Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (53 page)

Imperial court records reveal that ordinary folk possessed a relatively sophisticated understanding of the Empire’s complex constitution and their place within it. The two supreme courts were often called to arbitrate jurisdictional disputes and sent commissioners to gather evidence, including questioning peasants. Those in larger principalities were less certain of details, but still regarded the Empire as the collective home
of many communities, while the inhabitants of smaller territories frequently displayed detailed knowledge of how their lord related to the wider constitutional order. Peasants were prepared to send delegations to the Reichstag to see whether their ruler was overcharging them on imperial taxes. The literate recorded events like Reichstag meetings and electoral congresses in their diaries. Imperial mandates were publicly posted or announced by pastors at Sunday service, while other news travelled by word of mouth and until 1739 the Turkish Bells rang out during wars against the Ottomans.
⁸⁰

ROMANTIC NATIONALISM

Germany’s Double Fatherland

The growth of princely dynasties provided additional foci for identity by early modernity. As rulers of the second largest territorial bloc in the Empire, the Hohenzollerns offered a potential alternative to attachment to the Habsburgs. King Frederick the Great deliberately promoted an image of Prussia’s ‘power and splendour’ to other Germans whilst actively curtailing his own subjects’ identification with the Empire. The traditional prayers for the emperor were banned throughout Prussia after June 1750, while Berlin city centre was remodelled as an imposing European-class capital. However, Frederick’s direct military challenge to Habsburg pre-eminence after 1740 placed him in the awkward position of instigating civil war within the Empire after a century of internal peace. His propaganda ignored his own blatant disregard for the liberties of neighbouring Lutheran principalities to present Prussia as defending Protestant German liberties. However, he refrained from returning to the full-blown confessional polemic of the Reformation era. Instead, Protestant Prussia was associated with progressive government and true German values, whilst the Catholic Habsburgs were castigated for mismanagement, Ultramontanism and the suppression of German freedoms. The obvious inability of Austria and its powerful international allies to defeat Prussia in 1740–45 and 1756–63 appeared to corroborate these arguments.
⁸¹

However, Frederick and his immediate successors did not seek a ‘national’ role and had no idea of the ‘historic mission’ attributed to
them by later pro-Prussian historians. Frederick disdained German literature and culture, corresponded in French, and regarded himself as belonging to a cosmopolitan elite of Enlightened monarchs and thinkers. Yet his prominence made him a pan-German figure and, by default, associated Prussia with arguments for national renewal: his victory over a combined French and imperial army at Rossbach in 1757 was celebrated by some as a ‘national’ triumph.
⁸²

Count Pergen, the man in charge of Joseph II’s coronation as king of the Romans in 1764, covertly hired Friedrich Carl von Moser to counter Prussian propaganda and help rebuild Austrian influence after the Seven Years War. Like many intellectuals, Moser was already disillusioned with Frederick’s obvious cynicism and set about his task with energy to match that of his father, Johann Jacob. Four important works appeared between 1765 and 1767, of which
Of the German National Spirit
and
Patriotic Letters
were deservedly the best known. These attacked the ‘double fatherland’ of distinct Protestant and Catholic Germanies fostered by Prussian propaganda, arguing instead that German national identity was best served by the Empire’s constitution. Moser believed this was now endangered by princely despotism and disregard of imperial law, and he called on all Germans to unite behind the emperor. The Habsburgs were so pleased that they considered the rare step of raising Moser’s salary, but soon abandoned this once they spotted he had included them in his critique by distinguishing between ‘good imperial’ (
gut Kayserlich
) and ‘good Austrian’ policies. The Habsburgs also realized that Moser’s attempt to cast Prussia as an ‘imperial enemy’ akin to France or the Ottomans was proving divisive. Moser was quietly removed and he was assigned instead a minor administrative post in 1770.
⁸³

Moser proved so troubling because he clarified the questions facing the Empire in the later eighteenth century. In addressing what constituted the true nation, Moser was quite conservative in emphasizing the imperial constitution nearly thirty years after Prussia’s open challenge to Austria forced people to confront the gulf between formal status and the actual distribution of power. This made it impossible to discuss national identity without addressing the issue of imperial reform, which in turn raised the question whether freedom was best safeguarded by the current constitution, princely territorial states or greater individual rights and political participation.

The Politics of Sensibility

Possible alternative forms of attachment were exemplified by Joseph II’s coronation, the event that prompted Moser’s secret contract. Joseph’s entry into Frankfurt on 29 March 1764 surpassed all previous entrées and his cavalcade included 95 six-horse coaches processing to the din of a 300-gun salute and two hours of continuous bell-ringing.
⁸⁴
Writing in 1811, Goethe recalled feeling ‘that the whole affair took on a motley, unsatisfactory, often tasteless appearance’, especially the empty tables at the coronation banquet, attended by only three electors and one prince, in contrast to the nearly sixty princes and counts present for Charles VII’s coronation in 1742 (see
Plate 12
). The troops employed in crowd control at Joseph’s coronation used excessive force, at one point opening fire and killing a 19-year-old girl. Before his arrival, Joseph had written to his mother dismissing the event as ‘une vraie comédie’. His view was undoubtedly coloured by grief at his wife’s death only four months before, though this did not stop him eyeing up the princesses in attendance. Afterwards, he wrote again to his mother: ‘Yesterday’s ceremony, I must confess, is superb and august. I tried to carry it off decently, but without embarrassment. His Majesty the Emperor [Francis I] has admitted to us that he could not keep back his tears; they say the same thing happened to almost the whole congregation.’

Joseph’s experience indicates the Empire’s potential to appeal to the new politics of sensibility, which added programmatic ‘nationalism’ to the previously largely descriptive ‘nation’ identifying a distinct people. Nationalism required emotional and active engagement to promote the nation as the supreme form of social organization. The debate moved beyond the Humanists’ ‘culture wars’ over which nation had the best claim to a classical pedigree, to promote new forms of distinctiveness based on allegedly innate social and ethnic characteristics. Nationalism assumed several partly contradictory forms, but can be labelled ‘Romantic’ due to the emphasis on sentiment and the essentialist articulation of the nation as a superior transcendental force – what has aptly been called ‘a secular religion’.
⁸⁵
One of the earliest German advocates of this passionate engagement was Thomas Abbt, whose poem
Death for the Fatherland
(1761) said it all, radically reordering traditional virtues to place sacrifice for the nation ahead of saintliness. Romantic nationalists considered it unacceptable to discuss identity in a language
other than German and they began constructing a national history and literary canon to exclude people, events and works that did not fit their essentialist criteria. This entailed rejecting the pre-modern tradition of the Germans as a collection of different tribes whose distinct cultures and freedoms were guaranteed by the imperial constitution. Cultural and linguistic uniformity became the only acceptable basis for a nation state or, as Johann Gottfried von Herder put it more poetically: each nation could only have one language as the true expression of its soul. ‘Foreign’ forms had to be rejected as threatening national purity. These included not only the French and Italian influences that hitherto dominated elite musical and cultural life, but also the non-German customs and languages persisting across the Empire.
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The closure of French theatre troupes began in 1757 as part of general economies in courtly expenditure during the Seven Years War, but continued from the 1760s with the foundation of new ‘National’, or German-speaking, theatres and opera houses in Hamburg, Vienna, Mannheim, Berlin and elsewhere.

The Romantic nationalists of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ era from the 1770s are now celebrated as Germany’s literary giants, but in their day largely failed to find the employment they sought in territorial administrations and universities. Their calls for national renewal were undoubtedly sincere, but also influenced by their own experience of having to forge their networks outside established circles. Their distance from the traditional order was magnified in many cases by personal disappointment after placing unrealistic hopes in Joseph II or Frederick II of Prussia to lead their national revival. Those who did find official posts, like Goethe, were noticeably less hostile to the Empire. The broader population remained strongly attached to territorial and local identities, which appeared better served by the Empire’s loose political order than by the kind of integral nation advocated by Romantics.
⁸⁷

Joseph’s long reign (1765–90) meant there was no further imperial election until 1790, by which time the French Revolution was already transforming circumstances. Joseph preferred travelling incognito to the traditional pomp of an imperial progress, thereby further adding to perceptions of the old order’s irrelevance. He missed the opportunity of attempting what the British monarchy would do under Queen Victoria to align itself with more populist nationalist sentiment by inventing new ‘traditions’.

For all their limited appeal, the Romantic nationalists had made an important point: by 1800 the Empire indeed appeared antiquated and inadequate compared to their vision of a bright new national utopia. Acceptance of their critique rapidly gained ground once the Empire dissolved amidst the pressures of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, as the circumstances fitted the nationalists’ calls for the old order to die in order for Germany to be reborn. The situation after 1815 witnessed repeated disappointments as it proved impossible to agree on what constituted the nation. The liberal ideal of a family of friendly nations was replaced by a competitive survival of the fittest. The acceptance of essentialist definitions of identity condemned Europeans to fruitless struggles over the optimal size of invented nation states. The creation and maintenance of larger states has entailed marginalizing or obliterating traits perceived as inimical to dominant national cultures, whereas the desire for self-determination has threatened to fragment parts of the European continent into ever smaller pieces. Seen from this perspective, the Empire’s ability to accommodate different identities within a common framework assumes a new significance.

PART III

Governance

7

Kingship

KINGS AND THEIR QUALITIES

Governance not Government

Part III
examines how the Empire was governed, while
Part IV
looks at how governance related to social developments. The emphasis on
governance
rather than
government
is deliberately intended to overcome earlier presentations of imperial politics as a succession of failed attempts to create a unitary state. ‘Government’ implies a centralized, institutionalized state with a clear chain of command and responsibility. Modern politics are largely about determining who controls such states and what policies they should pursue. ‘Governance’ more commonly denotes auto-politics and self-regulation, both of which are closer to the Empire’s
regimen
of a broadly inclusive system relying more on consensus than command. This chapter begins by explaining how kings were chosen and the qualities they were expected to possess, before identifying their primary assistants and the resources at their disposal. The final section charts the main developments from the Carolingian to the Salian monarchs, thereby opening the chronological coverage continuing through the high and later Middle Ages in
Chapter 8
and across early modernity under the Habsburgs in
Chapter 9
.

Imperial governance was programmatic in that it was guided by coherent ideals and goals. All kings and emperors – like modern governments – had to react to circumstances and improvise, but they were not simply at the mercy of events. The difference lies in what they were trying to achieve. ‘State’ and ‘nation’ were not yet clearly delineated concepts functioning as focused policy objectives. Kings and
emperors were not state-or nation-builders, because no one felt either needed building. Medieval monarchs were expected to build churches and cathedrals. Otherwise, their role was primarily to uphold peace, justice and the honour of the Empire. Changing circumstances, like violence, rebellions, or invasions, were not seen as ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’ through new laws, better institutions, or more coherent frontiers. Most of the misunderstandings surrounding the Empire’s political history stem from attempts to impose anachronistic expectations on its rulers’ behaviour. For most of the Empire’s existence, imperial governance was guided by the prevailing ideals of good kingship.

Imperial and royal powers were never explicitly delineated. It was accepted by the twelfth century that the emperor possessed exclusive prerogatives (
jura caesarea reservata  
) largely relating to a clearer understanding of his position as feudal overlord. Subsidiary reserved powers (
jura caesarea reservata limitata  
) could be exercised with the advice of great lords. These were identified more precisely from the mid-fourteenth century and included declarations of war and the imperial ban. A final set of shared powers (
jura comitialia
) were clarified during fifteenth-century imperial reform as being shared with all imperial Estates.
¹
As later chapters will show, this gradual clarification of the Empire as mixed monarchy evolved with changing expectations of what authorities should do, rather than from a desire among princes to leave the Empire.