Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (59 page)

*excluding 170 forgeries attributed to him

**The figures in the table refer to the period in which each monarch’s documents have been counted. For most cases it is the entire reign, but for Otto III only the first 13 years.

⁺
upper estimate

⁺⁺
16 months

The position of the imperial court chancellery remained ambiguous, since it was both a Habsburg and an imperial institution. Much depended on how far the vice chancellor was willing to subordinate himself to Habsburg interests. Most vice chancellors were senior aristocrats closely connected to the Habsburg court. They increasingly became the dynasty’s expert advisors on imperial politics, reducing the imperial court chancellery to a clearing house for other Habsburg officials’ correspondence with imperial Estates. Joseph II repeatedly tried to exclude any remaining Mainz influence after 1767, and while the archbishop successfully defended his formal privileges, the episode merely contributed to the alienation of the Habsburg government from the imperial church around 1800.
⁸¹

RESOURCES

Key Characteristics in the Empire

Central financial institutions only emerged in the Empire around 1490 and looked very different from those in other European monarchies (see
pp. 397–8
). The general pattern in Europe was a shift from ‘private’ to ‘public’ finance as kings persuaded their subjects that their own resources were insufficient to meet rising expectations of royal governance. The king increasingly drew on his subjects’ private means to finance ‘public’ purposes. The usual mechanism was some kind of representative assembly through which taxes were negotiated and legitimated.
⁸²

There are complex reasons why the Empire did not follow this path,
the most significant of which was that the methods of resource mobilization established around 800 enabled it to meet the expectations of governance until well into the thirteenth century. Pressures for change emerged only slowly during the later thirteenth century, primarily through internal competition for control of the German crown. This changed how individual territories were governed, but impacted less on how resources were mobilized for common purposes. Major alterations only became necessary to meet new, external threats towards the end of the fifteenth century. Unlike the earlier competition for the crown, external dangers were recognized as common, and so legitimated broader changes in the overall imperial structure. The timing of this was important, because it occurred long after the Empire had begun to evolve as a more clearly delineated status hierarchy. Thus, the development of fiscal institutions reinforced the Empire as a mixed monarchy, rather than promoting the kind of centralization characterizing western European states.

For much of the Middle Ages men, consumables and services were all more useful than cash. The Carolingians levied annual general taxes on all free men, who paid in local produce or high-value items like fur pelts or honey, as well as in coin. Other occasional levies were raised for specific purposes, such as aiding Christians in the Holy Land. The Carolingians and Ottonians also extracted tribute from the Slavs. Louis II ‘the German’ received tribute worth at least 170 pounds in silver annually, enough to equip 68 mounted warriors.
⁸³
Cash was imperishable and relatively portable, but always had to be converted into what was really needed (warriors, supplies, etc.) and which could not always be purchased easily when required. Thus, resource mobilization in the Empire involved developing legally enforceable claims to specific kinds of aid, rather than the fiscal institutions that feature so prominently in conventional accounts of European ‘state-building’. The combination of assistance secured through legally enforceable obligations and direct extraction from the emperor’s own possessions proved sufficient to sustain imperial rule so that both the limited taxation of the Carolingian era and the tribute along the eastern frontier could be allowed to lapse when their collection proved difficult.

The Carolingians created the basic framework for extraction by establishing different kinds of jurisdiction over land, material assets
and people. Royal power was never solely limited to crown lands, and always extended over the entirety of the Empire. However, the monarch’s ability to draw support from other areas was filtered through the different jurisdictions. The royal domain (
dominium
) encompassed possessions reserved to sustain the king’s family and only ever accounted for a relatively small proportion of the total area. The bulk of the Empire was granted as benefices (
beneficia
), which remained royal possessions but were entrusted to dependants initially called both
fideles
(faithful) and
vassi
, the origins of the term ‘vassal’. The later German word
Lehen
is usually translated as ‘fief’, but is also cognate with the English ‘loan’, which more easily conveys the original relationship. The system allowed the Carolingians and their successors to dispense with the need to raise taxes, which would have required permanent institutions and a large number of officials. Instead, beneficiaries used the resources from their fief directly to sustain themselves and carry out tasks on behalf of the monarch. This method was ideally suited for an economy where coins were not yet the principal means of exchange, since beneficiaries could draw resources directly in kind.

Allodial property comprised the private assets of the pre-Frankish elite as far as they had survived, plus that granted to or acquired by Carolingian lords, including the royal family. Contemporaries distinguished between royal allodial lands and domains, but historians disagree whether this had any practical significance prior to the eleventh century.
⁸⁴
The Ottonians’ extinction in 1024 raised the fate of their family possessions separate from the domains that were now associated with an enduring monarchy. This distinction became clearer in the transition from the Salians in 1125 when Lothar III fought the Staufers as private heirs to Henry V’s personal possessions. Thereafter, family property was treated separately as hereditary dynastic assets separate from crown domains associated with the royal title. The same occurred with benefices, which were initially often assigned to lords who lacked private property in the same area, but frequently acquired it during their tenure as fief-holder. Possession of a fief by two or more generations of the same family swiftly encouraged ideas of hereditary ownership. Periodic royal efforts to stem or reverse this trend triggered relatively rare but nonetheless quite violent disputes with recalcitrant lords, as we shall see.

Feudalism

The distinctions between domains, benefices and allodial property remained fluid into the thirteenth century, because it was often not clear how individuals had acquired particular manors and other assets. The greater use of written documentation to record possession inevitably encouraged sharper distinctions and more coherent and exclusive concepts of personal property. Crucially, this occurred during the change from transpersonal kingship to enduring Empire. The exact nature of this process remains hotly debated.
⁸⁵

The root problem is semantics: a wide variety of terms were used well before they were defined in legal treatises in the twelfth century. The process of definition undoubtedly changed their meaning and use, complicating the interpretation of earlier evidence. The situation for the Empire was exacerbated by the excessive romanticization of the Germanic past, which reached new heights under the Nazis. Writing in the 1930s, Theodor Mayer presented the Empire as a
Personenverbandstaat
, or a state formed by ties of personal allegiance. This term proved very influential, yet it rested on imposing quite narrow and often anachronistic definitions on earlier medieval terms.
⁸⁶
Mayer’s model suggested the early Empire was organized with the king as leader of free warriors bound in personal allegiance. Finally, anglophone historiography brings its own problems, because the term ‘feudalism’ has been overloaded with other anachronistic interpretations implying a conscious system.
⁸⁷
Variations were
part
of the reality, not aberrant discrepancies within an otherwise coherent system. Local arrangements were negotiated according to immediate needs. Renegotiation could involve exemptions and changes to the level of burdens associated with fief-holding.

Some viable generalizations can be made. Relations between monarch and fief-holders were always asymmetrical, based on reciprocity and constituting a form of vassalage that became more clearly defined as ‘feudal’ during the twelfth century (see
pp. 356–65
). Both parties were free men until the emergence of the ministeriales as a new group of unfree vassals in the eleventh century. Throughout, relations involved questions of loyalty and trust, because they were mediated primarily through oral rather than written agreements. General rules were not fully codified until early modernity. The Carolingians and Ottonians
used the term
honores
for both benefice and the function associated with it.
⁸⁸

Vassalage could emerge from below as ‘commendation’ whereby a free man placed himself subordinate to a superior lord in return for ‘protection and guardianship’ (
Schütz und Schirm  
). It could also come from being entrusted with a benefice to carry out a specific task. A sharper articulation of rights and responsibilities around the mid-twelfth century clarified this act as ‘enfeoffment’. The term ‘benefice’ was simultaneously displaced by ‘fief’ (
feodum
).

Vassalage always included rights for the subordinate, especially excluding ‘servile duties’ (
opera servilia
) like manual labour, which remained a characteristic of the unfree population. Instead, vassals were expected to serve in ‘word and deed’ (
consilium et auxilium
). The former encompassed constructive advice, while the latter was understood primarily as military service and was driven by the introduction of the armoured cavalryman as a distinguishing feature of Carolingian warfare. The necessary equipment exceeded the resources of most free men, requiring assets to be grouped as benefices to sustain an elite of armoured knights. Although Carolingian and Ottonian lords expected royal campaigns to secure plunder, all accepted that benefice-holding would cover most of the costs of service. This freed the king from having to pay his army. Service was not fixed, but a period of six weeks became customary. Longer campaigns, like Roman expeditions, were restricted to exceptional circumstances agreed in advance at an assembly. The distribution of rich benefices to the imperial church resulted in this providing a substantial part of most emperors’ forces: 15 bishops accompanied Otto II’s ill-fated Italian campaign in 981–2, while twelfth-century archbishops could bring up to 1,700 troops, with 200 to 400 being the average size of an episcopal contingent.
⁸⁹
Other duties could be expected, especially if these were tied to a particular benefice; for example, garrisoning castles or guarding frontier marches. Senior lords were also expected to attend the royal court, assist in passing judgements, uphold the law and provide advice. Failure to perform duties opened the culprit to charges of ‘felony’ (
felonia
), providing grounds for the king to escheat the fief (see
pp. 613–17
).

Vassalage already extended to chains of three of more lords and vassals by 800. A Carolingian capitulary of 799 allowed the church to assign its property as benefices to lay subvassals to circumvent the
canon law restriction on clergy serving as warriors. Longer hierarchies benefited the king by creating denser networks capable of mobilizing more men. The trend to hereditary possession was already obvious and could be deliberately granted as an inducement. For example, Charles II ‘the Bald’ allowed those accompanying his Roman expedition of 877 to bequeath their benefices to their heirs. Hereditary possession could aid the king by stabilizing arrangements and giving benefice-holders greater incentive to promote economic development.

The rituals of vassalage changed in line with the shift from benefice to fief, but always remained personal even after written codification. Homage (Latin
homagium
, German
Huld
) was the more solemn ceremony in which the vassal became the ‘man’ of his lord; hence the derivation of ‘homage’ from the Latin
homo
for man. Homage had to be performed in person and was often tied to land or services. Fealty (
fidelitas
) was an expression of personal allegiance, which could be sworn in person or by proxy. Both types involved personal oaths, which played a prominent part in medieval political culture. The vassal ‘commended’ himself by placing his hands inside those of his lord. The solemn oath accompanying this ‘joining hands’ was sworn on a holy object, such as the portable imperial cross accompanying the king on his royal progress. ‘Defiance’ meant literally renouncing fidelity. Those doing so lost entitlement to their lord’s protection and opened themselves to his punishment, including being deprived of their lands and offices.

Initially, the oath preceded investiture, which involved the lord handing the vassal an object symbolizing both the benefice and the vassal’s status in a wider hierarchy. The Ottonians introduced the practice of handing over a flag to senior lords, which ritual came to characterize duchies, margraviates, counties palatine and landgraviates collectively as ‘flag fiefs’ (
Fahnenlehen
). Other objects included sceptres, swords, lances, gloves and even twigs.
⁹⁰
The Salians’ problems with the papacy led investiture to precede the oath under the Staufers, while the whole process came to be considered enfeoffment.