Part One of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)
Ep. 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 edition) – History of the Germans
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 Edition)
We are now 7 episodes into the action-packed life of emperor Maximilian and he is only 35 years old. We still have another 24 years to go and they will be again full of wars, outlandish schemes, including one where he wants to make himself pope and of course marriages that create an empire. But if you look into German history schoolbooks, the thing that Maximilian is most famous for is what we will discuss today, the Imperial reforms that start in earnest in 1495 and will go through some iterations, before being largely completed in 1555.
Of the 1495 reforms, the Ewige Landfrieden is the most impactful. And it begins as follows quote:
“..from this moment on, no person of whatever rank, status, or condition shall make war on others, or rob, declare feud with, invade, or besiege them, or help anyone else to do so in person or through servitors; or violently occupy any castle, town, market, fortress, village, farmstead, or hamlet, or seize them illegally against another’s will, or damage them with fire or in any other way, or assist by word or deed or in any other way support or supply any perpetrators of such deeds, or knowingly harbor, house, feed, or give drink, aid, and comfort to such persons.”
That sounds great. Who could possibly disagree with that? Why did it take months and months of negotiations to agree this?
Let’s find out.
First up, why was reform suddenly needed?
It is hard to nail down the point in time when things went wrong for the Holy Roman Empire. It might have been as long ago as 1077 when emperor Heinrich IV had to kneel before the pope in Canossa, or was it in 1166 when the last great army of imperial vassals dies in mud and shit outside the walls of Rome. Or was it the sword that murdered Philipp of Swabia in 1208 that was the last of the thousand cuts.
But whatever event you choose, by 1495 the empire has been in dire straits for centuries. As friend of the podcast Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini said to the imperial princes “you acknowledge the emperor for your king and master, nevertheless he possesses but a precarious sovereignty; he has no powers; you only obey him when you choose and you are seldom inclined to obey. You are all desirous to be free: neither the princes nor estates render to him what is due; he has no revenues, no treasure. Hence you are involved in endless contests, and daily wars; hence you suffer rapine, murder and conflagrations, and a thousand evils which arise from divided authority.”
…because the endless feuding destroyed the country
When there are no powerful central institutions, law and order collapses. As one chronicler said, when the cat is away, the mice govern as they will. And what these mice liked even more than cheese was other people’s cheese.
Feuding was endemic. There weren’t just the major conflicts like the Mainzer Stiftsfehde or the Princes’ War, there were lots and lots of little fights, in particular in the south, where political power was particularly fragmented. It is the scale of it that is so shocking. Peter Wilson counted that between 1440 and 1570 there were 278 noble feuds – in Franconia alone. In the first half of the 15th century, feuding destroyed 1,200 villages and the Hussite Revolt a further 1,500. And remember these villages are those that had survived the utter devastation in the wake of the Black Death.
Now nobody can claim that in the 14th and 15th century the rest of europe was an island of peace where everybody was holding hands and singing Cumbaya. The Hundred years war, the War of the Roses, the battles between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish king, the Reconquista were epic struggles that ruined the countryside in very much the same way as it did in the empire. But all these conflicts were about the consolidation of central power, the king of France against his major vassals, which included the king of England, the king of England against the dukes, the Polish king against an independent state in his midst etc. You get my drift. These wars ended with a victory of the kings, who established strong institutions that did in the end made the roads safe and stopped peasants being assaulted by the local lords. The problem in the empire was that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. One day the Margrave of Brandenburg or the Count Palatine would win some territory, next time duke of Bavaria or the duke of Wurttemberg would take it away from them. There could never be a decisive victory that could bring all this mess to an end.
Feuding and the ensuing misery for the peasant population had been a scourge of the empire for centuries. So, what was it about the 15th century that made the call for reform so deafening that it could no longer be ignored?
…because the empire is under threat from enemies for the first time
Arguably, there were two, or depending how you want to count, three things that changed during the 15th century.
Firstly, up until the middle of the 15th century, the empire had no natural predators. It may be a mess internally and the emperors were already very weak. But the gap to its neighbouring kingdoms, France, Poland, Denmark, Hungary wasn’t that huge. All these places, as discussed before, were going through a whole lot upheaval themselves. But as they consolidated, the fringes of the empire came under threat. Provence, Dauphine, Franche Comte, Prussia, Holland, the Venetian mainland, and even Austria were gradually swallowed up by these newly consolidated kingdoms.
And the empire is still shellshocked by the outcome of the Hussite wars where crusade after crusade is defeated in ever more humiliating fashion by the Bohemian peasant armies. If the flower of the German knighthood cannot even defeat these unwashed hillbilly’s, what if someone even better organised and even more powerful shows up on the border?
And there was exactly such a new kid on the block, a sort of bodybuilder kid, the Turkish Sultan who was rolling up the Balkans.
For the first time since the Magyar’s had been defeated on the Lechfeld in 955 was there a genuine threat to the very existence of the empire.
…because the cost of defence of the realm had exploded
These new threats emerged at a time when the cost of warfare exploded. Infantry tactics using pikes could now defeat cavalry and artillery had become a necessity. The best infantry troops were mercenaries, Bohemians, Swiss and German Landsknechte who expected to be paid handsomely. Founding canon was a highly specialised skill, and even a simple field gun cost a multiple of the typical knight’s equipment of warhorse, sword and working armour.
The defence of the empire could no longer be ensured by an occasional raising of the feudal levy. France and Hungary had created standing armies, and so had the Ottoman sultan. The Janissaries counted to about 8,000 to 10,000 men plus the permanent cavalry roughly the same size. And in case of war, the sultan could call on a multiples of that from the various regional governors, arguably as many as 200,000 men, though logistics meant they could not all be deployed at the same time in one place.
So the empire had to keep pace. In the 12th and 13th century the emperors would take 5 to 10,000 men south, Charles VIII took 30,000 men to Italy and as the Italian wars intensified, armies of 50,000 became the norm.
By the early 16th century one year of campaigning against the Ottomans cost between 1.8m and 3.6m florins and another two decades later, the annual cost of the wars with France ran at 5.4m florins annually. The regular income from the imperial treasury was 25,000 florins though occasional one-off subsidies could be materially higher. An emperor, even if he was a major territorial prince in his own right simply could no longer protect the borders.
Though the full scale of the urgency was not clear to everybody in 1495, it was understood that the current political structure of the empire had run out of road.
..and the Council of Constance had shown a way out
But there were rays of sunshine here too. Feuding and threats to the territorial integrity of the empire had not been the biggest concerns of the people in the beginning of the 15th century. The #1 issue was the great western schism, the fact that there were three popes who had all excommunicated each other and anyone who had followed their rivals, meaning everyone in europe had been excommunicated by at least 2 popes, giving them a 2 in 3 chance of hellfire.
This massive problem had been resolved by the Council of Constance that sat between 1414 and 1418. This gave people not only hope that even the most intractable of problems could be resolved, it also gave them the tool to do it with. A church council, as we laid out way back in episodes 171 to 174 was the congregation of the faithful whose authority superseded even that of the pope. In other words ideas that had circulated since at least Marsilius of Padua, namely that authority is based on the consent of the ruled, had found manifest expression and prove more effective in resolving the schism than the hapless attempts of kings, cardinals and emperors that went on before.
The debate over Imperial Reform begins
It is no surprise that the serious debate over imperial reform kicked off for good during the later stages of the Council of Basel, i.e. in the 1430s.
This debate is I think extremely unusual, since it wasn’t conducted in the context of gatherings, like imperial assemblies or parliament, as it would have happened in the more centralised kingdoms of France or England. Because Germany was already fragmented into dozens of important centres, some princely residences, some free imperial cities, the debate was conducted in writing. Initially by copying manuscripts by hand, but soon after Gutenberg had invented the printing press, many of these documents were printed and distributed widely.
Most of these documents begin with an analysis of the dire state of the empire. Here is one commissioned by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 (quote): “… we perceive that there is neither peace nor justice nor prosecution of the law anywhere in the Empire’s affairs. There are many wanton conflicts, disobediences of subjects towards their lords, robberies, arsons, murders, thefts on the roads, feuds and enmities, without any justice or integrity. Neither freedom nor peace is anywhere to be found. Any given prince must defend himself with his own might. When he pursues peace or war in one place, new disputes instantly begin elsewhere. It is constantly necessary for princes, counts, lords, nobles and other good people to prepare for battle, or to pay money to avoid being attacked. It follows from this that the principalities are decayed and ruined through pledging, destruction, base and sinful usury and other day-to-day futile, pernicious, great and severe costs. In the same way, counties, lordships, monasteries and collegiate churches are also reduced to extreme poverty and ruin, and the more prestige and temporal goods they have, the greater the damage they suffer.
From this it also follows that the Roman Empire, the emperor, the princes and all the German nation is now considered the least by all other nations… It therefore seems to me to be necessary to consider a means to raise up the Empire and to put in order the matters of the Empire.”
The analysis was the part that everyone agreed on, it was the solution that was contentious. There are a dozen or so “major” documents that are considered part of this debate and that have influenced the Imperial reform process, though I would assume there were loads more that did not cut as deep.
In a very broad way, they fall into three camps.
Solution 1 – MEGA – Make the Emperor Great Again
In 1437 a paper appears that proclaims to be the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund”, though it it is very unlikely he actually wrote it. For that the language is a little bit too fruity. The author does not hold back when he lays into the corruption and selfishness of the imperial princes. He is also interestingly very much against the imperial free cities, who he blames for not paying enough taxes. He says that when the heads of the church and the empire are confronted with their injustices, they quote: “turn their arses to us”. Not quite the tone of the imperial chancery.
His solution was to go back to the great and powerful emperors of the early Middle Ages. The princes, both the temporal and the spiritual ones should return all the lands, tolls, mints, mining rights that had once belonged to the empire. Then the emperor would again have the resources to deliver peace and justice and protect the realm.
This was of course never going to happen. But the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund” remained in print throughout the 15th and 16th century and enjoyed a lot of support amongst the lower classes, largely because it declared the following – quote:
“It is an unheard-of outrage – a great, ongoing injustice which ought to be publicized to all of Christendom – that some are so spiritually impoverished before God that they speak thus to their fellow human, whom God has powerfully redeemed and freed: ‘You are my property!’ This is a heathen way of behaving. God has redeemed us from all bonds, and henceforth nobody should haughtily exalt themselves into any position of ownership over another.” End quote
This idea of a renewed imperial power that could right all the wrongs done to the serfs and peasants was an important factor in the various uprisings and finally the Peasant War.
When these proposals were going a bit too fa, there were other, more moderate suggestions to create an effective imperial executive that enjoyed support.
Solution 2 – Let a Dozen Oligarchs Bloom
This position was first articulated in the policy paper, issued by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 that I have already quoted from before.
He proposed that every year the emperor and the electors come together in a city in the centre of the Reich and establish a court. Here all decisions about war, peace and justice were to be taken. As for the inner workings of this court he says quote: “each and every thing required for this establishment of justice and organization of the emperor’s court should be properly ordained by us, the electors, and the councillors whom we appoint for this purpose”.
The idea here is to set up a sort of oligarchy that runs the empire, keeps the peace, establish a system of courts to resolve disputes, bans feuding and raises armies for the defence of the realm as and when needed. The name for this structure was the Reichsregiment, best translated as the Imperial Government.
In this scenario the emperor was just a senior member of the Imperial Government with some ceremonial duties and maybe the nominal command of the army in case of war.
There are variations to this theme differing around the question of who is going to be a member of the Imperial Government. There were after all a number of very powerful imperial princes who were not electors like the dukes of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Brunswick, Holstein and the Landgraves of Hesse to name just a few. And these princes were as disinclined to be ruled by the seven electors as they resented imperial interference in their affairs.
Solution 3 – Be More Pope
This proposal originated with Nicolas von Cues, one of the most influential theologians and thinkers of the age. Cues took inspiration from the church councils of Constance and Basel, the events that had given people hope that the difficulties of the empire could be resolved in the first place.
For him, the Reichstag, much like a church council, should represent the constituent parts of the empire, decide the laws and has the ultimate say in how the empire is to be run. The Reichstag should convene annually and a committee formed by the Reichstag should exercise its rights during the time the Reichstag wasn’t sitting.
But Cusanus did not want to replace the emperor with an imperial government, in the same way the church council did not replace the pope. He believed the empire needed a strong executive power to deliver peace and justice. The emperor should command a standing imperial army funded by an imperial tax. He would also direct four imperial vicars based in Brabant, Austria, Milan and Savoy who would administrate four regions or circles of the empire. Next, an eternal peace that banned feuding would be passed by the Reichstag and a system of courts established. Decision of the courts would be enforced by the imperial vicars or the emperor himself.
These are the three options, return to the good old days of Otto the Great, create an Imperial government made up of electors and maybe princes and third, a sort of middle way where we end up with the Reichstag and the emperor working together, one focusing on passing the rules and the other on enforcing the decisions, in particular the ban on feuding and the defence of the empire.
Attempts so far by Trier & Martin Mayr
Fascinating as this debate amongst clerics and intellectuals may be, this does not solve the problem unless somebody does something.
As you may remember from the previous seasons, efforts have been made to bring about imperial reform.
The electors deposed Wenceslaus the Lazy for incompetence and replaced him with Ruprecht of the Palatinate in the hope he would resolve the issue. When neither he nor Sigismund moved things on, they planned to depose Sigismund as well, but failed to agree on a candidate for his succession. Still first attempts at establishing a general imperial tax were made, but petered out rapidly (episode 179).
There was a lot of enthusiasm when Friedrich III come in and established the Kammergericht as an imperial court staffed with professional judges but that had evaporated rapidly. In the 1450s and 1460s several princes, guided by Martin Mayr, attempted to reform the empire by replacing Friedrich III with a more suitable, or malleable candidate. Various names were floated, including Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate and Georg von Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia.
But neither of these schemes came to fruition. In the 30 years before the diet of Worms of 1495, the debate had gradually turned into a standoff. The princes demanded action, and in 1467 Friedrich III passed a time limited Landfrieden, or general peace and re- established the Kammergericht. However this did not materially reduced feuding, mainly because the Kammergericht judges often went without pay and Friedrich III lacked the resources to enforce their judgements.
After that things then ground to a complete halt. Every time the estates demanded more significant change, Friedrich III refused to even debate it, at which point the princes refused any help in the various wars and conflicts, except for the most obvious cases at Neuss and when Maximilian was imprisoned in Bruges.
The 19th century came down hard on Friedrich III, blamed the continued delay in German statehood on his intransigence. However, since the princely proposals were usually along the lines of the archbishop of Trier, aka asking for a complete emasculation of the emperor and the establishment of a princely Imperial Government, I can understand why he kept going Njet, or in Austria “na”
Maximilian on the other hand was more inclined to discuss imperial reform. He could see that his father’s strategy had run out of road. He had fought the French on the Western border for a decade and his dream was to go up against the Turks. There was no way he could do that without the support of the imperial estates. And the only way to ensure consistent support from the estates was by establishing new institutions and taxation model.
Therefore, when he was elected in 1486 he gave some subtle or not so subtle hints that he was ready to negotiate. But he could never really act on this since his father stepped in every time Maximilian was about to make concessions.
That is why nothing happened until 1495. But in 1495 Friedrich III, minus one half leg, was safely three feet under and the real discussion could begin.
Convocation of the Diet of Worms
Maximilian called on the imperial estates to assemble in Worms on February 2, 1495. When he did that, he had not intended to make this a debate about imperial reform. All he wanted was a two week get together, at the end of which the estates would grant him two things, an immediate subsidy to raise an army to go after king Charles VIII of France who had invaded the empire in Italy, and ideally a longer term say 10 to 12 year commitment to fund a standing army for the defense against the Turks.
As usual, Maximilian was late. When he got to Worms on March 18th, there was hardly anyone there. It took another 10 days before enough princes were assembled to form a quorum. Maximilian made a speech, said, give me the money now, it is urgent, the French are already in Naples.
This went down like a lead balloon. The still rather small audience was taken aback by the speech. Maximilian had not mentioned the imperial reform at all. Not a single word, not even a gentle nod in the general direction. Why, this was the first gathering after Friedrich III’s death. Of course we should discuss the Imperial reform now. They stalled and said we should wait until more princes are here.
April 1495 – The debate begins for real.
It took until April 7th for the 147 participants to make their way to Worms. There were 5 of the 7 electors, 29 temporal princes and 10 spiritual lords had come in person and a further 12 had sent their representatives. Then there were 67 counts and imperial knights and 24 imperial cities present.
By now Maximilian was getting seriously twitchy. He was not prepared for some longish constitutional debate. Literally a week ago his envoys had signed up for the Holy League and his new Italian and Spanish allies expected him to come down to Italy with an army and help trap the king of France in Naples. He also had another couple of irons in the fire. Perkin Warbeck, the Yorkist pretender was recruiting an army for his landing in England. This army was paid for by Maximilian and his mother in law, Margaret of York and was sailing in July of that same year. And there was still a rest of the Burgundian war going on in Gelders, where the French supported a claimant to the duchy.
Maximilian really needed to get this done and quick.
But that was not easy. The princes, bishops, counts, knights and cities who had gathered in Worms believed that it was now or never. Maximilian’s father was dead and the new king should now engage on the long overdue reforms, and moreover, they had him by the short and curly’s. Plus, if they would give him the money now and he defeated the French, went to Rome, got crowned emperor and returned as the victorious hero, it would take decades before they could nail him down again.
So they stalled. They took the imperial funding proposals and pretended they were debating them. But in reality, they discussed what imperial reforms they would demand of Maximilian. After a few weeks of no progress, Maximilian realised that his schedule was no longer achievable. He called the estates, asked them what they wanted and they presented him with a document outlining a range of reforms they wanted to discuss. These looked aspirational, but not excessive and Maximilian reluctantly agreed that the Reichstag would now debate imperial reform.
The decision making process
To understand what happened next, we have to take a quick look at the way the Reichstag makes its decisions.
The Reichstag is not a parliament where everybody is in one room and debates the issues of the day. The Reichstag is actually three separate colleges, one for the Electors, one for the imperial princes and the counts and a third one for the cities.
The process starts with an imperial proposal that sets the agenda. The proposal goes into each of the colleges, where the members discuss it behind closed doors and vote on their response.
Then the three colleges compare their respective opinions and debate and revise them, until they arrive at a unanimous opinion of all three colleges which is then presented to the emperor. The emperor can then either agree or reject it. If he rejected it, it went back to the colleges and the whole process starts again.
This process took ages!
The process was heavily tilted in favour of the electors and major territorial princes. These two colleges would coordinate their opinions before they would show them to the college of the cities who could then only get smaller adjustments through. Secondly, the smaller entities, the counts, abbots, abbesses and imperial knights had to pool their votes, weighing no more than the vote of one of the princes, and peasants were of course not represented at all.
And the emperor was not allowed to be present at any of these. He was literally hopping mad outside the closed doors as the king of France slipped through his fingers.
And because it was complex and involved a lot of chats in corridors and meetups in side rooms, it required someone to manage the process. Enter stage left, Berthold von Henneberg, archbishop of Mainz.
Berthold has been painted as Maximilian’s great adversary who fought for the rights of the estates against a recalcitrant ruler, unwilling to pass any reforms. But that is probably inaccurate. Berthold was, like many other bishops and abbots, very keen on a permanent peace and an effective ban on feuding. As we have seen in the example of Mainz, the largely defenceless church territories were under constant attack from rapacious princes. And he also believed that an Imperial Government would be much better able to achieve law and order than the emperor. But he wasn’t a revolutionary flying the flag of the liberty in the face of tyranny. He was more the guy who brokered the compromise the estates could bring to the emperor.
With all the preliminaries out of the way, we can look at the actual debates. I think the whole process breaks down into three separate phases.
Phase 1 lasted from March 18th to April 27th 1495. In that phase Maximilian pushed for his initial proposal to just give him the money and maybe discuss imperial reform later. That proposal was stalled by the estates. Instead they presented him with a counterproposal, to first discuss a permanent peace, the establishment or revival of the courts, the Kammergericht and the Reichsregiment, the Imperial government. Once that has been agreed they would be happy to discuss the funding of the army and taxation. Maximilian resented the idea of an Imperial government where the electors had a huge amount of power, but given his position, he agreed to proceed on this basis.
Phase 2 lasted from April 27th to June 22nd. As described above, the Reichstag set-up and process is heavily skewed to the electors and Imperial princes. And the electors and imperial princes know that Maximilian is under massive pressure. So they ransack the sweetshop. What the Reichstag presents on May 18th 1495 was a princely fever dream.
They propose an Imperial Government made up of 17 representatives that would be given full control of the state. They would handle Finance, domestic and foreign policy, defence, law and order, justice and even legislation. In this Imperial government the emperor would have only 3 of the 17 votes. In a particularly misjudged slight, the Habsburg duchies did not have a permanent seat in this government. What enraged Maximilian even more, if that is at all possible, was that the conduct of external wars was taken away from him completely. The Imperial government was to appoint an Imperial Captain who would raise troops, appoint officers, manage logistics and lead in battle.
That would have turned the emperor into a completely powerless figurehead, wheeled out on special occasions looking fancy in his crown and gown.
It also did not help that the proposal came with a whole host of accusations that Maximilian and his predecessors had presided over a century of decay and loss of territory. And since the emperors had let so many lands go, the burden on these who had remained was now exorbitant. So before he asked for more money, he should go and collect the outstanding dues in Provence, the Rhone Valley and the Low Countries.
Obviously there is no way in the world or outside it that Maximilian would sign on to this. They tried to sweeten the deal by granting him 100,000 florins to raise an army but that was less than the 150,000 he had asked for, and as we will see is only paid when it was too late.
When he receive the proposals on May 25th, he called it for what it was, blackmail. He was so angry, he did not respond for almost a month. Instead he acted as if there was no Reichstag going on. He invested Ludovico il Moro as duke of Milan without asking the electors, he negotiated with the Swiss about hiring mercenaries for a war against the French and the Turks.
Having spent weeks jumping up and down outside the council chambers of the Reichstag, now he let the princes walk by his chamber wondering what the king would do next.
It must have been a true feat of self-discipline to not go and beg for money. With every day that passed the chances to meet his international commitments and to catch the king of France were dwindling away. But there was no way he could hand over the crown of the empire to the princes. There is more of his old man in Maximilian that it appears at first sight.
But Maximilian wasn’t idle. He seeded discontent amongst the estates. Not everyone was keen on an all-powerful Imperial government dominated by the Prince-electors. All the smaller entities, the counts, the abbots, the cities, the imperial knights feared quite rightly that they would be swallowed up by the larger territorial princes. But even some of the most powerful dukes, of Bavaria and Saxony were unhappy with the limitations to what was right now almost complete autonomy. Slowly but surely the consensus over a princely oligarchy was falling apart.
The first indication that the princes were about to cave came when they revised their proposals for the permanent peace and the process for the professional court, the Kammergericht. These were all topics where the two sides had a lot of common ground. These proposals then became the basis on which productive negotiations continued for the rest of the Reichstag.
But on the Imperial government, not a peep until, almost a month later, on June 22 he sent a revised version of the Reichstag proposals back to the colleges. He had taken their text and just simply flipped words, so that for instance the Imperial Government was to be staffed not by the princes, but by people the emperor chose. It would be based, not in Frankfurt, but at the imperial court. Whole sections he did not approve off, like the section on the Imperial Captain, he simply dropped.
All that went back to Reichstag for further debate, which kicks off Phase 3.
We are now at the end of June. The battle of Fornuovo took place on July 8th. Charles VIII was home and dry. Perkin Warbeck’s landing in England had ended in a total disaster. The guy did not even get ashore before his small army was decimated. Gelders could wait another year.
Basically, the power of blackmail the estates had over Maximilian was gone. The ball is now in the King’s court. Now he can use time to force concessions.
On June 28th, the electors and princes give up their idea of an Imperial Government that replaces the emperor. Instead they agree to something called the “Handhabung” that laid down some rules about a governing council and the Reichstag procedure that would soon be revised.
And whilst all this back and forth over power in the empire went on, a few unsung heroes managed to forge an agreement between all the parties involved that would actually stand the test of time. The “Ewige Landfrieden”, the eternal peace which at least formally ended feuding in the empire, the Kammergerichtsordnung, the procedural for the professional imperial court and the Common Penny, the tax that was meant to fund these institutions.
Some of these were real breakthroughs that stayed on the statute book until 1806, others were less successful, but 1495 marked a huge step towards the curious constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire that we will discuss in more detail next week. I hope you will join us again.
And as always, if you feel this show serves a purpose that you feel is worth supporting, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you find all sorts of exciting ways to keep me in my seat chatting about long forgotten empires.
And a big thankyou to Duncan Hardy whose translations of key documents I used extensively in this episode. You can find a link to his excellent book in the travel, maps and books section of my website