Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (71 page)

IMPERIAL REFORM

Beginnings

Sigismund’s reign saw the beginnings of what later historians called ‘imperial reform’, which culminated in the establishment of new institutions between around 1480 and 1530 collectively giving the Empire
its definitive early modern form. This process is difficult to date precisely, because it changed character as it progressed. Like the Ottonians and Salians, Sigismund and his contemporaries conceived
reformation
largely as
renovation
, or restoration of an idealized, lost former political order.
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The immediate issues were those that had already loomed large since the Staufers, especially how best to uphold justice and public order, while the trigger was also familiar: helping the papacy put its house in order (see
pp. 70–73
). However, Sigismund’s intervention to end the Great Schism already differed substantially from early medieval emperors in that he collaborated with the new movement arguing that the church was a collective represented by a general council of bishops. Meanwhile, broader discussions of ‘proper order’ involved new, often radical views on the relationship between society, religion and politics. These desires would erupt violently around 1520, prompting further constitutional revisions to stabilize the Empire.

The timing of reform and especially its shift from renewal to innovation stems from the intrusion of new problems, forcing the Empire’s elite to accept new ways of coping with common threats. These problems were generally similar to those facing other European monarchies: how to overcome civil strife and protect the kingdom against external enemies. The usual response involved concentrating more power in royal hands, backed by a more extensive and efficient network of royal officials. These changes were underpinned by the reworked ideas of Roman law circulating within most of Europe since the twelfth century, which provided arguments favouring royal authority. The Empire did not take this course, despite participating in the discussion of Roman law ideas. One reason was that the changes made since the Staufers had enabled it to retain a lightweight, low-cost form of royal government which no important participant saw any reason to abandon now. Princes and cities enjoyed considerable individual autonomy, but discharged ‘public’ functions at their own expense, freeing the emperor from having to organize and pay for this. The other reason was that the emperor’s main task was considered to be maintaining internal peace, not waging external war. Peace was intended to be permanent, whereas war was always presented as a necessary exception. This meant that apologists for greater royal power in the Empire could not use the fiction employed in France, England and Spain that new taxes were short-term emergency measures. Instead, it remained
politically unacceptable to develop centralized institutions capable of sustaining the king’s permanent interference in his subjects’ lives. Regular taxation was equated with ‘eternal servitude’ inimical to ‘German freedom’.
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Pressures for Reform

In contrast to fifteenth-century England, Castile and France, there had been no civil wars in the Empire since Charles IV’s swift victory over Günther von Schwarzenburg in 1349. The subsequent succession disputes in 1400 and 1410 were more sullen stand-offs than full-blown conflicts. Yet serious violence erupted at local and regional level from tensions arising from feudalization and territorialization. The imperial church lands were often the worst affected, because mounting debts forced bishops to alienate property, leading to disputes with their chapters and entanglements with often aggressive secular neighbours. A notable example was the Mainz dispute from 1459 to 1463 triggered by the newly elected archbishop’s refusal to pay an exorbitant fee demanded by the pope to confirm him in office. The pope deposed him and invited the chapter to elect a rival, thus opening the electorate to interference from neighbouring princes who saw an opportunity to seize its property. Unrest continued into the 1470s as the disorder added to social and economic problems, stirring popular protest. Elector Palatine Friedrich I ‘the Victorious’ widened the conflict through additional disputes with other south-west princes and cities.
⁸⁵

The south and west were particularly prone to disorder, thanks to their dense and complex feudal hierarchy that fragmented jurisdictions, creating numerous points for potential friction. The disputes were not ‘private’ wars, but recognized legal practice, since the Empire permitted subjects to seek redress through feuding. This practice had been contained in the past, because feuds generally remained small scale, involving seizure or destruction of property, rather than full military operations. However, feuding increased in intensity and scale as princes waged multiple conflicts using their mediate vassals as surrogates, while many lesser vassals acted on their own initiative to preserve or widen their autonomy. Franconia saw 278 noble feuds between 1440 and 1570, with a peak from 1460 to 1479, followed by a second, lesser one from 1500 to 1509. The proportion of feuds pitting nobles
against princes rose from 40 per cent during the first peak to 53 per cent in the second, compared to feuds amongst nobles accounting for only 15 per cent.
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Most feuds involved intimidation, arson, looting, cattle rustling and kidnapping, with killings rarely being premeditated since an opponent’s death negated the feud’s purpose of compelling him to admit publicly to being in the wrong. The numerous cases of peaceful resolution are easily forgotten. The cliché of the rapacious ‘robber barons’ was an urban myth, fostered from this period onwards as part of a wider critique of nobility. Burghers themselves waged feuds, also burning villages and destroying crops belonging to hostile lords. Moreover, aristocratic concepts of honour were being embraced by others, spreading the use of the feud: 258 feuds were waged by Bavarian peasants and other commoners between 1450 and 1500.
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However, the overall level of violence did rise during the first half of the fifteenth century, when the disputes among princes in the Rhineland and south-west destroyed 1,200 villages. A further 1,500 villages were destroyed during the Hussite insurrection, which added to an overall perception of mounting disorder.
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The sense of danger was magnified by the emergence of the first serious external threat since the Mongols in the 1240s. The western frontier was disturbed by mercenaries temporarily displaced from the French civil wars in 1444–5, followed by ducal Burgundy’s aggressive expansion after 1468 and the subsequent dispute over its inheritance between the Habsburgs and French kings lasting from 1477 to 1493. Meanwhile, the ‘Turkish menace’ grew after the failure of the last old-style crusade in 1444. The Turks launched their first raid into Krain in 1469, followed by almost annual attacks on Styria after 1471.

Like the feuding, these wars were on an unprecedented scale. Henry VII’s Roman expedition of 1311 involved a royal army of 5,000 men, entirely in line with forces over the previous five centuries. By 1483, the French monarchy could mobilize 50,000, at a point when even the Habsburgs only mustered 18,000 in their campaigns in Hungary. New forms of warfare required a higher proportion of disciplined mercenary infantry fighting in regular formations. By the early sixteenth century, one year’s campaign against the Ottomans was reckoned to cost between 1.8 and 3.6 million florins, while the Habsburgs’ wars against France proved even more expensive, with costs doubling between 1530 and 1550 to reach 5.4 million florins annually.
⁸⁹
Established methods
could not cope. Sigismund and Frederick III received occasional substantial one-off payments from their immediate vassals, but the total annual revenue from imperial prerogatives had flat-lined at 25,000 florins since 1400. Several knights declared feuds against Frederick III for failing to pay their salaries, and he was not even safe from his own creditors who, in 1473, seized his horses, temporarily stranding him in Augsburg.

There was a growing recognition that change was necessary. One reason was that many of the enemies were now heretics (Hussites) and infidels (Turks), posing an existential threat that demanded real action. Princes also realized that feuding was undermining their authority. They relied on lesser nobles and mediate vassals both to administer their lands and as surrogates to wage war on their rivals. Unsurprisingly, their subjects found it hard to distinguish between tax-collecting and robbery, and often experienced territorial justice as arbitrary, responding with their own feuds against princely officials.
⁹⁰

It was indicative of the gradual underlying shift to written political culture that reform proposals began circulating as manuscripts from the early fifteenth century. By the 1440s these were becoming longer, more detailed and more practical.
⁹¹
The most famous is the
Reformatio Sigismundi
, which appeared during the church council at Basel around 1439, and was first printed in 1476, with three more editions by 1497. Although the author remains unknown, the proposal’s association with the emperor raised its profile. It was the first such text in German and is one of the earliest lengthy political discussions in that language. It is often difficult to follow, because German still lacked the vocabulary to discuss the kind of constitutional issues that had traditionally been debated only in Latin. The choice of German clearly signalled a desire to reach a wider audience, unlike the texts produced during the earlier conflicts with the papacy, which had been position statements intended only to help envoys engaged in face-to-face negotiations. Its concrete proposals were clearly partisan: the author advocated abolishing the imperial church and redistributing its resources to the knights, who were also to be protected from rapacious princes through further constitutional changes.

Leadership of Reform

Despite his association with the document, Sigismund was in no position to lead reform, being distracted by the church councils, the Hussite emergency and Hungary’s defence.
⁹²
His death in 1437 ended the Luxembourg royal line and finally opened the door to the Habsburgs, whom Charles IV had recognized as potential heirs in 1364. The recent marriage of Sigismund’s daughter Elisabeth to the Austrian Duke Albrecht V strengthened the duke’s position as sole candidate and he was accepted as King Albert II after an interregnum of only four months in 1437–8. Although not averse to reform, Albert was determined to secure his inheritance in Bohemia and Hungary. He never visited the core parts of the Empire after his election and died of dysentery in 1439 while campaigning in Hungary after a reign of 19 months, aged just 42.
⁹³

The Habsburgs’ position as the only viable candidates was confirmed by the acceptance of Albert’s cousin as Frederick III in 1440, despite his not being present at his own election. It was two years before Frederick left Austria to be crowned king at Aachen, and he again stayed in his own lands between 1444 and 1471, except for his imperial coronation journey to Rome in 1452. Understandably, this led to criticism of his being the ‘imperial arch-nightcap’, a pun on the electoral arch-titles suggesting Frederick was asleep on the job.
⁹⁴
In fact he clearly thought of himself as emperor, choosing to style himself as ‘Frederick III’ in sequence after the Staufer emperor, rather than after his own Habsburg predecessor Frederick the Fair, whom Louis IV accepted as co-king. Frederick also retained many of the former Luxembourg imperial servants, but he also conformed to the new pattern of imperial rule that required he secure his own lands before he could see to the rest of the Empire. Unfortunately, he faced considerable opposition from Austrian and Bohemian nobles and had to abandon claims to Bohemia in 1458, only to become embroiled in a dispute with his brother Albrecht VI over Austria between 1461 and 1463, which ruined that land’s finances. Frederick was then distracted by a prolonged dispute with Hungary, which now had its own king and invaded Austria in the 1480s.
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The experience of Wenzel’s deposition in 1400 and Sigismund’s reassignment of the Saxon and Brandenburg titles together contributed to
a stronger corporate identity amongst the electors by the 1420s. Taking their cue from the church councils, the electors already proposed themselves as a permanent advisory body for the Empire in 1438–9. This suggestion was not followed up, but their sense of responsibility for the Empire’s welfare grew with Frederick’s apparent uninterest in imperial affairs during the mid-fifteenth century. Trier, Bohemia and Mainz all submitted their own reform proposals, as did other princes like the duke of Bavaria from the 1460s. Count Berthold von Henneberg emerged as the spokesman for reform after becoming elector of Mainz in 1484 and he exploited Frederick III’s desire to secure recognition of his son, Maximilian, as successor to compel greater action on reform. Like many previous Mainz archbishops, Henneberg wanted to cement his diocese’s premier status within the Empire. However, his arguments carried weight because he shared a broad desire to enact viable reforms.
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Frederick III opposed reform as threatening to impose formal restrictions on his prerogatives. He avoided direct confrontation, which risked humiliation if the princes refused to give way, and instead spun out discussions until the electors accepted Maximilian I as king of the Romans in 1486, the first successor to be chosen during an emperor’s lifetime for 110 years and a sign that Henneberg and others genuinely wanted to work with the Habsburgs. Frederick retired to Linz in 1488, leaving Maximilian to manage the Empire. This opened the door to compromise, since Maximilian could now pose as mediator between the princes and his father. Despite misgivings over some aspects of reform, Maximilian continued this policy of brokerage after Frederick’s death in 1493 when he posed as the impartial judge seeking the best solution to the Empire’s problems from amongst the various options suggested by the princes.
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