Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (90 page)

Throughout, the household was celebrated as a place of safety and warmth, symbolized by its hearth, now solidified with stone or brick chimneys. The household was supposed to provide materially for all its members, hence the internal moral economy. However, it was also hierarchical under the patriarchal
pater familias
or
Hausvater
, responsible for economic coordination and maintenance of the ‘peace of the house’ (
Hausfrieden
). It is scarcely surprising that the household became a potent political metaphor and a key element in the debates over the common good from the high Middle Ages. Household members were expected to behave responsibly, so as not to damage their collective reputation and, with that, access to valuable resources. External peer pressure encouraged this, through criticism of drunken and other ‘bad’ householders as undermining overall communal well-being. Marriage remained restricted until at least one of the prospective partners could inherit or otherwise obtain the property necessary for a viable autonomous existence. The development of taxation increased the emphasis on maintaining individual household viability, since the most usual way to collect direct levies was to apportion quotas to towns and villages, which were expected to find the money themselves by requiring all householders to contribute. Moreover, as we have seen (
pp. 245–8
,
367–9
and
427–31
), households featured at all levels of society from humble peasants to the Casa d’Austria. Although households were also sites for ‘private’ emotions, it was their public aspect
that was idealized until the emergence in the 1770s in some places of the ‘bourgeois family’ as a private domestic sphere.
⁵⁷

Rural Self-Government

The development of communal government involved enfranchising male householders according to their property value in towns, or whether they leased or owned larger farms in villages. This established a link between taxation and representation, but at the communal level rather than higher up in any representative assembly. Those who were not economically independent were generally excluded from enfranchisement in the communal institutions: cottagers, landless labourers, unmarried younger men and generally the entire female population, though widows were allowed to represent households in some areas.

Rural self-government initially emerged around 1130 on the Empire’s periphery in areas where there were both fewer lords and fewer people generally: along the Lower Austrian frontier and in the North Sea marshes and those of the Weser and Elbe.
⁵⁸
These were all areas of recent settlement where pioneers were rewarded with corporate rights. Subsequent waves of migrants carried these arrangements across the Elbe, as well as into upland areas. The problems of starting a new life in often difficult circumstances undoubtedly contributed to a more collaborative approach, at least initially. Meanwhile, existing Alpine communities along transit routes bargained better terms by cooperating to keep passes free from obstacles by clearing rocks and maintaining bridges.

Many lords were happy to promote self-government, because this freed them from having to manage local affairs, which were now handled by village mayors assisted by selected householders. Criminal jurisdiction usually remained in the lord’s hands, while the inhabitants generally still leased his land. Territorialization extended other forms of jurisdiction during the fourteenth century, including powers to levy taxes and later also militiamen and conscripts. Thus, the process through which communes acquired rights was part of the wider development of the Empire and territories, and not in opposition to this. The commune ‘was at one and the same time a corporate association of agrarian producers and an instrument of feudal lordship to ensure the functioning of feudal exploitation and maintenance of feudal order’.
⁵⁹

These developments continued in the west into early modernity, and
though interrupted by ‘second serfdom’ east of the Elbe, villages remained important in that region too. Hereditary mayors developed in Brandenburg villages by the fourteenth century under the margrave’s jurisdiction. The margrave transferred his supervisory rights to his nobles around 1500 in return for tax grants collected by the communes at their inhabitants’ expense. As the old mayoral families died out, lords replaced them with their own appointees. Saxony and other areas east of the Elbe saw similar developments. However, even mayors appointed by lords were still members of their village community. Lords relied on them and the family patriarchs to organize serf labour from the village’s younger sons. Inhabitants retained rights of appeal to princely courts and successfully challenged excessive lordly demands, because princes wanted to protect households as their primary tax unit. Princely intervention rarely lightened the overall burden, but did generally shift it from lordly exactions to territorial taxes.

Brandenburg-Prussia went further by 1733 and established the state’s right to conscript peasants as soldiers, only releasing them back as agricultural labourers on its own terms. The Hohenzollerns converted their own domains into hereditary leases in 1702, allowing their new tenants to elect village officials. Many Junkers subsequently commuted labour service into paid employment, recognizing this as more productive. Some Brandenburg communities benefited from rising grain prices, accumulating sufficient wealth to buy their own knight’s fiefs by the late eighteenth century. The Prussian General Law Code of 1794 confirmed communal autonomy, integrating villages as the lowest echelon of state administration.
⁶⁰

The situation was different in Bohemia, where the areas under Czech law gave fewer rights to communal institutions like village headmen and courts. Although the actual implementation of Czech law converged with German practice during early modernity, this was not always for the better. In practice, Bohemian lords were able to remove troublesome headmen, despite their hereditary tenure of office, in those parts of Bohemia under German law, such as Friedland (Frydland). Headmen remained heavily dependent on lords for their economic livelihoods, since their incomes derived from lordly privileges like brewing rights, rather than wages. Nonetheless, communal institutions were just too useful for lords to ignore. As elsewhere, most lords were absentees and relied on the headmen chairing village courts to keep order
and ensure the smooth running of the manorial economy. This necessitated a flexible response to peasant complaints, effectively granting headmen wide discretionary powers. The primary difference with the rest of the Empire is instructive as it demonstrates how local legal arrangements elsewhere were connected to the wider constitutional framework. Bohemia approximated more closely to the western unitary kingdoms with a flatter hierarchy of jurisdictions. Its villages remained largely outside state administration, which depended heavily on the noble-dominated provincial Estates to raise taxes and recruits. Unlike most of Germany, Bohemian villagers did not have access to a separate hierarchy of princely and imperial law courts to obtain independent redress prior to Joseph II’s emancipation patent in 1781.
⁶¹

Civic Emancipation

The trend towards civic self-government resumed in Italy around 1000 after its interruption by the royal sponsorship of bishops during the previous century. As with its rural equivalent, towns often acquired greater autonomy through cooperation rather than conflict with lords, including the emperor. None of the Empire’s medieval royal families pursued a coherent policy of favouring towns to win burghers as alternative political partners to balance the lords. The royal families did not think in class terms but instead responded to local circumstances, their main concern being to match general expectations for royal justice and morality. Their thinking also remained hierarchical, with senior lords already known to them personally as their ‘natural’ partners. The emergence of the civic communal movement thus represents the failure not just of the monarch, but of all lords to widen the Empire’s consensual politics to accommodate new socio-economic forces. Imperial favour remained purely tactical. For example, Henry IV generally supported the Italian episcopate, not least because his Gregorian opponents usually backed those in episcopal towns who were already trying to unseat local bishops. However, Henry sided with the communal movement in Tuscan towns, because these generally opposed Matilda of Canossa.
⁶²
Meanwhile, most burghers had no desire to assert their voice in managing the realm, but instead simply wanted more control over their own lives.

The crucial step in civic emancipation was the acquisition of the
count’s rights over a town when these had passed into the hands of the local bishop. Some bishops were happy to be free from the responsibility of protecting their town and becoming dragged into the innumerable problems arising from rapid urbanization. Towns thus ‘communalized’ these jurisdictions by assuming responsibility for protecting themselves and handling internal justice and other public functions. This explains why civic autonomy began earlier in Italian than in German towns, which were generally smaller and so more dependent on lordly protection. It also explains why relations quickly soured in many Italian towns as citizens discovered that the bishop’s or count’s continued presence conflicted with their internal self-regulation. Cremona’s inhabitants ejected their bishop in 1036 and extended the city walls to enclose the episcopal compound. Likewise, towns resented the presence of royal palaces and garrisons as extra-territorial enclaves disrupting their jurisdiction. As we have seen (
pp. 45–6
), the Pavians famously tore down the royal palace for this reason in 1024. Over the next two centuries, citizens used their growing collective wealth to buy out royal rights to exercise justice or demand accommodation in their city.

Gregorian reform stimulated civic emancipation through its sustained critique of allegedly corrupt and immoral senior clergy and the secular lords accused of protecting them. Burghers increasingly asserted themselves as morally superior to both lords and clergy, notably in Milan, where the urban Patarenes movement temporarily expelled the archbishop between 1042 and 1044. The Patarenes had specific local roots, but also exemplified a general belief amongst townsfolk that self-government was essential to ensuring a peaceful, godly community.
⁶³
The ideal of the sworn godly community was often central to many towns’ myth of origins – that they had been founded as a single collective act of the population gathering together to pledge a ‘solemn association’ (
coniuratis
) (see
Plate 28
). For example, Bremen’s city hall is supposedly the size of its original inhabitants standing in a solid rectangle.

This process was well under way before the Investiture Dispute gave it a significant impetus by the fragmentation of local power through the presence of schismatic bishops, as well as the higher-level contest between emperor and pope. The competing authorities often granted concessions in return for financial and military backing from cities. Henry IV and his son renounced claims for accommodation
(
albergaria
) to persuade Mantua and Verona to abandon Matilda of Canossa. The success of north Italian towns in freeing themselves from such obligations is demonstrated by the fact that none of their imperial palaces survived the high Middle Ages.
⁶⁴

A similar pattern set in north of the Alps, though a few decades later. Worms was the first German town to expel its bishop, when it sheltered Henry IV from his Saxon opponents in 1073. Henry rewarded it by exempting it from royal tolls in January 1074 in a move that was significant since he gave this privilege to the inhabitants collectively rather than just to favoured individuals or merchants.
⁶⁵
As with all royal privileges in this era, it is important not to misconstrue this as simply the dissipation of central authority. Through his action, Henry demonstrated to his opponents that only he had the power to make such changes. Nonetheless, the corrosive impact of the Investiture wars accelerated the grant of further privileges, increasingly also by other senior lords. Mainz’s archbishop rewarded his burghers for rescuing him from Henry V in 1115 by granting them management of their own city. Other important episcopal towns emancipated themselves around the same time, including Cologne, Trier, Speyer, Cambrai and Valenciennes.
⁶⁶

Changing legal practice gave civic autonomy a firmer shape. The twelfth century saw a change from economic privileges associated with market rights (
Marktrecht
) to more general civic rights (
ius civitas
, or
Stadtrecht
), making the town and its inhabitants a legal corporation. For example, Strasbourg’s bishop granted his city a 112-article civic law around 1131.
⁶⁷
An important element was the power to raise the taxes and labour needed to sustain self-rule and carry out tasks ranging from street cleaning to building new city walls. Towns could now make up their own rules without reference to a lord, even if he might retain some elements of jurisdiction or, as was often the case in German episcopal cities, still possessed his own enclave around the cathedral, such as in Strasbourg and Bremen. Towns could also own property and assets, like a city hall, brewery, mills, smithy, poorhouse, plus land and woods beyond their walls. Increasingly, a town was called a
Stadt
, rather than a
Burg
(burgh, borough), the latter deriving from the word for their lord’s castle, though its inhabitants were still called ‘burghers’ (
burgenses
, or
Bürger
). The term ‘commune’ (
Gemeinde
) had emerged already during the twelfth century as an abstract of its individual
members, enabling them to interact in a world of lords as if they were a collective person.