Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (93 page)

Princely administration expanded to cope, and its staff acquired higher social status. Commoners regarded councillors and other senior staff as effectively nobles, opening a new route to social mobility alongside the church. Even comparatively small principalities and imperial cities founded universities and grammar schools to meet the growing demand for suitable candidates. Huge differences in pay persisted between noble and ‘learned’ officials into the late eighteenth century, though education became a prerequisite for many posts.
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Overall numbers remained modest. A typically middling principality in the eighteenth century might have 100–300 officials from senior councillors to messengers in its central agencies, and up to 800 officials of all ranks in its districts, together serving 200,000–400,000 inhabitants. Even in Prussia, the central agencies grew from 300 officials in 1680 to 640 by the 1750s, by which point there were still only 14,000 officials altogether, of whom 4,500 were excise collectors. Many officials were
employed by the localities or the Estates, rather than directly by the prince. For example, in 1762 Austria and Bohemia had 7,421 public officials employed by the Habsburgs, 1,494 by the provincial Estates, and 11,669 by nobles and towns.
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The emergence of princely administrations generated demands to share in the benefits of social mobility, wealth, status and influence. Criticism of ‘foreign advisors’ (
fremde Räte
) had already surfaced in the fourteenth century as locals accused their prince of unduly favouring outsiders to their disadvantage. Late examples include Dr Wolfgang Günther in Hessen-Kassel and Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (who was Jewish as well as an outsider) in Württemberg, who were both blamed for unpopular policies and executed as soon as their princely patrons died.
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The insistence on
Indigenatsrecht
, or binding requirements only to employ ‘natives’, was a major factor behind the coalescence of territorial elites, thereby contributing to the multilayered identities we have already encountered (
pp. 252–4
). The latter was also promoted by the growth of territorial Estates.

The Emergence of Territorial Estates

The Empire’s culture of seeking consensus to legitimate action was a major influence on the development of representation at the provincial and territorial level. The 1231 statute not only granted princes greater powers in their jurisdictions, but obliged them to consult ‘the better and greater men’ (
meliores et majors  
) to help them carry out their responsibilities. This provided the basis for Estates in the Austrian and Bohemian provinces.
⁹²
Homage ceremonies offered another impulse by providing opportunities for leading subjects to bargain for corporate rights and press grievances. In most cases, Estates emerged well ahead of their first actual plenary diet (
Landtag
). For example, those in Bavaria were already involved in the duchy’s financial affairs in the late fourteenth century, but only held their first diet in 1453. The presence of cathedral chapters could inhibit developments in ecclesiastical territories, because the clerical elite already found these effective platforms for their interests and had little incentive to include lay nobles or urban magistrates in negotiations with their prince-bishop. However, the latter often wanted to include his secular vassals and towns, either to balance
his chapter politically or to harness their resources as well. The meeting of the Magdeburg diet in 1400 is generally accepted as the first to convene in a German territory. This also highlights a more fundamental point that territorial Estates could be actively promoted by rulers, rather than simply emerging in opposition to them.

Estates existed in virtually every German, Bohemian and Burgundian territory and province by 1500, but not in Italy, where political development at this level had diverged, with the formation of territorial states based on the dominance of large cities over their hinterlands. Representation in Italy remained restricted to city councils, which denied their rural subjects a voice. Only Savoy followed the pattern elsewhere in the Empire, again underscoring the significance of its origins in Burgundy and subsequent association with the German kingdom. Village assemblies emerged together with Estates for the various Savoyard provinces by the late fourteenth century, though these lost significance after 1560, except in outlying areas.
⁹³

Estates represented corporate status groups, not inhabitants as equal citizens. Clergy were usually represented through mediate religious houses, which sent their abbots or priors. In some cases, like Salzburg, the cathedral chapter formed part of the territory’s Estates.
⁹⁴
Nobles participated on the basis of their mediate fiefs, provided rulers recognized that these qualified. In some territories, like Saxony, holders of all such fiefs could attend, even where these were held by towns. Elsewhere, nobles elected representatives from those holding qualifying property. Town magistrates and village headmen had already gained representation in the Tirolean Estates in 1363, and soon in many other Alpine territories, including Salzburg, Basel, Chur, Brixen, Sitten and Vorarlberg, as well as across parts of the south-west like Baden and a few other special cases like East Frisia. In most cases, the commons were restricted to the mayors of leading territorial towns. The tripartite division into clergy, nobles and commons was relatively rare: Bavaria, Upper Palatinate, Breisgau, Sundgau, Cologne, Salzburg, Basel, Liège, and the Ernestine and Welf duchies. North and east German Estates generally had two noble curia of lords and knights, alongside one for the leading territorial towns: electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and most of the Habsburg provinces.

All representatives claimed to speak on behalf of their wider communities. In the case of nobles, this meant their tenants or serfs. Like
envoys at the Reichstag and Kreis Assemblies, representatives held imperative mandates binding them to instructions agreed in advance within their communities. This inhibited the development of more ideological factions or parties by limiting the opportunities for representatives to appeal to others beyond their own constituents. Also like the Empire’s higher assemblies, the Estates followed late medieval practice in taking decisions by majority vote in corporate groups and then bargaining to reach an overall consensus. Meetings thus provided opportunities to assert social, corporate and (later) confessional status, as well as decide material issues.
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The Estates in Austria and Bohemia owed their relative strength to emerging between the late thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries, well ahead of other parts of the Empire.
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They also represented large provinces that developed taxation relatively early, thanks to economic assets such as silver mines and a vigorous transit trade, and especially because their rulers needed to fund defence against external threats, notably the Hungarians and Turks from the fifteenth century. In line with their territorially based imperial management, the Habsburgs dealt with their provincial Estates directly, and ensured that leading nobles and towns did not gain representation in the Reichstag. The Habsburgs also negotiated with each in turn on the basis of divide and rule. This proved difficult for them in Bohemia, where general diets of all five provinces together remained relatively common into the seventeenth century and, indeed, provided the institutional underpinning of the Bohemian Revolt (1618–20). The Burgundian dukes actively promoted general diets, called States General, in the 1430s to integrate the provinces accumulated through their rapid expansion since the 1380s. The Habsburgs were obliged to retain the States General when they acquired most of the Burgundian provinces after 1477, especially as the States General had become indispensable to raising taxes. The States General convened on average twice a year until the 1570s, when they split, with those in the seven northern provinces meeting separately in what eventually became the Dutch Republic.
⁹⁷
Maximilian I experimented with a similar General Diet for his Austrian provinces, but as in Bohemia this never developed as a permanent body, unlike the Burgundian States General. His successors largely eschewed general meetings, but the fundamental restructuring of the Habsburg nobility in the 1620s removed the need for substantial revisions to the Estates,
since these were now dominated by families who owed their status and wealth to having backed the emperor in the Thirty Years War.
⁹⁸
The Hohenzollerns, Wettins and Hanoverian Welfs also refrained from establishing General Diets as they accumulated additional imperial fiefs, each with their own Estates.

Estates without any noble representatives were known as
Landschaften
, literally ‘the countryside’. These are often interpreted as emerging more democratically ‘from below’ in contrast to Estates that appear more as an outgrowth of elite politics.
⁹⁹
In fact, the Zweibrücken and Palatine Landschaften were initially convened on the initiative of their princes. Others emerged because nobles opted out of territorial politics to secure immediacy as imperial knights, reducing representation to clergy and commons, for instance in Württemberg, Würzburg, Bamberg, Bayreuth, Ansbach, Trier and Fulda. Around 20 Swabian and Franconian territories developed full Landschaften composed only of mayors and village headmen, but these were all bishoprics, counties and lordships without indigenous nobles other than their lord. A few imperial cities also created similar institutions in order to negotiate more effectively with their dependent villages. There was no clear correlation between political vitality and social composition: the noble-dominated Mecklenburg assembly survived until 1918, whereas those assemblies in Bamberg and Würzburg that lacked nobles largely ceased functioning in the eighteenth century.

Provincial and territorial Estates adopted broadly similar rhetoric, as in the Reichstag, with their members presenting themselves as loyal subjects whose role was to assist in ensuring moral governance, peace, justice and the common good. Like the emperor, princes held the initiative, choosing if and when to summon their Estates and to set the agenda. A few Estates claimed the right of self-assembly, but this was formally prohibited in 1658. Estates responded with petitions and lists of grievances, using these to bargain collective rights entrenching their position within each territory. However, Estates could also become vehicles for sectional interests, as in the Habsburg lands, where Protestants used them in the 1560s and 1570s to secure limited toleration despite the opposition of Catholic members. Towns and nobles frequently clashed over economic questions and relative shares of taxation. Negotiations were characterized by greater proximity between ruler and ruled than discussions in the Reichstag and Kreis Assemblies. Moral
questions were expressed more openly, including criticism of princes’ personal failings, of their mistresses and courtly extravagance. A major reason for the difference in style from Reichstag proceedings was that territorial taxes paid for the prince’s household and his other policies, whereas imperial taxation funded only a narrow range of activities more clearly related to peace and justice.

The Estates’ criticism had real force, because the self-interest of their members frequently converged with the moral conviction that the established social order should be preserved and that any changes were to restore an idealized harmony by addressing perceived abuses rather than altering essentials. The Estates consciously distanced themselves from the princely court and administration, claiming they alone offered impartial advice, not the servile flattery of courtiers and hired lackeys. However, the Estates did not seek to replace princes with republics, or to extend political participation to ordinary inhabitants. Even Johannes Althusius, one of the Empire’s more radical early modern thinkers, saw the Estates’ chief function as a check on monarchical power, rather than its replacement.
¹⁰⁰

Most Estates established standing committees of selected members to represent their interests between full diets. Rulers often found these more congenial to deal with, especially as their smaller membership was more open to the usual forms of princely patronage involving honours, favours and bribes. Many territories held their last plenary diet between the 1650s and 1680s, though a few reconvened, sometimes after many decades. This trend towards oligarchy certainly restricted representation to a narrow elite that often acquired close ties to princely administrations, even where plenary diets continued to meet intermittently, as in Württemberg.
¹⁰¹
However, this was not simply a case of princely absolutism muzzling the people’s representatives, but rather reflected a consensus amongst influential sections of society that good governance rested on orderly administration and the rule of law, rather than democracy.

Territorial Taxation

Most Estates owed their origins to the financial problems of late medieval territories. Like the emperor, princes found that traditional means of resource extraction were unable to sustain either their ambitions or
the new understanding of their proper function. They had also dissipated their domains and now derived most of their income from the jurisdictions and privileges originally granted by past monarchs, such as toll, market and tariff rights. Tolls could be significant if a prince possessed land across a major transit route. Mainz raised as much from its Rhine levies in 1400 as from dues paid by 30 territorial towns. Silver-mining provided three-quarters of Tirolean and half of Saxon revenue in the first half of the sixteenth century. However, these were all exceptional cases and the general picture was one of rising debt (
Table 14
).
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