This episode is something I never thought I would do, it is a run through the history of the Holy Roman Empire from 919 AD to 1250, pretty most of the periods I have covered so far.  Why do it? If  you’re one of those who have listened religiously to all 137 episodes so far and feel completely up to date with what happened in the past, this will not contain much news. However it has been a year since we last talked about the emperors and you may like a refresher about the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufen. Just to get your bearings. Or if you have only recently joined the HotGPod family – welcome. These next 40 minutes or so should give you a solid rundown of “The story so far”.  And if you follow by reading the transcript on my website historyofthegermans.com, you can find links in the text that connect you to episodes that go deeper into the stories behind the short summaries you find here.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to a new season of the History of the Germans – From the Interregnum to the Golden Bulle.

This episode is something I never thought I would do, it is a run through the history of the Holy Roman Empire from 919 AD to 1250, pretty most of the periods I have covered so far.  Why do it? If  you’re one of those who have listened religiously to all 137 episodes so far and feel completely up to date with what happened in the past, this will not contain much news. However it has been a year since we last talked about the emperors and you may like a refresher about the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufen. Just to get your bearings. Or if you have only recently joined the HotGPod family – welcome. These next 40 minutes or so should give you a solid rundown of “The story so far”.  And if you follow by reading the transcript on my website historyofthegermans.com, you can find links in the text that connect you to episodes that go deeper into the stories behind the short summaries you find here.

Last thing before we get going. The History of the Germans does not carry advertising which means it is entirely dependent upon your generosity. If you feel like supporting the show and bathe in my eternal gratitude, you can do so on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or in the support section of my website.

So, the empire, or as it is called in 1250, the Holy Roman Empire. What is it, and more precisely, where is it? That sounds like a simple question.

The Territory of the Empire

Let’s just look at a map like the one entitled “The empire of the Hohenstaufen 1138-1268” which you can find in the map section of my website Historyofthegermans.com. That is quite neat with external borders and internal subdivisions into the different princely territories.

The problem is that such a map is completely anachronistic. The earliest maps that showed territorial borders date from the 14^th century. If you look at a map like the Mappa Mundi in Hereford cathedral made around the year 1300 you will find that in the medieval mind the center of the world was Jerusalem. There are cities and important cathedrals and castles shown, but the map does not tell you who these belong to politically. Medieval people did not think in terms of territory. They were much more focused on the relationships and networks, castles, towns, cities, their connections by roads and rivers. The way to think about political structures is to look at them as personal relationships.

In the early times of the Carolingian and Ottonian empire, the emperor claimed a universal responsibility for the whole of Christendom. As a successor of the Caesars of antiquity he had a claim to the whole world and effective imperium over those parts that acknowledged Christianity as their religion. Every free Christian was bound to the emperor and every pagan was to be converted and thereby made his subject. That is why Charlemagne felt it was his job to conquer and convert the pagan Saxons in the late 8^th century and then incorporate Saxony into the empire. It may also explain why Frederick II believed he could grant the Teutonic Knights the lands of the pagan Prussians, thousands of miles away and separated from the empire by Poland.

This universal idea of the empire never really went away, and emperors kept insisting on their role as the defender of Christendom and hence superior rank over regular kings. But actual power and influence was concentrated in those territories that accepted the emperor as their direct overlord.  The empire was wherever the dukes, counts, bishops etc., accepted that they held their lands as fiefs from the emperor. This could theoretically be in far away lands, like when the king of Armenia wanted to be crowned by emperor Barbarossa. It also meant in the reverse that if a prince refused to accept the obligations of vassalage and the emperor failed to bring him to heel, the territory would leave the empire.

Traditionally the empire is seen as comprising 3 kingdoms.

These kingdoms were the regnum Teutonicum, the German Kingdom which had emerged from the old East Francian sub-kingdom of the empire of Charlemagne comprising the duchies of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria and Saxony. Henry the Fowler added Lothringia, which included modern day Netherlands, parts of Belgium, Luxemburg and a chunk of eastern France on the line Liege, Verdun to Toul. On the eastern side this kingdom originally ended on the Elbe river, but the eastern expansion that started in the 10^th century and really got momentum in the 12^th century pushed the borders of the empire eastwards. The three kingdoms on the eastern flank, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary were initially in some sort of vassalage to the emperor, however, Hungary and Poland were able to wiggle out of this subordination during the 11^th century. Poland by refusing vassalage and winning a war against Henry II, Hungary by submitting under the direct overlordship of the pope. Only Bohemia, roughly modern day Czechia, remained part of the empire and its ruler even became one of the seven Electors.

Then there was the kingdom of Italy, originally the kingdom of the Lombards who had conquered Northern Italy from the Alpine passes to Rome. Charlemagne had ousted the last of the Lombard kings and the kingdom of Italy was held by his descendants until the late 9^th century when there was a brief period of separate Italian kings. Otto the Great removed the last of that line and from then on, with a brief interlude during the reign of Henry II, the emperor was automatically king of Italy, by which is meant Northern Italy.

The third kingdom was the Kingdom of Burgundy. That was another Kingdom, or more precisely set of kingdoms and counties that comprised the Franche Comte, Western Switzerland and The Rhone Valley and Provence. Burgundy was the last kingdom to join the empire in the 1030s under Konrad II and it was also the most decentralized.

Though these were three separate kingdoms, an emperor did not need to be separately elected and crowned in each of them. Some did like Barbarossa who got crowned in Aachen, Monza and Arles as well as in Rome. But it wasn’t necessary.

In fact though the German kingdom was a kingdom, there was no election or coronation to be king of the Germans either. The election performed with very few exceptions by the princes in the regnum Teutonicum and the coronation in Aachen was to be King of the Romans. The King of the Romans was automatically king of all three kingdoms and – most importantly – the future emperor. To become emperor however, the king of the Romans had to go to Rome and be crowned by the Pope. To add to the confusion no king of the Romans or emperor had real power in Rome ever since Otto III had been thrown out of the Holy City in 1002. But the title stuck until about 1508. Napoleon resurrected the concept when he made his son the King of Rome, a sort of stage in the process of becoming emperor.

The Economy of the Empire

The territory sort of clarified, let’s take a look at the economy.

The general perception that the Middle Ages was a period of stagnation could not be further from the truth. The time from 900 to 1300 was a boom time for Europe. The so-called medieval warming period allowed for an abundance of crops, including vineyards in the London suburb I live in. Agricultural efficiency grew exponentially thanks to the transition from ancient slave economy to free or at least semi-free labour, the developments of new forms of ploughs and the horse collar as well as the increase in demand for cash crops like wool used by the dyers and weavers in the growing cities. As population grew, more and more land was brought into cultivation. The forest that covered the entirety of the lands east of the Rhine during Antiquity literally vanished and had to be replanted in the 18^th and 19^th century. And crucially the movement of settlers into the lands East of the Elbe and then further into Silesia, Poland, Prussia and Livonia swelled food production further.

Mining started in the 10^th century near Goslar and its silver allowed for the minting of coins and hence monetarization of the economy. A 100 years later even larger reserves of silver and copper were found in the aptly named Ore Mountains between Bohemia and Saxony. Famously the mine at Joachimsthal in Bohemia gave us the word Thaler, which then via its Spanish derivation became the Dollar. German miners were much in demand across Europe, developing pits as far away as the great Swedish deposits in Falun.

All that growth did not happen only in the countryside. There had been some ancient Roman cities in the regnum Teutonicum, Cologne, Mainz, Trier, Strasburg, Augsburg, Regensburg, Salzburg and Vienna, but all cities east of there and many in the west too were established during the Middle Ages.  They were founded by ambitious kings and princes keen on the riches these places could generate. If you go down the list of the 10 largest cities in Germany today: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Essen and Leipzig have been founded in the Middle Ages, only 2 of them, Cologne and to a degree Frankfurt are former Roman settlements.

Trade flourished as the Northern Italian cities rebuild connections across the mediterranean and brough luxury goods north either across the Alps or via the Rhone River. From there the South-North Trade followed either the Burgundian valley or the Rhine River to the great fairs of Champagne and later the main cities of Flanders, Bruges and Ghent. These trade routes were age old, but during the Middle Ages Old Roman roads were rebuild and some, like the Gotthard pass were made viable for the first time.

What gave the empire an additional boost were new trade connections that had been of negligible importance in the past, the East West and North-South trade. One part of this story is the story of the Hanseatic league which brought scale to the trade in furs and beeswax from Nowgorod before developing a much larger trade in salted and dried fish to feed Catholic Europe with its hundreds of fast days. As shipping capacity increased trade in grain, wood and ash became viable, allowing the great trading centers in Flanders to sustain themselves.  Other trade routes were the Via Regia that connected Smolensk, Kyiv and Moscow with Leipzig and Nurnberg via Krakow and Breslau/Wroclaw as well as the roads along the Danube and south through the Balkans.

Bottom line, the High Middle Ages were Boom times. How anyone can look at the skylines of Paris, Munich, Cologne, Milan or Barcelona and think otherwise is a mystery to me. The tallest pre 1850 buildings in many European cities are the spires of their Gothic cathedrals, true miracles in stonemasonry and even more astounding, architecture and statics.

What is hard to reconcile are these manifest witnesses to growth and prosperity with the narrative of never-ending wars and conflicts. How could a city thrive and its merchants transport goods all across Europe when one local lord or other besieged them every two years and robbers attacked the goods trains? The answer must be that these attacks were less frequent and less ferocious than we imagine them. Sieges usually lasted only a few days because if the place could not be taken by surprise, medieval armies rarely had the equipment or the patience for a drawn-out siege. Merchants travelled together in groups, were pretty deft with the swords themselves and hired local thugs to help defending them.

Providing safety was the key job of a medieval ruler, which gets us to the imperial administration.

The Pope and the Emperor

When the Ottonian kings and emperors took over in the 10^th century practically nobody could read or write, except for clerics. And administration of an empire that stretched from Rome to Hamburg and from Magdeburg to Lyon required letters. How else could imperial orders be conveyed to the dukes and counts hundreds or thousands of miles away, how else could rights and privileges be confirmed.

The Ottonians and later the early Salians were very happy to use clerics in their chancellery and saw little need to build up their own secular bureaucrats. And that is because the church was very much beholden to the emperor. As in Byzantium the head of the church was a subordinate of the emperor. From Otto I until Henry III the emperors could appoint the pope often without asking the congregation in Rome and even where the pope had been elected by the Romans, the emperor could overrule and even depose him. The college of Cardinals as a body to elect the pope simply did not yet exist. Churches and monasteries were seen as private property, essentially prayer factories meant to ease the way of the local lord through purgatory.

Another advantage was that these prelates had no legitimate offspring and could hence not pass their job on to their sons. Every time a bishop passed, the emperor had a material influence in the decision who would be appointed next. Therefore the emperors shifted more and more of their administrative tasks on to the bishops. Bishops were given entire counties to administer, to mint coins, to collect taxes and tolls, to muster armies and send them to the emperor and so on and so on.

By the mid 11^th century, this system came under immense pressure from two sides.

The first one was the rise of lay piety.

One of the side effects of rising prosperity is that people increasingly find the time to ask themselves nagging questions, such as, why are things happening to me or to my community, why am I here, what happens to me when I die, what is the right way to live. And in the Middle Ages the answer to all these questions was religion, if something bad happens to you, it is because you have sinned, worshipping god is what humans are here on earth for, and if you are pious and live a life that pleases god, you go to heaven.

All this required an intermediary between the people and God, and that intermediary was the church. Which on the one hand gives the church enormous power, but also enormous responsibility. If the church fails to function as an effective intermediary because of corruption, lack of knowledge of the scriptures or other moral failings, whole communities are consigned to eternal damnation. And so the people, from the lowest peasant to the emperor demanded that the church cleans up its act. Greedy prelates who paraded their concubines through the streets were attacked by the townsfolk. Dissolute monasteries were subjected to strict discipline and lazy monks expelled. Monastic orders like the Cluniacs, the Cistercians and the Franciscans came into being attempting to live an austere, apostolic lifestyle. Their example put further pressure on the church hierarchy to shift from worldly desires to spiritual objectives.

This bottom-up push for a better church was complemented by a top down movement known as the reform papacy. Usually focused on Gregory VII but starting much earlier and persisting well beyond his time in office, the reform papacy fundamentally altered the role of the vicar of Christ. The popes had lost much of their spiritual authority when it had become the plaything of the Roman Aristocracy during the 9^th and 10^th century who happily put debauched 18-year olds on the throne of Saint Peter. One pope even sold the papal throne for cold hard cash. Emperor Henry III had to depose 3 popes in 1046, since all of them were profoundly unsuited for the role.  

He replaced them with a sequence of German prelates, one of whom, Leo IX initiated a first set of reforms that were then pushed further by his successors. The popes changed their lifestyle to one more suitable to a religious leader, members of the curia were chosen on knowledge of canon law and scripture, a college of cardinals was established to elect the pope and theologians tried to consolidate the teachings of Christ.

Though the emperors had proactively supported the reforms of the papacy – pious laymen they were – the changed standing of the pope and with it the changed status of church now caused  a huge headache. A reformed church should be able to organize its own affairs, in particular choose and invest its bishops and abbots based on religious criteria. That would be o.k. if bishops and abbots were just spiritual leaders of their flock. But as we said before, by 1077 they had become the effective administration of the empire alongside their duties as churchmen. Pope and Emperor clashed over the question who had the right to appoint, i.e., invest the bishops and abbots.

This conflict has become known as the Investiture Controversy, though the decision about who appoints and invests bishops and abbots was only one part of the conflict. It was also a conflict about superiority. Gregory VII and his successors took the view that the pope is the head of all Christendom and all monarchs have to bow to him. He even declared that he could depose any monarch, even an emperor.  The emperors responded with the “two swords” theory whereby emperor and pope stood side by side, the pope yielding the sword of spiritual power and the emperor that of secular power.

The Concordat of Worms from 1122 is supposed to have put this conflict to bed. The compromise laid out within it suggested the bishops and abbots get invested with their spiritual authority by the pope and with their secular authority by the emperor. This kind of compromise was pretty similar to what had been agreed in France and England around the same time. But whilst in France and England the church and monarch reconciled and the ecclesiastical hierarchy was gradually brought back under the control of the ruler, this was not the case in the medieval empire. The conflict between pope and emperor continued well beyond the Concordat of Worms.

The Empire and the Princes

The reason the conflict between the pope and the monarch was so much fiercer in the empire compared to other medieval monarchies was only in part down to the competition over who was the universal defenders of Christianity. It had also a lot to do with the role of the princes.

What is a prince? In the empire a prince is not defined as the eldest son and successor to the monarch, but is a specific rank in the imperial hierarchy. An imperial prince, a Reichsfurst is someone who has received a fief from the emperor directly, as opposed to having received it from another noble. A prince could be a duke or count, but a bishop or abbot could also be a prince. Being a prince came with a set or rights and privileges, many of which had been regalia, i.e., had been the rights associated with kingship, such as the right to call in taxes and tolls, build castles and bridges, mint coins etc.

The first structural conflict between the emperor and his high aristocrats dates back to the mid 11^th century, to the time of the emperors Henry III and then Henry IV.  When Henry III comes to the throne in 1039 the empire had gone through a long period of consolidation of power in the hands of just one man. Henry the Fowler had started out in 919 very much as a Primus inter Pares, a First Amongst Equals, but already his son Otto the Great had assumed a more elevated position when he sat himself down on the throne of Charlemagne in Aachen. As time went by, control tightened, the imperial families gained more and more titles and more and more land and rights shifted into the administration of the imperial bishops and abbots.

By the 1050s the emperors introduced a new tool to further strengthen their administrative grip. They increasingly employed so-called Ministeriales. These were unfree men trained as either fighters or administrators. These men were bound to the emperor due to their status as unfree serfs. They did not have the rights and freedoms a true knights had, who had voluntarily entered into the mutual obligations of vassalage. Ministeriales were sent out to build and garrison castles that were dominating the surrounding countryside and keep the local aristocrats in check.

This use of Ministeriales and in particular their use in securing an imperial territory around the unimaginably valuable silver mines of Goslar infuriated the neighboring Saxon aristocrats. They felt, as their leader Otto von Northeim said, that the ruler had moved from being a king to being a tyrant. That rendered their feudal obligations null and void and since no free man should endure such humiliation, rebellion was the only honorable course of action.

Canossa and beyond

This local conflict between the emperor and his Saxon subjects turned into a civil war engulfing the whole empire when emperor Henry IV simultaneously picked a fight with the pope. The trigger was a conflict over who would appoint the bishop of Milan, the pope or the emperor.  The two sides exchanged increasingly angry letters. Henry IV finally called his adversary „Hildebrand, not pope but false monk“ and demanded that he vacated the papal throne. Pope Gregory VII responded by excommunicating and deposing Henry IV. Initially the imperial bishops and many princes supported Henry, but their resolve crumbled as evil portends appeared. The nobles not just in Saxony but also in Swabia and Bavaria saw the opportunity to curb imperial power.

An imperial diet of all major princes told Henry IV that he would lose his throne unless he was released from the ban within a year and a day. That led to Henry IV’s famous journey to the castle of Canossa where he intercepted Gregory VII, did penance for three days in the snow, thereby forcing the pope to forgive him. That was a cunning move that saved his throne, but not the imperial power.

Even though the emperor was released from the ban, the princes still deposed him and elected a new king. In this election they also declared that any new ruler of the empire was to be chosen solely on the basis of merit, not on hereditary rights.

The civil war that followed lasted, depending on what individual conflicts one includes or does not include for either 30 or 80 years.

Henry IV did win the first round against the opposition and even ousted his enemy Gregor VII from Rome but was later bottled up in Italy for almost a decade and finally deposed by his son Henry V. Henry V stabilized the situation to a degree but when he died without male heir, his successor, Lothar III had to fight with Frederick and Konrad of Hohenstaufen, who felt cheated of the throne. Konrad of Hohenstaufen became the next king of the Romans but was now in turn in a constant war with Lothar’s heirs, the house of Welf. That means that except for some brief interludes, imperial power was contested in one or other part of the empire throughout the period from 1077 to 1152.

At the end of the process, imperial power and possessions in the northern half of the German kingdom were almost completely lost. The area north of the Main River began to forge its own destiny away from the imperial gaze, giving rise to some of the most powerful principalities of the Late Middle Ages and Early modern period, Saxony, Brandenburg and Brunswick/Hannover as well as the Hanseatic League and the land of the Teutonic Knights.

As for imperial history, it became a story of the south and west, of Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Burgundy and above all, Italy.

Rebuilding the empire under Barbarossa

Frederick I, Barbarossa assumed the throne in 1152 and settled the civil war. He was a descendant from both sides of the last conflict, a son of Frederick von Hohenstaufen and of Judith, from the house of Welf. The new king not only reconciled the two rival clans that had fought over the throne, but also roped in the other princes into his political projects.

He gave up the ambition to consolidate imperial power and instead went back to the earlier model of the king as a “first amongst equals”. As an honest broker, he settled longstanding conflicts between various princes by granting new ducal prerogatives to Austria, Meranien and Zaehringen and awarded titles and lands to others whilst keeping barely anything for himself.

Since he left no political testament, we do not know what Barbarossa’s long term plan was. But judging by his actions it seemed that he had decided to leave the German kingdom to the imperial princes and instead create his own power base in Northern Italy.

Northern Italy by that time had become a land of powerful cities rather than one of princely territories. That does not mean there were no aristocrats. In fact the cities were dominated by oligarchies of noble families. These cities were constantly at war with their neighbors creating a sort of chessboard of alliances. Based on the logic of „the enemy of my enemy is my friend“, cities formed alliances with the neighbors of their neighbors to fight their neighbors, or all the black squares against all the white squares on the chessboard.

From the perspective of a German high aristocrat, Northern Italy that had no grand territorial princes was a no-man’s land ready for the taking. Enough loot for himself and to reward his loyal followers. Initially everything went really well for him. He could gather huge support from the imperial princes to pursue several major campaigns in Italy that were extremely successful. He took and destroyed the largest of the Lombard cities, if not the largest and richest city in Europe, Milan in 1162. After that he resurrected the Roman law of antiquity that saw imperial power as absolute and demanded the return of all previously lost royal rights and prerogatives.

But the Italian cities did not like an overbearing emperor any better than the German princes did a century earlier.  They buried their differences, rebuild the city of Milan and formed the Lombard League with the explicit aim to oust the invader.

The Lombard cities found strong support from their neighbor further south, the pope. The pope too did not like the presence of imperial troops close to Rome. Moreover pope and emperor had a longstanding dispute over the inheritance of the great countess Matilda, which comprised Tuscany and chunks of the Emilia Romagna.

Barbarossa responded by mounting the largest of all his campaigns into Italy, and, instead of attacking each of the cities along the way, decided to head straight for Rome and force pope Alexander III into submission. On July 24^th, 1167 his army captured Rome after a brutal fight during which St. Peter was set alight. The pope had fled to Benevento but Barbarossa had his antipope stage a sumptuous coronation of his wife. That was the high point of his career. The next day, dysentery spread through the imperial army like wildfire. Rome’s climate was notoriously unhealthy, in particular in the height of summer. Without wanting to exaggerate, the death toll was completely devastating. Most of the great families of the realm lost at least one member and the great chancellor of Barbarossa and archbishop of Cologne, Rainald von Dassel, perished.

After this disaster, Frederick Barbarossa’s political system collapsed. His princes no longer saw him as the great victor offering the riches of Italy, but as a man condemned for his sins, in particular the sin of creating anti-popes and burning St. Peter. Though he made several more attempts to regain his position in Italy, few princes were willing to support him and in 1177 after the final defeat in Legnano he had to make peace with the pope and the Lombard cities.

Having lost the battle for Italy, Barbarossa began gathering his own territory in the German kingdom. He leveraged his position as emperor to call in lands that have become vacant due to the lack of male heirs. In a way the catastrophic losses at the siege of Rome helped, as it left many a county without successor. Within a relatively short period of time he acquired an L-shaped dominion stretching from Alsace through the Middle Rhine to the level of Frankfurt and from there Eastwards to Bohemia, including large parts of Franconia including the increasingly important city of Nurnberg.

Barbarossa was no longer the respected arbiter of princely disputes but had become a player in his own right trying to create his own family powerbase, his “Hausmacht”, from which to steer the empire. This model of emperors whose main source of power are the family possessions rather than the resources of the office will be the dominant political structure of the empire going forward.

The limits of this model became apparent when the largest landowner in the empire, Henry the Lion from the House of Welf, duke of Saxony and duke of Bavaria came into conflict with his vassals. Henry the Lion had tried to consolidate his power in an attempt to achieve quasi-regal status. When Henry’s rivals hit back, Barbarossa could not or did not want to come to the Lion’s aid. Henry the Lion lost the contest and his vast possessions were divided up. Bavaria went to the Wittelsbach, Westphalia to the archbishop of Cologne and the eastern part of his lands to the Ascanians. Only the lands around Brunswick were left to the Lion, who was also exiled. Only one participant got nothing, and that was the emperor Barbarossa himself. Nobody wanted to allow him to expand his already large dominion any further.

The Hohenstaufen in Sicily

The Hohenstaufen then got one last lucky break. Barbarossa’s son, Henry VI had married the aunt of the king of Sicily who somewhat unexpectedly died without legitimate heirs. Henry VI used the ransom king Richard Lionheart had to pay him for his release to fund a campaign to gain his wife’s inheritance. And by another stroke of luck the superannuated empress gave birth to a son, Frederick, in 1194.

The kingdom of Sicily turned out to be a poison chalice. Sicily, which comprised most of Southern Italy and was one of the richest kingdoms in the medieval world reached almost up to the gates of Rome. That meant the papacy was now surrounded by lands that were at a minimum nominally and often also practically controlled by the emperor. That would be an uncomfortable situation for anyone but if you add to that disagreements over the implementation of the Concordat of Worms and the spat over inheritance of Tuscany, it is easy to understand why the relationship between pope and emperor went from animosity to outright hostility.

Civil war between Philipp of Swabia and Otto IV

Breaking the link between Sicily and the empire became a focus of papal policy from the day Henry VI marched into Palermo in 1193. And the pope did not have to wait long to make a move. In 1197 Henry VI died just 32 years old. His heir, young Frederick is barely 3 years old and his mother whisked  him away to Palermo.

The empire is now rudderless. Henry VI’ brother, Philipp, duke of Swabia reluctantly picks up the title of king of the Romans, but has to contend with the son of Henry the Lion, Otto IV who enjoys papal backing. Another civil war follows during which both pretenders hand over royal privileges left right and center to gain support amongst the princes. When Philipp of Swabia is assassinated in 1208, precious little is left of the imperial regalia.

Otto IV once champion of the pope was now undisputed king and was even crowned emperor in Rome. But he faced the same dilemma as Barbarossa. With little imperial rights and possessions still available in Germany, an emperor needed to leverage his position into obtaining some of the riches of Italy. And Otto IV decided to go after Sicily, given it was ruled by a child and by then riven by constant infighting. That was again a bad move since it blew up the relationship with the pope. Otto IV is excommunicated and runs back to Germany to shore up his realm.

Emperor Frederick II and the Mainzer Landfrieden

Pope Innocent III sends young Frederick, the son of Henry VI, now 16 years old and at that point the last male  Hohenstaufen to follow Otto IV north and depose him. Frederick does what he is told and thanks to the battle of Bouvines he did not even participate in, Otto IV is ousted and Frederick becomes Frederick II, emperor. The other thing he was told to do and did not do was to relinquish the crown of Sicily. At which point we are back to the imperial-papal stand-off.

Frederick managed to keep the conflict from blowing out into the open for an astoundingly long time by regularly promising to go on crusade. The Holy Land was in dire straits after the disastrous failures of the Third and Fourth Crusade. When Frederick finally sets off, the pope had already lost patience and excommunicated him. Papal armies invaded Sicily whilst he was en route to Jerusalem. Frederick II managed to gain Jerusalem by negotiation, rather than by force, but got precious little thanks for that. Upon his return he achieves a reconciliation with the Vicar of Christ only after defeating the papal invasion and threatening Rome itself.

Things hold together more or less until 1245.

Sicily is firmly in Frederick’s hand, he is nominally accepted as overlord of Northern Italy and de facto  controls several cities and important castles there. Which gets us to the question: What happened to the Regnum Teutonicum, the kingdom north of the Alps?

Frederick II had stayed there from 1212 to 1220 when he fought against Otto IV, but did not set foot there again except for a brief interlude in 1235. For him the empire North of the Alps was of secondary importance. What he cared about was that there would not be a rival king who could lead armies south and mess up his political plans in Italy. He was therefore happy to leave the princes with all the privileges and rights they had amassed during the civil war between Philipp of Swabia and Otto IV.

To make sure that no local rival could emerge he had his son Henry elected king of the Romans and crowned in Aachen. Henry was just 9 years old when he was made king and was educated by senior German princes, first archbishop Engelbert  of Cologne, then duke Louis of Bavaria. Once Henry had reached adulthood he took his job seriously and began rolling back the concessions made by his father and his other predecessors which inevitably brought him into conflict with the princes.

That was exactly the opposite of what Frederick II wanted. He wanted peace and quiet up north, even if that meant the emperor had little power there. He sided with the princes against his own son. Henry feeling utterly humiliated, rebelled. Frederick II came up to Germany and defeated his son by sheer weight of the imperial prestige and the display of exotic animals and entourage.

Given that the whole issue had become so public, Frederick had to formalise the rights of the princes and the constitution of the empire, which he did in a document called the Mainzer Landfrieden of 1235, issued in both Latin and German.

This document consists broadly of two sections. The first one defines the status of the various princes, bishops and nobles and the second establishes the framework to maintain peace and justice in the empire.

Under the Mainzer Landfrieden the hierarchy of the empire differentiates between imperial princes and other lords. An imperial prince is someone who holds at least one of his fiefs directly from the emperor. Other lords are mediated, i.e., they are vassals of an imperial prince not of the emperor. And below them are free men, who in turn may be vassals of a mediated lord, unless they are toiling on the land of an imperial prince or even the emperor’s land himself. That is a major difference between kingdoms like England and France and the empire. The kings of France and England were the direct lords of all free men in the kingdom and could call upon them to go to war on the king’s behalf, even if their immediate lord wasn’t going. In the empire, the emperor had no such rights over the subjects of his imperial princes. If he called for war, he needed the imperial princes to come along for the journey and bring their forces. If they refused, that was that.

Furthermore imperial princes automatically received the right to exercise the imperial regalia in their fiefs. These included the right to administer justice, mint coins, raise taxes and tolls, build castles, found cities, establish mills and so forth. Over the centuries princes had obtained these rights one by one from the emperors sometimes in exchange for services rendered and sometimes by hook and by crook. The Mainzer Landfriede cleaned this mess up by simply declaring that all imperial princes could exercise all these rights within their fiefs, even if they never previously had that right or had lost the relevant charters.

The final big concession was that the emperor allowed the princes to pass their fief on to their daughters or even other relatives, should they die without male offspring. That was huge, because it meant the emperor could no longer revert a fief that had expired. This process called Heimfall of Escheat in English had been one of the main tools medieval monarchs had used to replenish the royal demesne. Meanwhile the imperial princes often retained the right of escheat and kept confiscating the land of widows and orphans who happened to lack the protection of a powerful warrior.

Then there is a second part of the Mainzer Landfrieden, the rules about conflict resolution. The main role of a medieval monarch was to provide peace and justice. And that was a difficult thing to achieve.

The preferred conflict resolution model of 13^th century Germany was the feud. In the absence of a functioning system of courts and a central authority to prevent violence, feuds are an entirely rational way to enforce a claim, though probably not one that ends up favouring widows and orphans. Abolishing feuds everywhere in the empire as Frederick had attempted in Sicily was completely out of the question given the weakness of the imperial poition. So the next best option was to regulate the way feuds can be declared and are to be conducted.

Under the Mainzer Landfrieden, any feud had to be formally declared and the parties had to observe a three-day cooling-off period before hostilities could begin. And certain acts of violence were prohibited upon sanction of instant imperial ban, in particular one was not allowed to set things alight, in particular not houses, barns and castles.

And finally, before a feud could be formally declared, the parties had to go before a judge, someone appointed by the emperor or even the emperor himself. Historians as I increasingly learn are not lawyers, and hence are keeping stum on what exactly this judge could decide and how a judgement could be enforced. I tried to read the original text but was none the wiser. What is clear is that the parties have to get a judge’s decision, but either party is still able to initiate a feud if they do not like the outcome. So it seems the judges acted more as arbitrators, attempting to diffuse the tension and arrive at a mutually acceptable solution. That is not a judgement as we would regard it today, but it was a way to reduce the overall level violence.

Once this constitution was laid out, Frederick II returned back to Sicily and had his second son, Konrad IV elected King of the Romans and gave him strict instructions to be a good arbiter between the princely interests and for heaven’s sake, do not rock the boat. His older brother and predecessor was led away to prison in Puglia where a few years later he ended his life by driving his horse down a cliff. Given the example, young Konrad IV did do exactly what his father had asked him to do, which was nothing much.

The end of the Hohenstaufen

The conflict between pope and emperor escalated dramatically in the 1240s as Frederick gained more and more power in Northern Italy and the pope got more and more concerned about imperial encirclement. Pope Innocent IV finally left Italy for the safety of Lyon, technically in the empire but practically outside imperial reach.

In 1245 the pope called a church council to excommunicate and depose Frederick II. At the pope’s behest some of the Imperial princes elected an anti-king, Heinrich Raspe, the Landgrave of Thuringia, exactly the situation Frederick II had tried to avoid by making all these concessions in 1235.

And this was not the only part of the political edifice of the Hohenstaufen empire that began to crumble. The Lombard cities reunited into a second Lombard League and in 1248 inflicted a massive defeat on him before the walls of Parma. Konrad IV too lost a battle against Heinrich Raspe, though that was less decisive. When Frederick II died in 1250 his empire was in dire straits. He had himself become increasingly paranoid and had accused his closest advisor Petrus de Vinea of treason, had him tortured and killed.

Whilst he had a whole brace of legitimate sons and an even larger set of illegitimate ones, they would all perish as the pope was hell bent to have the Hohenstaufens destroyed, root and stem. This story is very moving and sad, but to long to recount here. What matters is that Konrad IV left for Sicily only a year after his father’s death, leaving behind his little boy, Konradin as the last representative of the Hohenstaufen North of the Alps. Konradin never took a major role in imperial politics and perished in his attempt to regain Sicily for his family.

The empire was left to a series of ineffectual kings. Heinrich Raspe had been replaced by King William of Holland who spent his days trying to grow his own territory. Upon his death in a frozen Frisian lake, two new kings were elected, a Spaniard, Alfonso of Castile who never set foot in the empire and Richard of Cornwall, brother of King Henry III of England. Richard was a bit more interested in the job, but got entangled in English politics which turned him into an absentee landlord.

The vast lands of the House of Hohenstaufen as well as all that was left of the imperial possessions were suddenly without legitimate owner. They became the last great territorial feeding frenzy before the gates for new entrants into the circle of imperial princes close down.

Here we are. The Holy Roman Empire is still enormous, stretching from the gates of Rome to Hamburg and from Rostock to Arles. Its cities are still thriving and its peasants are bringing in rich harvests. But by the time King Richard of Cornwall dies in 1272, the empire as a political construct had suffered from 50 years of neglect, of rulers disinterested or disengaged. The resources of the office, the imperial regalia and castles and estates are lost. When henry the Fowler took on the kingdom of East Francia, it was a hospital pass, but it still looks like a lottery ticket compared to becoming King of the Romans in 1273.

Still, this next crop of rulers, often derided as “minor kings” were in fact much more successful than their more glamorous predecessors. The first will lay the foundation for a family fortune that at its hights grows into an empire where the sun never sets. Another will finally break the hold of the papacy over the emperor and again another will create one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful medieval capital the world has and will ever see.

That is what this coming season is all about, the 100 years from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull of 1356 or how the medieval empire becomes the Holy Roman empire with its prince-electors, its imperial diets, courts and ceremonies. An empire often derided as ineffective and antiquated, but that survived for centuries, and bestowed a legacy of regional cultural centres that are some of the greatest attractions of modern Germany.

I hope you come along on the journey as we find out how all this arise from the debris of the medieval universal empire.

I hope you enjoyed this painfully condensed summary of the history of the empire during the High Middle Ages. As I said at the beginning this should serve as a reminder for those of you who have listened to the show all the way to here. And to those who are new to the History of the Germans – I hope this was useful. As I have been rushing through things at a rate of knots this podcast is not famous for, I am sure some things may be unclear or you may want to hear the long version again. Therefore I have posted a transcript of today’s show on my website historyofthegermans.com where I have placed links to the relevant episodes in the text. If I have not completely screwed it up, you should be able to just click on the respective highlighted sentence and it should take you through to the relevant episode.

And I very much hope that you will come along for the next season, which starts next week with The Interregnum, the schreckliche, die kaiserlose Zeit – the horrible time, the time without an emperor. See you then.