Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (81 page)

Imperial Defence

The Empire’s military effort is perhaps the most commonly derided aspect of its early modern existence. Most nineteenth-and twentieth-century
historians measured state effectiveness by martial prowess. The Empire’s apparent incapacity is usually illustrated by its mobilization against Prussia during the Seven Years War. At the battle of Rossbach on 5 November 1757, Frederick the Great crushed a much larger combined Franco-imperial army, inflicting losses of 5,000 compared to 548 of his own troops. The rout and subsequent disintegration of the imperial army (
Reichsarmee
) led to its being mocked as the ‘run-away army’ (
Reiß-aus Armee  
). In fact, imperial troops made up only one-quarter of the combined army, and a third of them were actually the Austrian contingent. The causes of the defeat were multiple and cannot be attributed simply to any supposed deficiencies of the Empire.
⁷²

The Empire as a whole never possessed a permanent army, but instead imperial reform created a mechanism to mobilize troops when required for collective defence and internal peace enforcement. Burdens were apportioned between the imperial Estates using the matricular quota system. Legislation issued between 1495 and 1555 established the process by which mobilization could be authorized by the Reichstag for the entire Empire, or by the Kreis Assemblies for their own regions. Further adjustments in 1570 rejected tentative moves across the previous decade towards funding a permanent cadre in peacetime.
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The accumulative effect of these measures was to link official military activity firmly to upholding the eternal public peace. This associated ‘military authority’ (
Militärhoheit
) with the imperial Estates, since these had been charged since 1495 with maintaining the peace, thus denying such powers to mediate lords and communities whose martial activities came under growing supervision from the territorial authorities. Imperial Estates were identified with powers of command, able to name officers for their own forces, just as they had led forces in person under the previous, more personal, feudal obligations. Nominal supreme command remained reserved for the emperor, but in practice he named several generals. From the mid-seventeenth century the emperor consulted the Reichstag when appointing commanders of common imperial forces, but retained exclusive control of his own Habsburg troops. Princes recruited for foreign powers, most famously Hessen-Kassel during the American Revolution, claiming this as a ‘German freedom’, but that activity remained formally restricted by the proviso that it should not harm the Empire or emperor. Failure to observe this gave Joseph I
an excuse to sequestrate Bavaria, Cologne and Mantua during the War of the Spanish Succession.
⁷⁴

Except for financial support in 1544, the Empire refrained from backing Charles V’s wars against France, compelling him to use his own forces and those he secured by appealing to individual princes. The large numbers of German mercenaries serving him in Italy and the Low Countries were paid for by his own revenues and borrowing. Formal collective action remained limited to policing the western frontiers, especially after 1562, to insulate Germany from the civil wars raging in France and the Netherlands. Measures agreed at Reichstags between 1555 and 1570 failed to prevent either side from recruiting German and Italian troops, but otherwise successfully prevented these conflicts spreading into the Empire, except for Spanish and Dutch incursions in north-west Germany after 1585.

Like taxation, the main military effort was directed eastwards as Turkish Aid, reflecting the common expectation that the Empire should remain at peace with Christians whilst fulfilling its duty to repel the Ottomans. Substantial contingents were despatched five times from 1532, culminating in a sustained effort during the Long Turkish War, ending in 1606.
⁷⁵
These were field forces raised for specific campaigns, augmenting troops from the Habsburg lands and much smaller numbers of volunteers from across Europe. Rudolf II opened the Long Turkish War in 1593 with a field army of around 12,000 men from his own lands and 8,000–10,000 from the Empire.
⁷⁶
The only permanent force comprised 20,000 garrison troops guarding the Hungarian frontier after the 1520s, as well as a gunboat flotilla on the Danube.
⁷⁷

Military organization at the territorial level conformed to the imperial structure. Princes and imperial cities maintained small guard units, primarily for status and public order. These provided a professional cadre for contingents sent against the Turks. Peasants were enrolled in territorial militias legitimized by reference to imperial legislation requiring princes to maintain public order and assist the Empire. The militias underwent periodic reorganizations, especially from the 1570s when more systematic drilling was introduced, but they remained comparatively ineffective. Major operations always required professionals, hence the significance of the Empire’s fiscal system to pay them. The Schmalkaldic League and other alliances formed during the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries all borrowed directly from the Empire’s quota system in their own mobilization structures.

The Habsburgs tried to fight the Thirty Years War using these structures by claiming that the Bohemian Revolt was a breach of the public peace, while presenting Swedish intervention as a foreign invasion. Throughout, they legitimated their operations by issuing mandates summoning their opponents to lay down their arms and negotiate. Those who failed to respond were branded outlaws to be targeted with punitive action. Habsburg supporters like Bavaria conformed to this approach, since it legitimated their own seizure of lands and titles from the emperor’s enemies.
⁷⁸
Initially, all belligerents tried to fund war from regular taxes, supplemented by foreign subsidies, forced loans and coinage debasement, the latter causing rampant inflation between 1621 and 1623. Most of the emperor’s early opponents were relatively minor princes who lacked either large territories or reliable foreign backers, and were forced to subsist by extorting money and supplies from the areas where their armies were operating. General Albrecht von Wallenstein’s ‘contribution system’, adopted by the emperor’s forces after 1625, attempted to regularize this and extended it on an unprecedented scale. Wallenstein hoped to win the war by awe rather than shock, assembling such overwhelming numbers that further fighting would become unnecessary. Drawing on imperial legislation since 1570, Wallenstein issued ordinances regulating what his troops could demand from local communities, thus entirely bypassing regular tax systems. Subsidies and taxes from the Habsburg lands were now reserved to buy military hardware and other items that could not be sourced locally, as well as servicing the loans on which the entire system increasingly depended.
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Wallenstein’s system suffered from several major flaws, not least the excessively high pay rates he allowed his senior officers and the rudimentary checks on graft and corruption. The numerous abuses feature prominently in contemporary criticism and subsequent historical discussion, but it was their political implications that made his methods so controversial. Wallenstein’s army tapped the Empire’s resources directly without reference to the Reichstag or the Kreis Assemblies. He gave the emperor an army funded by the Empire, but under Habsburg control and used to wage what was really a highly contentious civil war. Whilst contributions sustained the ordinary soldiers, their officers
expected larger rewards, not least because they generally raised and equipped their units at their own expense. Wallenstein was already a major beneficiary of the redistribution of property confiscated from Bohemian nobles in the wake of the imperial victory at White Mountain in 1620. Confiscations were rolled out across the rest of Germany following further victories from 1623, with Wallenstein receiving the duchy of Mecklenburg in 1628, sequestrated from its dukes, who had unwisely backed Danish intervention three years before.

Alarmed, the electors combined to force Ferdinand II to dismiss Wallenstein in 1630, reduce the army, and switch to regular imperial taxes that allowed greater scrutiny and control. Sweden’s invasion of the Empire prevented the full implementation of these changes, and prompted Ferdinand to reinstate Wallenstein. Wallenstein failed to defeat the Swedes and was increasingly regarded as a liability in Ferdinand’s efforts to persuade Sweden’s German partners to defect. Wallenstein’s judicial murder in February 1634 demonstrated that the emperor retained control over the army and the loyalty of most of its personnel, but the problem of organizing war remained. Temporary military ascendency allowed Ferdinand to order all imperial Estates to combine their own troops with his as a single imperial army funded by regular imperial taxes. This arrangement was enshrined in the Peace of Prague in 1635, but it failed because the prevailing conditions rendered its financial arrangements untenable. In practice, the emperor had to allow Bavaria, Saxony, Cologne and – to an extent – Brandenburg considerable military autonomy. France and Sweden evolved an effective strategy after 1641, successively targeting pro-imperial territories, like Brandenburg and Bamberg, until they agreed neutrality. This gradually reduced the areas supporting imperial troops, forcing them onto the defensive. Nonetheless, Ferdinand III and his German allies still mustered over 76,000 men in 1648, compared to the 84,000 of his opponents, a significant factor in the emperor’s ability to extract reasonably favourable terms in the Peace of Westphalia.

The overwhelming desire for peace after 1648 led to the disbandment of virtually all forces in the Empire. Only the Habsburgs retained a small permanent army, which they redeployed in Hungary.
⁸⁰
However, the wider international situation compelled further discussion of defence. The emperor’s preferred solution was to return to the late sixteenth-century practice of extended Reichstag grants subsidizing the
cost of the Habsburgs’ own army. This was politically unacceptable after the experience with Wallenstein. The electorates and several medium-sized principalities established their own permanent forces during the later 1650s and 1660s. The earlier militias were sometimes revived and adapted as a limited form of conscription providing cheap recruits to augment the professionals. The outbreak of almost permanent warfare on the Empire’s western frontier after 1672 saw these forces expand considerably, creating the first true ‘standing armies’ alongside that of the emperor.
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This forged a new divide in the Empire between the ‘armed Estates’ (
Armierten Stände
) and their unarmed neighbours. Leopold I relied heavily on the armed Estates who could supply troops fairly quickly during both the Turkish War of 1662–4 and especially in the Dutch War of 1672–9 to defend the Rhine against French attacks. Collective defence became a modified version of Wallenstein’s system as Leopold assigned unarmed territories and cities to provide funds and supplies to support the troops of the armed Estates. Unarmed territories now risked slipping into mediate status under powerful territories like Brandenburg, Saxony, Hanover and the heavily armed bishopric of Münster, all of which tried to formalize their predominance by establishing protectorates. By 1679 it was obvious that the armed Estates intended to deprive unarmed ones of the right to participate in the Reichstag and Kreis Assemblies on the grounds they were no longer meeting their obligations to the Empire directly. This threatened to federalize the Empire through the mediatization of smaller territories, shortening the status hierarchy to a collection of large and medium-sized militarized principalities.

Leopold realized this would undermine his ability to manage the Empire and he sided with the lesser imperial Estates at the Reichstag to force through a compromise defence reform in 1681–2, establishing a system of collective security lasting until 1806.
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The matricular quotas were revised more clearly on a regional basis, retaining the 1521 register for cash contributions, but assigning new manpower contingents to give a basic rate (
Simplum
) totalling 12,000 cavalry and 28,000 infantry. As before, these could be mobilized as a fraction or multiple of the basic quota. The reform succeeded, because it stabilized the status hierarchy without preventing any further change. The
right
as well as the
duty
of all Estates to contribute was confirmed. The role of the Kreise
expanded to organize contingents from the smaller territories who could combine their soldiers into regiments of broadly uniform size. The smaller territories could still opt to pay cash in lieu, but the money was now to go through the Reichspfennigmeister (later the Imperial Operations Fund) to prevent them being bullied into unequal local arrangements by more powerful neighbours. All imperial Estates were free to maintain additional troops above what they should provide for the Empire, especially as such obligations were on a sliding scale with no theoretical upper limit. However, this did not amount to the ‘law of the gun’ (
Canonen-Recht  
) as some critics maintained, because in 1671 Leopold prevented the armed princes from securing the Reichstag’s sanction for unlimited war taxes. Consequently, the legal position remained the one agreed in 1654 that subjects were only obliged to pay for ‘necessary fortresses and garrisons’, thus still allowing some scope for territorial Estates to decide what these amounted to, as well as for the emperor to intervene when they could not agree.
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The armed Estates were also still free to provide additional auxiliaries through private arrangements with the emperor that might advance their dynastic goals. Finally, collective defence remained tied to the established constitutional framework governing decisions for war and peace, thus anchored on the ideal of a defensive war, since only this was likely to secure the necessary approval through the Reichstag.