Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (94 page)

Estates emerged partly through the protest of those affected by the expedients that princes adopted to cope, for example townsfolk who did not want to be pawned to another lord. Rulers also appreciated that broader consultation would allow them to draw on their own subjects’ personal resources. The result was to create a new set of taxes alongside those deriving from privileges and feudal dues. These new levies
became known as ‘territorial taxes’ (
Landsteuer
) since they applied more broadly to most or all inhabitants and were raised for an agreed common purpose. Such taxes were already levied ten times in Bavaria in the fourteenth century, and were introduced in the Palatinate after 1395. Rulers found that cooperation with Estates not only reduced opposition, but was essential for tax collection. This explains why community leaders and leading clergy and nobles were summoned in the first place, since these were often the same people overseeing collection in the absence of any other local administration. The Münster Estates helped their bishop collect taxes after 1359, while a joint ducal-Estates tax commission was established in Upper Bavaria in 1396. By the sixteenth century, Estates taxes provided half to four-fifths of most territories’ revenue. Estates were so useful that those princes who lacked them often now tried to form them, for example in Baden in 1558.

Table 14. Revenue and Debt in Selected Principalities c.1500 (in florins)

Estates used their power of the purse to influence policy. As leading property owners themselves, their representatives had a lot to lose from reckless actions, notably war. This provided a major break on violence and helped ensure that the growth of princely power did not produce an endless series of inter-territorial wars. For example, the Württemberg Estates forced their duke to agree to consult them after 1514 on major issues affecting the duchy. However, the Empire’s fiscal structure meanwhile identified princes along with the magistrates of imperial cities as responsible for collecting imperial taxes (see
pp. 403–6
). Imperial taxes immediately assumed the status of higher obligations overriding local concerns. Princes excluded their own territorial Estates from any say in the matter beyond helping to decide how to raise the money. Many deliberately concealed the true scale of their official obligations in order to demand far higher sums than they actually owed the Empire, hoping to keep the balance.
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Imperial legislation strengthened the princes’ hand, for example by ruling in 1566 that subjects failing to pay imperial obligations could be fined twice the amount. Military expenditure could also be presented as an imperial obligation, because all princes were obliged to assist upholding the public peace and defending the Empire. The almost continual imperial mobilization after 1672 ended any peace dividend following the Thirty Years War and established military taxation as permanent in virtually all territories, especially as the smaller ones decided to maintain their imperial
contingents in peacetime after 1714. This process also helps explain the decline of plenary diets, since rulers now usually only consulted Estates’ standing committees on tax levels, not their existence or purpose, which had become fixed.

As a result, Estates assumed the character of a branch of territorial administration with their own infrastructure of officials, treasuries and account books. Estates’ members frequently sat with princely officials on joint commissions overseeing the management and repayment of territorial debts. The Estates’ credit-worthiness was closely tied to that of their prince, who benefited from lower interest rates thanks to his ability to borrow against future taxes. Debt amortization opened up large areas of princely policy to the Estates’ scrutiny, if only retrospectively. Their officials also jointly audited military and other accounts. Of course, actual practice was far from perfect. One duke of Württemberg deliberately presented false accounts to his Estates to conceal the fact that he was receiving French subsidies, with the extent of the deception only becoming clear over two centuries later. Another duke was deceived by an envoy he sent to The Hague who spun out his time at government expense by sending misleadingly optimistic reports on his negotiations. Meanwhile, the envoy’s brother in the Württemberg administration altered a ducal decree, doubling his salary, without this being discovered for 14 years.
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Nonetheless, while Estates were scarcely representative in a modern democratic sense, they did encourage greater probity and discourage venality in a manner similar to that noted for Britain’s Parliament.
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All this contrasted with France, where the monarchy’s reluctance to consult its subjects after 1614 undermined its credit-worthiness and ultimately frustrated financial reform.

Police Measures and Social Discipline

Like taxation, social regulation is usually associated with the rise of centralized states. In the standard account, states first disciplined their own staffs and then used these to encourage the ideal of obedient, pious and thrifty subjects. In doing so, it is claimed, this instilled the work ethic that made the Industrial Revolution possible, as well as allegedly instilling Germanic subservience to militarized authority.
¹⁰⁶
Social regulation in the Empire was known as ‘police measures’ (
Policey
,
Polizei
), from the thirteenth-century translation of Aristotle’s
Politeia
.
This meant both ‘polity’, or state, and good order, suggesting that the authorities had both the right and duty to regulate social behaviour in the interests of the common good. The Reformation certainly influenced how these ideas were implemented in the Empire. Lutheranism in particular contributed to the belief that all moral and rational action should be judged according to its capacity to promote personal happiness and well-being. Humans, it was widely believed, would naturally incline towards sin, unless checked by a properly informed clergy, good education and a strong secular authority.

It is important not to simplify police regulation as state repression. Police measures emerged to fill a legal void by ordering aspects of life not already governed by customary law and traditional rights, such as the new problems arising from urbanization and economic changes in the high Middle Ages. These measures attempted to prevent competing interests from disrupting social harmony. For example, rural producers wanted high prices to maximize profits, whereas townsfolk wanted cheap food. Growth in both settlement size and overall population rendered traditional means like church charity ineffective against problems such as famine and plague.

The French monarchy responded to similar difficulties by assuming new powers and functions centrally and issuing royal legislation from the 1370s. Central legislation in the Empire remained restricted to providing a framework for public order prior to early modernity. Instead, police measures were allowed to develop from within communities from the thirteenth century onwards. Most of the early measures tried to control access to scarce resources, for example by setting criteria for membership of an urban or a rural commune, and by regulating marriage and inheritance. Others measures included food-safety inspections, building regulations, fire safety, rubbish collection, sanitation, public health, and Bavaria’s famous 1516 purity law that was really an attempt simply to control beer prices.

Regulation increased the importance of writing in public life. Before the twelfth century, books were usually only about religion. Thereafter, others appeared on law and as bound volumes of parchment used to record accounts, marriages, property ownership, licences and a host of other secular matters.
¹⁰⁷
This emerged broadly simultaneously at all levels of what would become territorial administration, from the village to the prince’s chancellery, during the thirteenth century. It laid the
basis for the modern ‘surveillance society’ as local authorities increasingly recorded their inhabitants’ lives in detail, and began issuing them with identification papers and passes that could be checked as they moved across the territory and beyond.

Higher lords and princes played relatively minor roles in these agendas before the emergence of their own self-consciousness as public authorities in the fifteenth century. Imperial reform accelerated this process by charging princes and other territorial authorities with a wider range of public functions relating to peace, justice, security and mobilization of resources to discharge these tasks. The Reichstag issued a wide range of general legislation between about 1500 and 1577, including the economic measures we have already seen (
pp. 462–9
) and three imperial police ordinances (1530, 1548, 1577). These reinforced the distinctions between imperial Italy, where they did not apply, and the rest of the Empire. They provided general guidelines that could either be implemented directly or modified to suit local laws and circumstances. Imperial legislation directly stimulated territorial activity: the number of territorial police ordinances doubled in the 52 years after the 1548 imperial ordinance, compared to the previous century and a half.
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The quality of territorial measures also changed as existing codes and measures were rewritten, rationalized and standardized along imperial guidelines.

Many of the measures reflected the heightened morality and anxieties of the Reformation era in which they were issued. The imperial police ordinances targeted card-playing, gambling and drinking, both to curb these as potential public-order issues and to encourage greater thrift and productivity. Other clauses were aimed at spies, arsonists, witches, conspirators and subversives in general. The aim was to achieve a well-regulated society by eliminating or at least minimizing risks and threats, thus shifting the ideal from peace to security. Later measures targeted beggars and vagrants for similar reasons. Overall, territorial legislation moved in the seventeenth century from stabilizing measures that simply corrected immorality towards those intended actively to change attitudes and behaviour. Some of the accompanying rhetoric was genuinely heartfelt, and many measures were in direct response to perceived changes and new ‘problems’, such as the population growth and costly wars from the 1730s to early 1760s.
¹⁰⁹
However, a ruthless fiscal drive was there from the sixteenth century, and it grew
with the new arguments of cameralism in the seventeenth century that productivity could be raised by punishing ‘idleness’ and encouraging thrift. Measures that could be classed as ‘economic’ formed 40 per cent of all police regulation in eighteenth-century Baden-Durlach, whereas regulation involving social order, including religion, now formed only 25 per cent, with 15 per cent covering public order and safety, 12 per cent health, education and culture, and 8 per cent land and building regulations.
¹¹⁰

Innovation remained within limits set by corporate social and political structures, as all authorities were reluctant to take steps that might disturb public order or disrupt established revenue streams. For example, many territories did promote the commercialization of common assets, either for sale or by taking them into central state control, but none adopted the wholesale ‘enclosures’ that broke up common lands in early modern England. Instead, the authorities sought to stabilize existing households by giving farms access to commons in proportion to their existing size, not according to their need or the requirements of a commercial land market.
¹¹¹
In short, the Empire’s authorities disadvantaged both the poor and the enterprising.

Cameralism remained very much a ‘baroque science’, often creating additional problems through contradictory, inadequate and unnecessary measures.
¹¹²
Cameralist writers were certainly frequently self-serving, obscuring defects and advancing their careers by peddling panaceas or visions of utopian, benevolent, impartial states. However, the Empire’s territorial authorities were far from all-powerful. Numerous measures were unenforceable, or were only implemented with difficulty, because they contravened popular values or expectations. Official regulation was also adapted to popular pressure and often originated in demands for action from ordinary inhabitants.
¹¹³
The result was an ‘empowering interaction’ in which engagement with ordinary people allowed the latter at least some chance to shape policy.
¹¹⁴
Paradoxically, this encouraged acceptance of established authority by ensuring the territorial state served genuine needs. Throughout, the authorities retained the upper hand. Although governance at the local level still relied heavily on the cooperation and compliance of community leaders and ordinary people, overall direction remained reserved to higher levels. Petitions and protests might achieve meaningful specific changes, but usually only if they conformed to official norms. For example, wives might secure
court verdicts against violent spouses by convincing the judges their husbands were bad householders rather than male abusers.
¹¹⁵