Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (85 page)

Despite his deteriorating military situation, Charles VII’s initial reception was fairly favourable. Fifty princes and counts attended his coronation in person on 12 February 1742, while representation at the Reichstag improved as several Estates sent envoys after long absences. The Reichstag voted assistance which, when combined with contributions from the imperial knights, provided 3 to 3.5 million florins across Charles’s reign.
¹²²
This did not, however, constitute formal endorsement of his war with Austria, which was regarded as a private matter, with the Reichstag adopting a position of official neutrality. The south and western Kreise mobilized troops to uphold this until 1748. Charles was forced to make concessions to win support. Fifteen counts were
raised to princely status, with some of them providing troops for the Bavarian army. More significantly, Charles granted Prussia ceremonial distinctions matching Austria’s status, including according Frederick II the title of ‘majesty’, enabling him to become king
of
rather than merely
in
Prussia. Prussian support was retained by recognizing its possession of Silesia as a sovereign duchy, raising doubts as to whether it still belonged to the Empire, while Spanish cooperation was purchased through conceding plans for a new kingdom to be created from Austria’s possessions in northern Italy.

Meanwhile, the other electors were mollified by revisions to the emperor’s electoral agreement in 1742, confirming that they were no longer personally obliged to seek confirmation of their fiefs at the start of each reign. More damaging still, Charles offered to renounce claims to Austria and Bohemia if Bavaria was recognized as a kingdom. When that failed, he proposed ending the war at the expense of the imperial church in a new wave of secularization. Although intended as secret, details of these negotiations were soon leaked by his enemies, exposing Charles’s inability to deliver his promise to be the ‘small man’s emperor’ favouring the minor imperial Estates against the two German great powers.
¹²³
By 1744 it was clear that Charles’s fortunes depended on how far Frederick II was willing to back him. Charles’s death on 20 January 1745 enabled his son, Maximilian III Joseph, to cut a deal with Austria, supplying troops in its ongoing war with France in return for an Austrian withdrawal from Bavaria.
¹²⁴

Austro-Prussian Rivalry

Frederick II secured international recognition of his possession of Silesia as the price for accepting Maria Theresa’s husband as Emperor Francis I in 1745 and refraining from opposing Austria in the remaining three years of war against France and Spain. Contemporaries perceived the period 1740–45 as a significant break with the past. Francis was only Habsburg by marriage and appeared the junior partner to Maria Theresa, who retained exclusive control of her hereditary lands. The division between imperial and Habsburg rule continued when Joseph II succeeded his father as emperor in 1765. Although Maria Theresa conceded co-rule to her son, he granted her ceremonial precedence ahead of his own wife at the Habsburg court, symbolizing how imperial affairs
had slipped into a secondary consideration in Habsburg policy, and sharpening the distinction between
kaiserlich
referring to the emperor and
reichisch
relating to the Empire. Already, Austrians talked of travelling ‘to the Empire’ as if it were a foreign country. The importance of the Habsburg lands is expressed by the imbalance in paperwork, with the Austrian state chancellery producing 259 volumes of records in the period 1745–1806, compared to only 25 for its imperial counterpart.
¹²⁵

Nonetheless, all senior Habsburg figures, including Maria Theresa, were convinced that the loss of the imperial title in 1740 had been a disaster and were determined to rebuild their influence in the Empire.
¹²⁶
They found some support, because the experience of 1740–45 had exposed the dangers of a weak emperor (Charles VII) and confirmed there was no viable alternative to Habsburg rule. Austria and Prussia together held half the Empire, excluding imperial Italy. Even when combined with the earlier loss of Naples and Sicily to Spain in 1735, Austria possessed a substantial empire of its own (
Map 10
). The disparity with other German principalities widened with the damage inflicted on Bavaria and Saxony during the War of the Austrian Succession. Contemporaries were increasingly aware of these material differences through a better understanding of statistics and more accurate information.

Austrian policy was governed by the desire to punish Prussia and recover Silesia, both considered necessary to restore the Habsburgs’ international standing. Diplomacy constructed a powerful coalition that included France and Sweden as guarantors of the Peace of Westphalia, as well as Russia, which hoped to annex Prussia itself. Fearing attack, Frederick the Great launched a pre-emptive strike in August 1756, planning to seize Saxony as a base from which to fight. Prussian troops also moved into Mecklenburg during 1757 to block a potential Swedish advance. Both actions played into Habsburg hands, since Frederick’s invasion of two Lutheran territories undermined his propaganda that he was defending constitutional liberties against Catholic Habsburg tyranny. His clear breach of the public peace appeared to provide Austria with the legal basis to sequestrate his lands, as it had done with its opponents during the Thirty Years War.
¹²⁷

The majority of imperial Estates were prepared to back collective military action to restore peace, but not to achieve Austria’s goal of dismembering Prussia. Frederick’s successful defence against years of poorly coordinated attacks enabled him to make peace in 1763 on the
basis of the pre-war status quo. The Empire was the only belligerent to achieve its official war aim, forcing Prussia to evacuate Saxony and Mecklenburg.
¹²⁸
Yet Prussia was the real victor, since its survival against seemingly impossible odds confirmed its status as a great power. Frederick built the huge showpiece Neues Palais in Potsdam to prove his country’s potency despite having just fought a costly war.

However, Prussia remained vulnerable, having only escaped defeat thanks to British aid and the fortuitous change of ruler in Russia leading to that country’s exit from the war early in 1762.
¹²⁹
Although allied to Russia after 1764, Frederick was conscious how quickly Russian troops had conquered east Prussia itself in 1757, holding it until peace was established six years later. Aware that he could not rely on international allies, Frederick refined his dealings with the Empire. His criticism of the Empire was only published long after his death, whereas his policies after 1763 show skilful use of the constitution to disrupt Habsburg imperial management and prevent Austria mobilizing the still considerable resources of the minor territories against Prussia.
¹³⁰
Prussia now presented itself as defender of German liberties against Habsburg tyranny as a way to block Joseph II’s attempts to reform imperial justice after 1765.

However, dynasticism proved the most explosive issue. Prussia had long-standing claims to the lands of the Franconian Hohenzollerns that merged into the margraviate of Ansbach-Bayreuth in 1769. Meanwhile, a Bavarian succession crisis loomed as Maximilian III Joseph had no son to succeed him. Dynasticism had shifted since the early eighteenth century in line with the generally more materialist approach to imperial politics. Although his father and grandfather had expended considerable effort to secure Ansbach-Bayreuth, Frederick was prepared to swop his claims if Saxony would cede the more strategically located Lusatia to strengthen his hold on Silesia. Meanwhile, Joseph II tried to persuade the Palatine Wittelsbachs to cede their claims to Bavaria in return for having the far richer, but from an Austrian perspective strategically vulnerable, Netherlands instead.
¹³¹

Towards a Polish Future

The prolonged negotiations from the mid-1760s saw these territories assessed in terms of size, revenue and population, rather than their
formal status as imperial fiefs. The discussions were interrupted by a civil war in Poland that led to the First Partition of that country, by Austria, Prussia and Russia.
¹³²
Frederick II gained Polish Prussia, thereby finally linking Hohenzollern Prussia to Brandenburg, while Austria seized Galicia. Poland’s fate exposed the risks for the Empire if Austria and Prussia continued their collaboration. Henceforth, the third Germany of smaller territories was stalked by the spectre of a ‘Polish future’.

Both great powers needed time to digest their Polish gains, while Maximilian III Joseph’s sudden death in December 1777 opened the Bavarian succession issue before Joseph II had clinched a deal with the Palatine Wittelsbachs. Emperor Joseph overplayed his hand, bullying Elector Carl Theodor into accepting poor terms without securing prior support from his French allies, who preferred to fight Britain in the American War of Independence. Frederick rejected Austrian proposals in April 1778, instead forgoing the Ansbach-Bayreuth inheritance since this would not balance Joseph’s potential gains in Bavaria. Prussia rallied Saxony to fight under the banner of defending the Empire’s constitutional order in the brief War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–9). Both Prussia and Austria made great efforts to secure wider support in the Empire, without success. The war exposed serious deficiencies in both the Austrian and Prussian armies, but Frederick managed to do sufficient damage to oblige Joseph to abandon his exchange plans beyond annexing a small slice of eastern Bavaria.
¹³³

Joseph then outflanked Frederick by forging an alliance with Russia, which abandoned cooperation with Prussia in return for a freer hand in dealing with the Ottomans in south-east Europe. Isolated without an international ally, Frederick returned to leading an obstructive opposition in imperial institutions. He was greatly assisted by Joseph’s many mistakes, including continuing Austria’s insistence that princes follow the old enfeoffment ceremonial. Joseph quietly dropped this in 1788, allowing princes to seek confirmation by letter like the electors. Joseph caused another minor scandal by issuing 140 so-called
Panisbriefe
during 1781–3, entitling Habsburg officials to free accommodation in the remaining imperial monasteries. This allowed Frederick to attack him for misusing imperial prerogatives, especially as these ‘meal tickets’ were issued unsystematically, while it was far from clear whether they could still be applied to religious houses that no longer had full
immediacy or had become Protestant institutions. Meanwhile, Joseph alienated many ecclesiastical princes by curtailing their spiritual jurisdiction over Habsburg lands, and by aggressively promoting his siblings within the imperial church.
¹³⁴

Frederick corralled several medium-sized and minor territories into the League of Princes (
Fürstenbund
) on 23 July 1785, which eventually grew to 18 members.
¹³⁵
This was certainly not part of any Prussian mission to unify Germany, but was simply a tactical device to hinder Habsburg management of the Empire. His nephew and successor, Frederick William II, abandoned the League once Prussia escaped international isolation through an alliance with Britain in 1788. Within a year, France had descended into revolution, while one year later Joseph was dead and had been succeeded by his younger brother, Leopold II. The Empire’s last 16 years would be dominated by the difficulties of attempting reform amidst an existential war. Before we can assess how far it stood any chance of success, we need to turn to the broader question of how its constitutional order was anchored in its social structures.

PART IV

Society

10

Authority

LORDSHIP

The Empire and Social History

Holy Roman emperors have often proved strange figures in European history. They do not seem to ‘belong’ anywhere. They are constantly moving about, appearing here and there, only to disappear again, often for decades at a time. It is thus scarcely surprising that the relationship between the Empire’s governance and the lives of its inhabitants has remained the largest gap in its history. This relationship has often been overlooked, because it was widely assumed throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century that the Empire was irrelevant to its inhabitants’ daily existence.
¹
The Empire’s transnational character has not helped, since much social history takes the nation state as its framework, with, for example, medieval and early modern ‘German’ population calculated according to 1930s frontiers and omitting political units like Burgundy that subsequently disappeared. Local and regional history also often focuses on later boundaries as if earlier political structures had little or no impact, while the recent fashion for micro-studies has added to the difficulties of drawing general conclusions over time and space. A full social history is beyond the scope of this book. The following will not claim that the Empire was some kind of cradle of European civilization deriving from a Frankish legacy. Difference and divergence are major themes, because the Empire never constituted a single, homogeneous society, nor did it have a unified economy. Instead, the next three chapters will argue that the Empire’s political institutions and practices were rooted in society and shared its strengths and weaknesses.

Political structures both expressed and conserved a society that became stratified hierarchically and structured horizontally along corporate lines. The Empire held and retained meaning as the framework protecting political and social diversity. Spatial and chronological variations in the political order reflected social and economic differences. One example is the higher concentration of lords in south-west Germany and old Carolingian heartlands along the Rhine. Another example is illustrated in the differences between east and west, which owe much to the timing of migration and settlement beyond the Elbe, and the relative weakness of the intermediary level of princely authority at the point of demographic and economic change in the fifteenth century. Variations in the emergence of towns also relate to regional differences in political authority, as well as the readiness of emperors and lords to grant privileges. The timing of political changes was often influenced by socio-economic factors, such as the demographic growth and economic innovation facilitating the shift from extensive to intensive lordship around 1200.