Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (92 page)

The situation in Italy was more extreme, as a few ruthless families rose from urban despots to become a new princely elite. The trend towards aristocracy was always more pronounced here than north of the Alps. Richer Italian burghers advanced towards noble status by becoming the subvassals of bishops and counts by the early eleventh
century, continuing to serve as mounted retainers into the thirteenth century, when they were increasingly subjected to taxation by more powerful city councils. Paradoxically, because rural lords posed less of a threat to civic liberties than in Germany, Italian cities found it easier to accept them within their walls. Intermarriage with richer burghers further blurred distinctions, creating an elite known as the
signori
, who used vassalage and control of small rural fiefs to underpin their power in both the city and its contado. Constitutions were rewritten allowing signori to hold positions as civic captains and other offices for life. Holding on to power often proved difficult in this violent, highly competitive environment, and most signori were content with dominating their own city, though the Visconti in Milan continued that city’s expansion at the expense of weaker neighbours. As we have seen (
pp. 193–4
and
393–4)
, successful despots secured their authority by trading support for Roman expeditions in return for the emperor’s grant of hereditary princely status. Florence was relatively exceptional as one of the few large cities retaining a more republican regime, largely because its wealth allowed for a more elaborate bureaucracy and for the mercenaries necessary to defend its regional influence.
⁸⁰
Venice and Genoa likewise remained republics, but with relatively large yet exclusive patriciates that in any event assumed the outward symbols of nobility such as coats of arms.

No German or Burgundian burgher rose from councillor to become the prince of his home town. The only German principality based directly on a town was Brunswick, created under the special circumstances of the Welfs’ reconciliation with the Staufers in 1235 (see
p. 361
). Nobles and lords were part of urban life, but did not merge to the same extent with patriciates, which instead were distinguished from their fellow citizens by lifestyle, marriage patterns and, from the fourteenth century, a self-conscious projection of themselves as their community’s leading families. Unlike in Italy, the presence of so many powerful princes offered sufficient employment opportunities for knights and other lesser nobles, together with a route to social mobility for burghers, who could rise through employment in the expanding princely territorial administrations rather than serve their home town. All German and Burgundian cities already had lords, being either their bishop, prince or the emperor, who was a much closer presence for the imperial cities than for Italian towns. Additionally, the tendency towards oligarchy
was checked by imperial intervention. Although Charles V revised numerous civic constitutions to strengthen patrician powers, he nonetheless ensured these remained communal rather than princely regimes.

The Empire’s Bourgeoisie

The relatively small size of most German towns was a further factor ensuring oligarchy did not develop into despotism. For example, the Württemberg territorial town of Wildberg comprised 1,328 inhabitants in 300 households in 1717. These shared 95 public offices, including the three mayoral positions, 15 members of two councils, and 25 inspectors of roads, buildings, bread, fish, cattle and meat.
⁸¹
One fifth of male householders thus held at least one public office, ensuring that authority remained fairly well distributed and a significant proportion of the population retained a meaningful stake in communal affairs. Towns retained a vitality and cohesion based on fairly broad daily interaction between people who generally knew each other well.

This point has wider significance, given the general impression of German towns as declining economically and politically after 1648. This negative interpretation rests on a contrast with their cultural and economic dynamism around 1500, as well as unfavourable comparisons with cities in other countries, especially those in western Europe that benefited from colonial trade and early industrialization during the eighteenth century. Whereas cities like Nuremberg had been at the forefront of the German Renaissance and Reformation, and had played a major role in institutionalizing the Reichstag, they appear sleepy backwaters by the late eighteenth century, when most had static or even declining populations and all were hemmed in by principalities that outweighed them culturally as well as politically. Eighteenth-century Germany appears a land of princely courts, dotted with small ‘residence towns’ (
Residenzstadte
) dominated by imposing baroque palaces, opera houses and court theatres. The general impression is that princes and nobles dominated German society, retarding both economic development and the emergence of a politically conscious bourgeoisie. This situation has been blamed for the lack of a genuine revolution and the late start for German industrialization.
⁸²
In short, the imperial cities and, by extension the Empire, appear backward because they failed to develop as industrial and commercial centres like London or Amsterdam.

Things look different when viewed from the perspective of the Empire’s urban population. Political conditions were far more stable in the eighteenth century than in the urban heyday around 1500. The last imperial city to be deprived of its autonomy was Donauwörth, annexed by Bavaria in 1607, while in 1671 Brunswick became the last territorial town bombarded into accepting greater princely control.
⁸³
Both cases were exceptional. Although individually small, German towns were numerous and fairly evenly distributed, at least west and south of the Elbe. Their inhabitants already represented 13.5 per cent of the German population in 1450, remaining roughly at this level for 250 years before doubling by 1800. Only Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg had over 100,000 inhabitants and so did not compare to London, which at around 1 million contained a tenth of England’s population. However, there were only two other English towns with over 15,000 inhabitants, whereas this size was exceeded by 7 imperial cities and 27 territorial towns, indicating that the Empire’s experience was not unduly at variance with supposedly more progressive parts of Europe.
⁸⁴

The relatively even distribution of the German urban population in multiple, middle-sized centres persisted well into modernity, while the country still today lacks a single, dominant metropolis. This has brought economic and cultural benefits. Certainly, most early modern imperial cities succeeded on their own terms by providing stable and safe environments for the majority of their inhabitants. Most cities had relatively high levels of small-scale manufacture and commerce, with even fairly minor cities like Heilbronn and Lindau serving as regional economic centres. Wealth discrepancies were indeed very considerable, but urban growth did not produce large slums, while inhabitants remained cohesive and identified strongly with their ‘home town’ and with the Empire.
⁸⁵

The majority of the Empire’s most passionate advocates came from the urban elite, like Johann Jacob Moser, who grew up in Herrenberg and Stuttgart in Württemberg. After graduating from Württemberg’s local university of Tübingen, Moser eventually entered the duchy’s civil administration, then spent four years as a law professor at his alma mater. After that, he successively worked in the Reichskammergericht, the Württemberg civil service (again), the Prussian university of Frankfurt an der Oder, as a freelance legal consultant to Emperor Charles VII, and director of the Hessen-Homburg privy council. Finally, and
tumultuously, he served the Württemberg Estates during their long dispute with their duke.
⁸⁶
Moser’s career demonstrates the relative ease with which educated burghers moved between civic, princely and imperial employment. The Empire’s multicentred politics thus offered numerous chances for social mobility largely independent from broader economic developments.

REPRESENTATION AND REGULATION

Princely Administrations and their Staff

Medieval kingship was primarily about the morality rather than the scope of action. Social engagement was limited to largely symbolic acts like helping individual widows and other ‘defenceless’ inhabitants. According to the chronicler Wipo, Conrad II brushed aside his courtiers’ advice to hasten to his coronation and instead stopped to listen to petitions from a peasant, an orphan and a widow, and thereby ‘prepared himself that day the way to the remaining affairs of government’. Wipo stressed that Conrad ‘responded like a vicar of Christ’, yet there was nothing particularly ‘imperial’ about his actions.
⁸⁷
Similar stories are recounted for other medieval kings. However, subjects increasingly expected their kings to respond to their concerns in a more sustained and systematic way. Through petitions, protests and representation in parliaments, subjects compelled monarchs to legislate and eventually to develop centrally directed institutions to ameliorate society’s concerns.

At first sight, the Empire appears to move in the opposite direction as its central authority seemingly becomes more distant from the lives of ordinary inhabitants after the mid-thirteenth century. However, the difference is less pronounced when all layers of authority are viewed together. Social and economic regulation developed at the level of princely territories and imperial cities, rather than through central institutions, in a process that remained mutually interdependent into the eighteenth century and that established additional layers of representation within most of the Empire’s component territories, complementing the representation of the imperial Estates in the Reichstag.

These provincial and territorial Estates (
Landstände
) were the princes’ allies
and
rivals. Their ambiguous role explains why historical
interpretations have often diverged widely, with some regarding the Estates as champions of popular liberty against princely despotism, whereas others condemned them as vested interests frustrating beneficial changes.
⁸⁸
The Estates were a product of the general changes within the Empire from the late Middle Ages into early modernity as local and territorial authorities expanded their functions to cope with rising population, economic change, and the growing complexity of daily life.

Princely administration remained rudimentary into the fourteenth century compared to the towns, but also to some other European authorities, notably the papacy. Towns were the first to be confronted by the complexities of mass communal living and developed new methods to cope, including adopting writing in routine administration. However, the contrast with princely and imperial administration should not be pushed too far. Lords and kings benefited from their long association with the church, whose monasteries and abbeys also pioneered new techniques early on, while manorial administration could also be quite complex, especially as jurisdictions fragmented and economic relations were commercialized. Italian and later also German and Burgundian lords were perfectly able to master the requirements of commercial leases and new forms of asset management.

Nonetheless, princely and royal administration remained small, because outside war-making its primary tasks were limited to demonstrative acts of justice and good kingship. The growing hierarchy of vassalage enabled those higher up the social scale to concentrate on these affairs, considered their ‘proper’ business, whilst devolving more mundane issues to their inferiors. These continued the existing face-to-face methods, because as the population grew, it supported more lordships whose authority remained restricted to roughly the same number of people. The overarching imperial framework continued to legitimate princely and lordly authority through the charters associated with feudalization, and new coordinating legislation like that of the public peace (
pp. 402–3
and
620–27
). Meanwhile, princes and cities increasingly assumed greater responsibilities as their jurisdictions coalesced into more distinct territories.

Territorial administration acquired a firmer institutional footing in the fourteenth century, several centuries after the establishment of the imperial chancellery that undoubtedly provided a model. Clergy predominated, given the scarcity of educated literate staff, which persisted
due to the paucity of university graduates. Clerics were also cheaper, since they lived off their benefices, whereas laity required salaries. Cologne’s chancellery employed 12 clerics in the 1340s, while its Palatine equivalent still managed with just four to five scribes some ninety years later. Most administration was handled by lesser nobles, either directly as vassals or as paid officials, for example serving as castellans and bailiffs as the district structure took shape. Princes meanwhile followed the emperor’s example, touring their lands with a cavalcade of servants, baggage wagons, kitchen utensils and carpets to make each stopover more comfortable. After the mid-fourteenth century, they began camping for longer periods near good resources, like lucrative toll posts, or copying Staufer practice by staying in their territorial towns. The focus on fewer but increasingly substantial palaces accelerated in the fifteenth century and developed into the norm during the next century when each principality became firmly associated with a residence town. The significance of such towns is illustrated by the way that Hanover gave its name to an entire territory originally formally known as the duchy of Calenberg. The greater stability increased the pressure on resource management, since supplies were no longer consumed close to source, but had to be provided in a form capable of sustaining what had become a permanent princely court at a fixed location. This coincided with imperial reform, which itself placed additional demands on the princes and cities.