Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (87 page)

Combined, these developments propelled further social stratification. The need for slaves evaporated with the dwindling domains, consolidating peasants as a social group commanding their own labour. However, new distinctions emerged between the rural and urban population, as well as within both. Other variations emerged through different inheritance patterns, themselves anchored in agreements with lords. Partible inheritance remained the dominant form in the German south-west, Rhineland and parts of Franconia, but primogeniture spread elsewhere, protecting peasants from the impoverishment that often followed multiple partitions, but also distinguishing them from new groups of land-poor or landless inhabitants. More fortunate peasants used their relative wealth to buy further exemptions, for example by paying lords with candle wax rather than their labour. Lords frequently encouraged the commutation of labour services into cash dues and rents. Meanwhile, peasants acquired an incentive to develop their plots, because they were free to keep any surpluses once they had paid their fixed obligations to their lord.

Rents allowed more flexible forms of lordship. The lord’s presence was no longer required to coordinate manorial labour, enabling him not merely to be absent, but to draw income from scattered possessions not grouped into manors. Manors became centres of lordly jurisdiction rather than economic production. Jurisdictions themselves fragmented after 1300 with the general commercialization of fiefs, since individual elements could be sold or transferred. One important element was mastery of serfs (
Leibherrschaft
), which declined with the contraction of directly worked estates, but persisted in some areas as the power to command labour. Even tenants and leaseholders usually remained subject to some kind of residual obligation, such as maintaining walls and roads, or providing a few days’ portage each year. Other feudal elements also persisted, such as lordly restrictions on individual choice, for example marriage or freedom of movement.

A second important element of lordship comprised seigniorial authority deriving from the
dominium directum
, or underlying ownership of land used by tenants and leaseholders. This ensured that lord–peasant
relations were never entirely dictated by economic factors. Seigniorial authority provided the legal framework to negotiate the terms of the lease, determining how far peasants could control and use their plots, as well as their protection from eviction. These powers were increasingly articulated from the thirteenth century as ‘landlordship’ (
dominus fundi
,
Grundherrschaft
).
¹⁷
This aspect was far more significant north of the Alps than in Italy, which largely bypassed this form through a shift directly to private written contracts with leaseholders. These contracts remained asymmetrical, especially as cities acquired jurisdiction over their rural hinterlands and imposed restrictions on the rights of leaseholders to renounce their contracts. Political interests drove these changes, because magistrates recognized that their own power depended on their ability to ensure that sufficient food reached their city’s market.

Judicial authority (
Gerichtsherrschaft
) constituted the third major form of lordly power. Population growth and economic commercialization brought overall benefits, but often at considerable individual cost, straining customary legal arrangements.
¹⁸
The longer feudal hierarchy and the shift to patrilinear families and more territorially based power all added to the need to demarcate jurisdictions more clearly. Jurisdiction stratified up and down the lordly hierarchy into higher and lesser authority, with important cases reserved for the former (see
pp. 622–3
). Jurisdiction also allowed lords to maintain military authority over a population that was often no longer economically dependent upon them directly, for example enabling senior lords to summon their vassal tenants to help fulfil their own obligations, including those to the emperor.

The Fourteenth-Century Crisis

The trends of the Salian and Staufer eras continued into the early fourteenth century, further underscoring the point made earlier (pp.66–7 and 377–9) that the Staufers’ demise was personal rather than structural. Nonetheless, high politics continued to make a social impact. The rivals for the German crown after 1250 granted immunities and privileges to lords and towns to win their support, while relative royal weakness provided more scope for local initiatives in revising existing legal and social arrangements. Meanwhile, economic
growth slowed during the late thirteenth century as rising lordly demands on peasants combined with the still-growing population to encourage renewed subdivision of tenancies in many areas. Between half and three-quarters of peasant farms in northern Burgundy and south-west Germany were reduced to only 3–5 hectares.
¹⁹

Unfortunately, adverse climatic conditions set in with colder, wetter weather around 1300, damaging harvests and causing famine in parts of Germany between 1309 and 1311, with further problems thereafter.
²⁰
All normal activities and concerns were suspended as the malnourished population fell victim to the Black Death, which killed around 60 per cent of inhabitants from 1348 to 1350. This was not a solitary cataclysm. The plague returned with virtually every subsequent generation into the fifteenth century, with some outbreaks actually even worse, such as that in Bohemia in 1379–80. This slowed the recovery, so that the total population around 1470 was still a quarter below that in 1347. The mortality crisis triggered the fourteenth-century recession, characterized by the rapid contraction in settled areas, with, for example, 1,000 square kilometres lost to the North Sea where flood defences were no longer maintained. Less fertile or accessible areas were either abandoned or given over to meadows, pasturage, or the steady spread of reforestation. Those areas with better soil were now worked even more intensively, since this offered the best returns on the available labour.

The result was accelerated market specialization and exchange, since localities were less able to provide all their needs directly. A more diversified economic landscape emerged. Mixed husbandry and arable farming predominated, because animal manure increased and prolonged soil fertility. Such areas often clustered around towns, which provided markets for meat. Meanwhile, population decline reduced the demand for grain and left more for animal feed. Viticulture expanded along the Moselle, Rhine, Main, Saale, Unstrut, Rhône and Po rivers, and in other parts of Italy. The population recovery accelerated this by providing the labour required by viticulture. Some areas developed crops for manufacturing, notably wool in Saxony and flax in Swabia. Rural industry also grew where there were good mineral deposits, notably salt mining in Austria, Bavaria and parts of the Alps, as well as silver and other ore extraction in the Tirol, Harz and parts of Saxony. Bohemian glass manufacture also acquired an international reputation in this period.
²¹

The relative rapidity of these changes proved deeply disturbing, though their exact connection with heightened violence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains controversial.
²²
Lordship was certainly hard hit as land values crashed, for instance falling in the county of Namur by between a quarter and a half. Population decline increased labour’s scarcity and bargaining power. Tenants negotiated lower rents and dues, while those in Bavaria and Franconia secured hereditary tenure. The trend towards a landless proletariat was now reversed as former day labourers gained access to tenancies. The few lords still farming with dependent serfs now stopped this practice, while wages became more widely available to attract and retain workers. Weaker lords generally fared worst, like the knights and mediate vassals with small fiefs, who often sought alternative employment as princely retainers and administrators, thereby consolidating both the longer lordly hierarchy and the territorialization of princely power. Where possible, lords used existing elements of servitude to invent new taxes, such as emigration fees, marriage licences and death duties, though their overall burden eased with the economic recovery after 1470.
²³

Thanks to accumulated capital, towns and individual burghers were often well placed to profit in these conditions, buying land or investing in viticulture around their town. Urban artisans also benefited from higher wages. Towns and burghers bought or mortgaged lordly rights, accelerating the fragmentation of lordship into different kinds of jurisdiction that could be shared or held by multiple owners. Overall, this process prevented the development of a uniform society of subjects sharing a common relationship to authority in the Empire.

Growth and Diversity in Early Modernity

The initial recovery paradoxically produced the ‘late medieval agrarian depression’ around 1350 until 1470.
²⁴
Land was slowly reoccupied after 1370 and production increased, especially as harvest yields also improved. Despite periodic famine years like 1437–8, grain prices fell to a long-term low in the mid-fifteenth century. Social and geographic mobility resumed in the mid-fourteenth century, but slowed again around 1400 until the rapid and sustained demographic recovery between 1470 and 1530. By 1560 the population in most areas matched
early fourteenth-century levels, and in some places continued to rise until a renewed slowdown around 1580 with the onset of the renewed colder, wetter weather of the ‘Little Ice Age’. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) reduced the Empire’s population by a fifth, primarily by magnifying the impact of renewed plague.
²⁵
The rate of recovery was slowed by renewed warfare after 1672 but restored to 1618 levels around 1710, while renewed and sustained growth set in around 1730. Middling principalities like Brunswick and Württemberg now saw annual growth rates of 6 to 7 per cent, rising to 10 per cent in Brandenburg. Bavaria was the only major territory to experience marginal population decline across the eighteenth century. The total for the Empire (including Burgundy, but excluding imperial Italy) rose from around 20 million in 1700 to over 29 million in 1800, with perhaps another 5 million in imperial Italy. Population density was far higher than in Habsburg and Hohenzollern territory outside the Empire, which together held another 12.6 million people in 1800.
²⁶

Food prices rose 250 per cent across 1500–1800, whereas real wages fell by up to a half. The discrepancy worsened in the second half of the eighteenth century when rising population caused food prices to rise up to six times faster than wages. Crop failures precipitated serious subsistence crises during 1755–62, 1770–74 and 1787–9. Systemic underemployment set in by the later eighteenth century, with a quarter of the population living precariously and 5 to 10 per cent displaced to a life on the roads.
²⁷

The extent to which development diverged along the river Elbe remains one of the most controversial aspects of European history, since it lent itself to ideological distinctions between western democracy and eastern autocracy.
²⁸
It is clear that different trends set in during the fifteenth century, producing what has been labelled a ‘second serfdom’ east of the Elbe. This entailed the re-emergence of bonded, dependent labour working large manorial estates. Its roots lay in the impact of the fourteenth-century crisis, which proved far more serious in the east, because peasants had fewer opportunities to profit from their temporarily increased labour value. There were fewer towns and market networks were less well developed compared to those in the west. As grain prices continued to fall, only large-scale production remained profitable, especially where it had access along rivers to ports able to ship bulk cargoes to feed the more urbanized markets of
north-western Europe. Lesser lords in the east were also better placed relative to princes than their western counterparts, given the less dense and flatter lordly hierarchy. Princes east of the Elbe relied on knights and mediate vassals to govern the more dispersed rural population and had granted more land as mediate fiefs. Compared to that in the west, the imperial church was a smaller and more recent creation east of the Elbe and less able to provide alternative employment to lesser lords, or to act as a possible support for princes. Altogether, the eastern regions remained distant from the king, who played a less significant role in promoting local developments through charters and immunities.

Consequently, knights in the east of the Empire had greater opportunities to acquire concentrated and extensive jurisdictions. In particular, they were often able to use the institutions of the nascent territorial administrations to their advantage, for example through imposing wage limits and tighter supervision of the rural population.
²⁹
Mastery of serfs was revived to secure labour for a new form of manorial economy (
Gutswirtschaft
) based on a large, landed estate (
Gut
) operating a monoculture of grain production for export. This developed in Schleswig, Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Bohemia, and to a lesser extent in parts of Austria, as well as outside the Empire in Poland and Hungary. In fact, relatively few eastern lords truly fit the model of the
Junker
‘agrarian capitalist’, while perhaps only 10 per cent of grain production was exported through long-distance Baltic trade. Other forms of production and land use continued. Nonetheless, the development of the new manorial economy helped to distinguish regions east of the Elbe as one of several major socio-economic areas in the early modern Empire.