Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (98 page)

It is here that we can see another example of how society and politics interacted in the Empire. Unlike territorial taxes, the Common Penny and subsequent imperial levies enjoyed a higher legitimacy through being sanctioned by the Reichstag and through their purpose in upholding justice and repelling the Turks. Simultaneously, imperial reform disadvantaged the knights relative to the princes, who were now clearly identified as the prime guardians of the eternal public peace that had outlawed feuding. Princely dignity and status were anchored constitutionally, whereas knights had lost an important means of defending their autonomy, rank and honour. The new order was underlined by the deposition of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg for murdering a love rival and annexing the imperial city of Esslingen, which led to the imperial sequestration of his duchy between 1519 and 1534.
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The message was clear: princes had nothing to gain from defying the new order and everything to lose.

The situation was more complicated for the knights, who lacked both resources and a firm role in the new institutions. Although
individually weak, they retained potential through cooperation. Franz von Sickingen and Götz von Berlichingen demonstrated this in 1515 when they drew on their personal contacts to recruit 7,000 mercenaries for their feud with the city of Worms. Seven years later they mustered 2,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry against the elector of Trier. Unfortunately, at the time this made the knights appear an even greater threat to the Empire’s peace and the newly institutionalized status hierarchy. Matters deteriorated as Sickingen convened a series of congresses in 1521–2 culminating in the formation of the Landau League of Swabian and Rhenish knights. There was nothing unusual about this organization, which displayed all the features of previous knightly associations, as well as those being formed among the counts to assert collective influence in the Reichstag. The Landau members promised mutual aid and forswore internal feuds. However, the wider circumstances, combined with the knights’ continued refusal to pay imperial taxes, made their organization immediately subversive.

The response also showed how much had been changed by imperial reform. Charles V’s brother Ferdinand mobilized support through the Empire’s new legal and peacekeeping mechanisms. Sickingen and his fellow knights were branded outlaws, making them fair game for the south-western princes who mobilized against them. Sickingen died as his castle of Landstuhl was pummelled by princely artillery on 7 May 1523. The princes went on to demolish a further 23 castles.
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Already suffering from the advanced stages of syphilis, Ulrich von Hutten fled to an island on Lake Zürich where he died three months later, while the surviving knights submitted to princely authority.

Imperial Knighthood

The Franconian knights largely abstained from backing Sickingen, already adopting a less confrontational course after 1507 by stressing subordination to the emperor. By 1532, they and their Swabian counterparts accepted the logic of their own argument and paid a ‘voluntary subsidy’ (
subsidium charitativum
) direct to Ferdinand.
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This decision to contribute directly secured the hybrid status of imperial knighthood (
Reichsritterschaft
). The knights remained personally free under the emperor and distinct from mediate territorial nobles solely under a prince. Imperial knights thus did not participate in territorial Estates,
causing those still doing so in Swabia and Franconia to opt out. However, the knights were not full imperial Estates since their earlier refusal to pay imperial taxes had led to their exclusion from the Reichstag and the Kreis Assemblies. For this reason, they were excluded from the religious settlement of 1555 and denied the right of Reformation to manage their own churches. Lacking full imperial fiefs, the knights also only possessed lesser criminal jurisdiction, meaning their tenants were subject to princely courts for more serious offences. In fact, though their possessions were immediate, they were also frequently bound in vassalage to local princes and generally followed their lead in religious matters.
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However, additional imperial privileges in 1559 exempted the knights and their tenants from being taxed or conscripted by princes, who were obliged to accept the knights’ fiefs as ‘freer’ than ordinary mediate fiefs. The situation remained in flux as the pace of imperial reform slowed in the later sixteenth century. Many knights pushed for allodification of their fiefs, meaning their conversion to direct personal possessions, which would have removed princely jurisdiction entirely and left them only with the emperor as direct overlord.

The ambiguities were exposed by another, more localized revolt, instigated by Wilhelm von Grumbach, a knight who played king-maker in the bishopric of Würzburg by securing the election of his preferred candidate, Konrad von Bibra, in 1540. Bibra’s death three years later exposed Grumbach to the revenge of the man he had originally defeated, Melchior Zobel von Giebelstadt. Grumbach skilfully exploited all the Empire’s mid-sixteenth century problems, which provides a further reason to explore this incident in detail. The backdrop was the aftermath of Charles V’s victory over the Schmalkaldic League and his attempt to reorganize imperial management, which eventually led to the Princes Revolt of 1552. As elsewhere, Franconian lords were entangled in a myriad of local disputes over churches, landownership, territorial and criminal jurisdictions, and the pressures resulting from attempts to forge more centrally steered fiscal and administrative systems at the territorial level. All lords from prince to knight were also struggling to accommodate younger sons amidst changing forms of inheritance.

Like Sickingen, Grumbach was no reactionary throwback, and he exploited opportunities provided by the new institutions, including
winning a case in the Reichskammergericht against Zobel over possession of his Würzburg knight’s fief. Grumbach secured the backing of princes who had been punished by the Habsburgs for picking the wrong side in the larger conflicts in the Empire between 1546 and 1553, notably the notoriously unruly Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades, who had been his pupil, and the Ernestine Saxon Johann Friedrich II, who had lost his electoral title to his Albertine cousin following defeat in the Schmalkaldic War. However, Grumbach also deliberately played the theme of the ‘good old days’ of knightly autonomy to rally support. Without his knowledge, one of his supporters murdered Zobel in 1558. The new bishop blamed Grumbach and confiscated his fief. Grumbach’s decision in 1563 to retaliate by declaring a feud transformed a complex case in which no party was entirely innocent, into a clear breach of imperial law.

Crucially, the new emperor, Maximilian II, decided to work through the institutional framework to restore peace, rather than accept the offer of an alliance with the knights against the princes. Efforts to defuse the situation in 1566 through talks in the Reichstag failed when Johann Friedrich II declared for Grumbach in the hope of recovering his lost electoral title. Maximilian branded the unfortunate Grumbach and his allies outlaws, thus sanctioning a repeat of 1523 as the south German princes combined to restore order by force. Grumbach was captured and executed to make an example in 1567.
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The ‘Grumbach Affair’ attracted attention across the Empire, not least for wild rumours of conspiracies involving Calvinists and the French. However, its real importance was in demonstrating both the effectiveness of imperial reform and how it had created a new constitutional order. By 1566 it was already obvious that there was little enthusiasm amongst the knights and territorial nobles for aristocratic associations as alternatives to accommodation with the Empire and princes. The latter worked to defuse tension by accepting the knights as junior, but nonetheless legitimate, partners in the Empire’s status hierarchy. The 1566 Reichstag confirmed that knights could incorporate their fiefs into ‘cantons’ on a regional basis, thereby giving them a distinct, common organization to secure autonomy whilst they still remained vassals of princes. The knights united as a common corporate group in 1570, agreeing to pay contributions to the emperor to subsidize defence against the Turks, and establishing a permanent
infrastructure of five Swabian, six Franconian and three Rhenish cantons, plus a further, autonomous Alsatian canton. Although they held common congresses after 1577, cantonal organization remained restricted to membership fees that supported a small staff handling correspondence with imperial institutions. The most important attribute of self-regulation was the ability to decide collectively on applications from outsiders for membership.
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Internal solidarity remained heavily influenced by long-established family alliances, kinship and communal property ownership, like that at Friedberg. Cronyism and nepotism prevailed over confessional differences, except for increased tensions during the period 1590–1640. Knights established a firm grip on the cathedral chapters in Mainz, Bamberg, Würzburg and several other important church lands, enabling individual families like the Schönborns to exercise considerable influence in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century imperial politics.
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Princes broadly accepted the consolidation of imperial knighthood since this contained the knights as a distinct group, thus reducing the likelihood that their own territorial nobles would gain similar freedoms. There were some 1,600 to 1,700 imperial knights’ fiefs in the late eighteenth-century Empire. Together, these encompassed 10,455 square kilometres with 450,000 inhabitants, making them collectively equivalent to one of the larger principalities such as Hessen-Kassel or Salzburg. However, these fiefs were split between around 400 families and were scattered across south and west Germany. By contrast there were 1,400 mediate church and knightly fiefs in Bavaria alone, and perhaps around 50,000 noble families in Germany, with many more in the Habsburg and Hohenzollern lands outside the Empire.
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Residual jurisdiction still allowed princes to mediatize knights’ fiefs, for example if families died out or broke the law. The Franconian margraves recovered 99 fiefs in this way between 1618 and 1730, while the bishop of Würzburg suppressed 29. The dukes of Württemberg simply bought 21 fiefs between 1545 and 1724. Other forms of pressure could be applied, such as damming crucial streams or restricting the movement of goods and people. Württemberg, Hessen, Ansbach and the Palatinate were the most aggressive towards the knights, notably during Charles VII’s weak imperial rule (1742–5).
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The knights responded by seeking to upgrade their status from ‘members of the Empire’ (
membra imperii
) to full imperial Estates, but
they continually undermined their case by refusing to accept additional burdens. The Wetterau counts had already accepted these in 1495 and secured a collective vote in the Reichstag’s princely college. The formalization of a clearer status hierarchy through imperial reform encouraged the counts to break ranks with the knights. The Wetterau counts had already separated from the local imperial knights in 1511, while the acquisition of similar collective votes by the Swabian, Franconian and Westphalian counts reduced cooperation in these regions too.
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The knights further wrecked their chances by recklessly insisting on precedence ahead of the imperial cities during negotiations to include them in the Reichstag in the 1640s. Further attempts later in the seventeenth century and again in the 1770s foundered on similar problems. The knights’ relationship to the Empire remained largely personal and direct to the emperor. They continued to pay significant voluntary contributions in wartime, while many validated their status by serving in the Habsburg army; over 80 knights held the rank of general or colonel in the Thirty Years War alone.
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Cross-Status Alliances

The knights’ relationship to the counts points to the difficulties encountered during early modernity in forming alliances across different status groups. A coincidence of interests could overcome this at regional level, especially in the south-west, which had the highest concentration of cities, knights, lords and princes. Most of these combined with Frederick III to form the Swabian League on 14 February 1488 (
Map 18
). The most potent of all late medieval regional alliances, the League absorbed the smaller Lower Union, founded in 1474, as well as the St George’s Shield association. Frederick joined in his capacity as Austrian archduke, allowing him to cooperate with a wide range of his socio-political inferiors without compromising his personal authority as emperor.

The League mixed elements of late medieval associations, like forswearing feuds and promising mutual aid, with new ideas deriving from imperial reform, including a quota system for military and financial contributions, and a coordinating council composed of representatives from all status groups. The members deliberately reconstituted their
organization in 1500 as a formal league, dropping the earlier label ‘union’ (
Einung
) with its roots in looser, sworn associations.
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Despite its failure against the Swiss in 1499, the League prevailed over Bavaria in freeing Regensburg in 1492, liberated Esslingen from Ulrich of Württemberg in 1519, crushed the Knights Revolt in 1523, and surmounted the far greater challenge of the Peasants War in 1524–6. Importantly, cross-status solidarity proved stronger than cooperation in separate groups. Württemberg left the League in 1512, because its duke refused to work with the cities, yet his attempt to found an alternative, exclusively princely alliance collapsed amidst mutual recriminations. Similarly, the knightly St George’s Shield association withered because the League appeared to offer better security.