Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (95 page)

The process developed its own logic and momentum through centre–local interactions and through the administration’s ‘inner dynamism’ as officials continually expanded their remit.
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For example, Württemberg village courts increasingly referred cases over access to forests to the ducal superior court; the latter thereby became the ultimate authority in such matters, in which it previously had no great interest. In short, the state unintentionally encouraged its inhabitants to widen its functions and responsibilities. Regulation of one aspect of life frequently prompted intervention in another, especially as individual mandates often served multiple goals. Both the governed and governing came to see the authorities’ role no longer as merely divinely ordained stewardship of humanity, but as a body duty-bound to promote positive improvements. Overall, the integration of society and authority reinforced the belief that the common good was best advanced by benevolent administration and the adherence to agreements and laws, rather than through expanding forms of direct representation.

SOCIETY, TERRITORY AND EMPIRE

Absolutism and its Limits

These developments are usually interpreted as measures that sustained more absolutist princely power, which is the flipside of the customary presentation of the Empire as a loose federation after 1648. This section will argue that not only were the territories still formally within the Empire, but that they and imperial institutions remained entangled in a common corporate social order that persisted beyond 1806. Contemporaries were well aware of the growth in princely power and pretensions. Johann Jacob Moser observed in 1773:

More and more the desire to be sovereign is mastering electoral and princely courts: how many soldiers does one have? As many as one wants; how many taxes does one decree? As many as one wants; how many excises and other duties does one impose? As many as one wants. In short, one does what one wants, and the territorial Estates and subjects, if they are still alright, can howl; or one brooks no contradiction . . . [and] they are driven to numerous crimes, disobedience and rebellion.
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Moser wrote from bitter personal experience, having been consigned to a dungeon for five years after protesting at the duke of Württemberg’s illegal taxation during the Seven Years War.
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However, he owed his eventual release to a case brought by the duchy’s Estates, who successfully prosecuted the duke in the imperial courts, culminating in the imposition of tight fiscal constraints in 1770.
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Thus, Moser was also able to remind princes that their powers ‘did not make their land into their own free state, but only part of the entire state-body of the German Empire’.
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Some princes agreed wholeheartedly. Max Franz, Emperor Joseph II’s younger brother and archbishop-elector of Cologne and prince-bishop of Münster, regarded his cathedral chapters and Estates as guardians of his territories’ constitutions, quite properly preventing him from interfering with the rule of law. The laws that bound Max Franz’s subjects applied equally to himself and his officials.

Most historians have remained sceptical, doubting how far imperial institutions could constrain Austria and Prussia, whilst also noting how territorialization invested ideological power in princely governments to act on their own initiative. To some, the late eighteenth century saw a growing tension between dynamism at the territorial level and a rigid and seemingly increasingly irrelevant imperial framework.
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The most obvious manifestations of dynamism were the ‘enlightened’ reforms implemented in Austria, Prussia and many middling and even smaller secular and ecclesiastical territories after about 1770.
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These measures changed the substance and not just the style of territorial governance. Promotion of the common good expanded more explicitly to include subjects’ happiness, as well as security and order. Happiness was now defined by material welfare and physical well-being, rather than in moral-religious terms. Practical examples included the secular-inspired welfare measures and the changed and expanded provision of education. A second area of activity entailed the dismantling of the confessional state through greater toleration, widening the individual and corporate liberties already provided through imperial law since 1648. In the late eighteenth century, Catholic territories such as Austria expropriated huge quantities of ‘useless’ church property in the
manner of the earlier Protestant secularization, but they used the resources obtained to support state-controlled welfare and education, rather than to improve clerical instruction or advance religious goals. Such changes were legitimated by reference to the concept of utility central to much Enlightened thought and which supported the alteration or removal of ‘traditional’ privileges in the name of the common good.

The contradictions inherent in the reforms were most obvious in efforts to codify territorial laws, because these entailed rationalization and systematization at odds with the fudges critical to sustaining the Empire and its corporate social order.
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Codification accelerated trends already present in cameralist regulation by levelling social distinctions in the name of common progress. Society was being pushed from an order based on legally distinct corporate Estates and towards one composed of legally equal individuals sharing a uniform relationship to the state. Socio-legal distinctions gave way to stratification defined more obviously economically by class. The ultimate direction of these developments was still far from clear in the late eighteenth century, while the authorities lacked a coherent plan beyond a still largely traditional concern for the common good and fiscal efficiency. Codification and other efforts at standardization proceeded quite slowly. It took 52 years to dismantle the tariff barriers between Austrian provinces after 1775, while even after the impact of Napoleon, Baden in 1810 still used 112 different measurements of length, 92 measurements for square measures, 65 for dry goods, 163 for fruit, 123 for liquids, 65 for alcohol, and 80 separate definitions of a pound weight.
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Public Debt

The real problem was not any sclerosis in imperial institutions, but the general reluctance to tamper with the corporate socio-political order. This is best illustrated by the growing problems of debt as the Empire’s larger and smaller territories emerged from the wars of 1672–1714. Unlike the aftermath of the Thirty Years War (see
pp. 464–5
), the imperial Estates did not work through the Reichstag to tackle this problem collectively. Some territories were able to reduce their liabilities, but all suffered from renewed costly warfare between 1733 and 1763. The Habsburgs alone spent 404.85 million florins fighting three
wars from 1733 to 1748. Significant administrative and fiscal reforms from the mid-1740s enabled the monarchy to weather the Seven Years War, which cost around 40 million florins a year. Further post-war measures helped boost net annual revenue to 65 million by 1790, around three times higher than that in 1740. However, debts rose almost as fast, from 118 million (1756) to 291 million florins (1781), while the Turkish War of 1787–91 cost 220.4 million, pushing total liabilities to over 400 million by the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792.
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No other territory matched the Habsburgs’ revenue, expenditure or debts. While their exposure to debt varied, abstinence from warfare was no guarantee for healthy finances since princely expenses were often proportionately far higher in smaller than larger territories. Maintenance of a princely court consumed one-fifth to one-quarter of peacetime expenditure in most medium-sized and smaller territories compared to 1.7 per cent of Habsburg outgoings in 1784. Minor princes often lived well beyond their means, compensating for their relative lack of real political influence by spending lavishly to assert their status. Ernst Friedrich III of Sachsen-Hildburghausen dined daily with 100 guests while his debts piled up, reaching an astonishing 1.3 million florins by 1769, equivalent to 23 years of his principality’s revenue.
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Prussia’s freedom from state debt was misleading, because this derived from ruthless parsimony, while in all other respects the Hohenzollern monarchy shared the same structural problems common throughout the Empire.

By the later eighteenth century, all German (and also Italian) principalities found themselves with fiscal structures that had failed to keep pace with demographic and economic growth. Practicalities partly explain this. Despite improved surveillance and accounting procedures, it remained difficult to assess individual wealth accurately. Since their inception in the fourteenth century, general taxes attempted to target individuals rather than households or communities, but efforts were frustrated by the desire to fix assessment rather than accept that change itself was inevitable and devise more flexible methods instead. Reluctance to divulge details also hindered the compilation of reliable tax registers, while officials entrusted with this task were obliged to respect corporate immunities, though these were never as extensive nor as extreme as in Spain or Hungary. For instance, clergy and nobles rarely
possessed complete exemption, even from direct taxes. Indirect taxes proved so attractive because they could be levied on goods in flow without requiring detailed registers of individual or communal wealth. This explains the reluctance to dismantle internal and frontier tolls and tariffs. However, indirect levies were only really lucrative in countries with expanding economies and substantial long-distance, external trade, like Britain and the Dutch Republic.

Consequently, German governments relied on quota systems similar to the Empire’s matricular register, apportioning tax burdens amongst communities and in turn within these to households. Quotas generally reinforced corporate distinctions, with clergy, nobles and commons being assigned distinct shares, especially in the case of taxes agreed by territorial Estates. For example, the bishopric of Paderborn used a land tax called the
Schatzung
(Assessment), levied in multiples of a basic quota that was worth about 6,800 talers in 1590. The cathedral canons and the territorial nobles were exempt, leaving the basic quota to be divided amongst the remaining status groups, with the lesser clergy paying about 10 per cent of it, the burghers of the bishopric’s 23 towns 40 per cent, and the peasants the remaining half. Subsequent adjustments altered this distribution, notably through the extension of exemption to all clergy by 1700. This reduced the value of a basic quota to only 5,000 talers, obliging the authorities to increase the number of multiple quotas levied each time to maintain overall revenue.
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Naturally, favoured groups lobbied hard to defend their corporate advantages. The most significant event in crown–noble relations in Brandenburg-Prussia after 1648 and prior to the emancipation of serfs in 1807 was the widespread protest in 1717 against the king’s attempt to commute his vassals’ personal military service into taxation. The nobles’ appeal to the Reichshofrat only increased the determination of the Hohenzollerns to secure further exemption from imperial jurisdiction. However, the Hohenzollerns’ Pomeranian nobles only accepted conversion of their fiefs into allodial property in 1787, thus opening them to taxation, long after Brandenburg-Prussia secured exemption from the jurisdiction of the imperial courts around 1750.
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Despite securing considerable autonomy, the Hohenzollerns refrained from tampering with the composite character of their monarchy, which remained composed of different provinces still defined by their formal boundaries as imperial fiefs. Each province had its own Estates, even if
these now rarely met in plenary diets. While the basic fiscal structure was uniform across the monarchy, its actual implementation rested on agreements with these Estates that no Hohenzollern king dared to disturb.

More fundamentally, throughout the Empire both rulers and ruled refused to accept the true cost of government. Virtually every territorial government, except Prussia’s, regularly overspent, with the Habsburg annual deficit fluctuating between 4 million and 80 million florins across 1787–1800.
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Borrowing had long become an established part of government finance, further illustrating how backward Prussia was in still hoarding a reserve of coins packed into barrels in the palace vault. Princely and civic finances were geared to debt servicing and repayment, rather than tapping rising wealth. Accounting remained primarily legal rather than fiscal, recording liabilities and obligations between governments, their subjects and creditors, rather than attuned to administering budgets.
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Even though cost estimates and planning had become routine aspects of financial management by the early eighteenth century, governments still operated along late medieval lines by tying individual revenue streams to specific purposes like maintaining the princely household or military expenditure. Each major branch of government had its own treasury, receiving revenue, making expenditure and contracting debts. Money could be switched between accounts, but clear oversight generally remained elusive. The desire to conceal military expenditure from the Estates in some territories simply added to this problem.

Debts were modernized in the sense of becoming eternal, attached to an impersonal state, rather than extinguishing at each ruler’s death. However, they remained legal contracts and were personal rather than commercial. The state and the urban and rural corporations comprising it acted like individuals, linked by a multitude of separate contracts to their creditors. Default was difficult, especially as most credit was raised through personal connections between individual officials and lenders. Borrowing on international money markets remained limited, as did attempts in Austria, the Palatinate and elsewhere to establish state banks, especially as these were invariably undercapitalized. Thus, territorial nobles and religious houses remained the principal lenders. Church and charitable institutions owned two-thirds of Bavarian state debt in 1790, compared to only a tenth held by private individuals.