parliamentary proceedings in 1774. Well before then, the Reichstag had emerged as a key political information hub, publishing far more information about its deliberations than any other European representative institution.
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These developments demonstrated the Empire’s shift from a presentational culture based on the personal presence of the emperor to one of representation mediated through print and images. To late eighteenth-century observers this appeared to render the Empire lifeless as its envoys at the Reichstag communicated through letters and memoranda, rarely gathering in the hall for speeches. From a twenty-first-century perspective this virtual political reality appears almost post-modern.

However, it was already obvious that the authorities could not monopolize the new media. The papacy had already attempted censorship in 1487 by ordering all printed works to be submitted to the approval of the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, Trier and Magdeburg prior to sale. Maximilian swiftly excluded papal influence by asserting that censorship was an imperial prerogative, which itself was a demonstration of the Empire’s ability to respond to circumstances. Publishers initially cooperated because an imperial licence offered copyright protection, enabling them to prosecute pirate printers through the new imperial supreme court, or Reichskammergericht. Johannes Reuchlin’s discussion of Judaism was the first book to be banned, in 1512, but censorship only really became an issue once Luther had been outlawed by the Edict of Worms in 1521. By then it was too late in his case, as 700,000 copies of his works were in circulation.

The Empire adapted, abandoning the unrealistic goal of total control in favour of measures intended to influence content. The Imperial Book Commission was established in Frankfurt in 1569, reflecting that city’s status as the centre of Europe’s book trade. Additional legislation was intended to curb scandal, libel and polemic rather than stifle
debate. Like the other sixteenth-century institutional changes, these measures contributed to the Empire’s complementary structure by providing a regulatory framework to be enforced by imperial Estates in their own territories.
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Regional differences in practice reflected the decentralization. Prussia was perceived as the state most tolerant of religious works (something that was not entirely true), while Austria and Bavaria were regarded as reactionary. Saxony was the most liberal overall, because it wanted to promote Leipzig as a rival centre of the book trade. In practice, censorship was often haphazard and handled variously by courtiers, librarians and university rectors.
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Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and other leading authors used pseudonyms to avoid unpleasant repercussions as territorial governments tried to extend control during the later eighteenth century. Meeting resistance from the increasingly politicized reading classes, many territories then relaxed or abandoned censorship around 1800. Throughout, the Empire’s decentralized structure facilitated relatively free expression, in contrast to France, where 183 people were imprisoned in the Bastille between 1760 and 1789 for breaching censorship laws.
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Censorship resumed after the dissolution of the Empire in 1806, because consolidation into fewer states made it easier to oversee, while the spectre of French revolutionary terror increased its acceptance amongst readers.

Decentralization contributed to an equally diverse educational landscape, as each principality and even large city wanted to have its own university. The Empire’s first university was founded in Prague in 1348, relatively late compared to Bologna (1088) or Paris (1170). However, the Empire had 45 universities by 1800, compared to 22 in France and 2 in England. The absence of a national church was another stimulus, since each territory wanted the full range of educational opportunities aligned to its own faith. Provision in Protestant territories was generally better and included even girls’ elementary education in some Calvinist territories by the late sixteenth century. Nonetheless, many Catholic villages also had basic schooling, with the proportion of them providing it in the duchy of Jülich rising from a quarter in the sixteenth century to 90 per cent in the eighteenth century. Attendance was already mandatory in many territories by 1700, with provision in smaller principalities often far ahead of larger ones like Austria and Prussia. By the late eighteenth century, the two German great powers controlled half of the Empire’s territory, yet they had only 10 universities between them,
compared to 35 across the other principalities and imperial cities. The Empire’s demise saw 20 of these universities closed by 1826, including Rinteln and Herborn, largely through the process of territorial consolidation. By 1500, literacy already stood at 5 per cent, with a peak of 20 per cent in large cities, while the overall rate reached 25 per cent by 1806, better than in France but behind parts of Britain.
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Education and literacy were relatively evenly spread, with almost every town having its own lending library by the eighteenth century.
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The educated public were served by the world’s first postal network, deliberately promoted through the grant of imperial privileges in 1490, creating a communications system transcending both geography and political decentralization. Already open to private customers in 1516, the network of post horses and coach routes connected most of the Empire within a century, allowing Europe’s first regular newspapers to develop through a commercially viable distribution network, 26 years ahead of France.
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The Empire had its first daily paper from 1635, some 67 years ahead of England. The expansion of territorial governments created additional markets for specialist journals on agriculture, economics, health, finance and military affairs. There were over two hundred commercial publishers in the Empire by the 1770s, while the number of authors tripled across 1760–91 to reach 8,000, or twice as many as in France, which had roughly the same population. Although this period was celebrated as the great age of German literature, luminaries like Goethe and Schiller sold only 2,000–3,000 copies of each new book, whereas Zacharias Becker’s
Advice Booklet for Peasants
sold over a million. This reflected the primarily practical orientation of public communication in the Empire as earlier religious and political controversies gave way to an interest in problem-solving.
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