Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (64 page)

The Staufers’ engagement in Italy was more prolonged than that of the Salians. Henry IV spent only a quarter of his reign there, compared
to a third under Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ and three-quarters under Frederick II. Nonetheless, the family powerbase remained Swabia, which they had held since 1079 along with allodial possessions in Alsace. These lands were close to those of their Salian patrons. Thus, Conrad III’s accession in 1138 shifted the Empire’s core region back to south-west Germany from the north, to which it had briefly moved under Lothar III. Barbarossa and Henry VI bought or inherited additional lands across southern and east-central Germany after 1160, increasing the number of individual crown properties to 4,300.
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Existing palaces were renovated and expanded, while new, fortified ones were built in their core region: Wimpfen, Gelnhausen, Hagenau and Kaiserslautern. Altenburg and Eger were constructed in central Germany to secure access to Bohemia.

While scarcely ‘a catastrophe for Germany’,
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Henry VI’s death in 1197 was a serious setback for the Staufers, because it triggered the double election and civil war after 1198. The county Palatine on the Middle Rhine was seized by their Welf rivals, while the newly acquired properties in east-central Germany were lost. However, Frederick II recovered royal lands which, by 1241, were almost as extensive as at their peak in 1197, while the family’s own possessions expanded considerably with the (temporary) acquisition of Austria and Styria in 1237. Royal possessions were managed more intensively through methods such as clearance of wastes and greater engagement in the commercializing economy. Royal officials, recruited from ministeriales, were posted to oversee crown lands, castles, and the growing number of imperial towns that the Staufers also actively promoted.

Governance followed a broadly similar path in Italy, though with far greater emphasis on reclaiming regalia rather than lands. Thanks to the new understanding fostered by the Worms Concordat of 1122, regalia were now more clearly understood as legal rights to exploit particular resources and to exercise certain kinds of jurisdiction, especially in Italy’s numerous towns. Barbarossa convened an assembly of Italian lords at Roncaglia near Piacenza in November 1158 and demanded the return of all regalia allegedly usurped since the 1070s. Contemporaries estimated these were worth 30,000 pounds of silver annually.
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This was not simply an attempt to set the clock back. Barbarossa accepted greater demands for civic self-government, but insisted that the new elected officials swear loyalty to him as emperor. He also demanded
that all towns maintain a royal palace, though he agreed these could now be placed outside their walls. Overall, he aimed to forge a more direct relationship with Italian towns, similar to that in Germany. Strong opposition in the form of the Lombard League forced him to compromise in 1183. Over the next 12 years many of the recently recovered regalia were transferred to the cities in return for cash and political support, notably during the conquest of Sicily in 1194–5. Henry VI renewed efforts at tighter control, appointing royal castellans in castles to curb civic influence in their rural hinterlands, but also continued to pawn Italian crown lands.
⁶

Previous emperors had promoted tighter supervision of crown lands, notably Henry IV. Like their predecessors, the Staufers’ development of crown and family possessions was simply part of a wider range of royal strategies and certainly should not be interpreted as an
alternative
to feudalization, especially as the Roncaglia assembly also saw efforts to foster tighter political loyalty based on clearer reciprocal obligations between king and vassals.
⁷

The New Feudal Order

Staufer policies become clearer when we recognize they were not seeking a unitary state, but instead employed different methods in their various lands. In Sicily they regarded themselves as the legitimate heirs to Norman hereditary kingship, whereas they tried to manage the Empire by reworking relations with their vassals. This process has been labelled the ‘Feudalization of the Empire’ and represented the definitive abandonment of attempts to prevent fiefs becoming hereditary in favour of trying to turn this to the emperor’s advantage.
⁸

Lothar III had already attempted to reorder relations with his vassals by defining a longer and clearer status hierarchy in 1136. Conrad III continued this, as did Barbarossa after 1157 when he encouraged the use of Roman law, which was being studied at the new university of Bologna. Bologna lawyers helped define vassalage in more obviously feudal terms, but their influence should not be exaggerated, as the disassociation of public functions from aristocratic titles was already accelerating since the early eleventh century. All lords were assuming broadly similar responsibilities as, for example, bishops acquired counties and thus superior criminal jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the Investiture
Dispute encouraged superior lords to fix their vassals’ obligations more precisely in writing to be sure of their support.
⁹

The process of feudalization involved identifying the scope of fiefs and their associated rights and obligations more clearly in written charters. This established a sharper hierarchy. The feudal lord retained superior powers over the fief, variously termed
dominium directum
,
dominium feodale
or
dominium superius
, but always consisting of reserve rights expressed practically as the power to confirm the vassal’s possession. The vassal enjoyed rights of usage (
dominium utile
), often defined expansively to include powers to develop the fief economically and to oversee the lives of its inhabitants.

These distinctions were standard throughout Latin Christendom, but assumed a particular form in the Empire thanks to the deliberate elaboration of a complex status hierarchy after the mid-twelfth century. The more intensive management of crown lands reflected how the Staufers no longer saw these as assets to be distributed as rewards for loyalty and support. Instead, they used their undefined imperial reserve powers to distinguish additional ranks of lords. Moreover, as suzerains of the entire Empire, the Staufers retained existing powers to confirm or withhold recognition of individual lords’ inheritance of what were now accepted as hereditary fiefs.

Feudalization emerged ad hoc from the practical problems of managing the senior lords, notably the Welf family, whose rise demonstrated the problems associated with established methods. The Welfs were an old, well-connected family with several branches. The one established in 1055 around Ravensburg in Swabia rose to prominence through its appointment as dukes of Bavaria in 1070. Although the Welfs lost this in 1077 after opposing Henry IV, they changed sides and were reinstated in 1096. Ten years later they were allowed to inherit part of the Billungs’ private property in Saxony and were rewarded with the Saxon ducal title in 1127 after their defection from the Staufers helped secure Lothar III’s election. Heinrich ‘the Proud’, the leading Welf, was designated the successor by Lothar only to be defeated by Conrad III in the 1138 election. The Welfs were punished through the loss of both duchies at Heinrich’s death in 1139, but his only son, Henry ‘the Lion’, was compensated with the county of Brunswick and eventually recovered Saxony in return for recognizing Conrad III.
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This sequence of reward, punishment and partial reinstatement was entirely in line with Salian
and Ottonian practice, and reflected the importance of personal friendships and animosities within the Empire’s lordly elite. However, these changes depended heavily on circumstance, like the opportunity provided by Heinrich the Proud’s death, which allowed Conrad to block Henry the Lion’s inheritance.

Barbarossa took a different course by following Henry IV’s example of splitting larger ducal jurisdictions to facilitate more subtle management of the senior lords. Barbarossa needed to reward Henry the Lion for his invaluable assistance in securing the royal election in March 1152, but did not want to make him too powerful.
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Accordingly, when he gave the now vacant duchy of Bavaria back to Henry in 1156, he simultaneously detached its eastern marches as a new duchy of Austria, which he gave to the Babenberg family. The Babenberg ally, Duke Vladislav of Bohemia, was granted royal status in return for renouncing claims to Austria and for accepting the incorporation of the Piast duchy of Silesia into the Empire in 1163. Meanwhile, a new duchy of Merania was created in 1152 from various lordships on the Croatian and Dalmatian coast and given to Count Conrad of Dachau.

Henry the Lion was left as de facto royal governor of northern Germany during Barbarossa’s prolonged absences in Italy. However, he used this to pursue a feud with the archbishop of Cologne after 1166 over possession of Westphalia, the western part of the old duchy of Saxony. He developed his own court which, unlike the emperor’s, was fixed in Brunswick. Henry became the first German lord to assume the prerogative of issuing his own charters, while his marriage to Matilda, daughter of the English king Henry II, appeared to confirm his regal aspirations. The deciding factor in the ensuing conflict was the relative willingness of the participants to accept obligations to the Empire. Cologne’s archbishop, Count Philipp von Heinsberg, won Barbarossa’s favour by agreeing to provide additional troops just as Henry refused to assist the imperial campaign of 1176 unless he received the royal lands at Goslar. The dispute deepened as Henry refused a personal summons to participate in another campaign.
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Barbarossa returned to Germany in 1177 having been defeated in Italy. He needed to reassert his authority and rally support, while Count Philipp saw an opportunity to defeat his regional rival. Henry the Lion’s trial in 1178 followed the conventional pattern of prolonged consultation amongst interested parties, allowing counts like the Askanier and
Bogislav of Stettin a chance to complain about his overbearing management of northern Germany. The verdict was passed as the Gelnhausen Act on 13 April 1180. Henry was exiled and Westphalia was given to Cologne as a distinct duchy, while the rest of Saxony passed to the Askanier Count Bernhard of Anhalt. Five months later Bavaria was transferred to Count Palatine Otto of Wittelsbach, another of Barbarossa’s partisans. However, the process of 1156 was repeated with the margraviate of Styria being detached as a separate duchy under the Traungau family. A year later, Bogislav was freed from Saxon jurisdiction as duke of Pomerania, while the archbishop of Aquileia was given ducal rank based on the former margraviate of Friaul.
¹³
These changes doubled the number of ducal titles since 1098.

Henry the Lion returned from exile in 1185, but found little support for his efforts to reverse the Gelnhausen Act before his death in 1195.
¹⁴
Henry VI’s unexpected death in 1197 allowed Henry the Lion’s son, Otto IV, to challenge the Staufers, resulting in the 1198 double election. The Staufer candidate, Philip of Swabia, was backed by the beneficiaries of the 1180–81 redistribution, plus Mainz and the bulk of the imperial church and ministeriales. Only Cologne broke ranks, hoping to displace Mainz as the premier archbishopric by staging Otto’s election. Otto also drew support from those alarmed by Staufer absenteeism in Italy and Henry VI’s proposal for a hereditary monarchy.
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Most of the fighting was in Italy, where it seriously damaged imperial prestige, but the war was already settled before Otto’s defeat at Bouvines in 1214, since most of his supporters had defected to Frederick II, who replaced the murdered Philip of Swabia as Staufer candidate in 1208.

The Emergence of the Princes

Frederick II confirmed Wittelsbach possession of the Palatinate and Bohemia’s royal status after being elected king by his own supporters in 1212. Once his victory was secure, he formalized what until then had been a temporary expedient and granted uniform privileges in two charters to the spiritual (1220) and lay lords (1231).
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Other European monarchs issued similar general charters: England’s Magna Carta (1215), the Aragonese Privileges (1283, 1287), the
Joyeuse Entrée
of Brabant (1356). Those in the Empire codified ideas of princely status (
principatus
) evolving since the tenth century, which suggested that all
senior lords were collectively ‘princes’ regardless of their precise titles or lay or spiritual characters. Scholars in Bologna and elsewhere encouraged this with a new interpretation of ancient Rome’s military and political elite as combining judicial powers (
jurisdictio
) with governance (
regimen
).
¹⁷
In short, the charters did not
devolve
royal powers to the princes, but applied new terminology to distinguish them as a political elite above other lords.

Already after 1180, Barbarossa distinguished more sharply between
princeps
and
nobiles
. Both were noble in the sense of socially distinct from commoners thanks to their military function, but the former were now clearly politically superior. Frederick II’s charters confirmed this by relating princely status directly to holding immediate imperial fiefs (
Reichslehen
). He retained the traditional position as suzerain, entitling him to confirm each new vassal in possession of his fief and to adjudicate internal family inheritance disputes. However, the changes also brought significant new advantages. Confirmation of the new duchies enlarged the number of senior vassals immediately subordinate to the emperor. The grant of broadly similar charters to both spiritual and lay princes ensured a more uniform set of obligations towards the Empire. Separate legislation since 1136 meanwhile strengthened the authority of the nascent princes over their own vassals, while continuing demographic and economic development ensured that, although smaller than the old duchies, the new ones could now be asked to provide more assistance. Finally, the Staufers’ parallel articulation of a collective imperial honour helped instil a sense of their obligations as binding on all in ‘service to the Empire’ (
Reichsdienst
).
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