Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (58 page)

The Royal Court and Arch-Chancellery

The itinerant character of imperial rule inhibited the growth of a fixed, institutionalized court to match that of the Byzantine emperor, which numbered 2,000 courtiers in the eleventh century. Nonetheless, the emperor’s mobile entourage was both large and impressive, numbering 3,000–4,000 people, including servants and soldiers, during the Salian and Staufer eras.
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Two primary functions already emerged under the Carolingians. One was the permanent, though itinerant, royal household charged with feeding, clothing and sheltering the king and his entourage. The second was an intermittent advisory role, which in turn divided into a confidential
curia minor
of trusted individuals and a wider
curia major
of larger assemblies of lords. Neither was institutionalized prior to the very late Middle Ages.

The boundaries between both advisory meetings and the royal household remained blurred, because assemblies required the king’s presence. The ceremonial roles assigned lords at assemblies and coronation banquets were marks of favour and one-way participants could ‘read’ in them the current political balance. As part of the gradual transition from a culture of personal presence to more formalized political practice, these positions became fixed as the arch-offices associated with secular electoral titles. The Bohemian king was already distinguished as the arch-cupbearer (
Erzschenk
) around 1290, while the other titles were fixed by 1356: arch-steward (count Palatine), arch-marshal (Saxony), arch-chamberlain (Brandenburg).

The ecclesiastical electors were distinguished as imperial arch-chancellors. The arch-chancellery was the only permanent central administrative institution prior to early modernity, owing its origins to the notaries employed by Charles Martel to look after his documents. Louis I entrusted oversight of this to his arch-chaplain (
Archicapellanus
) in charge of his court chapel, which travelled with him, distinct from the clergy serving the royal palaces.
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In the German kingdom Mainz secured control of both the chapel and chancellery, retaining the
latter when the former was delegated to a more junior
capellarius
in 1040. Various senior clergy were appointed chancellors of Italy after 1012, though the post was eventually permanently associated with Cologne, despite the decline of actual business after the mid-thirteenth century. A Burgundian chancellery was established in 1042, initially under local archbishops before being transferred as an arch-office to Trier.

Only the Mainz chancellery developed as a functioning administrative body. It remained central to the city’s political prestige and provided the basis for new functions during the late fifteenth century: chairmanship of the Reichstag, management of the imperial archive, and appointment of the secretariat servicing the Reichskammergericht.
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Written Culture

The relationship of writing to imperial governance is controversial, because written laws, instructions and other documents have long assumed hallowed status in historical scholarship as totems of political progress. They offer the most accessible route into the past and have proved especially attractive for historians living in an age dominated by formalized procedures. Surviving Carolingian administrative documents known as
capitularia
appear to present a command-style monarchy operating through a clear, hierarchical institutional structure in which lesser officials were closely supervised and required to submit regular written reports. The
capitulare de villis
of 771, for instance, specifies how royal lands are to be run and orders stewards to provide inventories of assets and revenue streams.
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This has led to some extravagant claims for the Carolingians as conscious state-builders with a coherent grand strategy, allegedly capable of mobilizing 100,000 troops from a population of 20 million.
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There was certainly a surge in writing: 7,000 manuscripts survive across continental Europe from the ninth century, compared to 1,800 for the previous eight centuries combined.
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Many of these documents are religious commentaries or chronicles. The primary use of writing prior to the twelfth century was to convey religious truth.
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Even the most literate section of society, the clergy, did not possess a fully written administrative culture at this point. Writing itself lacked social prestige compared to martial prowess, horsemanship and other
physical activities, as the earlier discussion of kingly virtues has illustrated. Charlemagne issued only around 80
capitularia
across his reign and they are largely absent from both the era before 780 and after 820, though there is some evidence that established administrative routines continued into the early tenth century.
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Regardless of the exact extent of written culture, it is unreasonable to expect that Charlemagne’s subjects obeyed his sparse commands more completely than the Empire’s inhabitants during the much better documented period after the fourteenth century, when it is clear that written official rules were often ignored or misunderstood by their intended recipients, or even unknown to them. Early modern authorities had to repeatedly issue the same instructions and often tolerated high levels of non-compliance on less important matters just to ensure the really serious ones were followed. Byzantium was far larger and enjoyed a continuous existence since late antiquity, but even its army was nominally 120,000 in the ninth and tenth centuries, of which no more than 12,000 could usually be concentrated in any one place.
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Extrapolation of army size based on population estimates, or through calculating the number of men required to encircle the known extent of early medieval towns, are all highly speculative methods. The claims made for Carolingian capacity and efficiency would make even nineteenth-century German statesmen and generals ‘green with envy’.
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The exaggeration of Carolingian capacity sharpens the contrast with the more unlettered Ottonian era, thereby contributing to the general sense of the Empire in terminal decline. If Carolingian structures derived directly from late antiquity and were as effective as has been claimed, one would have expected them to have easily survived the civil wars of the mid-ninth century, which pale in comparison with those of third-and fourth-century Rome.

The preceding suggests that Carolingian governance was probably already more like that of the Ottonians in relying heavily on personal presence, rituals and consensus. A more plausible estimate for Carolingian capacity is that a large army was around 5,000–12,000 warriors, providing less of a contrast with the 2,000–8,000 that the Ottonians could usually muster.
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Practical difficulties of movement and supply inhibited large troop concentrations for long periods. A royal army would be composed from the king’s own retinue and those of his lords who were close allies or who had answered his summons. The king’s
force would be supplemented by contingents provided by the lesser lords and communities of the immediate area where it was operating. Larger numbers of less-experienced and poorly trained men could be summoned locally for specific tasks, especially if major sieges were undertaken. These numbers grew largely thanks to the rise in population and production across the eleventh century. Frederick I’s army on the Third Crusade in 1190 was considered huge by contemporaries; it probably numbered 15,000 including 3,000 knights – still far short of the hundreds of thousands some chroniclers claimed.
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It is unlikely that Ottonian commanders needed to read transcriptions of late Roman military manuals in order to know how to fight; their Slavic and Magyar opponents certainly did not, yet were frequently successful. It is highly speculative to blame Ottonian defeats on supposed failure to follow such advice, while attributing successes to allegedly having done so. Later graduates of European military academies could make elementary mistakes, despite their formal training. In addition to oral tradition and actual experience, tasks like economic management and the self-confidence that generally comes with elevated social status would all have prepared Ottonian nobles for command.
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In short, change across the period from 800 to 1100 was by degrees rather than absolute. Written culture may have contracted around 900, but had never been widespread, while the level of contraction itself has been exaggerated.
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Few written documents were intended as universal laws. General laws were already considered fixed by moral and religious absolutes that could not be altered by mortals. Most documents issued in the name of German kings before early modernity were charters (
Urkunden
) regulating local, specific circumstances, and are better understood as ‘privileges’ rather than ‘laws’. They illustrate how much royal activity was reactive, rather than planned: charters were usually issued at the request of their recipient. Written documentation had yet to assume precedence over other forms of legitimation like custom. Except for intellectual exchanges between scholars, during the Middle Ages most letters were destroyed after they had been read, in contrast to early modernity, when even mundane items such as bills and receipts were often preserved. When Frederick I wanted to know how to greet Pope Hadrian IV in 1155, he asked the oldest princes in his camp who had been present at the last imperial-papal meeting 22 years earlier. Their
recollections carried equal weight with formal recorded protocols.
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The relatively low volume of paperwork reduced the potential for conflict by making inconsistencies between claims and practice less obvious.

The Empire did not match the papacy’s use of writing to document claims and extend influence; the papal chancery issued ten times as many documents as its imperial equivalent during the first half of the fourteenth century. Princely and civic representatives began keeping diaries of their negotiations at royal assemblies from the 1380s, and the practice became widespread by the 1420s when the imperial arch-chancellery was also maintaining an official transcript (see
Plate 24
). Written communication surged from the early fifteenth century, with the chancellery’s output supplemented by additional letters sent directly by the emperor (see
Table 4
). Whereas only four personal letters survive for Henry III in the mid-eleventh century, Ruprecht in the early fifteenth sent 400 just to Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Cologne and Strasbourg. The transition to written culture was completed in the mid-sixteenth century under Charles V, who sent and received at least 120,000 letters, in addition to the vast number crossing his officials’ desks.
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The Imperial Chancellery

The expanding paperwork necessitated the development of an imperial chancellery (
Reichskanzlei
) separate from the arch-office held by Mainz. Some kind of archive existed from at least the Salian era and continued under the Staufers, who likewise employed successive bishops of Speyer to oversee it. Speyer officials handled the actual paperwork, a further indication of the medieval Empire’s reliance on the imperial church. They provided continuity into the later fifteenth century, with only a partial change of personnel under the later Luxembourgs, who enjoyed the additional services of the Bohemian royal chancellery. The original archive remained with Wenzel after his formal deposition in 1400, forcing his rival Ruprecht to develop a new one, but still relying on the bishop of Speyer and his staff. The new chancellery and some of its staff passed to Sigismund in 1410, indicating that the lack of dynastic continuity from 1254 to 1437 did not prevent the growth of an institutional memory.
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Sigismund’s papers passed to Albert II in 1438 to form the basis of
the Habsburg imperial court chancellery (
Reichshofkanzlei
), run by the imperial vice chancellor, whose appointment had depended since 1356 on Mainz as arch-chancellor. In practice, the vice chancellor was a Habsburg official overseeing communication between the dynasty
and the Empire. The actual business was channelled through the Reichshofrat, the second imperial supreme court, established in 1497 for this purpose as well as safeguarding imperial feudal prerogatives. Administration of the Habsburgs’ hereditary possessions was detached to separate institutions during the 1520s, while the imperial court chancellery re-emerged as a distinct body in 1559 when the Reichshofrat was reorganized as a purely judicial court. These changes created a tripartite split: the Habsburgs separated administration of their own lands from the task of communicating with the Empire, while Mainz ran the separate imperial chancellery handling the paperwork associated with the Empire’s common institutions, chiefly the Reichstag.
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Table 4. The Growth of Writing in Imperial Governance