Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (67 page)

Spiritual boundaries remained fairly stable, since they could only be altered with papal agreement, unlike the frequent partitions and changes in secular jurisdictions. However, the actual territory of bishops and abbots was always much smaller than their spiritual jurisdictions. Since it originated in gifts of crown land to the church, ecclesiastical territory was considered inalienable. Pieces were sold or pawned, but never on the scale witnessed with secular possessions, especially as the chapters always opposed alienation as threatening to their church. The Salians transferred numerous counties to church lords, while, as we have seen, Frederick II confirmed the bishops’ possession of ducal powers entailing judicial and military privileges equivalent to the secular princes. The Staufers’ demise ended the growth of ecclesiastical lands and jurisdictions, since no future monarchs were able to be so generous, while the spiritual character of abbots and bishops ensured that they could not accumulate further lands through inheritance. The subsequent viability of ecclesiastical territories therefore depended on how far they had been favoured by earlier medieval rulers. Paderborn and Eichstätt remained poor, as did bishoprics and abbeys north of the Elbe, which were mostly later foundations which had had less time to acquire land than the longer-established ones in the old core regions along the Rhine and Main. The relative vulnerability of many northern and eastern ecclesiastical territories also helps explain why they were already on their way to being secularized ahead of the Reformation.

Ecclesiastical lords also appeared to be less potent patrons than their secular counterparts after 1250 and were often unable to prevent their vassals escaping their jurisdiction. Cologne is a prominent example. Since the 1060s, successive archbishops had amassed the extensive
terra coloniensis
across north-west Germany, consolidated by the grant of their new title as duke of Westphalia in 1180. However, the counts took the opportunity of the Staufer’s demise to emancipate themselves during the later thirteenth century. The defeat of Archbishop Siegfried von Westerburg of Cologne in the battle of Worringen in 1288 proved a major setback and though he continued to oppose his counts’ desires, those in Geldern, Jülich, Berg and Cleves all eventually secured their autonomy through the acquisition of ducal titles in the fourteenth century. A similar process occurred in the archbishopric of Trier where the counts of Luxembourg and Nassau escaped jurisdiction, while the bishop of Würzburg found his acquisition of the old Franconian ducal title did not improve his position relative to neighbouring secular lords.
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Mainz became hemmed in through the expansion of secular neighbours (
Map 17
). The acquisition by the lords of Hessen of the landgraviate of Thuringia in 1247 enabled them to develop a distinct territory, cutting that of Mainz in two by isolating the section around Erfurt from the main strip at the Rhine–Main nexus. Hessen was able to stop Mainz from summoning its inhabitants before episcopal courts after 1370. Mainz’s refusal to grant similar concessions to the neighbouring Palatinate led to a long and debilitating dispute that lasted from the fifteenth century into the 1660s. However, ecclesiastical lords were not invariably the losers. Margrave Albrecht Achilles of Bayreuth overreached himself in the mid-fifteenth century when he tried to coerce local monasteries into accepting his protection, but fell deeply into debt when he was then blocked by the bishop of Bamberg.
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Secular Territorialization

The examples of Mainz, Hessen and the Palatinate suggest we should not interpret territorialization as a linear process driven by a succession of rulers all working to the same plan. The Palatinate remained one of the most powerful ‘territories’ of the later Middle Ages by relying on its electoral and Palatine status and rights, rather than through amassing land. It owed its later influence to Barbarossa’s transfer of the count Palatine title to his half-brother Conrad of Staufen in 1156, and the subsequent grant of former Salian estates in the Rhineland and, especially, protectorates over Worms, Speyer and Lorsch ecclesiastical
properties. The royal estates at Alzey were transferred to the Palatinate in 1214, followed by fiefs acquired from Speyer and Worms; the latter included Heidelberg in 1225, which became the administrative seat. The Staufers’ demise ended these donations, ensuring that Palatine territorialization was closer to that of the ecclesiastical territories rather than hereditary secular duchies. Subsequent growth remained largely restricted to efforts at converting the Palatinate’s bundles of jurisdictions over knights, towns and monasteries into more immediate forms of control.
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Thuringia’s example also illustrates how territorialization was never a simple process of consolidation. Originally the area of the Toringi, who had been conquered by the Franks in 534, Thuringia was bounded by the Harz mountains and the Unstrut, Werra and Saale rivers. In addition to Erfurt, which belonged to Mainz, the region contained the important imperial abbeys of Fulda and Hersfeld. The accession of the Ottonians in 919 transformed it from a border zone to a core region soon endowed with important palaces. The Ludowinger family of counts based at Schauenburg became the dominant local presence under the Salians and were awarded the title of landgrave in 1130. Barbarossa rewarded Ludowinger support by giving them the Palatine powers formerly associated with ducal Saxony, which he stripped from Henry the Lion in 1180. These powers were similar to those of the counts Palatine on the Rhine, and gave the Thuringian landgrave opportunities to cultivate his own clientele. The Ludowinger family inherited additional property in Hessen protected by the castle of Marburg, as well as the castles of Neuburg on the Unstrut and the Wartburg, the latter made famous in 1517 when Luther nailed his
Ninety-Five Theses
on its chapel door. So far, Thuringia’s development fitted the classic pattern of gradual accumulation and consolidation. It was sufficiently advanced for Landgrave Heinrich Raspe to be considered worthy of election as anti-Staufer king in 1246. However, Thuringia was not coherent enough to survive his death a year later, as this opened a prolonged inheritance dispute that eventually pulled it apart. Hessen passed as a separate territory to the counts of Brabant, who were awarded a landgrave title in 1292. The rest passed to the Wettin family as counts of Meissen, who managed to repel royal efforts to escheat it as a vacant fief between 1294 and 1307. The Wettins resumed the earlier consolidation, but were unable to reassert control over the lords of
Gleichen, Henneberg, Reuss and Schwarzburg, who had meanwhile gained autonomy. The Wettins acquired the Saxon ducal title from the defunct Wittenberg branch of the Askanier in 1423, but split their possessions in 1485, separating the electorate of Saxony to the east from the rump of Thuringia, which was subsequently partitioned as the ‘Saxon duchies’ of Weimar, Gotha and Coburg after 1572, followed by further subdivisions during the next two centuries.
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Partitions were a constant feature, indicating the very slow acceptance of dynasticism as a political principle. The Welfs split in 1267, barely three decades after the establishment of their new duchy at Brunswick, and multiple lines persisted until 1918. Hessen repeatedly split into Upper and Lower sections after 1308, with this division becoming permanent with the establishment of separate lines based in Kassel and Darmstadt in 1567. Baden’s initial expansion stalled in repeated partitions after 1190, with only a brief reunification from 1475 to 1536 until the various sections were finally concentrated in 1771. Other families divided their lands without such serious repercussions for their subsequent influence: the Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs, Hohenzollerns and (to an extent) the Wettins.

Jülich’s steady expansion on the Lower Rhine was thus highly unusual. Its dukes successively acquired Geldern, Berg, Ravensberg, Cleves and Mark between 1393 and 1521. Its demise was rather more typical. Biological extinction of the ruling line opened what proved the last inheritance dispute accompanied by serious violence, between 1609 and 1614, other than that over the Austrian succession (1740–48), which was an altogether different affair.
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Jülich’s example also demonstrates the growing rigidity of fiefs, since its expansion occurred after feudal jurisdictions had acquired more stable identities and boundaries. Each fief retained its own laws and institutions as it was acquired by the duke of Jülich, who held fiefs as a personal union rather than integrated territory.

The Growing Significance of Mediate Fiefs

The inheritance or transfer of immediate fiefs affected their mediate, dependent vassals as well. Territories thus remained composites, comprising three elements: 1) the allodial possessions of the ruling family in secular principalities or lands attached to the cathedral and chapter
in ecclesiastical ones; 2) the possessions of territorial subjects subject to their prince’s legal and fiscal jurisdiction; and 3) the mediate vassals’ fiefs. The exact mix varied considerably, while jurisdictions frequently did not entirely align with land ownership. For example, ecclesiastical princes exercised spiritual jurisdiction across the lands of their secular neighbours, while princes might share rights or hold different levels of criminal jurisdiction over parts of their possessions.

Crucially, fief-holding retained political and military significance across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and did not simply become another form of landownership, unlike in France and England where lords responded to the new economic pressures by converting many of their obligations into cash payments. Instead, the periodic struggles to control the German crown required that princes and their vassals remain armed.
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Armed retaliation through feuds remained a legal way to seek redress under imperial law, while lordship over mediate vassals offered an effective way to expand influence in the conditions of the later thirteenth century. The Staufers’ last decade saw serious fighting in much of the Empire, while the kings after 1257 were rarely able to help their lesser vassals. The ministeriales and knights charged with administering crown lands and protecting imperial abbeys were usually too weak to fend for themselves. Many placed themselves under the protection of neighbouring bishops or secular princes, notably the count Palatine and the dukes of Bavaria.

This process continued even as the general political situation stabilized after 1273, because the agrarian depression setting in around 1300 adversely affected the lesser vassals. Many of those who were still ‘free’ (i.e. immediate under the king) now voluntarily placed themselves under princely protection and became mediate vassals. The new understanding of property greatly facilitated this, because the knights retained ‘rights of usage’ of their fiefs. Often, these arrangements included princely confirmation of new forms of inheritance allowing the knight to exclude daughters and other relations in future. Overall, these developments hastened the merger of the ministeriales within the lesser nobility, either as knights who remained free under the king or as a new social Estate of ‘territorial nobles’ (
Landadel
) under a prince.

These changes were often accompanied by considerable violence at the local level, because they involved clarifying exactly who was subordinate to whom and what rights and land each noble held. Princes also
used the new powers acquired in the 1220 and 1231 charters, which allowed them to decide who was allowed to build castles and to oblige their vassals to ‘open’ their own castles to them. Princes often deliberately manipulated personal and material animosities to extend lordship over a rival’s mediate vassals. Nobles responded by forming associations to defend their status and autonomy. Princes could offer cash subsidies to cover the cost of service as inducements to entice vassals to switch allegiance. They also broke up their own allodial property to form new fiefs that could be granted to clients.
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Although still useful, the term ‘territorialization’ is thus in many ways a misnomer. Rather than the coloured patches shown on later historical atlases, princely territories expanded largely as webs of jurisdictions. Coalescence was often interrupted by the extinction of families or their partition into different branches, as well as more fundamentally by the economic and demographic upheavals of the first half of the fourteenth century. True ‘territorialization’ as conceived by later historians only really commenced with the political and institutional changes of imperial reform during the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as we shall see (
pp. 396–406
and
524–38
).

FROM LITTLE KINGS TO BIG DYNASTIES

The End of the Staufers

Territorialization advanced further and faster in Bavaria, Austria, Tirol, Bohemia and parts of west and north-west Germany. These were neither necessarily the richest nor most populous parts of the Empire. The prolonged royal presence in Franconia, Swabia, the Upper Rhine and parts of Thuringia contributed to the number of small fiefs emerging from the crown lands, while the concentration of people and wealth in the south-west also helped sustain a larger number of relatively small lordships. The Staufers’ demise after 1250 saw the monarchy shift to the more territorialized parts of Germany. At first glance, this appears to corroborate the old view of the Empire as being undermined by princely autonomy. However, the Staufers’ end was more personal than structural. After a 15-year absence in Italy and the Holy Land,
Frederick II had returned to Germany in 1235 accompanied by lavishly dressed Muslim bodyguards, camels and elephants – the ultimate symbol of pre-modern imperialism. Despite not recruiting additional troops, he crushed a rebellion without a fight, deposed his son Henry (VII) and Duke Friedrich II Babenberg of Austria, and settled the long-running dispute with the Welfs.
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