Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (60 page)

In line with its personal character, vassalage ended in the event of
Herren- und Mannfall
. At the death of a lord (
Herr
), all vassals were required to seek renewal of service from his successor, while the death of a vassal (
Mann
) obliged his heirs to request a fresh enfeoffment.
⁹¹
These requirements persisted after the Staufers formally accepted
secular fiefs as hereditary. Hereditary fiefs meant that the king could not refuse to enfeoff a legitimate, able-bodied heir, but renewal was still required for the successor to exercise any rights or functions associated with the fief. Lordly families could choose one of their members as legitimate heir. This still required royal endorsement in the case of immediate imperial fiefs, creating additional opportunities for the king to intervene as arbiter of inheritance disputes.

Crown and Imperial Lands

Virtually any kind of property or right could be held as royal domains, fiefs or allodial possessions. Royal domains originally consisted of fairly extensive farmland worked largely by slave labour, as well as mills, fishponds and vast tracts of thinly populated forest reserved for hunting, notably the Dreieich Forest by Frankfurt and the Ardennes near Aachen.
⁹²
These possessions were not managed through centrally planned extraction. Most of the produce was perishable, bulky or both. It was difficult to transport across a kingdom that even an unencumbered rider required a month to cross. Much was consumed locally, just maintaining the producers and those who administered individual assets like palaces. Some produce might be concentrated regionally, for example to support a military campaign. However, the main purpose was to feed the royal entourage on its endless tours of the realm.

It seems likely that the Merovingian monarchy was already partially itinerant and while the Carolingians had favoured sites, they never stayed at them for long. Royal progresses were common in medieval Europe, but itinerant monarchy became a distinguishing feature of the Empire, persisting long after other European kings had largely settled down, and in stark contrast to the self-exclusion of the Chinese emperor in his Forbidden City. The ability to travel extensively distinguished the king from his lords, since he alone could freely move throughout the entire realm.
⁹³
Others would have to pay their way, unless they had strategically placed relations, and could find that prolonged absence weakened their local authority. The practice of royal progress continued well beyond the mid-thirteenth century, but gradually lost its significance as the formalization of elective monarchy by 1356 lessened each new king’s need to show himself to lords absent at his accession. The institutionalization of assemblies in the form of the Reichstag by the late
fifteenth century also provided a convenient way to meet everyone at once, while the parallel move to territorially based imperial governance established a new focus in the capital of the imperial family’s hereditary lands.

The needs of itinerant monarchy dictated the extent and location of royal domains, which needed to be scattered to provide sustenance and accommodation along major routes and in areas of political and strategic significance. The Carolingians and Ottonians preferred travelling by river or lakes, given the lack of all-weather roads north of the Alps. Charlemagne had 25 major and 125 minor palaces sustained by 700 different royal estates (
Map 14
). Most of these were on or close to the Rhine, Main, Danube, Saale and Elbe.
⁹⁴

Aachen was the most important palace (
palatium
,
Pfalz
), used since the 760s as a winter residence because of its thermal springs. Other important sites included Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Ingelheim and Frankfurt. Paderborn provided a base in Saxony, while Regensburg served the same purpose in Bavaria. Konstanz and Reichenau on an island in the same lake were key staging posts between Italy and Germany. These locations remained significant into the later Middle Ages. Subsequent royal lines added further sites around their own family properties. The Ottonians developed Magdeburg, Quedlinburg and Merseburg in the Elbe–Saale region. The Salians added Speyer near their own base on the Middle Rhine, but also Goslar in the rich mining region of the Harz in northern Germany.
⁹⁵
Chapels were already present in Carolingian palaces, but the Ottonians developed closer connections between royal residences and religious sites, favouring royal abbeys and major cathedrals.

Most palaces were unfortified, except those near frontiers. There was no standard design, but the royal apartments were in an imposing building containing a great hall and chapel, while stables, servants’ accommodation and storehouses completed the complex. Aachen became the model for Magdeburg and Goslar as the Ottonians and Salians stressed continuity with the Carolingians. The later Carolingians began fortifying palaces, and already allowed other lords to protect their own residences from the 870s, especially if these were in frontier areas or along rivers vulnerable to Viking raids. Fortifications generally consisted of wooded palisades, sometimes atop a hill (
Motte
). Henry IV broke tradition by embarking on extensive castle-building to assert
tighter control over royal domains in the former Ottonian heartland of Saxony, which risked becoming a ‘distant’ region with the transition to Salian rule in 1024. Using new wealth and manpower from economic and demographic growth, Henry IV constructed at least eight stone castles perched on rocky crags. The most powerful was the Harzburg, built after 1067 on a high hill south-east of Goslar, only approachable along a narrow path. Unlike earlier fortifications that had been intended as refuges for the surrounding population, Henrician castles were only large enough to accommodate a royal garrison intended to dominate the surrounding area.

The Carolingians had already created a special jurisdiction called a
Burgwerk
surrounding fortifications, which allowed the commandant to draw the resources and labour required to construct and maintain defences. Similar rights were attached to palaces, but were also granted to bishops and abbots so they had the means to develop their churches. Henrician castles were held by the unfree vassals known as ministeriales. By the thirteenth century, castle commanders were called ‘castellans’ (
Burgmänner
) and were usually endowed with a fief sustaining themselves and their garrison of between 30 and 50 men.
⁹⁶
These developments promoted the emergence of knights as a distinct group of vassals who were considered the lower echelon of the nobles.

The transfer of fiefs to support castellans was just part of a wider redistribution of resources under revised relationships throughout the Middle Ages. The Carolingians had already endowed monasteries and abbeys with additional royal assets, and the Ottonians extended this to enhance the ability of crown vassals to meet demands for royal service (
servitium regis
). The practice peaked under the Salians, who added few palaces, preferring instead to stay with abbots and bishops.
⁹⁷
The difficulties created by repeated clashes with the papacy prompted the Staufers to promote imperial cities as alternative accommodation on crown domains (see
pp. 505–7
).

Resources were earmarked as
Tafelgüter
, literally ‘table properties’, supplying food and other consumables to sustain the royal court when it stayed in the associated palace, abbey or city. A rare surviving list from 968 records just one day’s requirements: 1,000 pigs and sheep, 8 oxen, 10 barrels of wine, 1,000 bushels of grain, plus chickens, fish, eggs and vegetables. Information from the better-documented Staufer era indicates that an army of 4,800 troops needed 8,400 baggage
attendants, 19,000 horses, mules and oxen pulling 500 wagons, together consuming 2.4 tons of food and 57 tons of fodder daily.
⁹⁸

The royal prerogatives included the right to
fodrum regis
, obliging communities to supply fodder, and to
Gistum
(hospitality). Various other rights existed, though their terms are not always clear.
Fodrum regis
retained its original meaning north of the Alps, but by the late Middle Ages meant accommodating the king in Italy where a separate term (
albergaria
) emerged by the eleventh century to denote obligations to house royal servants and troops.
⁹⁹
Non-material services could also be required, as indicated by Henry V’s charter removing legal and fiscal obligations from Speyer’s inhabitants in 1111 in return for their performance of an annual mass to commemorate his father buried in the cathedral.
¹⁰⁰
Royal service was commuted into cash in Italy during the eleventh century in a process that had become general across the Empire by the thirteenth century. As we shall see, however, indirect control of the Empire through vassalage remained the most important means of governance into early modernity, while the role of royal domains was taken by more extensive hereditary possessions directly held by the ruling dynasty.

FROM CONSENSUS TO COMMAND MONARCHY

Dukes and Counts

It is helpful to start our chronological examination of imperial governance by outlining the three main stages in development. The first three royal lines tried to control the Empire through a relatively flat hierarchy of functionaries bound to them through vassalage. Management of these vassals required constant personal engagement and was a major priority. Managerial style moved from a more consensual approach, most pronounced under the Ottonians, to a command style that reached its limits in the Salian period under Henry IV.

The Staufers’ accession initiated a second stage around the mid-twelfth century based on revising relations to vassals along more obviously ‘feudal’ lines enshrined in general charters. This entailed the definitive acceptance of hereditary fief-holding, but also the deliberate fragmentation of the previously fairly large fiefs to create a larger, more
hierarchically structured lordly hierarchy now headed by a princely elite. This hierarchy continued to evolve after the Staufers’ demise around 1250 as jurisdictions gradually became more clearly delineated and territorially bounded. A fundamental division emerged between those holding full imperial fiefs immediately subject to the emperor, and lesser lords holding minor jurisdictions within these fiefs as vassals of at least one other layer of feudal authority between themselves and the monarch. Adapting imperial governance to these new conditions was delayed by the fact that all the realistic contenders to replace the Staufers were evenly matched materially and politically. The third stage opened as the Luxembourgs increasingly based imperial governance on extensive fiefs held as hereditary dynastic possessions rather than royal domains. This section explores the first of these stages, while the next two chapters examine the others in turn.

The Carolingians established the Empire’s basic internal political structure by combining elements of their existing practice with those adapted from the Lombards and Germans they had defeated. Their principal achievement was to convert the political capital garnered from three generations of successful conquests into a revised relationship with their senior lords who had been only loosely subordinated to the Merovingian kings. The lords were now distinguished through their appointment to public offices, which assumed new prestige through the consolidation of the Frankish realm as the Empire.
¹⁰¹
Two parallel, partially overlapping secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies emerged; the latter was headed by archbishops and bishops endowed with benefices and collectively forming the imperial church already discussed in
Chapter 2
(
Maps 1
and
13
).

The secular hierarchy comprised dukes and counts. The exact character of the early duchies remains controversial. The most likely conclusion is that the Carolingians initially distinguished between the title and function of ‘duke’ (
dux
) bestowed by the king, and the title and status of ‘prince’ (
princeps
), or tribal leader. The latter position only existed in recently conquered areas, especially Saxony, Bavaria, and, to an extent, Swabia, Lorraine and Lombard southern Italy. Princely power derived from below through recognition by lesser lords within the ‘tribal’ region. As with royal succession, contemporaries did not distinguish clearly between election and hereditary right. Kings affirmed ‘electoral’ rights in these regions into the eleventh century to
curb the trend towards hereditary rule, which had, in practice, already become entrenched during the tenth century, notably in Saxony where the Billung family held sway from 961 to 1106.
¹⁰²

Ducal authority entailed military command, thereby providing the origins of the German word for duke (
Herzog
), as well as supervision of the counts. As with the royal selection of bishops, it is not clear how far the appointment of dukes was a free choice. Ducal titles appear to have been given to Saxon, Bavarian and Lombard princes to integrate them within Carolingian governance. Tribal structures were eroded through intermarriage and the transfer of land and influence across a broader elite. The title of ‘duke’ supplanted that of ‘prince’, which disappeared around 920, except in southern Italy, where it survived for another century. The attitude of local lords influenced the royal choice, not least because ducal authority was impossible to exercise without their cooperation. Developments across the tenth and eleventh centuries saw ducal positions fluctuate between royal appointments and hereditary possessions, with the overall trend in favour of the latter. Hereditary possession entailed the right to pass the title to a chosen successor, reducing the role of the king from one of appointment to confirmation, but this change was only possible through its parallel acceptance by the lesser lords. It should be remembered that for most of the Middle Ages what was being held hereditarily was a
title
and its associated functions and jurisdictions, and not a
territory
in the sense of a distinct area and its inhabitants.