Law and Justice

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The Imperial Diet at Augsburg in 1500

Ep. 228 – Maximilian I (1493-1519) – The Princes and the Emperor. – History of the Germans

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 228 – Maximilian I (1493-1519) – The Princes and the Emperor.

If there was one group that consistently thwarted Maximilian’s grand plans for world domination, it was the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. He had given in to their demands for Imperial Reform, had granted the Reichstag far reaching powers, had established the Reichskammergericht as a law court independent of imperial authority and had announced the much longed for ban on feuding. But did the princes, counts, knights and cities hold up their end of the bargain and paid him taxes to raise the armies needed to defend the borders of the empire – well you bet.

They left him hanging before Livorno, they collected berries instead of fighting in the Swiss war, and – spoiler alert – they will not raise a little finger to help Ludovioco il Moro to regain his duchy of Milan, even though Milan had been an imperial fief since the days of Charlemagne and Otto the Great. No money, no soldiers, nothing.

When Maximilian called a Reichstag in Augsburg to raise support for his ally, the duke of Milan, the princes stalled the opening until news arrived that Ludovico had been captured and marched off to a French prison where he would end his days.

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Small sidebar here. Ludovico il Moro had been Maximilian’s most important source of finance. He had paid him a sum total of a million florins over the years, many multiples of the empire’s contributions. And when Ludovico demanded payback from Maximilian, the emperor had to raise his hands and admit that all the cash had gone and that he had no soldiers or vassals he could call on to help. In his decisive battle against the French, Ludovico was deserted by his Swiss and German mercenaries, because he could no longer pay them. There was no money no more.

Ludovico il Moro during better days

Let’s go back to Maximilian’s problem with the imperial princes.

As we have seen these last dozen or so episode, the two emperors, Friedrich III and Maximilian had a whole host of problems. There were the external enemies, the Turks, the Hungarians and most prominently, the French. Soon Venice will join this not very exclusive club. Another issue were family frictions, Friedrich III with his brother and cousins and now Maximilian with his son Philip the Handsome. Then there was the limited capacity of their homelands to sustain their pan European political ambitions. These capacity limitations were in part inherited from predecessors, namely Sigismund in Tyrol and Charles the Bold in Burgundy. But that was exacerbated by the nonchalant way they managed their resources. Pushing again and again for taxes and subsidies, but rarely investing these in infrastructure or even the effective defence of their own borders.

But their, and in particular Maximilian’s, Achilles heel was the lack of support from the Empire. We have done the numbers before. But let’s just reiterate. The empire, including Bohemia, the Swiss Confederacy, Savoy, Provence, Northern Italy, and the Low Countries held 23 million people compared to France’s 13 million, Spain and England at single digit millions and even the massive Jagiellonian empire of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Bohemia and Hungary came to no more than 12 million. Moreover, the Empire comprised all the wealthiest and most “industrialised” in inverted commas parts of the continent. In other words, if united, the empire was a colossus that could force all its neighbours into submission.

The Holy Roman Empire in 1356

We know and the players of the Renaissance game of painted thrones knew that the empire was not united. But nobody yet knew how disunited it was. The did not know for a fact that the Swiss would go their entirely own way and that Northern Italy would become a pawn in the contest between Spain and France. When The French king, the doge of Venice, the Pope, the king of Naples, the duke of Milan, the kings of Spain and England made their political calculations, they had to assume that there was a not insignificant probability that tens of thousands of battle hardened Teutones could come across the alps at any moment. That is why they sent observers to the various Reichstags and that is why they offered the German princes brass and brides.

And that concern or hope, depending on viewpoint is what kept Maximilian in the great game of European politics. Ludovico il Moro kept shelling out cash and marrying his niece to Maximilian because he believed the threat of an imperial intervention would keep Louis XII away. The Holy League invited Maximilian because they thought he could bring a mighty force to sway the battle of Fornuovo. And when Maximilian presented his grand plan to wipe the upstart French king off the map, they all listened.

But in all of these cases, Maximilian came up short, incredibly short. Every single time the Reichstag refused the money to hire the armies, or if the tax was already agreed, failed to collect it. They did not even honour his demand to join him on his coronation journey to Rome. So Maximilian only ever brought along tiny armies, essentially all that his exhausted lands could afford.

Which leads to the simple question, why?

We know why the imperial princes refused to support Friedrich III except for that one time at the siege of Neuss. The princes did not fight for that stubborn old man, because the old man was so stubborn and had consistently refused to grant imperial reforms that in any way reduced the imperial prerogatives – to the extent those still existed.

But why did they refuse to help Maximilian who had given in to most of their demands at the Diet of Worms in 1495 as discussed in episodes 223 to 225 and Duncan Hardy had so eloquently explained?

The common view shared by Maximilian’s most thorough biographer, Hermann Wiesflecker, is also the simplest. These princes did not care one bit about the empire, not its institutions, its reputation, not even its territorial integrity. All they cared about was their own advancement, the transformation of their bundles of rights into territorial states. And most of all they cared about their independence from the emperor, which is why they did not want him to be successful and hence powerful. They were unfazed by neither the French nor the Ottoman threat, since the borders to these powers were manned by the House of Habsburg and as long as the Habsburgs had money or at least credit, they should have the honor and expense of being the shield of Christendom. And reading some of Maximilian’s speeches, this was very much the view of the emperor and his entourage.

Heinz Angermeier, the preeminent historian of the imperial reform process, believes that there was a structural fault in the imperial reforms of 1495 that prevented the princes from wholeheartedly buying into the project. The 1495 reforms had provided institutions dealing with rulemaking, the Reichstag and adjudicating, the Reichskammergericht. In modern parlance, that would be the legislative and the judiciary power. But it had not created viable institutions for the exercise of executive power. Hence the years following 1495 were taken up with defining the structure, rights and composition of this executive power. Only once this had been settled could the princes accept a reduction in their sovereignty in exchange for an increase in justice and stability.

And there is also a third option, which is that the princes believed that Maximilian’s plans were bonkers, which is English for nuts and durchgeknallt in German. The grand Plan of surrounding and burying the French king under the ruins of the Louvre was simply one set of many steps too far. They wanted their emperor to first sort out the still raging feuding in in the empire before he set off on wild adventures in foreign lands.

Let’s keep these three perspectives in mind as we look into the Imperial Diet of Augsburg in the summer of the year 1500. And yes – we have now officially crossed the line into the 16th century!

This gathering had been scheduled for the beginning of the year leaving enough time to raise an army that could support Ludovico il Moro in his attempt to take back Milan. But the delegates dithered and delayed until April, when news arrived that Ludovico il Moro had already been betrayed at Novara and had been apprehended by the French authorities.

And just another little titbit about the events that led to the duke’s arrest, which says a lot about the Swiss mercenary and justice system. Here is the situation. The French had defeated Ludovico in a battle outside the walls of the city of Novara in Northern Italy. Ludovico lost the battle mainly because his Swiss mercenaries refused to fight other Swiss mercenaries in the pay of the French king. And then there was the minor issue of not getting paid. After the battle Ludovico and his remaining soldiers, including his Swiss mercenaries, gathered inside Novara and soon thereafter capitulated.

The Swiss mercenaries were granted the right to leave with their weapons and were now filing out of the town. Ludovico on the other hand was asked to surrender and hand himself over. Something he had no intention of doing. Instead he tried to flee, disguised as one of the Swiss mercenaries. The French suspected this and hence French officers controlled each of the men leaving Novara.

Ludovico’s mercenaries, offered a bag of silver and probably feeling a bit ashamed, were willing to smuggle him out. And the scheme worked reasonably well for a while.  Though obviously a lot of the soldiers knew who he was, the Swiss officers made sure they all stayed stum. Once the vast majority of the soldiers, including Ludovico had passed through the gate, the French began to panic that their great prize had escaped them. They walked back and forth checking all the men who were around for a second and third time. At that point Hans (or Robert) Turmanni from the canton of Uri approached a French officer asking him what he would pay him to point out the duke. Apparently the price of a deposed duke in 1500 was 200 florins. The French paid and Turmanni pointed at Ludovico, Ludovico was captured and ended his days in jail.

Der «Verrat von Novara» – eidgenössische Söldner übergeben den Herzog von Mailand an die Franzosen (Luzerner Chronik 1513)

Now comes the interesting part. What do you think happened to the traitor Turmanni? If he had been an ordinary landsknecht, he would have disappeared, nobody knew him, nobody could ever find him. But the Swiss were different. Everybody knew everybody. And hence everybody knew who had betrayed the duke. They knew who he was and where he lived. And they told everyone at home in Uri what he had done. Hence when Turmanni dared to come home three years later believing everybody had forgotten about the affair, he was in for a shock. He was dragged before a court, accused of dishonoring the regiment and betraying the Swiss confederacy who wanted to keep the duke for themselves. Witness statements were taken and a jury condemned him to death and had him executed. Events like this earned the Swiss mercenaries a reputation for being disciplined and reliable.

 Back to the Imperial Diet in Augsburg.

When Maximilian was finally able to open proceedings, he must have been raging with anger. Once again the imperial princes had left him in the lurch, and this time in the most humiliating fashion. He might not have liked his wife Bianca Maria Sforza much, but seeing her uncle frog marched into a French prison was an affront of epic proportions.

He began his speech talking about the many threats to the empire, from the Turks and now from the French who were not at the border, but inside the borders of the Holy Roman empire. And let us not forget the Venetians who have taken large sways of what had once been the March of Verona and the Patriarchy of Aquilea, with not as much as a by your leave. Things he said were about to become much worse. The king of France was soon going to travel to Rome and be crowned emperor, taking away the grandest of imperial princely titles, that of Prince elector. And then the French, together with the Venetians will attack the Austrian lands, come across the Alps and take their principalities one by one.

What was needed was to complete the reform process and establish a standing army, such as the French, the English, the Spanish, the Hungarians and probably a number of others already had. Such an army would need a permanent source of funding, not an ad hoc grant of money that never ever arrived.

The response from the princes? Obviously Maximilian’s mind had once again left off on one of his pipe dreams. Only because you, Maximilian want to see the king of France burning to ash in his palace, does not mean Louis wants the same for your or us princes. The king of France, the princes said, was a sensible man, a man one could do business with. They will send him an embassy to negotiate a deal and all will be fine.

There is a bit of a gap in the political positioning here.

We have no detailed accounts of the proceedings, but it is likely that discussions went back to one of the proposals of the diet of Worms that were not implemented. Berthold of Henneberg, the archbishop of Mainz and archchancellor had pushed hard for what he called the Reichsregiment, a government made up of princes and city representatives who would manage the affairs of the empire on the day to day. Maximilian had rejected this in Worms in 1495 as going too far in reducing his powers.

But now Maximilan seemed to have been more amenable to the idea. What brought on that change of mind cannot be ascertained. Wiesecker argues that Maximilian had been pushed into a corner by the princes along the lines of sign here or all your power will be lost. Angermeier takes a different stance. According to him Maximilian saw value in the idea of having a permanent institution that would handle administrative matters and deals with emergencies. He had seen that the imperial reform had been incomplete without some form of executive branch. Maximilian’s preferred option had been to establish imperial circles that bundled smaller and larger principalities together under an imperial captain. There should be four of those, excluding the Habsburg lands. But the idea of the circles were rejected by the princes, which meant we discussion circled back to the Reichsregiment.

And that is where they came out in the end. The Reichsregiment was made up of 20 members, which included the prince electors, a rotating set of representatives of the princes and the cities and 2 imperial knights. The emperor had the chairmanship of the Reichsregiment when he was present in person, otherwise it fell to the most senior prince, which was usually the archbishop of Mainz, aka Berthold of Henneberg.

They took on the responsibilities of the Reichstag when it was not sitting, which included the right to issue imperial bans. They had oversight of the Reichskammergericht and responsibility to maintain the Ewige Landfrieden, aka the ban on feuding. And they had oversight of the collection and distribution of the imperial taxes. They took up residence in Nürnberg.

What did Maximilian get? What he was promised was a permanent army of the empire under his command. That sounds like very little for giving up pretty much all of his rights as a monarch. However, we have to remember that in the mind of most medieval rulers and in many ways Maximilian was a medieval ruler, warfare was the main task of a monarch. He did not think much or cared much about building infrastructure, policing or welfare policies. So he was happy to hand these tasks over to the princes, who he understood he needed. If he received a standing army in exchange for this, that would be a fair deal, not a brilliant deal, just a fair one.

So though he sounded a bit clipped when he delivered the concluding statements of the Reichstag, I do not think he thought this was an apocalyptic fail that will cost him all that was left of the power that an Otto the Great or a Barbarossa once wielded.

The reckoning came when the Reichregiment held its first session and decided that the command of the imperial army should go to one of the imperial princes, not to Maximilian. And of course this army was never established nor were the common taxes ever collected.

In the discussions in Augsburg Maximilian had said, that if the princes refused his call for support once more, he would not wait for his enemies to steal the imperial crown. He would rather smash it onto the floor and pick up the pieces. What he meant by that was that he would let the empire go down the drain, take whatever imperial lands were left for himself and let the smaller and mid-sized estates fall prey to the bigger ones in one gigantic civil war.

Well, none of that crown smashing happened, but the civil war did indeed happen.

Maximilian decided to completely ignore the Reichsregiment and the other institutions created in 1495. He promoted his Reichshofrat as an effective source of justice and focused on his own lands for once. He did implement some major administrative and military reforms in Austria, Tyrol and Further Austria that laid the foundations for the Austro-Hungarian imperial administration of the centuries that followed. He built the Zeughaus, the great armory of Innsbruck where he housed his artillery, one of the most sophisticated and innovative in europe. It is also here where he established an armorers workshop that attracted masters from Nürnberg and Augsburg, an establishment that rivalled the city-based manufacturers in scale and quality. He did bide his time and focus on other matters.

Meanwhile the Reichsregiment prove almost immediately to be extremely ineffective. A committee of 20 is unwieldy in the best of times, but one that includes representations from various estates, most of them rotating in short intervals and then being superseded by the Reichstag when it was sitting, that was instant paralysis. Tax discipline did not improve so the Reichskammergericht ran out of money and was temporarily shut. And anyway, its judgement could not be enforced since the famous standing army was never established.

It did not help that Berthold of Henneberg, the motor behind that whole endeavor died in 1504.

Ah, and then there was the minor issue of a massive civil war. It is a war we have already heard about, the war of the Landhut succession from episode 197. I just knew that one time it would come in handy, because I do not have to go into much detail here.

Bottom line was that Duke Georg the Rich of Bavaria- Landshut, he of the famous Landshut wedding, left behind just one daughter. According to the Wittelsbach family compact that should mean his duchy would go to his cousin, Albrecht of Bavaria-Munich. And with that all the dukes men would have done the impossible and put Bavaria back together again. But Georg no longer liked his cousin Albrecht and in his will gave all his lands and titles to his daughter and son-in-law. That son in law was from the other branch of the Wittelsbachs, the Counts Palatine on the Rhine.

You will be surprised to hear that this disagreement was not resolved by the Reichskammergericht as should have been the case under the Ewige Landfrieden. Instead it was resolved by force of arms. And since Albrecht was Maximilian’s brother in law, he and all the Habsburg allies lined up on this side, whilst Habsburg’s strongest opponents lined up on the other.

Triumphzug Kaiser Maximilians I. (die Böhmenschlacht und der böhmische Trophäenwagen) von Albrecht Altdorfer (Regensburg um 1512–1515)

The whole affair was extremely brutal as both sides used the famously undisciplined Landsknechte whose skill in raping and pillaging was unsurpassed at the time.  And even in this merciless conflict, Maximilian’s brutality stood out. When the garrison of Kufstein surrendered after a long siege, he had all the defenders executed as traitors. And then he had the event immortalized in an engraving by Hans Burgkmair.

The Execution of the Guardian of Kufstein, from “Der Weisskunig” by Hans Burgkmair 

And this time Maximilian did win.

At the next imperial diet, in 1505 in Cologne, he formally abolished the Reichsregiment that had so obviously failed to prevent this violence. And he showed himself again as a magnanimous ruler when he created a new statelet from bits of Georg’s inheritance for the defeated party. Pfalz Neuburg as this was called became the childhood home of Georg’s grandson. Ottheinrich of the Palatinate, one of Germany’s most impressive renaissance princes, architect of the Centerpiece of the Heidelberger Schloss, and owner of some of the grandest pieces of armor ever produced.

The ruins of the palace “Ottheinrichsbau” in Heidelberg Castle, Germany. Built from 1556 to 1566.

The combination of the utter failure of the princely Reichsregiment, the victory in the war of the Landshut succession and his magnanimous verdict gave Maximilian the leeway to once more adjust the imperial constitution. He introduced the imperial circles in 1512, the ones that actually worked, and tasked them with enforcing the judgements of the reconstituted Reichskammergericht.

And he abandoned the common penny for the Reichsmatrikel, the system whereby every estate committed to provide a set number of riders and infantry or their equivalent in cash. That took out all the uncertainty about how much in taxes could be raised and from who. And most importantly, tax collection was in the hands of the estates, meaning there weren’t imperial tax collectors roaming around the empire and  undermining the integrity of the territorial principalities.

That was an arrangement the princes could live with. Sure, they did not want to be brought under the cosh of their imperial overlord. At the same time they realized that they could not operate in an open, dog eat dog world. Rules needed to be and the Reichsregiment of 1500 and its second iteration in 1521 showed that a weak imperial oversight was better than a closer control by the princes, which in practice meant by the prince electors.

Hence the empire settled into this model of a mixed monarchy where royal prerogatives were shared between emperor and estates that made the Holy Roman empire so unique. And in this system Maximilian and his successors were able to raise forces, not the overwhelming force the empire could in theory mobilize, but better than nothing.

For once in a long time a success for Maximilian. But there are more to come as we go through the next few episodes. The early modern world and its two main protagonists, the kingdom of France and the Habsburg, not the Holy Roman Empire, are taking shape. If my planning holds, we should be soon see the full picture of what Maximilian’s grandson, Charles V will inherit. And once we see that, this season will come to its close, and the next one, the great one, the one about the Reformation will kick off.

I hope you will stick around for that. I am pretty sure it will be worth it

And before you all go, let me thank all you generous patrons who keep this show on the road and advertising free. I keep getting asked to join podcast networks that would take on much of the dour marketing activity and promise a massive increase in listenership. But these offers come with a sting, i.e., I would have to allow advertising on the show. After all these guys do not run charities. But I want to stick to the strategy I once decided to follow, which makes this endeavor entirely dependent on the generosity of such lovely people like Thomas R., Thomas B. C., David P., Matt N, Tom D., who is also a huge supporter across all social media platforms, and the John W. who sadly passed away recently. And if you want to join this elite group, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where lots and lots of options await you.

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Part Three of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 225: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495 – History of the Germans

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 225 – Der Ewige Landfrieden (the Public Peace) of 1495.

Let me start today’s episode with some outrageous national stereotypes. If an Englishman is disappointed with the way the affairs of state are conducted, he writes a letter to his member of Parliament. A Frenchman in that same situation rents a tractor and dumps manure outside the Palais d’Elysee. A German threatens to file a lawsuit with the constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht.

Where did the Germans pick up the belief that courts and the law will protect them against government overreach? Sure, 19th and early 20th century judges had on occasion stood up to the Kaiser’s administration and the Grundgesetz, the liberal constitution of 1949, had become a cornerstone of our national identity following the comprehensive loss of moral standing.

But there is also a long strain that goes back to the Holy Roman Empire and the two imperial courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat. These courts have a bad reputation, not only because Johan Wolfgang von Goethe saw it fit to ridicule his former place of work. However, not everyone shared this negative perspective. Many social groups down to mere  commoners relied on these independent judges to protect their life and property against rapacious princes.

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And with that, back to the show.

I guess you are sitting in your car or on the train listening to this and thinking, how can there be a connection between what you have heard these last 224 episodes about lawlessness and chaos in the Holy Roman Empire and the high status court judgements enjoy in Germany today? I do admit, it is a long shot, but bear with me.

Let’s go back first to the early and high Middle Ages, the Ottonians, Salians and early Hohenstaufen. The emperors of this period saw law and justice as their primary tasks, alongside the protection of the church and the defense of the honor of the empire.

The Laws of the Empire – or Absence Thereof

But what did they mean by law and justice? There was of course no codified law in existence. The closest thing to a law code was the Sachsenspiegel and its variations. But this was a collection of legal customs compiled by a scholar, Eike von Repgow, not a compilation of binding laws. There were other, competing sources of law, the ancient Frankish law codes, specific local traditions, Canon law, aka the law of the church, precedents in the form of previous imperial judgements and charters, some real, some fake.

Roman Law, specifically the Codex Juris of Justinian was added to this mélange in the mid-12th century when scholars in Bologna recovered the original text and Barbarossa re-issued it as the laws of Roncaglia (episode 55).

There was obviously no coherence between these various sources of law, not even a widely accepted hierarchy. Attempts were made both on the territorial and imperial level to reconcile all these into one coherent “law of the land”, but it took until 1794 before Prussia passed the first comprehensive law code, the Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht. Austria followed in 1802 and France with the much more modern Code Napoleon in 1804 that was adopted by several German principalities.  I.e., for 98% of the time the empire existed, there was no coherent law, not even on a territorial level.

The purpose of Judgements

So, without a coherent set of laws, how did the courts arrive at their judgements, and why did so many people think these courts were a place to get actual justice?

If you read about legal disputes in the papers, the headline is usually X won or Y had lost, framing the lawcourts as a place of epic battles where victory or defeat are determined by the rhetoric flourish of the advocates and the stern application of the law.

But most people who go to court do not give a jot about the law. They want something and all other routes to compel the other side to concede have been exhausted. Going to court is expensive and the outcome uncertain, or as my law professors used to say, in court and on the High seas, you are in the hand of the gods. Which is why about 70% of cases that go to court end in a settlement. If you take into account that most lawyers advise clients to settle out of court, the percentage of disputes resolved without an actual court decision may well be north of 90%. In other words, a legal system that promotes viable settlements gets you 90% the way to law and order.

And that is what the imperial courts of the medieval emperors were aiming for, viable settlement. Only rarely would they lay down the law. And where they did so, these judgements were underwritten not just by the king, but by all the powerful individuals who had been involved in finding this solution, committing them to uphold the judgement.

The objective was not to discover the accurate legal solution, but to find a compromise that allowed both parties to leave the court with their honor intact. Disagreements could be framed as misunderstandings and the abandoning of position could be described as magnanimity. In the early Middle Ages, no other form of dispute resolution was possible. This was a society built on personal reputation. The political system consisted of personal bonds between vassals and lords, not institutions. A vassal followed a lord because the lord had promised to protect his rights and status. That expectation would be damaged irrevocably, if the lord was subjected to a humiliating defeat in court. His followers would then wonder whether this lord was still able to protect their land and possessions? At which point the lord’s only remaining option was to rebel against the “bad king”, resulting in civil war. That is what happened way back in episode 3, when Otto the definitely not yet great, convicted duke Eberhard of Franconia to the humiliation of having to carry dogs. Eberhard rebelled, causing a civil war that nearly wiped out Otto.

Bottom line, a medieval imperial court was a forum to negotiate a compromise, not a place to determine guilt or ascertain property rights.

The territorial courts

That should have got us 80% of the way, was it not for some major logistical challenges. There was usually only one emperor and he could not be everywhere. As it happened, from the 12th century he was barely anywhere. Moreover, from the 12th century onwards, the operating radius of the emperors had shrunk to the southern parts of the German lands. Large parts of the duchy of Saxony never saw an emperor again for centuries. So, who was supposed to do all that mediating.

Itinerary of kings and emperors 919-1519

In the Carolingian empire, the counts were given the task of adjudicating as representatives of the emperor. But as the role of count had become hereditary, emperors no longer wanted to be held responsible for the decisions of these counts.

This left a vacuum that was gradually filled by the dukes and then the territorial lords.  This situation was formally recognized by Frederick II’s privileges for the bishops and princes in the 1230s. Therin the emperor granted the imperial princes the jurisdiction over all the people in their territories, not just their personal servants and vassals.

Based on this privilege the territorial princes established a system of courts, usually split into the lower jurisdiction that focused on civic disputes and minor crimes and misdemeanors and the Blutgerichtsbarkeit, literally the jurisdiction over the blood, which had the right to condemn people to death and use torture to force confessions.

Court procedural for Lower and Higher Bavaria 1520

Lower jurisdiction was exercised by the mayor of the village or town, usually in conjunction with jurors chosen amongst the senior members of the community. As the territorial principalities became more vertically integrated, they were divided up into districts, called Ӓmter, where a judge and court would be established either hearing cases directly or to hear appeals against the lower level justice. And there could be a further appeal to the princely court or a senior law court.

The higher criminal jurisdiction, the Blutgerichtsbarkeit was usually exercised by the prince, either as a Hofgericht, a princely court where the lord would preside, or as a Landgericht, staffed with professional judges and jurors.

Though the territorial courts often had the means to implement their judgements by force, they did maintain the older tradition of preferring settlements over judgements. That was in part down to the complexity and contradictory nature of the law, but also because such compromises were better at calming down tensions. Rebellions and uprisings were common throughout the 15th and 16th centuries and could attract the support of jealous neighbours. So princes preferred calm to the strict application of the law. 

Similar structures were established in the cities with a lower magistrates court dealing with civil cases and minor misdemeanours and a higher court meeting out more severe punishments.

Appellate Courts and Private Courts

These territorial and city courts brought about a major improvement in law and justice in particular when staffed with professional judges, who kept records and tried to maintain coherence in the application of the law.

But they did have some weaknesses. Territorial laws and customs varied considerably from one place to the other. Behaviours and business practices that were perfectly acceptable in one place could be severely sanctioned in the next. People who stumbled into these idiosyncrasies might refuse to accept the proposed settlements, leaving the case open or potentially escalating.

That was a particular issue for the cities that traded with each other over long distances. Material differences in laws and customs could hamper this trade. That is why many cities, in particular those newly founded in the east, copied existing city laws, Stadtrechte, from so called mother cities. The laws of Magdeburg, Soest and of course Lubeck were wide spread. And to ensure the practical application of these laws remained in synch, complex cases could be brought to the mother city, making for instance City Council of Lubeck the appellate court for many Hanse cities.

From the Stadtrecht (city law) of Hamburg

Territories increasingly shifted to the use of Roman law and asked universities to opine on complex legal questions. That brought their practices into some at least broad alignment, though differences remained.

Leagues were another co-ordination mechanism acting as a bridge between different status groups. For instance the Swabian Leage maintained its own court system to adjudicate conflict between members which comprised princes, cities and imperial knights. The court could even overturn local magistrates decisions, thereby deepening the integration of their legal frameworks.

Landfrieden attempts until 1495

Therefore the empire wasn’t a lawless free for all before 1495, as has often been claimed. The inhabitants of cities and territories were bound by rules, adhered to commercial law practices and were subject to criminal justice, all administered by increasingly professional lawcourts.

But there was a massive gap in this system of the territorial courts. By definition they had no jurisdiction to adjudicate in conflicts between territories, cities or imperial knights. The framework under which these conflicts were supposed to be resolved was the so-called Landfrieden, the public peace.

When the first Landfrieden was promulgated by Henry IV in 1103, it was already a step backwards. His father, Henry III had forced a great pacification of the empire in 1043, that referred all conflicts to resolution by him and a prohibition of violence. But that has in large parts gone down the swanny during the regency of Agnes of Poitou and the conflict between pope and emperor known as the Investiture Controversy that followed.

The concept of a Landfrieden after 1103 was that all the powerful princes come together and promise to resolve their conflicts through mediation. But crucially, it did not and as we have discussed before actually could not ban feuds altogether. Feuds remained allowed, provided the party declared the feud in the proper manner, sought reconciliation first and did not breach specific rules, like for instance, not to attack royal highways.

After this first Landfrieden of 1103, several more were declared, including ones in 1152, 1158,1179,1186,1235, 1287, 1323, 1383, 1389, 1442, 1467. Having to say the same thing again and again is not a good sign.

The Landfrieden of Rudolf I

The success of these declarations of a public peace depended heavily on the ability of the imperial courts to actually mitigate the conflicts before they descended into feuds. You needed a court that was able to come up with sensible settlement proposals and within a reasonable time frame.  

And that was not always the case – hence the regular renewals. During the interregnum and then the long period when the imperial title moved between the Habsburgs, Luxemburgs and Wittelsbachs, emperors simply did not have the time to build up the court infrastructure needed. That meant mediation either did not happen, was ill thought out or came too late. Any of those and blood was be spilled. And once they were going at each other hammer and tongs, it was three times harder to get them back to the negotiation table.

In the 15th century things went properly downhill. Wenceslaus the Lazy, Sigismund and Friedrich III spent most of their time on the eastern edge of the empire dealing with existential threats from Bohemia and Hungary. Adjudication often stalled completely.

As the 15th century continued this gaping hole in the legal system gave room to veritable chaos. Princely warfare became more intense with the development of artillery and the growing size of the armies. Imperial knights whose income from tenants had shrunk following the Black Death, made up for it by conducting feuds on behalf of paying patrons. Even villages resorted to feuds in order to protect their hard won freedoms.

With no mediation process in place, let alone any kind of sanction for breaking the rules of feuding, things went seriously out of control, so seriously that even the imperial princes demanded an end to the madness.

On the positive side, the idea that violence needed to be a legitimate part of the negotiation process had lost credibility.

The right to feud against a “bad” overlord or an unjustified claim from a neighbour was rooted in the concept of vassalage. As mentioned before, a Lord had to keep face if he wanted to hold on to the support of his vassals. And that meant he had the right to rebel if disrespected.  If you check out Otto von Northeim’s speech in episode 31 and 100, you can see the line or arguments that justified rebellion. But by the 15th century, feuding was no longer necessary. The power of the territorial princes no longer rested on the oaths of their vassals, but on the institutions, administration and military forces they had established. They could now sustain a negative judgement without losing their status.

That is why in 1467 Friedrich III  could issue his Landfrieden that banned all feuding outright as lèse-majesté. That was  a major step forward, though this arrangement still remained time limited to 10 years. And it lacked an enforcement mechanism, since the Reichskammergericht he had tasked with providing mediation and – if necessary – order the execution of its judgements, ceased to operate after 1475.

The 1495 Landfrieden brought this sorry saga to an end. It declared that (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.” (end quote).

The Ewige Landfrieden banned private warfare under all and any circumstances and for ever. It established the state’s monopoly of violence. This, once enforced became another nail in the coffin of the Middle Ages.

Reichskammergericht, Reichshofgericht and Kreise

But as Friedrich III could tell you, the operative word here is “once enforced”. Even if everybody would have been happy to outlaw feuds for ever, and not everybody did, that would not have yielded results. Conflicts between the holders of imperial immediacy did not vanish overnight. The dukes still wanted the cities, the landgraves the bishops’ lands, princes still debased currencies and imperial knights kidnapped merchants.

What made the difference was the establishment of two courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat and another coordination mechanism, the Kreise, the imperial circles.

The Reichskammergericht in its latest incarnation was established at the diet of Worms in August 1495, its judges were appointed on October 31st and it heard its first cases four days later, a sign that at least occasionally, the empire could move swiftly.

The reason it did work, and worked for so long, came down to a number of institutional choices.

As I do not have to explain to our American friends, the composition of the court is almost as important as its remit and procedures.

In case of the Reichskammergericht, the presiding judge, the Kammerrichter, was appointed by the emperor, whilst the judges who shared the decision making, were proposed by the imperial estates. The imperial estates submitted a list  from which the incumbent judges chose the new member of the court. The judges, including the presiding judge, swore allegiance to the court, not to the emperor and not to the imperial estates.

The reichskammergericht in session

Though these appointments did have some influence, in practice, the Reichskammergericht acted independently from the emperor and the imperial princes. It had its own budget, its own administration and chancellery.

The Reichskammergericht was also based away from the Habsburg’s capital, first as an itinerant court, then from 1527 until 1689 in Speyer and after that in Wetzlar.

The Reichskammergericht Building in Wetzlar

This degree of independence set it apart from the territorial court that aligned much closer to the increasingly absolutist territorial princes.

Its remit was to adjudicate disputes between the imperial estates and other holders of imperial immediacy and banning anyone who broke the public peace for any reason. And, beyond this role as protector of the public peace, it also acted as the final appellate court above the territorial courts. This latter role was however unevenly distributed across the empire, since the Prince Electors, all the Habsburg lands and several other senior lords had the “ius de non appellando”, a privilege that protected their judgments from being reviewed by the Reichskammergericht. Over time the court was able to chip away at these exemptions, before it gained a much wider remit in 1526, which we will discuss in a minute.

Two years after the Reichstag established the new Reichskammergericht, Maximilian established another court, the Reichshofrat. The Reichhofrat was very much the court of the emperor, as opposed to the Reichskammergericht that was the court of the empire. Its judges were appointed by the emperor and it was based wherever the emperor resided. Its remit was conflicts over the rights and obligations of vassals. In practice this involved mostly matters of inheritance. Typical issues were the succession to fiefs where the incumbent family had died out or the permission to split a fief between multiple heirs.

Reichshofrat in session

The two courts did have quite a bit of overlap, since inheritance conflicts could easily tip over into breaches of the public peace. To limit forum shopping, the courts agreed a rule that no case could be brought if it was already pending in front of the other court.

The other Achilles heel of previous Landfrieden arrangements, beyond courts simply shutting down, had been the lack of viable enforcement mechanisms. The way the 1495 reforms addressed that, was by allowing the Reichskammergericht to demand the Reichstag to issue an imperial ban to coerce a reluctant party to adhere to its rulings. That was deemed too slow and complicated and from 1559 the emperor was tasked with issuing the ban on behalf of the Reichskammergericht. The Reichshofrat, as the court of the emperor could issue the imperial ban directly, though there were some limitation to prevent abuse.

Imperial ban was however very sparsely used as a tool. The sanctions associated with it were often going too far. It allowed anyone to kill the banned person without repercussions and his property and fiefs could be confiscated without compensation. The execution of an imperial ban threatened to unsettle the social order, creating a high bar to its application.

The Reichskammergericht – like the medieval imperial courts before – preferred finding viable compromises, rather than bringing down the full force of the law. Where they needed execution, they relied more on the imperial circles. These circles had been instituted in 1512 as a means to co-ordinate on a regional basis. There were initially six circles and later 10, comprising the entire empire except for Bohemia and Switzerland. The Kreise became the closest thing the empire developed in terms of administration. They organised the military forces of the empire, collected the taxes based on the Matrikel system, executed imperial and court orders and maintained the peace in their region. They were headed by a Kreistag, an assembly of the Kreis members. It is here in the Kreistag, where the smaller estates of the empire, the cities, counts and minor princes were engaged. That is where they passed legislation, co-ordinated infrastructure projects and settled their differences. Thanks to the imperial circles, the empire was a lot more coherent in its actions and laws than these maps with 350 tiny statelets suggest. They were so successful that older leagues, like the Swabian league, were ultimately replaced by these imperial circles.

Map of the Imperial circles

One would assume that the Reichskammergericht would be more popular for claimants than the Reichshofrat. The ofrmer was independent, whilst the other was under the direct control of the emperor. However, the Reichskammergericht found itself often overwhelmed with cases, making its proceedings slow and protracted. Some of the numbers, in particular Goethe’s claim of 10s of thousands of open cases were clearly exaggerated. Sure, there were cases that had been ongoing for a century. But these were often inheritance cases where the purpose was to settle the matter in an amicable way to prevent open hostilities, a scenario where delay can be the prudent choice. The Reichskammergericht regularly cleared its backlog suggesting it could not have been all that bad.

And, if necessary the Reichskammergericht could act very quickly. For instance Commissioners could be sent with injunctions to mobilise the military forces of the Kreise to prevent breaches of the peace.

Nevertheless, the Reichshofrat had a reputation to be quicker and sometimes more effective since its enforcement could rely on the full force of the Habsburg emperor. Moreover, despite its institutional attachment, the Reichshofrat gained a reputation as a defender of smaller imperial vassals against expanding territorial princes.

The court procedures and the witch craze

Both Reichskammergericht and Reichshofrat conducted their cases mainly in writing. Lawyers submitted writs and memoranda summarising their arguments. Before 1495 the courts operated in the fashion of an Anglo-Saxon court, basing its decision only on evidence brought forward by the parties. The Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat procedure allowed the courts to task officials with the collection of evidence, including taking witness statements.

This more inquisitive process spread across the legal system of the empire to the territorial courts, which had some painful unintended consequences.

The imperial criminal code of 1532 shifted the responsibility to prove guilt from the accuser to a public prosecutor. Previously an accuser had to bring the evidence for the alleged crime and if he failed to prove his allegation could face severe financial and even criminal recriminations. Once this task has been taken over by a public prosecutor it became a lot less risky and less expensive to report crimes. So far so sensible. The more crimes get reported, the more likely it is that they get prosecuted.

Forms of torture 1572

What turned it into a  toxic cocktail was the rise in allegations of witchcraft. Witchcraft was a crime and prosecutors were compelled to investigate them. Torture was a broadly acceptable tool in the investigative process. Plus the criminal codes of the time contained scarce protection against arbitrary arrest. One can imagine what then happened. Investigators torture alleged witches who bring up names who in turn get tortured as well, leading to even more arrests until the whole empire is in the grip of a veritable witch craze. Over the course of the 16th and early 17th century territorial courts had 22,500 alleged witches executed.

Map of Convictions of Witches in Bavaria

Neither the Reichskammergericht nor the Reichshofrat had tools to intervene, since criminal law, the “jurisdiction of the blood” had become the exclusive prerogative of the territorial princes. The only grounds for intervention was a breach of procedural rules, which curbed some excesses, but failed to prevent the ultimate outcome. A very sad topic we will probably have to get back to at some stage.

The broader remit after 1526

Against this darkness stands a more positive and more lasting impact of the system of imperial justice. In 1526 the remit of the Reichskammergericht was expanded. It allowed ordinary citizens to challenge their prince if he or she overstepped his legitimate powers, for instance unlawful exactions, arbitrary violence or the violation of traditional rights and protections.

This is a fairly rare institutional set-up in continental europe before the 19th century. By submitting themselves to the court’s verdicts, the princes gave up a big chunk of their autonomy. For instance the duke of Hohenzollern-Hechingen had to return the hunting guns he had taken off his peasants and reverse enclosures. A count found himself imprisoned for 10 years for having forged his subjects signatures on loan agreements. Duke Karl Leopold of Mecklenburg was deposed for putting excessive taxes on his subjects and trying to suppress his ducal assembly.

Why did German princes accept that? The decision came in the immediate aftermath of the peasant’s revolt of 1525, the largest uprising in Europe before the French revolution. It had become clear to the imperial estates, in particular the smaller ones, that they needed a way to ease social tensions. Populations who know that there is a way to seek legal redress for perceived infringements are less likely to risk life, limb and property on the barricades. It did not work perfectly and there were several rebellions and uprisings in the 17th and 18th century. But they were limited in sale and severity, compared to similar occurrences in Bohemia and Hungary where there was no room for redress.

Here is what Peter Wilson said about the consequences: quote: This process  had been labelled ‘juridification’ and involved a fundamental change in behaviour at all social levels. Lords had previously used violence to assert authority and status. Feuding had been criminalised in 1495 and now repression was likely to be condemned in the courts”.  The courts provided a platform for princes, burghers, peasants even the Jewish minority to hash out their differences based on the understanding that each side could call on certain rights and protections.

Other than in France, common people in the empire did not feel utterly powerless before the institutions of their princes or the emperors. Sure, a court case was hard to mount and ruinously expensive, but it was possible and it had a chance of success.

That in part explains the lack of enthusiasm for the French revolution amongst the broader population in Germany. Like in Britain, Germans were quickly turned off by the excesses of Jacobin rule and they simply did not see themselves being as oppressed by their governments as the French. That did change once the empire and its legal safeguards against princely overreach had gone, but it was there in 1789.

The other lasting impact was that calling a court for help became the Germans’ reflexive reaction to injustice. Germans, or at least Germans of my generation, see their country first and foremost as a Rechtsstaat, a state under the law.

Let me end with a quote I found in Peter Wilson, by a Habsburg Official, Joseph Haas bemoaning the dissolution of the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat in 1806  (quote):

“The judicial power [which] was until now the shining jewel of our constitution. Two Imperial Courts, whose councillors were appointed with great care and were free of external influence, competed with each other in the impartial administration of justice, and gave even the lowest subject right against the most powerful prince”. Now that these are dissolved, he goes on to say: “there is no doubt that canals will be dug, roads laid, avenues and parks, theatres and pools created, cities illuminated, and we will shine and starve. The only robbers threatening the subjects’ property will be the tax collector and the French and German Soldiers” (end quote).

And this brings our mini series about the Imperial reform of 1495 to its conclusion. Next week I will be away in Naples because I cannot bear the incessant rain here in London any longer. But I leave you a particular present. I did an interview with professor Duncan Hardy who I have mentioned several times before and who is a true expert in the empire of the 15th and 16th century. I am sure you will find that as enlightening as I did.

And in the meantime, spare a thought for your hard toiling podcaster, who has no Reichskammergericht to call upon for fair wages, but lives in hope of the generosity of his fellow history nerds. If you want to be part of the exclusive club that luxuriates in the soft glow of your fellow listeners gratitude, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and click on any one of the options.

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The Constitutions of Melfi

A medieval ruler that has a Muslim fighting force at his back and call and who negotiates Jerusalem out of the hands of the Sultan of Egypt is not what you expected when you began listening to the History of the Germans Podcast. I am afraid you aint seen nuttin yet!

This week we come to what was long believed to be his masterpiece, the Constitutions of Melfi. Even if It isn’t the creation of a modern state in the 13th century as Kantorowicz had believed there is still something fundamentally different here. The Middle Ages is a world where progress comes from people moving forward whilst looking back. They ask questions about the world and seek the answers in the past, in the Bible, the Church Fathers, Aristotle, Averroes etc. Only where the ancients are silent will great minds like Albertus Magnus look at the real world, undertake experiments and collect observation to derive their answers. Frederick is different. He does turn around and look at the natural world first and at dusty books second.

Let’s see what that means when it comes to organising his kingdom.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 80: A different kind of Emperor

A medieval ruler that has a Muslim fighting force at his back and call and who negotiates Jerusalem out of the hands of the Sultan of Egypt is not what you expected when you began listening to the History of the Germans Podcast. I am afraid you aint seen nuttin yet!

This week we come to what was long believed to be his masterpiece, the Constitutions of Melfi. Even if It isn’t the creation of a modern state in the 13th century as Kantorowicz had believed there is still something fundamentally different here. The Middle Ages is a world where progress comes from people moving forward whilst looking back. They ask questions about the world and seek the answers in the past, in the Bible, the Church Fathers, Aristotle, Averroes etc. Only where the ancients are silent will great minds like Albertus Magnus look at the real world, undertake experiments and collect observation to derive their answers. Frederick is different. He does turn around and look at the natural world first and at dusty books second.

Let’s see what that means when it comes to organising his kingdom.

Before we start just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Ernst and the 2 Roberts who have already signed up.

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Before we can go to the part where we stare at Frederick with open mouths, we have to close the loop and talk about what happened when he returned from his adventures in the Holy Land. Just to recap. Frederick had finally set off on crusade in June 1228 after having delayed so often, the new pope, Gregory IX had lost his rag and excommunicated him. Frederick tried in various ways to placate the pope but to no avail. He needed his excommunication lifted since otherwise his authority and legitimacy would erode. With a pope dead set against him, this unauthorised crusade was his only hope to be re-admitted into the bosom of mother church.

When he managed to acquire Jerusalem, minus the temple of Salomon for Christendom, he thought that this would make the pope so happy that he would give up his hostile stance. But that was a bitter miscalculation. Gregory IX was – if anything – even more incensed about Frederick being successful than he was about Fredrick being late. Since Gregory VII the papacy had grown to believe it stood above all secular rulers and when Innocent III climbed to the apotheosis of papal power, he called for a crusade he would lead himself. Though this did not happen, it implanted the idea that it was the pope’s job to free Jerusalem. He would use his vassals the kings, princes and emperors for the job, but the ultimate responsibility and glory was to go to the pope. Frederick’s actions have brought this concept to collapse. He had undertaken his crusade against the explicit wishes of the pope and as an excommunicate could not be construed in any way as acting on behalf of the pope. That meant the recovery of Jerusalem was his achievement, leaving the popes whose efforts had so far failed, feeling humiliated

Hence his stay in Jerusalem was in equal measure brief as it was uncomfortable. He stayed a mere 2 days because on the day after the coronation the patriarch put the entire city under the interdict. No mass could be red, no sacrament performed. Imagine you have undertaken the immensely painful journey to Jerusalem and then against the odds, you can get into the Holy city only to find, you cannot pray before the mount Golgotha, the one reason you had come in the first place. Without that prayer, the absolution you craved would not be forthcoming. Your soul is condemned to remain in purgatory for a very, very long time. Frederick had to leave the nominal capital of his new kingdom in haste so the interdict could be lifted and the pilgrims got their absolution.

Things did not exactly improve when he came back to Akkon. The patriarch and the Templars had gathered troops in the city. These could only be meant to fight him since there was now peace with the Muslims. Frederick had the patriarch and some leaders of the crusader orders put under house arrest which threw oil on the flames. The population rose up and pelted him and his men with filth as they went down towards their waiting ships. With a curse on his lips Frederick left the Holy Land.

The papal opposition to Frederick’s escapade was not limited to the Holy land itself. Whilst Frederick was out opening up holy sites to pilgrims, the pope was attacking on two fronts. In Germany he encouraged the imperial princes to consider the election of a new king, the deposition of Frederick as emperor and removal of his now 17-year old son Henry who had become King of the Romans

In Southern Italy Gregory IX took an even more hands-on approach. He hired an army of mercenaries, kitted them out with uniforms bearing the keys of St. Peter and sent them off to invade the Kingdom of Sicily. He flanked this move with the usual papal weapons, a release from any oath of fealty sworn to the excommunicated emperor and a solid dose of misinformation. Frederick, his Holiness announced had died in the Holy Land, a just punishment for all the unspeakable sins he had committed.

Gregory IX excommunicating Frederick II

The leader of the papal army was none other than John of Brienne, erstwhile king of Jerusalem and Frederick’s father-in-law. And he was a skilful commander. By the time Frederick’s galley landed in Brindisi on June 10th, 1229, most of the mainland was in papal hands. Frederick’s generals and his Saracen fighters were undefeated, but their area of operation had shrunk, and the units were separated.

Frederick’s arrival flipped the situation rapidly. Frederick’s mere existence exposed the papal lies. As news of the recovery of Jerusalem spread across the country, people questioned the papal intentions. Plus the emperor gained some unexpected help as the Teutonic Knights were blown into Brindisi by a storm and joined his forces.

The papal forces weighed down by their contradictions and possibly a lack of pay rarely stood and fought. By August Frederick was in Capua. The papal legate melted down the treasures of the ancient monastery of Montecassino to pay the troops just to convince them to hold the border. But still they ran. In just 2 months Frederick had cleansed his kingdom of the invaders, again with barely shot fired. These bloodless victories have become his speciality. He had gained Jerusalem without a fight, he had gained the empire through the battles of others and now Sicily regained twice, again more through law and diplomacy than brute force.

Well, not without any brute force. The city of Sora was one of the few places that resisted. It was besieged, conquered and flattened, never to rise again. “The plough should furrow the site of the faithless city as of old the city of Carthage had been”, that is how the emperor himself described his punishment. The male inhabitants were hanged, women and children sold as slaves.

City of Sora in 1606 (not permanenty destroyed)

Meanwhile up in Germany the situation had not spiralled out of control as Gregory had hoped. By and large the German magnates remained loyal. Only Duke Ludwig of Bavaria fell for the lure of papal promises. He had been one of the great political maneuverers during the civil wars between Hohenstaufen and Welfs. By playing one against the other he got his son into the line of succession of the Count Palatinate on the Rhine. Frederick II enfeoffed him with this rich land in 1214 and the Bavarian duke decamped immediately to lovely Heidelberg. From that day onwards until 1918 the Palatinate and Bavaria remained in the House of Wittelsbach. Frederick weirdly trusted Ludwig and made him a member of the regency council during his sons Henry minority. In 1228 Henry turned 17 and the regency was over. Henry took the reigns north of the Alps as the elected and crowned king of the Romans. The relationship between king and duke soured quickly which may be one of the reasons Ludwig sided with Gregory. In 1229 Henry lead a large army against Ludwig and defeated him, which brought an end to papal schemes in Germany.

There is an epilogue to that story. In 1231 Ludwig of Bavaria is murdered by a man nobody can identify. The murderer is tortured for days but even upon the worst pain medieval justice can inflict refuses to name the man who had ordered the hit. What bewildered contemporaries was that reluctance to name his client. In the 13th century there was only one organisation everybody knew about whose contract killers never disclosed who they worked for – the assassins. I guess there is a significant overlap between listeners to the podcast and fans of Assassins creed, so if you are one of those, move on 60 seconds. For the rest of you, the Assassins were a radical Islamic sect who gained a significant territory in Syria. They took in young man and trained them as killers in the name of Jihad. Given that important personalities in the Middle Ages were usually armed and well-guarded, many of these attempts were suicide missions. The story goes that the recruits were given hallucinogenic drugs, mainly hashish and once properly off their faces, were led to a fake paradise where amazing food and beautiful girls were on tab. Once they had seen the beauty of where they would go, they craved nothing more than death in the name of Jihad.

Murder of duke Ludwig in Kelheim

Frederick had allegedly met the leader of the assassins during his stay in the Holy Land. Out of this most likely apocryphal story the idea emerged that Frederick had his own assassins, trained in the mysterious Saracen city of Lucera. And it was one of those who had killed the Bavarian duke.

Lovely story, but a few too many ifs and buts. My money is that the killer was either mentally ill or had other, more rational reasons to conceal his client. That doesn’t mean that Frederick of Henry are off the hook. It was known that Henry in particular wanted to be shot of the duke.

Germany and Sicliy brought back under control, the question is what next? The road to the papal residence in Agnani is wide open. Gregory IX is out of funds to pay soldiers, none of the kings and cities he calls upon are sending him military support. Frederick could just go and capture the vicar of Christ and dictate terms.. That is what his Norman forebearers had done on many previous occasions.

Map of the Papal states

But Frederick had constraints that his ancestors did not have to deal with. He wasn’t just king of Sicily but also the Holy Roman Emperor. And whilst the Sicilians would be completely fine with a pope in chains, the Germans less so and the Lombard cities definitely not. That explains why he, the conqueror and ultimately injured party sued for peace.

Hermann von Salza, grand master of the Teutonic Knights and eternal go-between was sent to the curia where he achieved a truce. Still pope Gregory refused to lift the excommunication, even though that excommunication was put on for failure to go on crusade, a misdeed the emperor had undoubtedly remedied.  When the German princes vowed for the future behaviour of their overlord, Gregory ran out of arguments.

Still, Gregory took his pound of flesh. Not only did Frederick have to restore all church property he had confiscated during the war. That would be standard. But the pope also changed the way the Sicilian church was to be run. Under the Normans the Sicilian clergy had been entirely at the kings back and call. Appointments were in the royal gift and did not even need papal approval. When the usurper Tancred needed the pope in his fight with Henry VI papal influence in Sicily grew. Henry VI tried to turn back the tide but after his death Innocent III took direct charge of Sicilian bishops and abbots.in the years 1220 to 1228 Frederick had turned the dial back and expelled those bishops he found to take orders from Rome and brought the rest in line, much like he did with the Barons and the Sicilian Muslims

We do know our Frederick and his attitude to the management of Sicily, so it is surprising that he accepts wide ranging papal influence in Sicily. Clergy is no longer subject to secular law and even free from royal taxation. That was a significant concession as it allowed for the existence of institutions independent of him within the tightly run kingdom.

So, how did he want his kingdom being run?.   

Peace and Justice are the preeminent yardsticks on which medieval rulers were measured by their contemporaries. We may look at battles won or lost, territories gained or irredeemably ceded to their neighbours, but for the general population bringing peace and security was what mattered.

Peace and justice are two sides of the same medal. Real peace can only exist when there is justice and justice can only be provided when there is peace. In the previous decade Frederick had brought peace. He had driven the barons from their castles and brought the Guerrilla war in central Sicily to an end.

Now it is time to bring Justice as well.

In late summer of 1230 Frederick ordered that his justices, the judges presiding over the courts in each of the 9 provinces of his realm to send 4 of their most knowledgeable and wise lawyers to court. These men were called upon to compile the entirety of the law that prevailed in the land. This they would do under the auspices of the Lord Chief justice, Henry of Morra and the future chancellor Peter of Vinea.

Castle of Melfi where the Laws were announced

This commission worked extremely fast and in August 1231 Frederick promulgated a new and comprehensive collection of the law: (quote) “We therefore desire that only the present laws under our name should be in force in the Kingdom of Sicily,’ and we order that these constitutions should be observed in the future, after the laws and customs contradicting these our constitutions have been annulled in this kingdom.”

There is now only one law in the land and that law is contained in this codex. All other pre-existing laws, orders and ordinances are null and void. What is not in the book no longer exists.

Consolidating the law isn’t unusual in the 13th century. As literacy spread and the increasingly complex society also becomes a written society, kings and emperors commission summaries or compilations of their laws. One of those we have already encountered, the Laws of Roncaglia that Barbarossa had promulgated in 1158. Others are compiled by lawyers like Eike von Repgow’s Sachsenspiegel.

If you want to refresh your memory, check out Episode 55 – Episode 55 – The Laws of Roncaglia • History of the Germans Podcast

But these laws, that did not have a name at the time but would later be called the Liber Augustalis, i.e., the Book of the Emperor or the Constitutions of Melfi is something quite fundamentally different.

The Laws of Roncaglia weren’t new. They were just a reaffirmation that the Roman law as laid down in the Code of Justinian in the 6th century still prevailed. What was laid down in there had often nothing to do with the law as it was practiced amongst the Lombard communes at the time. Barbarossa wanted to use the Code of Justinian to force through political and economic change. The laws of Roncaglia derived their legitimacy from the fact that these had always been the laws of the Empire and hence need to be obeyed. They were not legislation coming from the will of Barbarossa. The only new law in the laws of Roncaglia were the statutes of the university of Bologna.

The Sachsenspiegel is a compilation of the laws as they are practiced amongst the Saxons. Eike von Repgow who had put it together had no power to legislate nor did he want to introduce new legislation. Again, it is based on the idea that law is ancient and immutable. All the compiler is doing is finding and reporting it.

The constitutions of Melfi are fundamentally different. Like the Sachsenspiegel they are based on the law as it was practiced at the time. The lawyers collected the existing ordinances and commands of the Norman kings, reviewed judgements and included those concepts of Roman Law that were practiced in Sicily.

But here is the big difference. In doing so they first looked at rules that contradicted each other and selected one of them. They added new laws and regulations either on topics not yet covered or replacing existing legislation. The constitutions of Melfi were not a compilation of laws but an act of legislation.

Frederick did not just ask what the law has been, but what the law should be. What rules and regulations do we need to bring Justice to my lands. Where existing laws are unhelpful, they are replaced. Where there aren‘t any rules but there should be some, he has them created.

This is big step away from medieval thinking, not just in law but generally. The medieval mind as best expressed in the scholastic method looks at a problem and asks what the authorities have said about it. Has Aristotle or Pliny the Elder said something about this. How does that compare to other authorities, the bible or the church father. The scholastic disputation is not about, which of the authorities is right, but how one can derive a solution that fits with all of them. This is not to say that the scholastic method was an aberration. The rigour of its process and the resurrection of so many works of antiquity made a huge contribution to the development of humanities and science.

But intellectually it is a process where you move towards your goal by walking backwards with your head in a book. That is what the Sachsenspiegel and the Laws of Roncaglia do in law. With The Constitutions of Melfi Frederick turns around looks down the path and asks, what laws do I need to get to where I want to go. And his objective is a peaceful realm where people can rely on justice. But to achieve this is not for the benefit of the people, but for the benefit of the state.

To legitimise this new approach, he does not go back to the idea that the Roman Caesar was all powerful and could make laws. He goes back to the nature of man. In his preamble he says that: “Thus man, whom God created virtuous and simple, did not hesitate to involve himself in disputes. Therefore, by this compelling necessity of things and not less by the inspiration of Divine Providence, princes of nations were created through whom the license of crimes might be corrected. And these judges of life and death for mankind might decide, as executors in some way of Divine Providence,’ how each man should have fortune, estate, and status.”

If you strip out the Divine providence bit, this is pure Hobbes. “Homo Homine Lupus est”, man is by natural law prone to fight and quarrel. Only the force of the state can tame this desire for discord and civil war. This concept of an objective morality that legitimises strong central government was first published in 1679, but Frederick had incorporated it into his idea of justice as early as 1231.

Having a clear purpose and being freed from the shackles of tradition, the commission was able to  arrive at novel solutions, novel solutions the tie in with each other to achieve peace and justice.

To illustrate that let’s look at one of the fundamental theeats to peace in the Middle Ages, the feud.

Across all medieval kingdoms, society recognised feuds as a legitimate way to resolve conflict. Was that because the culture was suffused with the concepts of honour and status that needed to be constantly reaffirmed and defended. In part certainly. But the more profound issue was that there were not many other ways to resolve conflict.  

Higher justice was administered intermittently by peripatetic kings. So, unless the king came round, there was no court that could adjudicate the differences between important nobles. And if he came around that was no guarantee the case would be heard. To bring a case, the claimant needed access to the immediate entourage of the ruler who could suggest a case to be heard.

Next problem, the judgements were utterly unpredictable. There were few written laws and lots of unwritten conventions. These were applied by a judge and jury made up of kings and nobles with little legal training.

So as a nobleman being attacked by a ruthless neighbour, you did not know if at all and when you would get justice. Taking up arms and defending your rights was often a necessity, not a choice. Society had to accept it, even if the church was trying to put limitations around it through the Truce of God.

The constitutions of Melfi are going to the root cause of feuds to provide peace.  

The rules start with an outright ban on feuding. (i) A count, baron, knight, or anyone else who publicly incites war in the kingdom should be punished by death after all his goods have been confiscated. (ii) Moreover, he who makes attacks or counterattacks should be condemned by the proscription * of half of all his goods. Bingo! The defence that “he started it” may save your neck, but still means you lose half of all you own! Great incentive to deescalate a conflict.

Then he takes a stab at avoiding feuds in the first place. Many of those we hear emerge when men are drinking together and real or perceived sleights end up with swords drawn. So he tries to nip those in the bud:

“Since the bearing of forbidden weapons sometimes is the cause of violence and murder, we elect to resist now rather than to avenge later. By the present law, we order that none of the fideles of our kingdom should dare to carry sharpened and prohibited weapons: small knives with points, swords, lances, breast-plates, shields or coats of mail, iron maces, or any others which have been made more to cause injury than for some beneficial purpose. However, we allow the curials and their servants to carry the aforementioned prohibited arms and others as long as they are staying with us in the court or are returning to or from home or are traveling on our business. We also exempt knights, the sons of knights, and townsmen from the force of the present law. We do not forbid them at all to carry swords when they ride on business outside of the locality in which they live. But when they have returned to their own locality or are guests somewhere, they should immediately put aside their swords.”

Privately owned castles as we have heard in the last episode are already banned which again reduces the probability of nobles resorting to feud because that makes it a lot more dangerous.

And then he addresses the biggest issue, the absence of alternatives to get justice. Sicily did already have a fairly sophisticated legal infrastructure, but the Constitutions of Melfi establish a full system of appellate courts.

The kingdom is divided into 9 districts. In each district there is a permanent court, presided over by a Justice usually a trained lawyer. This is an appellate court, i.e., it decides mainly cases brought up from judges. Of those there are 5 each in the major cities, 3 in the medium sized ones and at least one in the smaller ones. The judges are the courts of first instance.

Any dispute, quarrel or crime is to be brought before the Judge in the city. If either party is unhappy with the decision, they can appeal to the court at district level who will investigate the case anew. And even on the district court decision, there is an appeal to the royal court, presided over not by the king, but by the Lord Chief Justice. And for minor disputes there are baillis or magistrates in most larger villages whose decisions are reviewed by the judges.

Not only is this full range of appellate courts absolutely unique in Europe and in many places will take until the 19th century to develop, the process in front of the courts is also extremely modern.

There is no trial by combat. There are no compurgators, the sworn witnesses who could get you off by simply stating that you were a decent and honest man.

Frederick’s court procedure aims to establish the facts. To do that there are broadly two methods. In the Anglo-Saxon/Germanic tradition the idea is that both sides of the disputes battle it out before the judge and jury. Judge and Jury only look at the evidence presented by the parties. In the Roman law procedure that is applied here, the judge attempts to establish the facts through enquiry. The parties bring the facts, but the judge can ask for additional information to support the enquiry. 

It is the judge’s job is to question witnesses, review documents and other evidence in order to find out what really happened. Only on that factual basis would he (and I am afraid it was inevitably a he), make his decision. T

Frederick goes one further in his desire to bring peace through state intervention. He determines that if a crime was committed, the judge would investigate, even if the injured party does not want a prosecution or can no longer ask for one. This state prosecution is new. Again, the compilers of the laws looked at what needed to be done to stop the intimidation of witnesses and victims and came up with a novel solution, a solution that you find today in many Roman Law based legal systems such as Germany and France.

If you add it all up, the constitutions provided a coherent system to suppress feuding. The ban on carrying weapons reduced the probability of feuds emerging, the system of appellate courts provided reassurance that the aggrieved party could find swift and predictable justice. If the conflict has broken out, the argument that “the other one has started it”, brings only partial relief. And yes, there are draconian punishments for anyone breaking the peace. But the latter have existed for 300 years threatening punishment both here and in the afterlife without much effect. This one worked.

There are more provisions in the constitutions of Melfi that feel extremely modern. Secular Divorce procedures were introduced, though only the man was allowed to ask for one. Weaker members of society were brought under the particular protection of the state, that includes nuns and widows but also Jews, Muslims and prostitutes. The punishment for rape of a prostitute was death. Rape and the difficulty to prove takes up a significant section in the Liber Augustalis. He cannot find a solution either, but at least allows circumstantial evidence as proof and puts a fine of four gold coins for anyone who does not come to the aid of a woman being raped.

It even included laws about the environment. Hemp and Flax can only be soaked in places 1 mile away from cities or castles, burials have to have a minimum depth and animal cadavers have to be deposed off a quarter mile from the district. What is remarkable about that is not so much the specific rules, but that there are royal rules about air and water quality at all. At the time the idea of the state ensuring the health of its citizens was again entirely novel.

Finally Frederick sets out the administrative structure of his kingdom. Above and on top of everything is he, the king. Then there are three great officials, the Chancellor, responsible for administration and documentation, the Lord Chief Justice in charge of the courts and the Treasurer in charge of collecting taxes, paying out funds and keeping the books. All three of them are salaried officials appointed upon merit. Beneath them the structure gets a bit murky as justices and governors have overlapping responsibilities in the provinces. But what a difference to the political structure in the empire where the imperial princes have roles based on inheritance and where there are simply no salaried bureacrats, except for the chancellor and his notaries. Where there is no tax income to pay for any institutions.

That being said, the state of Frederick II wasn’t completely detached from the medieval world. The opening paragraphs are dedicated to the persecution of heretics who were to be subjected to the harshest of punishments. Tax was arbitrary and collected by tax farmers who enriched themselves at the expense of the people.

And there is obviously no notion of citizenship of the people. The inhabitants of the kingdom are subjects whose freedoms can be restricted at will based on the necessities of the state. And that state is Frederick II. And what we do not know is how neat and tidy the system really was. Were there really justices in all the cities who diligently enquired into the circumstances of the cases? Did the cases progress smoothly to the appellate courts etc., etc., pp.

And there is the shadowy downside of the legitimisation of his powers. Frederick believed that without a firm hand, his kingdom would fall into chaos and civil war, something he had experienced painfully during his entire childhood. It was better to brutally enforce justice, or the will of the king which was the same thing, then letting things slip. And that was to apply even if it is cruel. He did wipe out the city of Sora, had its male population hanged and the women and children sold into slavery in the name of the necessities of the state. This notion of justice being blind and cruel applies not just to his subjects but even to his own family and closest friends.

The state of Frederick II was and is a near endless source of debate. Was Frederick really foreshadowing the renaissance, an absolutist ruler 400 years before Louis XIV, a modern autocrat or was he just resurrecting or prolonging the institutions of his Norman forebearers plus a set of fanciful ideas that were never implemented?

These debates moved to the forefront of the historical debate in the 1920s and 30s after the publication of Ernst Kantorowicz famous biography of Frederick II. I may have said this before, but the perception history of Frederick II is almost as interesting as the actual history. So we will do at least one episode on that when we come to the end of this season.

But next week we remain firmly in the 13th century. Frederick can keep the peace with the pope until 1239 when Hermann von Salza died and this vital communication link breaks. In the interim he tries to consolidate his reign. Sicily put on a stable footing, his gaze turns to Lombardy where a Second Lombard League had formed. And then there is the realm north of the Alps where his son Henry who he had made king of the romans at the age of 8 was now asserting his independence from a father he had not seen since childhood. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for products you do not want to hear about. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.    

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Frederick II as a state builder in Sicily

This week we look in a bit more detail how Frederick II regained his beloved kingdom of Sicily. For 30 years after the death of the last Hauteville king in 1190 the institutions of that kingdom had been eroded, the crown estate squandered, and powerful local forces had been riding roughshod over the royal administration. Fredrick will bring this land back under his firm control. That is however not your usual return of the king story, because the way he does it is no longer typically medieval…..

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 79 – Return to Sicily

I have to start with an apology. Last week there was no episode even though there should have been one. What happened is quite simple – I was not happy with the what I had produced. And that was not just a problem with the new Episode I was recording but also the one before, Episode 78.  It simply wasn’t doing justice to the story. The Crusade of Frederick II and the creation of Frederick’s kingdom in Sicily are amongst the events in medieval history that I had really, really wanted to tell and tell them well. So I went back to the drawing board, rewrote the script for the last and this episode and I hope this is now more up to scratch. .

This week we look in a bit more detail how Frederick II regained his beloved kingdom of Sicily. For 30 years after the death of the last Hauteville king in 1190 the institutions of that kingdom had been eroded, the crown estate squandered, and powerful local forces had been riding roughshod over the royal administration. Fredrick will bring this land back under his firm control. That is however not your usual return of the king story, because the way he does it is no longer typically medieval…..

Before we start just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Kevin, Don and Eric who have already signed up.

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Last time we left Frederick II leaving the Holy Land where he had gained Jerusalem for Christendom only to be pelted with manure and hounded out of town by the patriarch of Jerusalem..

Today, we need to wind the clock back to 1220 and the days after Frederick II had been crowned emperor by pope Honorius III in Rome. As we heard before, Frederick almost instantly ignored all the concessions he had made to the pope in the run-up first to the coronation as king of the Romans and then the coronation as emperor. The most significant of these concessions was his promise not to rule Sicily and the empire simultaneously thereby encircling the Papal states.

And it is also the concession he is most thoroughly disregarding. Frederick is first and foremost a Sicilian and giving up his home and his inheritance is inconceivable. Plus, the Sicilian crown could be incredibly valuable, though at this point, in the winter of 1220, it was nothing but.

His ancestors, the Norman kings, in particular Frederick’s grandfather, King Roger II had created one of the richest and most tightly run states in 12th century Europe. On the island of Sicily and in the former Byzantine provinces of Puglia and Calabria, the Normans were able to continue with the institutions that dated back to ancient Rome. The population was accustomed to paying taxes. And I guess by now you know my view on taxes; a political entity that collects taxes can establish a bureaucracy staffed with officials, keep sizeable armies and fleets in the field and is no longer dependent upon its vassals. Simply speaking it can create a state as opposed to a medieval kingdom that is a loose confederation built on ritual and personal relationships.

But most of these institutions had collapsed in the 30 years after the death of the last of the Norman kings, William II. In the wars between Tancred and Henry VI and later during the minority of Frederick, local barons as well as German Ministeriales occupied the vast crown estates whilst the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa monopolised the trade in grain and other foodstuff. The Muslim population in the centre of the island asserted itself, set up emirates independent of the crown and forged alliances with their brethren in North Africa and southern Spain. Royal authority, such as it was rested initially in the hands of Frederick’s wife, Constance of Aragon and then with the chancellor William of Pagliara, a wily politician with a keen eye on his own purse.

When Frederick returns to his homeland in 1220, he comes with a fully formed plan how to regain control. The first step was to get the crown lands back. And for that he goes back to a legal model his other grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa had once deployed in Italy, but with a twist.

On December 20th, 1220, Frederick calls the barons of Southern Italy to an assembly at Capua. There he proclaims his Law of Privileges. This law states that everyone who currently occupies former royal lands is to come to the chancery and request a re-issue of the charter that granted him possession in the first place. That automatically wipes out all of those occupants who never got a piece of paper granting them the land, very similar to what Barbarossa did with his laws of Roncaglia – Episode 55 if you want to check back.

But Frederick II goes not just one, but two steps further. Step one is that even if a baron shows up with a privilege issued after 1190, it is at the emperor’s discretion whether or not the baron can keep it. This discretion is guided by the necessities of the state, which, unsurprisingly in the majority of cases suggested the lands and rights should be given back. And finally, those few that were allowed to keep their lands did receive them with the caveat that the emperor could at any time demand them back. Alongside the law of privileges came the rule that no vassal of the king could build or hold a castle, neither on crown land nor on his own. All castles are to be handed over immediately or destroyed.

That sounds great in theory. But as we have seen with Laws of Roncaglia, an emperor can announce all sorts of far-reaching laws, enforcing them is a entirely different kettle of fish. And that is where Frederick goes a completely different path to his grandfather.

Barbarossa had managed the empire by supporting the largest of his magnates, Henry the Lion against the smaller princes. Frederick turns this policy on its head. He uses the smaller barons to tackle the largest one. Once Mr Big is removed the focus shifts to the second largest and so on and so on until the last of the barons is broken. In 1220 the most powerful of the Southern Italian barons was the count of Molise. Against him he fielded Thomas of Aquino, the father of the great scholastic thinker, Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino and other lesser Barons.  By spring 1221 the count of Molise was reduced to his last stronghold where he surrendered two years later. In the settlement he had to hand back all the crown lands and go into exile. However, he was allowed to keep his personal property. A further two years later, he was summoned to court for some infringement to the settlement, failed to appear and subsequently the remaining Molise property was confiscated and ended in Fredericks hands. Frederick did not even have to fight these campaigns in person. He left this to the barons who, blinded by greed, were all too happy to oblige.

Once the campaign against the larger barons was over these lesser barons, Roger of Aquila, Jacob of San Severino and others were called to fight the next war, this time against the Saracens on the island of Sicily. When they arrived late, or with insufficient troops, Frederick had them tried for treason, convicted and their lands confiscated. Their sentence was commuted to exile, and they joined their former foe, the count of Molise in Rome.  Now their land fell to the crown too.

The push to return all castles into royal hands also went surprisingly smoothly. Usually it was enough for two royal officials to come to the castle gate, point out that their neighbours would be happy to sack his castle, rape his wife and murder his children upon royal orders if he did not hand it over and hey presto the castle was in royal hands. Once enough castles were acquired and most of the local barons deprived of their defensive walls, all the officials had to do was point at the imperial garrisons nearby and the last of the private fortifications fell.

Many of the once immensely powerful German Ministeriales who had conspired with Otto IV caved almost instantly. The unfortunately named Diepold von Schweinspeunt had once been the effective ruler of the kingdom but found himself now imprisoned in his own castle until he had handed over all his vast territories. Only then was he allowed to join the Teutonic Knights, never to be heard of again.

Within just months Frederick was in possession of a whole string of castles in the North of his kingdom and this network grew and grew over the next decades. He built allegedly as many as 200 castles and towers, of which 37 are still in existence.

Frederick’s citadels in their majority lack any of the picturesque that you associate with medieval castles. They are blocky, designed to hold a garrison of soldiers in wartime. There is no space here for a seigneur and his family to live and entertain guests. The castle is a fortress of the state, meant to defend the realm against enemies from without or from within. They were forts held by a small detachment during peacetime and to be reinforced by the local lords and their retinue in wartime. They could therefore be built like a Roman castrum, based on a single uniform ground plan with slight variations – representing the latest in simplicity, utility and rectangularity. A stone square or rectangle with a tower at each corner. This is what most of his castles look like. However his most famous castle, the Castel del Monte looks entirely different. We will talk about it at a later stage.

But let us get back to Frederick’s reconquest of his kingdom. In 1221 the subjugation of the barons on the mainland was running on its own momentum so that he could set off for the island of Sicily itself. The island was structurally different from the mainland in as much as feudal lords had historically been less powerful. The challenges here were the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa on the one hand and the Muslim population on the other.

The maritime republics were interested in two things. The first was to have staging posts for the extremely lucrative crusader trade. Ship travel on galleys was an unmitigated nightmare. The ships were rammed full with people, passengers as well as rowers and sailors. A later traveller Konrad Grunenberg describes the scene below decks. People got seasick or picked up other diseases that made it impossible for them to reach or empty their chamber pots. The whole floor was covered in human waste, was crawling with fleas, lice, gnats and worms. Moreover, the galleys also transported animals, horses for the knights and sheep, goats, calves, pigs etc as food, all making noises and adding to the ever-present dirt and rodent infestation. That meant for passengers to survive the ordeal they needed to go ashore at regular intervals, breathe fresh air, clean up and sleep. To make that possible and to virtual and repair their ships Genoa and Pisa needed safe harbours along the Mediterranean coasts, in particular in the Kingdom of Sicily.

The other thing they cared about was the grain trade. Ever since ancient Rome, Sicily was one of the breadbaskets of the Mediterranean. By 1220 the Pisans and Genoese had established an oligopoly for the transport of grain, paying minimal amounts to Sicilian farmers and selling the goods at high prices in Rome, Florence or Milan.

 When we think about these merchants from Venice, Genoa or Pisa, we see them depicted in their finery, kneeling before a beautifully painted cross or admiring the Madonna. In their daily life, a 13th century Genoese merchant was more corsair than confrere. Their vessels were good for both transport and war and they thought nothing of attacking competitor’s ships or, if there were enough of them, unsuspecting cities. That is what happened to Syracuse. A Genoese merchant-corsair, Alaman da Costa had captured a Pisan ship laden with weapons. When he met up with other Genoese in Crete, they decided to put these to good use. The sailed on to Malta, convinced the Genoese commander of the harbour to lend seven war galleys and made themselves masters of the ancient Greek colony of Syracuse.

Frederick could not leave that standing, even though he did feel a lot of gratitude towards the Genoese who had helped him to get to Germany and his destiny in 1212. Frederick drove the Genoese out of Syracuse and also recalled many of their privileges under the laws of Capua.

But he went a lot further. He passed regulations that forbade foreigners to have preferential treatment on the island, in particular as tax and dues are concerned. That diminished their trading profits because it created a level playing field with the locals.

But the final blow to their dominance came when Frederick decided to rebuild the Sicilian fleet. Ever since Robert Guiscard the Hautevilles had been a sizeable maritime power, sometimes stronger even than Venice. For Sicily and the crown of Sicily to prosper, the kingdom needed a fleet. A fleet consists of ships and building and operating ships is skilled work and takes time. Frederick needed a fleet now. He got there by hook and by crook. He confiscated Genoese and Pisan ships first as prizes in the military conflict, but later by offering to buy them, or else. He hired sailors and ships officers from the Italian cities. His admirals were often Genoese, like the famous Henry of Malta who had been a pirate like Alaman da Costa but could be bought into imperial service. With time shipbuilding in the kingdom sped up so that by 1225 the emperor could send a fleet of fifty warships and a hundred transport vessels to Damietta. By 1228 he had enough to ship 3000 knights and their retinue to the Holy Land.

This is the first time a medieval emperor had a fleet. Otto III had an admiral but not a single ship. Barbarossa was allegedly defeated in a sea battle by Venice according to the great fresco of Spinello Aretino in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, but that did not happen, because Barbarossa did not have any ships. Frederick II is the first, and the last medieval emperor to fly the imperial standard from one of his own vessels. The next one will be Charles V in the 16th century. Not that Germany lacks maritime tradition, not at all. It is just that the emperors had no hold on the famous Hanseatic fleets.

Having merchants ships and war galleys to protect them, Frederick could enter the grain trade himself, buying up grain in Sicily and selling it at a major profit In Northern Italy, Spain and Provence, thereby squeezing out the Pisans and Genoese.  

Frederick embarked on all sorts of mercantilist economic policies that would much later be employed by Louis XiV’s minister Colbert. Precious metal exports were banned. The manufacture and export of luxury goods encouraged. Silver coins introduced to facilitate trade that until then had relied on heavy Byzantine cold coins. In one year he banned all export of grain to bankrupt the foreign traders, cancel their remaining privileges and take over their facilities, creating state monopolies.

And – you guessed it, taxes were re-introduced, still crude based on the total amount the emperor specified as needed and allocated to subjects based on some arbitrary measure. Like Louis XIV, Frederick would leave the tax collection to private individuals, a sure way to make taxes harder and even more unfair.

But remember we are in the 1220s and in France during the Ancien Regime 500 years later tax farmers were squeezing the last out of the population.

With the barons subdued, tax income being raised and economic policies pursued, the government no longer relies on vassals and their fiefs to administrate the realm. Frederick’s kingdom is run by officiales, people who serve because of their skills not because their father had the same job. They serve for exactly as long or as short and in whatever capacity Frederick orders. It is almost the diametrically opposite of the Holy Roman Empire where the archbishop of Mainz is by convention always the imperial arch chancellor. The chancellor of the Kingdom of Sicily is whoever Frederick appoints.

That leaves the question, where do these officiales, these medieval civil servants come from? Bologna, the great law faculty once endowed with special rights by Barbarossa would be the natural source. But these jurists are scarce, and they have options. Four of the last 6 popes had been jurists trained in Bologna. What would you like to become, pope or civil servant in the imperial chancery? It is a no-brainer. And in case you disagree due to the obvious downsides of becoming pope remember that many of the medieval popes had not taken holy rites before ascending the papal throne.  It really is a no-brainer.

To overcome this shortfall Frederick founds the university of Naples, the first secular, state sponsored and state-maintained university in the world. The existing universities at the time, Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Salerno have emerged organically. A group of scholars and their students would form a union, a “Universitas” and ask for recognition from an emperor, king or pope. They would receive a charter that grants  special legal status and regulate the operation of the university.

Naples is different. Frederick founds it as a branch of the state that provides him with officialis. It is a secular institution. The church has no control over it. It has a monopoly for higher education in law in Sicily. That means his subjects are banned from going to any other university. He offers generous support to foreign students, and he pays the professor, not the students. It is, like most things in Frederick’s Sicily, in his control and serves his purposes. Very different to many medieval institutions that are created by and for its members.

Now we get to the last set of opponents to the emperor, the Muslim population on the island. They had come as conquerors in the 9th century and ruled the place for nearly 200 years. They had inflicted a terrible defeat on emperor Otto II in the battle of Capo Colonna in 972. It had taken the Normans decades to conquer the island but once they had, they did not have either manpower nor inclination to force them to convert. In particular under Roger II the Muslim population even flourished. The Normans had taken over the machine of government, but the  Muslim bureaucrats and officers remained. The Saracen guard of Roger II was a legendary force, entirely immune to excommunications and other papal weapons. Muslim craftsmen worked on the great churches of Palermo and you find Arabic script all over the output of the great manufactures of Palermo, including on the imperial coronation mantle.

One of the reasons nobody forced conversion was that Muslims and Jews were paying a special tax in exchange for being allowed to maintain their religion. That is pretty much the same the Muslim rulers did with the Christian population when hey conquered Egypt, North Africa and Syria.

By 1220 this rather idyllic coexistence had gone quite comprehensively sour. In 1190 Christians massacred their Muslims neighbours in Palermo. The survivors either converted or fled into the mountains. A state within the state sprang up around mountain fastness. The original population mixed with the refugees from Palermo and newly arrived North Africans. Their base was in the centre and south of the Island near Agrigento and in the Valle di Noto.

During Fredricks minority the Saracens were hostile to the king, largely because they feared the influence of pope Innocent III who had no time for coexistence between Muslims and Christians.  During that time their raids stretched sometimes as far north as Monreale just outside Palermo.

In 1222 when war breaks out between Frederick and the former rulers of the island. The concern now is less about papal influence and religious persecution. Frederick does not have the slightest bit of religious fervour in his bones. He famously will only erect one church in his entire life despite an otherwise massive building programme. His faith, if he has one, is the belief in the necessities of the state..

Hence the conflict is political not religious. Frederick cannot tolerate the existence of a political entity that is not obedient to him – full stop.

The war goes on for almost a decade. As Frederick’s army take the cities and larger villages, the Muslim forces retreat into the mountainous hinterland. This is territory even the modern Italian state struggles to control.

What makes this one of the most famous stories in medieval European history is how Frederick resolves the impasse. There was no chance they would ever give up fighting as long as they stayed in the hills and mountains of central Sicily. So he has them shipped them off to the plains of Puglia. He makes no difference between combatants and the general Muslim population. All are rounded up and put on ships to go across the the Mainland. A near abandoned ancient Roman military colony, Lucera was chosen to house them. How many were moved is uncertain. Somewhere between 15,000 and 60,000 might have been brought across. In Lucera they were allowed to live as their religion and custom demanded. They were allowed to build mosques and minarets. They could elect their own leadership and were given the surrounding lands to cultivate.

In Lucera there was no chance for them to resume the guerrilla war. They were surrounded in all directions by Christian communities that even if not openly hostile were unlikely to help them. The Saracens quickly realised that the only guarantor of their survival in this environment was the emperor himself, the one they had fought and the one who had forced them here. To protect themselves they became their enemy’s closest allies. Frederick allowed them to arm themselves and train for war. In  return he received what no western monarch could command, a standing army. Yes, the templars and knights of St. John too were standing armies, but they weren’t loyal to the king of Jerusalem. Frederick was the only king who could snap his fingers and an army would appear by his side, an army feared throughout the western world. An army that would happily fight the pope and mother church itself.

The existence of Lucera, the deal Frederick made with sultan Al Kamil over Jerusalem and rumours he had connections to the Order of the Assassins all added up to a picture of man in thrall of the Followers of mohammed. The emperor, the sword of Christendom a closet Muselman? And even if not, was he a good Christian when he is doing all this? Pope Gregory IX and his successors will use this narrative when the struggle between emperor and pope is hurtling to its climax.

Next week we will pick up the narrative in 1229. Frederick had liberated Jerusalem but is still excommunicated. Pope Gregory IX has put a mercenary army in the field to conquer Sicily for the church. At the same time things are stirring in Germany where Frederick’s oldest son, Henry reigns as king. Duke Ludwig of Bavaria once guardian of the young king is encouraged by the pope to contest the crown. Will Fredrick’s empire hold together against papal wrath? I hope you will join us again.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for matrasses or as I recently heard energy supplements and pension plans. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.   

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Frederick II in Germany and the Sanctification of Charlemagne

This week we take a look at the reign of Frederick II in Germany from 1212 to 1220. Most of what he did was putting a nail in an actual coffin whilst also putting the metaphorical nail into the carcass of imperial rule in Germany.

And was that such a bad thing? What happens when the emperor just hands out what is left of the royal demesne? Cathedrals go up, princes hold splendid courts and none of them think about disturbing the peace in Italy. If you are the king of Sicily, that is a near perfect result.

And if you are the pope, even more so, in particular when Frederick II throws in a brand-new crusade and swears on all that is holy that he would never pursue a link-up between Sicily and the empire.

Everybody happy? Let’s see..

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 77 – The Nail in the Coffin

This week we take a look at the reign of Frederick II in Germany from 1212 to 1220. Most of what he did was putting a nail in an actual coffin whilst also putting the metaphorical nail into the carcass of imperial rule in Germany.

And was that such a bad thing? What happens when the emperor just hands out what is left of the royal demesne? Cathedrals go up, princes hold splendid courts and none of them think about disturbing the peace in Italy. If you are the king of Sicily, that is a near perfect result.

And if you are the pope, even more so, in particular when Frederick II throws in a brand-new crusade and swears on all that is holy that he would never pursue a link-up between Sicily and the empire.

Everybody happy? Let’s see..

Before we start just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Sharon, q and John who have already signed up.

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Let’s start and end this episode with Frederick II’s relationship with the papacy, something we will probably have to do in most upcoming episodes as well, so brace yourselves.

Frederick’s trip to Germany had been sponsored financially and politically by his godfather, pope Innocent III. And once Frederick had settled down north of the Alps, had been elected and gone through his first coronation, it was payback time. Payback happened in the shape of the Golden Bull of Eger. A golden bull is not a grown-up version of the Golden calf the Israelites danced around. It refers to a decree that had received a special status thanks to the use of a golden seal, a bulla aurea. These golden bulls were rare and usually reserved for the most important decisions. The most famous of those was the Golden bull of 1356 that set forth the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, namely the institution of the 7 electors.

Golden Bull of 1356

In short, in 1213 Frederick II issued a decree that was to be of utmost importance. It consisted of three main commitments. First that the crown gives up the right to the spolia, i.e., the right to receive the income from any bishopric that happened to be vacant after the incumbent’s death. Second, Frederick II gives up his rights to decide contested episcopal elections, and finally he recognises the pope’s right to central Italy, specifically to the March of Ancona and the duchy of Spoleto. That is pretty much the end of the concordat of Worms. The church in Germany is now fully independent of the emperor. All its resources can now be used as the bishops wish. All the generous donations in lands and rights that the Ottonian emperors had made in the hope these would remain at their disposal are lost to the crown for good.

In 1216 when his rule is fully established Frederick was made to swear to these concessions again and had to get the imperial princes themselves to swear to them as well. And he had to agree to another condition. He had to abandon the crown of Sicily in favour of his son Henry, so as to ensure that there would not be a union between the Holy Roman Empire and Sicily, a union that would encircle the papal states.

“Recuperation”of the Papal States under Innicent III

We all know by now know what an oath is worth in 1216. At no point did Frederick II contemplate to put down the crown of Sicily. Southern Italy is his home. Even though he now styles himself all Swabian grandson of Barbarossa, in truth, the only reason he came up to Germany in first place was to protect Sicily from imperial invasions.

He comes up with a cunning plan to outmanoeuvre the pope. If he cannot be king of Sicily and emperor at the same time, well, let us see whether my son Henry can. Whilst he solemnly reaffirms all these commitments about not being king of Sicily anymore, he negotiates with the princes about electing young Henry as king of the Romans. And in December 1216 young Henry and Frederick’s wife, Constance of Aragon arrive in Nurnberg and by 1220 young Henry is elected and crowned.

One reason Frederick gets away with such blatant disregard for his godfather is that he died, quite unexpectedly, in 1216. Innocent III had been a young man by papal standards when he was elected, just 37 years old. He died on July 16th, 1216 of a recurring malaria in Perugia. Sometimes the great defence mechanism of the papacy takes one of its own..  

Earlier that year he had presided over the 4th Lateran council, which must count as the absolute high point of medieval papal authority. Present were 400 bishops and archbishops from all corners of the Christian world. Even the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria had come. 800 abbots and priors as well as delegates of the emperors, both our Frederick as well as the now Latin emperor of Constantinople, the kings of England, France, Aragon, Hungary, Cyprus and Jerusalem. Remember that in 1204 the fourth crusade had taken Constantinople and placed a French nobleman onto the throne of the Basileus.

Innocent III at the 4th Lateran Council (19th century engraving)

The council promulgated 71 decrees covering a remarkable wide field. The doctrine of transubstantiation was defined in the very first of them. Number 13 forbade the formation of new religious orders, though the Dominicans were approved at the same council, the 18th abolished the use of boiling water and red-hot irons in trials by ordeal; the 21st insisted on confession and communion for all Catholics at least once a year at easter; the 31st banned illegitimate sons of clergy taking over their father’s churches. The last segments were directed against the Jews. No Christian was to have commerce with Jewish usurers; both Jews and Muslims had to wear distinctive dress, nor were they allowed to be seen in public during Holy Week.

But at least he did not call for their expulsion or destruction. That was reserved to heretics, namely the Albigensian or Cathars of Southwest France. The 4th Lateran Council granted any knight who would be prepared to undertake the tough job of slaughtering peasants a free ticket to paradise.

The overarching theme of the council was however the recapture of the holy sites in Palestine. The crusader states still clung on to the coastline but despite several attempts, including the huge third crusade, Jerusalem was still in Muslim hands. After the catastrophe that was the 4th crusade, pope Innocent III did even contemplate to take a crusader army to Outre Mer himself. As the true emperor that he saw himself, that was a natural conclusion. A date for the crusade was set for 1217 and a special tax was levied on all bishops and cardinals to fund the expedition. That project collapsed with the death of Innocent III.

Though Innocent III was probably the most powerful medieval pope, his remains did not get treated with the respect they deserved. The night after his death, the house he had died in was raided and his body stolen. It was found the next morning, stripped naked in the street, rapidly decomposing in the heat. The citizens of Perugia buried him hastily in their cathedral. It is said that his bones ended up being mixed up with those of Urban IV and Martin IV in a box that was kept in the sacristy. In the 19th century Leo XIII ordered that the bones should be brought to Rome to be buried in a splendid tomb in St. John Lateran. A priest was dispatched to pick them up. Innocent III came back to Rome by train in a simple suitcase.

Tomb of Innocent III

“Brief and empty is the deceptive glory of this world” is what Jacques de Vitry said when he saw the popes naked body in the street.

Innocent III’s successor was Honorius III, a much older man and, as it happens, a former tutor of Frederick in his very early years. We will get back to Honorius towards the end of the episode when he will perform the imperial coronation in Rome.

The pope is as we know by now only one of the trifecta of horrors an emperor has to deal with. The other two are the princes and the Italian communes. We get to the communes in one of the next episodes, so today it is only imperial princes.

The way Frederick dealt with them was a combination of exalted ritual and plain bribery. Bribery was the way Philipp and Otto IV had competed for the crown and Frederick just continued the process. Other than Philipp he had never seen a different model of how to manage the Holy Roman Empire and none of the princes would have told him otherwise. And there is also the question whether there was a road back to the governance in the first years of Barbarossa’s reign. The idea that an emperor could rally his princes behind him with the promise of the riches of Italy had died from dysentery before the walls of Rome in 1167. Even Frederick’s grandfather had replaced a policy of centralising royal power with a policy to strengthen the territorial power of the Hohenstaufen family.

But Fredericks level of generosity was unprecedented, in particular given his rival, Otto IV was utterly defeated and by 1218 also utterly dead. Even poor Walter von der Vogelweide, the itinerant Minnesaenger finally gets his fief that allows him to live in relative comfort.

The most generous donation though goes to the bishops. In 1220 he agrees to the Confoederatio cum principibus ecclesiasticis. A very long word for the total abandonment of even the last remaining vestiges of royal power in ecclesiastical lands. He hands over the right to mint coins and raise duties on the rivers.  These are the most financially valuable rights. The right to mint coins does not just involve the ability to physically stamp coins, but it also includes the right to determine which coins are legal tender. And that can be really lucrative. The tradition was to declare certain coins invalid as of a particular day and require the inhabitants of the territory to swap them for either a smaller number or inferior coins. The prince or king would then pocket the difference. This may help filling the pockets of the bishop but had devastating impact on the economy. Constant devaluation or replacement of the currency created uncertainty and made transactions riskier. In England the kings did not resort to such policies. The English pound remained fairly stable throughout the Middle Ages despite occasional royal bankruptcies, one of the many reasons for England surpasses Germany in terms of prosperity during this period.

See the lands held by the church before teh reformation shown here in pink

Granting the right to levy duties on river and road transport was even more devastating for the German economy. The rhine river is the natural link between Northern and Southern Europe. It is navigable from Rotterdam to Basel. From there it is 400 km to Milan across alpine passes or 250 km overland to Chalons where one can pick up the Rhone River and sail down to Marseille. It is the natural transport artery of Europe. Today transport volume on the Rhine, Main, Mosel and Neckar is 6 times that of all French navigable rivers. Nevertheless, by the 15th century the cities from Reims to Lyon matched or exceeded the economic power of the German cities along the Rhine. And that had a lot to do with the ability of all sorts of princes with access to the river to demand duties. On top of that came the Stapelrecht, the right to demand that any passing merchant had to offer his wares at market in the town he passed. The Rhine was still a great way to transport things from North to South, but it had to fight with one arm tied behind its back.

You cannot blame all that on Frederick II whose room to manoeuvre was limited and who may not fully understand the economic implications.  Though his grandfather did at some point cut down to duty posts along the Rhine and Main River to facilitate trade. So maybe he could have understood that in part. In his beloved Sicily we will see him deploying much more beneficial policies. Detractors may claim he simply did not care.

Generosity towards the princes was one part of Fredrick’s governance model. The other was the power of rituals. We have already seen how Barbarossa had tried to wow his contemporaries with the imperial diet of Pentecost 1184 and how Philipp of Swabia used splendid feasts as a way to bring wavering princes over to his side.

Frederick turbocharged these events by leveraging potent symbols to legitimise his regime. The first of these elaborate ceremonies took place in 1213, so before the battle of Bouvines and Frederick’s rise to undisputed power.

He had the remains of his uncle Philipp who had been murdered and quickly buried in Bamberg dug up and laid to rest in the cathedral of Speyer. Speyer was the St. Denis of Germany, the place where the emperors had been buried. Once the greatest and most splendid church building in Western Europe, next to Cluny it was the German Metropolis as a chronicler called it.

Remember that the family of Barbarossa never called themselves the Hohenstaufen. They saw themselves as descendants of the Henrys of Waiblingen, the dynasty we call the Salians. Hence the Salien burial place in Speyer, built by Konrad II and Henry IV was their family mausoleum. That was true even though until 1213 no Hohenstaufen rulers had been buried in Speyer. Frederick Barbarossa’s remains had been lost in Palestine. Henry VI was buried in Palermo and Konrad III, well Konrad III nobody talks about. He was also in Bamberg in a long-forgotten corner. But the women of the family were buried in Speyer. Beatrice, the wife of Barbarossa and grandmother of Frederick was there as well as her daughter Agnes.

By staging a great reburial of the murdered Hohenstaufen king, his uncle, in the burial ground of the old emperors, Frederick II establishes a link between himself and the splendour of the empire of old. He, the child of Puglia is lifted to the true heir of the kingdom. Not quite the same as the revelation of Aragorn of Gondor, but the same idea. The true king is back.

The next big set piece is linked to the coronation. You may remember that his first coronation in Mainz was a bit haphazard. In 1215, after Otto IV had lost the battle of Bouvines, this was to be remedied. Aachen had been firmly within the territory controlled by Otto IV. But when Frederick II took an army up north along the Rhine, the Welf allies came across one by one, even Otto’s father-in-law, the duke of Brabant. The city of Aachen opened its gates and Frederick entered in all his splendour.

What followed was the full medieval coronation ceremony inside Charlemagne’s palatine chapel. That chapel not only held the fabled throne of Charlemagne that Frederick ascended, but it was also lit by the enormous Barbarossa Chandelier, made from gilded copper, 4.2m in diameter and hanging off a 27 metre chain that symbolised the new Jerusalem.

But that is not the only relic that Barbarossa had left behind. In 1165 Barbarossa had arranged for his antipope to elevate Charlemagne to be a saint. The Holy Roman Empire still lacked a saint. The Hungarians had Saint Stephen, the Norwegians Saint Olaf, the English had Edward the Confessor. Charlemagne was to become a symbol of the divinity, holiness of the empire, independent from papal authority. No surprise then that the official church never acknowledged the sainthood of Charlemagne.

As part of the sanctification of Charlemagne Barbarossa had his grave opened and his bones put into a temporary casket. Ever since then the debate raged about how to properly honour the greatest of all the emperors. Finally, Otto IV had commissioned the metalworkers of Maastricht and Aachen to create a splendid, golden shrine, almost as large and as splendid as the three kings’ reliquary in Cologne. By the time it was finished, Bouvines had happened, and Aachen had fallen to Frederick.  

Two days after his coronation and on the first anniversary of the battle of Bouvines, Frederick had the remains of Charlemagne solemnly translated into its final resting place. Once the lid had been put over the casket, the king took off his royal mantle, mounted the scaffold together with the Master of Works and personally nailed the coffin shut.

With this, almost intimate act, he declared not just his veneration of the saint, but also his personal, familial connection. He is the pious son who gives rest to his great, great, great grandfather, reaffirming his membership to the everlasting imperial dynasty that traces back to Julius Caesar and ultimately ancient Troy.

We may grin at this ham-fisted historical fabrication, but the medieval world swallowed it hook line and sinker. There were over 100 locations across the empire where Charlemagne was venerated as a saint.

The shrine is obviously more than worth travelling to Aachen for. What I find fascinating is the iconography. First on the front we see Charlemagne enthroned flanked by two smaller figures of pope Leo III and the archbishop of Reims, i.e., the emperor is bigger than the pope.

Then on the sides where you would normally find apostles or prophets, we have depiction of emperors and kings. Chronologically we have Louis the Pious, Lothair, Charles the Fat, one unknown emperor, Zwentibold King of Lothringia, Henry the Fowler, Otto I to III, Henry II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Otto IV and Frederick II. There are some surprising absences. No Louis the German who founded East Francia. Instead, we have Lothair and Zwentibold, rulers of Lotharingia of which Aachen was a part. This is not a German shrine then. The next absence is Conrad II, probably an oversight. Conrad III because nobody liked him. Lothar III, grandfather of Otto IV is an odd absence. But the most confusing omission is Barbarossa himself. Why is he not there when Otto IV is? Given Frederick II himself is on, the piece must have been reworked in the months before Frederick had entered Aachen. So why not remodel Otto IV into Barbarossa? If all this is about the everlasting Staufer dynasty, why having the interloper there? It is a mystery.

The Karlschrein is one of the absolute highpoints in European medieval goldsmith art, together with the shrine of Mary also in Aachen and the slightly older three kings reliquary in Cologne. In these years following the battle of Bouvines, Europe experiences a period of incredible artistic flourishing. We already talked about the troubadours and Minnesaenger whose most productive period is between 1190 and 1230. Many of the great medieval epics were written down and finalised in this period. Parzival, Tristan and Isolde, The Nibelung, Dietrich von Bern and one of my favourites, the story of duke Ernst – do you remember it from episode 23?

In architecture we are transitioning from the Romanesque to gothic. The first gothic church had been St. Denis near Paris that was begun under the abbot Suger in 1135. In 1207 the cathedral of Magdeburg, the great church erected by Otto the Great had burned down. Its replacement was the first German gothic church. It was followed shortly after by the cathedrals of Bamberg and Naumburg. Where German artists and craftsmen excelled was in the sculptures decorating these new gothic cathedrals. There is the statue of St. Maurice in Magdeburg, the first realistic depiction of an African man since Roman times. The great figures of the founders of Naumburg cathedral which includes the gorgeous Uta von Ballenstedt and, the greatest of them all, the intriguing Bamberg Horseman, the first monumental equestrian statue since antiquity, depicting, well we do not know who. Some say it is Frederick II, but it could equally have been Henry II, Imre of Hungary or a saint, if not the messiah.

The funding for these great works came at least in part from the incredibly generous donations Frederick had to do to keep the imperial princes on side.

By 1220 Frederick feels he had spent enough time and money in Germany, 8 years overall. The realm north of the alps is at peace. His legitimacy is recognised by all. All the generosity had also allowed him to have his son Henry elected and consecrated as king.

The next, inevitable step is the coronation as emperor in Rome. And that required the agreement of the pope. As I said, this episode begins and ends with the relationship between pope and emperor.

Innocent III had died in 1216. His successor, Honorius III was a much more conciliatory man. He was much older and more of an administrator than a visionary. That does not mean he lacked political objectives, but other than Innocent, he lacked the ambition to achieve all of them at once.

Honorius III cared about one thing, regaining Jerusalem. For that objective he was willing to overlook many a thing.

In 1215, at his coronation in Aachen Frederick did not only ascend the throne of Charlemagne and nailed his coffin shut, he also emulated him a third time, by taking the cross. The notion of what constitutes a crusade had gradually shifted from the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre to a more general Holy war on Muslims and pagans. As a consequence Charlemagne’s brutal raid on the pagan Saxons was recast as a crusade, a crusade even before crusades were a thing..

Hence when Frederick took the cross in 1215, he did that to elevate his standing as future emperor, as a descendant and follower of Charlemagne, not as a faithful son of the church. That is why Innocent III largely ignored it and called his own crusade at the 4th Lateran Council, a crusade he planned to lead himself without material involvement of the emperor.

Honorius III, as I said, was less ambitious. He embraced Frederick’s commitment to take the cross. It is probably also in this context that Honorius accepted the election of little Henry as king of the Romans alongside his title as king of Sicily. He must have realised that this would mean a de facto union between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Sicily, in other words, the encirclement of the states of the Church.

Pope Honorius III (by Giottto)

When Frederick arrives before the Porta Collina on November 22, 1220 he promises again that he would never seek a union between the empire and Sicily and only them is he admitted to the Holy city. From there he rides in procession behind the prelates and cardinals of Rome to old St. Peter. He enters the Atrium, a space that, like Old St. peter itself, no longer exists. In there stood on one side the enormous sarcophagus of Otto II also now relocated and replaced. On the other is St. Maria dei Turri, rebuilt after his grandfather had so sacrilegiously destroyed the predecessor church. Here he swears all the oaths of fealty and obedience to the pope his predecessors had sworn before him. Upon entering the basilica itself he is made a canon of St. Peter, in other word he is now a priest, able to administer sacraments.

He is anointed by Hugolino, the cardinal bishop of Ostia who had also anointed Otto IV just 11 years earlier. Hugolino was a nephew of Innocent III and will later become pope Gregory IX.

The climax of the ceremony comes when Frederick receives the imperial robes, the orb, the sceptre and the crown from the pope himself at the altar of St. Peter. Amongst the great imperial garments are now the wonderful items brought across from Palermo. The imperial coronation mantle, the imperial socks and the even more over the top imperial gloves. I will put pictures of all of these and the sculptures I mentioned before on to the episode webpage. The link is in the show notes.

After that the pope celebrates mass at which the emperor – having taken his clothes off again – assists him as if he was a junior priest.

At last Frederick again pledges to take the cross and receives the crusaders robes from the cardinal bishop of Ostia.

Leaving St. Peter the pope mounts his horse, again helped by the emperor who holds his stirrups. Frederick then performs the service of Strator and leads the Pope’s horse over an unknown distance.

My god has this changed from the days of Otto the Great. The emperor is made to bow and assist and kneel and reaffirm the supremacy of the pope so often, it almost looks as if the pope is crowned, not the emperor. Remember the fallout between Barbarossa and the pope over the strator service? That feels a long time ago.

In the Middle Ages, these ceremonies were supposed to mean an awful lot. It used to be that the displayed reality became truth through its performance. An emperor leading the pope’s horse like a groom became a servant of the pope.

But we are also coming to the end of the true medieval period, which means that oaths and rituals are still performed and intended to convey reality, the truth is that oaths are broken, and rituals do not protect from political realities.

What nobody knows and probably nobody even imagines is to be possible is that this is the last imperial coronation performed by a pope in Rome for the next 150 years.  

Next week we will see what Frederick does with his newly acquired imperial crown and crusading pledge. Suffice to say that oaths will be broken, political necessities will overturn ritually confirmed relationships. But that is not all. Frederick will set out on crusade despite being excommunicated, will be successful without a shot being fired and still….well, I hope you will join us again.

Before I go, let me thank all of you who are supporting the show, in particular the Patrons who have kindly signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. It is thanks to you this show does not have to do advertising for matrasses or as I recently heard energy supplements and pension plans. If Patreon isn’t for you, another way to help the show is sharing the podcast directly or boosting its recognition on social media. If you share, comment or retweet a post from the History of the Germans it is more likely to be seen by others, hence bringing in more listeners. My most active places are Twitter @germanshistory and my Facebook page History of the Germans Podcast. As always, all the links are in the show notes.   

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Barbarossa brings back Roman Law

Today we will talk about part two of Barbarossa’s plan to take control of the kingdom of Italy. Part one was the subjugation of Milan and the softening up of the Communes. Now comes part two – the establishment of a new system of government for Northern Italy.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 55 – The Laws of Roncaglia

Today we will talk about part two of Barbarossa’s plan to take control of the kingdom of Italy. Part one was the subjugation of Milan and the softening up of the Communes. Now comes part two – the establishment of a new system of government for Northern Italy.

Before we start just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Ulf and Marcus who have already signed up.

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Just to recap. By September 1158 Barbarossa had completed one of the shortest and most efficient Italian campaigns of the medieval period. He had set off from Augsburg in mid-July and by early September Milan had capitulated. By October, most troop contingents both those from north of the Alps and those of the communes were on their way home and all of Italy was his.

Barbarossa meanwhile is not going home. He takes a tour of Lombardy, visits Monza where his uncle had been crowned king of Italy and then calls an Imperial Assembly on the fields of Roncaglia for November 11th.

For the Italians this whole thing starts to look a little bit odd. Why is he still here? Milan has fallen, imperial honor has been restored and the army has returned home, so surely the emperor is going home too. There must be some domestic issue or feud or something that requires his presence up north. But it can’t be helped; they show up as requested, hoping that all he wants is a last knees-up before going home.

They are in for a shock. Barbarossa is going to unleash on them a new and unexpected   weapon, more devastating than a trebuchet and more cunning than a Bohemian king, I talk of course of the professional lawyer and the Roman Law.

Roman law wasn’t new nor was the professional lawyer. Both flourished over in Constantinople. It was just in Western Europe where it had not existed for centuries.

Before 1100 law in Europe was a hotchpotch of local customs, some law codes issued in the 6th and 7th century by Germanic rulers most famously the Salic law then there were the rules of feudal law, whatever that was, we have ecclesiastical rulings and some remnants of Roman law practice, the latter only really in Italy. These laws were incoherent, patchy and often contradictory and hence judgements were unpredictable.

Judgements were provided either by a jury of peers or by the ruler alone. None of them had any legal training, making again the outcome of cases unpredictable. And finally access to justice was limited. Part of the privileges aristocrats believed they had was to bring cases to the emperor, meaning a plaintiff needed an aristocratic sponsor to get a hearing. Court procedures were also unregulated, and decision were often taken without detailed investigation or without the other party even given a chance to respond. One such case was Barbarossa’s decision to support the Lodi against Milan in 1154, without hearing the Milanese and in fact without even hearing the city leadership of Lodi either.

This state of affairs was unsatisfactory but acceptable for a largely rural society with limited monetary exchange dominated by personal obligations rooted in status as serf, free man, noble or prince. It was utterly unsuitable for the urban world of Italian communes. Merchants relationships were ruled by contracts.  They needed clarity on their legal position in order to properly assess the risks of transactions. Is

Attempts had been made to codify the existing laws into a coherent structure for example under King Henry I in England, but even there in the most advanced governmental system in Europe the task was unmanageable.

That is why the rediscovery of the Codex Juris Civilis of Emperor Justinian in some Italian convent was such an immediate success. The Codex Juris dates back to about 530 AD and contained a comprehensive, ordered, coherent and rational set of laws designed for the sophisticated urban society of the Roman Empire. It did not just contain the laws but also a collection of authoritative legal opinion on these laws and a textbook that helped students to learn to understand the law.

To understand how groundbreaking the Codex juris is, it is important to understand the different between a compilation of laws and a codex. Hansard is the official report of all parliamentary debates in the British parliament since the 18th century. It is the official record of all the laws of England and Wales. It is also very long. There are more than 600 volumes since 1980 and the total is supposedly over 2000 volumes. Neither are all these laws equally important nor is anyone physically able to read all this. And then there is the question how well all these statutes interact with each other and how the regular citizen can get an understanding of the law.

The Codex Juris is by no means short nor is it an easy read. But it is a lot shorter and a lot easier to read than Hansart. The difference between a compilation and a codex is not what is in it, but what is not in it. When the Codex Juris Civilis was created in 530 there were already several compilations of imperial legislation and of authoritative legal texts. These laws and opinions would sometimes say the diametrically opposite. The authors of the codex took all these compilations and ordered its content by subject. Then they looked at the different rules side by side and decided for one and ditched the rest. Rationality was the key driver of the decision which rules to keep. Does this rule fit with the overarching concept, does it operate in harmony with others or is it likely in tension with another part of the codex. Does it provide a fair and equitable outcome? They did the same with the authoritative legal texts from famous jurists of imperial Rome. They again ordered them by topic, matching the list of topics in the codex and stripped out the bits that were contradictory or out of synch with the overall structure.

What came out in the end was a legal system as opposed to a list of rules. A system that was logical within itself. It was also abstract. For instance, it required agreement over price and object as a requirement for anything being regarded as a contract. It does not matter whether it is a contract over a bag of grain, a journey to Constantinople or the marriage of your eldest daughter. That means the rule could still provide useful answers to issues the writers had not anticipated.

The Codex Juris was designed for an urban society that was used to import grain from Egypt, silk from China and tin from Cornwall. It was so far advanced compared to all existing law codes it was as if you had given a copy of Einstein’s theory of general relativity to an 18th century natural philosopher. The lawyers of the time could understand it after years of diligent study which propelled the application of law forward literally by centuries.

The bits that worked very well for the Italian city states and that they first adopted were the civil law parts, law of contract, law of ownership and the like. Such topics were simply non-existent in most Germanic codes. For instance, the Sachsenspiegel, a collection of the ancient laws of the Saxons that remained in force in some way until about 1900 had no provisions on how contracts are entered into, the obligations of the parties under the contract etc. It simply wasn’t something the rural society of 12th century Germany had any need for.

And, what the Italian merchants also preferred was the judge-centric legal system Roman law prescribed. In the German legal tradition, judgements were made by a jury of peers. And that is unsuitable when it comes to adjudicating complex contractual arrangements. A jury rarely has the time and the training to assess the content of a 100-page contract. I know that in some US states juries decide on such matters, but let’s just say it is a model rarely copied elsewhere. Professional lawyers who had spent years training in Roman law are more suitable judges on such matters, not because they are any less biased, but because their decisions are more predictable. They will by and large use the same sections of the law and the same legal commentary to derive their decisions, which means their judgements should be similar.

And the third component that contributed to the success of Roman law amongst the merchant elite of Italy was the concept of equity. Equity is the idea that if the outcome of a mechanical application of the law would result in an outcome that is apparently unjust or obviously not what the parties intended, then the learned judge can alter the outcome to a more sensible result. That reduces predictability but was extremely useful in cases where an unpredictable set of circumstance could lead to a frustration of the parties’ intents. Take the loss of a valuable cargo on a ship travelling from Constantinople. There are hundreds of things that could have caused that, a drunk captain, a storm, an incompetent pilot, pirates, fire on board from cooking, fire on bord due to lightening, spoiling of the goods due to heat, incompetent storage, incompetent storage ordered by the recipient etc,. etc,.  pp.

Equity is a useful concept. I can say that because I remember a time in my dissipated youth when I spent a long night writing a force majeure clause in an English law contract – where equity does not exist in the same way – and had to think of all the things that could happen to a chocolate factory in Bulgaria. And whatever had gone wrong with that factory – and in all likelihood something had – it was not on that list. I might be biased but Equity is a much more useful way to deal with that uncertainty than letting interns slave away through the night.

So, Italian merchants were supportive of the Corpus Juris as it gave them a legal framework for their commercial existence, a judiciary that could produce predictable resolutions to disputes and a concept of equity that balances potentially unjust outcomes.

But the Codex Juris did not just contain contract law and court procedure alone, it also contained something like the constitution of the Roman empire. And that constitution in the year 530 was that of an autocratic regime. The emperor was the source of all laws and stood above the law. Law was what pleases the emperor. There is even an explanation inside the Corpus Juris where the imperial authority had come from. According to this theory, the right to pass laws had originally rested with the Roman people but that under Augustus they had permanently transferred this right to the benevolent emperor. 

Subsequently under the Roman law the princeps could pass or cancel any law he liked, he can appoint the judges who are responsible to him, and he has a wide range of privileges, we will discuss in a moment.

For Barbarossa the Corpus Juris was even more an answer to all his prayers than it was to Italian merchants. It solved so many problems.

His first problem was still the foundation of his authority. The Ottonian emperors had derived their authority from the concept of sacred kingship, from being the vicar of Christ on earth. But following the investiture conflict this source of authority had been lost, or worse was now residing in the papacy who could enfeoff the emperor with it. That was unacceptable to Barbarossa because it meant the pope could easily choose someone else, say the Byzantine emperor or the King of France and make them emperor.

But where, if not from the Pope where does his authority come? Well, it is there in black and white in the Codex Juris. The emperor has absolute power over all citizens of the empire because that power has transferred to his predecessor the divine Augustus in the first century. In fact, imperial authority predates the popes and even Christianity and hence is independent of papal authority.

His second issue was that imperial administration had so far relied entirely on the chancery which was staffed with churchmen. Even though Barbarossa was able to retain the loyalty of his bishops and the German church in general throughout his reign, having a non-ecclesiastical source of smart administrators would be extremely useful. And that is where the school of Bologna comes in. They are churning out a near endless stream of young, highly trained and mostly impecunious men that could be put to good use in the imperial administration. And they will. For instance Pietro della VIgna the chancellor of Barbarossa’s grandson Frederick II was one such jurist who had studied in Bologna on a scholarship.

The third problem was more specific, how to exercise power in Italy. The German governance system did no longer work in Italy. The bishops and princes through which the emperor exercises power in Germany were simply too weak in Italy. The episcopal rights and privileges had transferred to the communes and the major princes had largely disappeared except for parts of Piedmont and some pockets in central Italy. What was needed was a legal definition of the relationship between the powerful communes and the emperor. And that is where the Corpus Juris comes in.

It was so simple. The communes had already adopted Roman law. And the corpus Juris was a codex which means it was a coherent unified law, not a pick’n choose. So conceptually if you use the rules on contract law you also accept the absolute rule of the emperor.

During this assembly in Roncaglia, Barbarossa took this line very forcefully. He did promulgate the so-called Laws of Roncaglia. They are so-called laws of Roncaglia because these weren’t new laws. The way he framed it was that these were just reminders of what the law already was according to the Codex Juris.

Let’s see what that means specifically.

The first is the Lex Regalia, the law of the imperial rights.

Do you remember the oaths that Otto and Rainald have made 57 Communes swear earlier in the year? It is the one where the citizens of each city have promised that they “shall not deprive him of his royal rights here or elsewhere, and if they should be taken from him I shall in good faith aid him to recover and retain them.”

Barbarossa thinks it is time to be a bit more specific about these royal rights. Like very specific, like having a piece of paper saying exactly what is is, specific. For that he enlists the help of the famous jurists of the university of Bologna. These four great doctors, I spare you the names, are held in the highest regard across Europe for their knowledge and understanding of the Codex Juris Civilis of Justinian. Barbarossa tasks them to produce a comprehensive list of all the Regalia, the royal rights in Italy. The lawyers draft in 28 further lawyers, one from each major city to help with the task. The professional lawyers are unleashed.

This commission comes up with a long list of regalia which include ownership of all public roads, navigable rivers, harbors and riverbanks, the right to demand any kind of tolls for transit or use of bridges, the right to mint coins, income from fisheries and salt mines. The crown also owns all lands without an owner, the property of traitors and convicted criminals and of those who live in incestuous unions. And half the treasures found on imperial or church land and all of it if he assisted in its recovery. All silver mines. The right to commandeer ships and conveyance of goods on roads. The emperor can also demand a special tax for an imperial expedition, the so-called Fodrum.

And now comes the smart bit. The Laws of Regalia stipulates that whoever currently exercises these rights has to prove ownership with an imperial charter explicitly awarding these rights.

As I mentioned before, these rights had been lost to the crown during the long imperial absences from Northern Italy. They were initially assumed by the bishops and then by the Italian communes.  Some of the bishops had received imperial charters confirming the transfer of these rights, but only when they were loyal to the emperor against the pope – so not that many. Usually the bishop had simply taken the rights without ever saying please and thank you. In the early 12th century, the communes wrestled the privileges from the bishops and again there was rarely an imperial charter confirming the transfer. They may have forced the bishop to sign a paper transferring the rights, but that was illegal without consent of the emperor.

That was it. Nobody had the necessary papers and bingo, the emperor could claim the lion’s share of all these sources of income. To get a bit of context around that. The regalia are estimated to have produced an income for the empire of 30,000 mark of silver per year. Compare that to the fine Milan paid of 9,000 mark of silver or the 400 mark of silver Henry the Proud and Pope Innocent II fell out over which cost the Welf the crown. 30,000 mark silver per year is an unimaginably large sum, dwarfing anything Barbarossa could get from Germany. And more importantly any resources any of the great German princes could ever mobilize.

The law on the regalia has some elements of Roman law as we have seen, but it is at heart still going back to traditional concepts of ownership and enfeoffment. There are three more “laws” in inverted commas that are pure Roman law.

The first is the lex palatina, the “law of the palaces” that stipulates that the emperor can erect palaces inside any city if he so chooses. When we talk about Palaces here, they aren’t luxurious homes. A palace or Pfalz in this context is a fortified structure inside the city housing a garrison as well as imperial bureaucracy. The cities that used to house an imperial palace like Pavia and Ravenna had tried to get rid of them since time immemorial. You may remember in episode 22 when emperor Conrad II gave the citizens of Pavia a harsh telling off for destroying the imperial Pfalz in 1024. The last thing any Italian commune wants is an imperial stronghold imposing central authority over the city council and the consuls.

The second one is the Lex Tributum, Law on Tributes which re-establishes the taxation system of antiquity. The emperor is thereby entitled to raise a fixed amount from each citizen as a regular poll tax as well a tax on property. If you have been following the podcast for a while you know how important the ability to raise regular taxes is to the formation of stable political entities in the Middle Ages. One of the key reasons the kings of England could fight two hundred years wars against a much larger France was their ability to raise taxes. Can you imagine how European history would have unfolded if the Holy Roman Emperors had been able to raise taxes from the richest region of Western Europe? To the Italians relief this law was not to be implemented immediately. It was more of a reminder that the emperor can bring such taxes.

The third is the lex omnis iurisdictio which declares that all jurisdiction and coercive power belongs to the prince and that all judges receive their authority from the prince and have to swear an oath to that effect. That de facto abolishes the municipal courts and replaces them with imperial courts.

All this is indeed legit under the Codex Juris Civilis and the four great Doctors of Law tell the Italian Communes that this is what it is. Barbarossa gets up and allegedly delivers a speech dripping with Latin quotations and references to the Codex Civilis. Not bad for an illiterate man with modest if not negligible Latin.

At the end of the speech the bishops, nobles and communes formally renounce their regalia and swear an oath on the four laws. Rahewin even tells the story that the communes suggest to Frederick that he should appoint a Podesta in each commune to ease implementation. A Podesta was usually an external person of good standing who was given dictatorial powers over a city for a fixed period of time. These Podestas had become necessary as strife between factions inside the city had become uncontrollable. You may have seen the pictures of San Gimignano a small town in Tuscany which has preserved many of its medieval tower houses. Practically all Italian cities were full of these family fortresses that are a physical manifestation of the brutality of city politics. It is the Capulets against Montagues everywhere.  As positions hardened between different family factions the cities became ungovernable and hence the need of a Podesta to stand in the middle for a fixed period. An imperial Podesta chosen by Barbarossa and installed for an indeterminate time is a very different proposition.

The whole these laws and the Podestas are a massive case of imperial overreach. Compare the laws of Roncaglia with the terms of the surrender of Milan. The Laws of Roncaglia are even more intrusive than the terms the defeated city had to sign.

  • Milan was allowed to keep his consuls and elections without a podesta
  • Judicial authority was awarded to legates only in cases involving the honor of the empire not everything
  • There was no mention of taxes, just a one-off payment.

It is hard to understand why the cities, in particular those who had been fighting alongside Barbarossa against Milan would accept such terms. Well, they may just have sworn to all these things, not out of conviction, but because they were standing in a muddy field outside Piacenza surrounded by the now much smaller but still lethal army of Barbarossa.

We will see next week how all this pans out.

But before we do that, let me just talk a little bit more about Roman and German law.

There is no doubt that Barbarossa would have loved to extend the laws of Roncaglia to the entirety of his empire. But German legal traditions were fundamentally at odds with Roman law.

At around the same time in 1220-1230, Eike von Repgow will publish his Sachsenspiegel, or Saxon Mirror a collection of Saxon laws and customs as they had been passed down by his forefathers.

It does not cover all areas of the law but focuses on two areas, the Landrecht, which is the laws governing the interactions between free men and women. It is focused on topics like property rights, inheritance, family law and neighborhood disputes. The Landrecht also includes criminal law stipulating mainly compensation, so-called wergild for injuries.

The second part is the Lehnsrecht or feudal law. It determines the rights and obligations between the different layers of society starting with the king and going down to spiritual and secular princes, lords, free men of substance and other free men subject to feudal obligations.

And finally, it covers the courts, namely that the court is comprised of a jury of peers presided over by the king or a count.

You see the difference. Roman law is rationality versus Germanic law is tradition. Roman law is focused on issues in an urban society whilst Germanic law covers issues arising in a rural society. Roman law is applied by professional lawyers, Germanic law is applied by peers. In Roman law the emperor is above the law and makes the law, in Germanic law the king is subject to the law and new law arises from precedent and customs.

These two systems could not be more different.

We will get to hear more about Roman law and Germanic law traditions as we go along, but here are the broad outlines what happens.

Roman law will take hold in Italy and France. Once the school of Bologna stipulates that each king is the emperor in his own kingdom and hence can pass any law they like, the French Kings get on board. The Capetians found the university of Montpellier specifically to produce lawyers trained in Roman law to staff their administration. These professional lawyers even formed their own type of aristocracy, the Nobles of the Robe who controlled the high courts. After the revolution the concept of a rational and coherent code of law still appealed and leads to a modernized form of the Codex Juris, the Code Civil promulgated by Napoleon in 1804. The Code Civil is still in force in France and several other countries, obviously with modifications along the way.

In Germany, as always, the situation was a bit more muddled. Roman law and professional lawyers became an important tool for the princes to manage their territories. It ultimately became the law of the Empire and so formally reigned supreme. However, Germanic law and compilations like the Sachsenspiegel was not completely abolished. It was presumed to remain in force thanks to a privilege granted by Charlemagne, which almost certainly did never exist. That meant It could be applied to disputes between Saxons, but all cases involving non-Saxons or areas not covered by Germanic law, Roman law was dominant. In fact, the Sachsenspiegel was still cited as a source of law in 1932.

But ultimately German law ends up based mostly on Roman law foundations. When the Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch, the code of civil law was passed in 1900 its structure and content was heavily influenced by the codex civilis. For instance, Courts are judge centric and laymen are only involved in some parts of criminal law.

There is however one legal tradition where  Germanic law concepts still prevail. And that is English law. It is not that the Kings of England were unaware of Roman law. Absolutely not. Allegedly a copy of the Codex Civilis had come to Oxford as early as 1149 and many advisers and clergymen of the Plantagenet kings had been trained in Roman law.

According to Norman Cantor it was mostly an issue of convenience. England already had a functioning legal infrastructure with shire courts and hundred’s courts that would be difficult to replace. Moreover, these courts did a decent enough job as far as the king was concerned. They managed themselves, i.e., did not cost him much and transferred a steady stream of fines and court fees to the king. And as for the concept of an autocratic king as the source of all laws, that was hard to push through after Magna Carta and the provisions of Oxford. I mean one King tried but lost his head over the issue.

So, there you go. Germanic law traditions no longer apply in Germany but via English law are still in use in the US, Canada, Australia, many commonwealth countries and dominate the world of international trade.  And poor law interns still sweat over risks to Bulgarian chocolate factories through the night

As mentioned before, next week we will see how the Italian cities take the laws of Roncaglia. Spoiler alert, not well. And Barbarossa looses the moral high-ground when he accepts cash for conflict from the Cremonese. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you feel like supporting the show or want to get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. All the links are in the show notes.

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Bringing the broken Empire back together

This week we finally get our narrative going. Barbarossa will boost the honour of the empire by burning cities, hanging heretics, slaughtering rabble-rousing Romans and inventing the concept of the university.

History of the Germans
History of the Germans

A narrative history of the German people from the Middle Ages to Reunification in 1991. Episodes are 25-35 min long and drop on Thursday mornings.
“A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad”. Gregory of Tours (539-594)

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

The Interregnum and the early Habsburgs (#138 ff
– Rudolf von Habsburg (#139-141)
– Adolf von Nassau (#142)
– Albrecht von Habsburg (#143)
– Heinrich VII (#144-148)
– Ludwig the Bavarian (#149-153)
– Karl IV (#154-163)
The Reformation before the Reformation
– Wenceslaus the Lazy (#165)
– The Western Schism (#166/167)
– The Ottomans (#168)
– Sigismund (#169-#184
The Empire in the 15th Century
– Mainz & Hessen #186
– Printing #187-#188
– Universities #190
– Wittelsbachs #189, #196-#199
– Baden, Wuerrtemberg, Augsburg, Fugger (#191-195)
– Maps & Arms (#201-#202)
The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg
– Early habsburgs (#203-#207)
– Albrecht II (#208)
-Freidrich III (#209-

Ep. 52: Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1190) – Unification of the Empire – The Honour of the Empire
byDirk Hoffmann-Becking
Ep. 52: Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1190) – Unification of the Empire – The Honour of the Empire

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans – Episode 52 The Honour of The Empire

This week we finally get our narrative going. Barbarossa will boost the honour of the empire by burning cities, hanging heretics, slaughtering rabble-rousing Romans and inventing the concept of the university.

Before we start just a reminder. The History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generous support from patrons. And you can become a patron too and enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and other privileges from the price of a latte per month. All you have to do is sign up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website historyofthegermans.com. You find all the links in the show notes. And thanks a lot to Elliott, Otto and Craig who have already signed up.

Last week we talked, amongst other things, about this new generation of princes who surrounded Barbarossa. These young men – and I am afraid they were all men – had a very different outlook from their forefathers. They saw the provincial kings of France and England rising up in the world whilst their ruler Conrad III could not even acquire the imperial crown, let alone be the universal monarch his title made him out to be.

The weakness of the king reflected the weakness of the empire and that by extension meant that they, the princes as branches of the empire appeared weak. The sources talk a lot about the honour of the empire, or honoris imperii in Latin as the key motivation in Barbarossa’s reign. What that is exactly is much in dispute. And Barbarossa and his princes who did not speak Latin would not have used that word anyway.

In broad terms it is something between respect and authority. Honour is diminished when imperial orders are disregarded or when someone, usually the pope claims to rank above the emperor. In a governance system with zero institutions, how can an emperor make sure his orders are implemented and nobody contests your status?. Conrad III and Lothar III before him thought that the only way to make people do what you want was brute force. Burn their castles and massacre their peasants until they obey.

Barbarossa and his circle are different. They believe that the emperor by force of his office, his personality and his honour is to be obeyed, as long as he is a just lord. And Barbarossa made sure he was a just lord by delegating all major decisions to a court of the princes. The princes were then bound to uphold the honour of the empire by enforcing that decision. And if the emperor encounters resistance in implementing the decision, it is not just his authority and standing that is at risk, but the honour of the empire as a whole and that of each individual prince as well.

If you listen carefully, you can hear echoes of Otto von Northeim’s speech in 1073 where he attacked emperor Henry IV: “As long as he was a king to me and acted royally, I also kept the oath I swore to him freely and faithfully; but after he ceased to be a king, the one to whom I had to keep loyalty was no longer there”.

And the first thing the honour of the Reich demanded was for Barbarossa to be crowned emperor in Rome. With the empire north of the Alps largely at peace an expedition to Rome was a much easier proposition than it had been for Conrad III just 2 years earlier.

In preparation of the journey negotiations with pope Eugene III began that will end in the treaty of Constance. This is again another indication how the balance of power between popes and emperors have shifted in the last century. A little more than 100 years earlier Barbarossa’s great, great grandfather Henry III had journeyed to Rome not even knowing who exactly the current pope was and, when he had doubts about the validity of the one who presented himself, he had all three contenders to the papacy deposed and a new one put in place. Now, the emperor has to negotiate terms with the pope. Delegations moved back and forth between Germany and whichever small town the pope currently resided at to find an agreement.

The terms of this agreement can be summarised as follows:

  1. Barbarossa shall not make peace with either the Roman commune or the Sicilians without the consent of the pope. The emperor is to make best efforts to subject the Romans to the pope and the holy mother church.
  2. The emperor as advocate of the church was to preserve and defend the papacy and all their legal rights.
  3. The emperor promises not cede any land in Southern Italy to the “King of the Greeks” which was to mean emperor Manuel in Constantinople and should Manuel invade both Pope and emperor would combine their forces to throw him out.
  4. The pope on his part would crown him emperor and would help him in accordance with his duty to the papal office to maintain, increase and expand the honour of his realm.
  5. And finally, the pope promises to warn, and if necessary, excommunicate anyone who dared to trample underfoot or overturn the imperial honour.

Many a tree have been felled and carbon pigment expanded on the question who got one over the other in this agreement. Given that opinion is split almost exactly 50/50 it must have been one of those compromises that left either side believing they got what they wanted until they find out that they did not.

And even if Barbarossa had signed a bad treaty, he still benefitted by calling in the papal obligations first and leaving  his own commitments for later..

Pope Eugenius III had already made a number of decisions in Barbarossa’s favour even before ethe ink was dry. First up he deposed the archbishop of Mainz, who you may remember was the only significant elector who had opposed Barbarossa at his elevation. And secondly the pope annulled his marriage to Adela of Vohburg. Barbarossa had no particular liking for his first wife that had been chosen for him by Conrad III. But more importantly, her political usefulness had vanished when her father had died, and even more problematic the couple had no children. A few monks were assembled to go through the rickety Staufer family tree and unsurprisingly, they found a common great, great grandmother and bingo, the marriage was annulled for consanguinity.

Barbarossa used his newly acquired status as bachelor to paper over the most explosive clause in the treaty of Constance, the promise to expel emperor Manuel should he show up in Southern Italy. That would be a big shift in Staufer policy towards Constantinople.

You may remember that Conrad III had maintained a close alliance with Manuel who had cared for him when he had been injured in the Second Crusade. Conrad promised him parts of Puglia as part of a marriage alliance and even received vast amounts of cash to fund a campaign in Italy in 1149.

As you may have heard on the History of Byzantium, Manuel’s #1 political objective was to weaken the king of Sicily and regaining a foothold in Southern Italy and for that  he was counting on Stauffer support

It is unclear whether Manuel knew about the clauses in the treaty of Constance but it is not likely that Barbarossa had told him What Barbarossa did Instead of announcing his U-turn was to send envoys asking the Vasilev for the hand of his daughter, the beautiful, purple born Maria. That must have been a ruse to string the Byzantine emperor along. Barbarossa needed his coronation more than any amount of Greek gold and that meant he had to honour the treaty of Constance, at least until he had done the business in St. Peter. But after that, who knows. It is worthwhile to keep the communication channels open.

So far, so good. We have a calm Germany, an invitation to Rome from the pope and we have kept the emperor in Constantinople at bay.

Two more things need to be looked at before the horses can be saddled.

The first is the Commune of Rome. As I mentioned before, the Roman population had increasingly enough of the popes and cardinals in their midst. By 1153 they had become full on radicals. A charismatic preacher named Arnald of Brescia had appeared. Arnald’s key message was that the church should be giving up all the trappings of worldly power and revert back to the life of ascetic preachers. Somehow this did not go down well with the mighty cardinals and confrontation led to the expulsion of the papal court. The commune began to restyle itself as the ancient Roman republic. It formed a senate and elected two consuls.

The old sign SPQR, the Senate and the People of Rome that was once carried before the victorious legions that subdued the known world  re-emerged for the first time in 500 years and with it delusions of grandeur. Just as an aside, it is still in use, mainly to grace manhole covers. They had already written to Conrad III and offered to crown him emperor. That letter was at least deferential and polite. The letter Barbarossa received in 1153 was anything but. The writer made it clear that if Barbarossa did not come down pronto, something bad would happen. I guess that is not a way to talk to someone who rates his own honour above everything else. Being threatened by some shoeless rabblerouser was just the thing to make the imperial blood boil. The Roman communal leaders were sent home with some choice words and now Barbarossa had his own reason to go to Rome and tell these jumped-up plebeians what is what.

But these were not the only plebeians asking for imperial support. As Barbarossa was holding court in Constance and putting the finishing touches on the eponymous treaty, two citizens of the town of Lodi in Lombardy happened to travel through and, seeing the line of petitioners waiting for the king, joined in to tell of their plight.

Lodi lies 30 km south of Milan and had come into conflict with the mighty metropolis. Milan was not only the largest and most powerful of the communes in Lombardy, it also did not like competition. And Lodi was though small, still a competitor. So the army of Milan came and razed old Lodi to the ground, removed all fortifications and forced the inhabitants to move into undefended villages nearby. After this catastrophe the Lodese began rebuilding their shattered lives. They set up a new market in a field near the main road and things were slowly improving. But even a small market was unacceptable to the Milanese and they shut that down too.

Barbarossa heard their plight and – without hearing the other side – wrote a harsh letter to the consuls of Milan ordering them to allow the market of Lodi to reopen. One of his Ministeriales, a man called Sicher was dispatched to Milan with the document bearing the imperial seal. Sicher first came to Lodi to tell the population what the emperor had decided. Instead of rejoicing, the citizens panicked. It is all good for some potentate from north of the alps to make some ruling, but nobody had seen an emperor in Italy for 15 years and the Milanese cavalry could be down here in half a day to burn the miserable huts they were living in now. They begged Sicher to go back home and forget about everything, but the poor man did not dare to disobey his master. He went to Milan and the Consuls had the letter read out in a public assembly. That did not go down well. Not only did the Milanese refuse to obey, they tore the order to shreds and Horror of horrors trampled on the imperial seal. Even the hapless ambassador had to flee for his life.

Barbarossa’s honour demands that he comes to Milan and makes the city obey him. Not just Barbarossa’s honour, it is the honour of the realm as a whole that is at stake.

By October 1154 Barbarossa’s journey to Rome finally sets off from Augsburg. He is in great company and many of the new generation princes are with him. Henry the Lion, Berthold von Zaehringen and his bannerman, Otto von Wittelsbach, count palatinate of Bavaria. But his army is quite small. Just 1,800 armoured knights. The king may have brought peace to the realm, but not everyone trusts it will hold when the king is down in Italy and, as we all know it is dangerous down there. Many of the old hands prefer to stay home and see what happens.

The army crosses the Brenner pass and after burning a castle belonging to the city of Verona and hanging its defenders, meanders its way down to the fields of Roncaglia. These fields are a flat area outside the city of Piacenza extremely suitable for royal assemblies in Italy.

By the 12th century Italy is fundamentally different from the empire north of the alps. A German royal assembly is family gathering of aristocrats that can take place in an episcopal palace or imperial Pfalz. Northern Italy has barely any major feudal lords left.

During the last 150 years the emperors have spent a total of just 22 years in Northern Italy, leaving the place without central authority for long stretches of time. And that is particularly true during the last eighty years of civil war. In the interim the city governments have first taken over all the secular powers of their bishops and subsequently conquered the lands outside their walls. The local lords were made to either flee or integrate into city society so that the area surrounding the cities, the so-called Contado had been cleared of castellans.

And then all these Cities whose Contado share a border tend to be constantly at war. The political map of Northern Italy looks a bit like  a chessboard. If you are a city on a white square, you are at war with all the cities on the black squares next to you and you are allies with the ones on the white squares. 

Hence, if an assembly would take place in a particular city, half the participants would be on enemy territory. So, the only place where representatives of all these cities can meet without fear of being captured and murdered is an open field – the field of Roncaglia.

This first of Barbarossa’s royal assemblies is a great success. Nearly all the cities of Italy have sent representatives. Most cities have paid the Fodrum, a traditional tax paid when the emperor is in Italy. Some cities go further. Genoa brought him lions, ostriches and parrots they had captured from the Muslims in Spain. Pisa too brough expensive gifts.

The main point of the Meeting  was however not to gather trinkets, but to let the Italian subjects of the empire know that the king is back. Barbarossa main concern was the size of his army. So he passed laws that required the cities and vassals such as they were to provide military support upon request. He also banned the sale of fiefs as that would circumvent the ability to call for military service. And he set financial compensation levels for vassals who were unable to attend in person.

And then he began dispensing justice. He ordered the cities of Pavia and Tortona to make peace and exchange their captives from the recent war. Chieri and Asti were admonished for insubordination and their complete destruction ordered.  And Lodi was re-established. The Milanese had realised that this emperor was actually coming down to Italy and that he could make things quite uncomfortable. So, they offered an enormous sum, 4,000 pounds of silver and a promise to rebuild Lodi and Como to make amends.

Business concluded the next step was to be crowned king of Italy. To do that he chose the small city of Monza where Conrad III had been crowned. Presumably he did not want to do it in Pavia as was customary since Pavia and Milan were hostile to each other and going to Pavia would make the lovely 4000 pound of silver disappear.

The two consuls of Milan had offered to lead the army from Roncaglia to Monza and Barbarossa was happy to accept this generous offer from his new friends. All this business with the trampled seal was it seems forgotten. But the consuls led the army through a part of the country that had recently been completely destroyed in a war between Milan and Pavia. Lack of food and pouring rain made the journey an utter misery. Barbarossa is getting really angry now. He sends the two consuls home and asks them to come back with food and to open a market where his troops can revittal. But no food, no market appears.

That is the end of the reconciliation with Milan. When they come back with their four thousand pounds of silver, he sends them packing. He takes his army and plunders the lands of Milan for a while. But his forces are far too small to attack the great metropolis itself. Then he moves to Piedmont to raze Chieri and Asti to the ground as promised.

Finally, he begins to point the army in the direction of where he actually wants to go, Rome. On the way there he comes past the city of Tortona, an ally of Milan. When Tortona does not obey his demands to give satisfaction to Pavia, he loses the plot. His army may be far too small to attack Milan, but his honour demands some punishment, and that punishment will be borne by Milan’s ally, Tortona. He besieges the city for two months, two months the Tortonese were waiting for help from Milan that never came. Tortona’s citadel sits on a steep hill overlooking the city and is a hard nut to crack. Though Barbarossa’s allies, the city of Pavia bring siege engines and ruthlessness, but progress is slow. And it is brutal. Any defenders they capture are being hanged at large gallows within sight of the city walls.

The city has one vulnerability. Water supply is from just one well outside the main citadel. Barbarossa’s troops manage to at least temporarily capture the well, long enough to throw carcasses of animals and humans into the well. After that the city surrenders. Barbarossa allows the defenders to leave but once they are gone, he has the city burned to the ground.

It had all gone off to such a good start but look at it now. The Italians are used to brutal warfare. Milan had razed Lodi, Como and Novara to the ground and the others weren’t shy either. But taking sides against Milan so openly and consistently will make it hard to be the impartial arbiter of the city disputes he would like to be.

And as if he needed to make it any clearer whose side he was on, he has himself crowned in Pavia after all.

Time to go south and regroup. And en-route he does a good deed, if not a great deed.  In May 1155 he finds himself outside Bologna. Bologna has by now become famous as a place of great learning, in particular its school of law. Its founder, Irnerius had resurrected the Codex Juris Civilis, the law book of emperor Justinian who had ruled 527-565. This was a comprehensive codex of the entirety of existent law in the Roman empire and far, far advanced to the Germanic law texts in force at the time. Irnerius had founded his school in 1050s and by the time of Barbarossa’s visit there were students from all over Europe getting trained in Roman law. But their legal status in the city of Bologna was precarious. In particular the city had made all students from a particular area, say the French or the Burgundians liable for any debt incurred by one of their number. Students weren’t good with money and judging by my own experience still aren’t. And on top of that the typical antagonism between town and gown was already in full swing. Barbarossa took the side of the university and put students and lecturers formally under imperial protection. They are only liable for their own debt, and they should only be judged by their magisters or the local bishop. Not by the city court. This ruling, the Authentica Habita was to be included in the Codex Juris Civilis which made it applicable all throughout Europe. This rule created the model of the independent university that still exists, even if students are now subject to local laws and courts. So, there was something really good in all that bloodshed.

It is now June and as we all know that means time is running out. Rome is already dangerous but in a few weeks it will be a hotbed of disease. All that wandering up and down in Lombardy and the siege of Tortona had cost too much time.

On June 8th do the new pope Hadrian IV and Barbarossa finally meet. Pope Eugenius III had died in 1153, his successor lasted a year, and now it was Hadrian IV, Nicholas Breakspear from Hertfordshire, the only English pope in history. Hadrian was an energetic and competent man with a long list of problems. The first one was to make sure that Frederick Barbarossa was a good son of the church and sticking to the treaty of Constance.

On that count things were off to a bad start. As the pope arrived in the imperial camp near Sutri he expected the new emperor to perform the service of Strator and Marshall as Lothar III had done.  These ceremonial services involve the emperor welcoming the pope at least a stone’s throw from his accommodation, leading his horse to the entrance and then holding the papal stirrup as the pope descends. What exactly went wrong here is unclear. Either Barbarossa outright refused or did it wrongly, sloppily or sourly. In any event, once the pope had descended from his horse and sat down on his chair, he refused the kiss of peace, and all hell broke loose.

Why Barbarossa was unwilling to perform the act has been disputed. The older view was that these services would make him look like a vassal of the pope. And hence his honour would not allow that. Modern historians believe it was a misunderstanding of sorts, which would mean that this was one of the few displays not meticulously planned beforehand.

Anyway, the parties leave without further conversation. The pope insists the ceremony is repeated as that this was an ancient ceremony performed by all emperors in the past. As far as I can see that is untrue. The first emperor to perform this service was Lothar III and it had bad consequences if you remember episode 44.

Barbarossa’s archivists were however not as well versed with their history to refute the papal claims and – as time was running out – 24 hours later Barbarossa repeated the whole procedure and this time did as he was told. The relationship was off to a very bad start.

Pope and Emperor then progressed to Rome where papal authority was limited pretty much to the right bank of Tiber, the Vatican city. The main city was held by the Senate and People of Rome. One thing Hadrian had achieved though was getting Arnold of Brescia expelled from the city when he threatened an interdict. The senate complied and Arnold was tried as a heretic. After the utterly unsurprising verdict, he was handed over to Barbarossa who had him hanged, his body burned and his ashes thrown in the Tiber, so as not to leave a place for his followers to remember him. Whether that endeared the citizens to Barbarossa is unclear.

They did come up to him though and offered to crown him if he would pay 5000 pounds of silver for the privilege. Again, not really a compelling offer even if Barbarossa did not really got on with Hadrian IV. This delegation however meant something was up. Just to be on the safe side Barbarossa deployed a thousand men to hold the leonine walls and block the bridge across the Tiber by St. Angelo.

The next day was a Saturday and coronations normally take place on Sundays. Or so the Romans thought. Hadrian and Barbarossa had decided that to avoid any more trouble, best thing to do was to pull the coronation forward to Saturday.

The emperor arrives surrounded by armed guards at the church of St. Maria in Turri just outside old St. Peter and offers the traditional coronation oath. The pope asks him whether he wants to be a faithful son of the church and he answers three times, that yes he will. The pope now covers him with his mantle and the emperor kisses his chest.

Pope and emperor then enter the atrium of St. Peter through the silver gate where prayers are spoken, then more prayers as he reaches the rota, the giant circular plate of red marble that is still at the entrance of St. Peter. And finally, he is anointed in front of the relics of St. Peter. During the mass Hadrian hands him the sword and sceptre and finally places the crown on his head.

At that the congregation shouts and screams with joy, so loud one might have thought a tremendous thunder had fallen from the sky. And that is what the Romans hear on the other side of the Tiber.

Whilst the emperor returns to his camp and sits down for a great celebratory feast, the Romans are coming out armed to the teeth and angry. They may have still hoped to get their 5000 pound of silver for the coronation or at least some recognition. And what then follows is a brutal massacre. The civilians in Rome have no chance against the battle-hardened knights even if they had not put on their armour. A thousand Romans were killed, 200 captured and – according to the imperial chroniclers, only one of theirs was harmed.

It might have been a great victory, but it also made the position of both pope and emperor in the Holy city untenable. Leaving behind the stench of rotting flesh the two heads of Christendom travelled to Tivoli and then onwards to Spoleto. This journey did not improve imperial papal relations. Wherever they went questions arose about who was who’s vassal, which rights were to be granted by who and just generally who was in charge here. The party arrived at the abbey of Farfa, an imperial abbey since time immemorial and subject to so many imperial charters I used to jump over them every time I saw one – ahh Farfa again. But by 1155 the pope was utterly convinced the abbey was now his if only for the fact that no emperor had shown his face there for half a century. All these unresolved issues weren’t really crucial but they constantly implied that either party failed to recognise the honour and status of the other and gradually eroded the alliance the two sides had formed under the treaty of Constance.

The cities along the way are asked to pay the Fodrum, the tax owed to a passing emperor. Spoleto thought they could fool the emperor and paid him in worthless copper coins. They had hoped they get away with it because they held one of Barbarossa’s followers, a count Guido in their power. That did not go down well, in particular not the imprisonment of an imperial envoy and so Spoleto was besieged, captured and burned. For the next two days the army plundered Spoleto during daytime but stayed in their camp during the night as the smell of burning flesh was overpowering.

This may all be sort of profitable for the soldiers, but it did not really do much for the actual military objectives. Barbarossa had promised the pope to overcome the Roman Commune and to break the hold of the Normans on Southern Italy. As for part one, that had already failed, leaving objective #2.

There were some promising signs for a successful campaign. The great king Roger II had died in 1154 and his son William I was struggling to gain control, in particular over the rebellious feudal lords on the mainland. He and his chief minister Maio of Bari were pushing for ever more centralisation of the government and squeezed the barons out of positions of power. No wonder they called him William the Bad.

This discontent could have provided the opportunity for Frederick to deliver against his promise in Constance. Very much like in Lothar III’s day the barons of Puglia were ready to rise up and the cities were happy to join.

And another advantage was at hand. Emperor Manuel had sent two of his best generals, Michael Paleologos and John Doukas with a small army and a big chunk of cash to Ancona. They were to team up with Frederick and capture Puglia. For several days the two sides negotiate but in the end there is no deal. Two things are stopping Frederick.

The first was the treaty of Constance. Barbarossa had promised the pope not to make an agreement with Manuel that would give the Byzantines control over Puglia or other parts of Italy. And that would have been the demand from Constantinople. These guys were not handing over fine gold just out of the goodness of their hearts. Doing a deal without papal consent would have caused a lot of friction in the already difficult relationship with the pope.

He may have taken the risk if the chances of success would have been high enough. The Byzantines had brought only a small army to add to Barbarossa’s already modest forces. And it is now the height of summer and his vassals have already made clear that they are not keen on a campaign in Southern Italy – again, the same scenario as 17 years earlier when the German princes ended Lothar III’s campaign.

Barbarossa puts all this in the too hard box and decides to go home. The alliance with Byzantium is now dead as is his chance to marry a gorgeous, purple born Greek princess. Palaeologus and Doukas go it alone and have some initial success. They even capture Bari. In the process they drive a final nail in the coffin of germane/byzantine relations by showing letters bearing Barbarossa’s signature that purport a transfer of ownership of Puglia to the Vasilev.  These may either be fake or being used without consent. In the end the byzantine endeavour fails, their small army perishes, and the two generals die manfully in battle.

As for Barbarossa, his return home also allowed for true heroism. As the army was about to leave Italy they had to pass Verona, a city whose castles they had sacked on the way down and whose citizens were none too happy to see them coming up again. They did provide a bridge across the river Adige or Etsch in German outside the town for the army to cross but otherwise stayed behind their walls.

The army followed the Etsch for about 25 km from Verona and reached the Chiusa di Verona or Veroneser Klause where the river valley narrows with steep mountains on both sides. And that is where the Veronese had decided to trap the army. They blocked the exit and entrance with large boulders and their archers shot at the advance guard of the army. There was no way out. To the left the ice-cold fast flowing river Etch, ahead and behind well defended enemy positions and to the right, the sheer cliff of the Chiusa de Verona.

The enemy’s demands were not political but purely financial. They required that every knight including the emperor himself was to hand over their armour, their horses and their weapons. This was totally unacceptable. Imagine the emperor returns from his trip to Italy with barely the clothes on his back. His rule would have ended even more ignominiously than Conrad III.

But it did not. If you want to see a great depiction of how he got out of this cliff hanger, you have to go to Munich. There in the gardens of the royal residence, the Hofgarten a 19th century painter depicted the most glorious moments in the history of the House of Wittelsbach the Kings of Bavaria. And that cycle of frescoes starts with Otto von Wittelsbach in the Veroneser Klause. Otto was an accomplished warrior and he and his Bavarian knights were also skilled climbers. In the night, unseen by their enemies 200 of the brave Bavarians scaled the sheer cliff carrying their weapons and their armour. No ropes, no harness,, no crampons, just straight up the wall. As the sun rose, they planted the imperial banner and with wild screaming descended upon the thieving Veronese. At the same time Barbarossa and his men attacked them from the front. In less than an hour the opponents sued for mercy, but none was forthcoming. They weren’t real combatants, they were robbers after monetary gain, not knights fighting for glory. Barbarossa had all those who survived hanged alongside the road.

And so ended the first of Barbarossa’s journeys to Italy. He had achieved his main objective, he had received the imperial crown, but he had not achieved much else. His relationship with the pope was on the rocks since he neither cleared out the Roman commune nor defeated the king of Sicily. His alliance with emperor Manuel in Constantinople was now permanently dissolved. The Northern Italian cities remember him for the brutal siege of Tortona, the destruction of Chieri, Asti and Spoleto and the hanging of so many.

As he heads back, one idea takes hold of his mind. Italy was so immensely rich, so much richer than Germany that if he were able to establish a permanent rule over Italy he would be truly as powerful as his great predecessors Otto the Great and Charlemagne. He must also have realised that the two biggest issues he had faced were the small size of his army and the unreliability of his vassals who wanted to go home just when things had become interesting.

Fighting for the honour of the empire was a motivator for many of the younger princes, but it seems not for enough for all. Next time he needs to come with more men and stay for longer and to do that his governance model needs a tweak. What that is and how he fares on his next round we will find out next week. Hope to see you then.

And in the meantime, if you want to get deeper into the Byzantine side of the Mediterranean conflicts, I strongly recommend the History of Byzantium by Robin Pierson who you have heard in the introduction. Robin has been tracing the Eastern Empire since 2012 and I have been following him ever since he started. His in-depth knowledge of the subject and ability to distil the most important facts makes listening to his podcast such a joy. Our narratives are currently almost in parallel, so if you want to get the Byzantine perspective on The alliance between Manuel and Barbarossa check out his episode 235.. I cannot recommend that enough.

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The Basic Law of the Holy Roman Empire

“Every realm that is divided internally will go to ruin, for its princes have become the comrades of thieves. The Lord has poured out the spirit of deceit among them, so that they grope about at midday as though in darkness, and He has withdrawn the light from their dwellings, so that they are blind and leaders of the blind. And those who wander in the dark run into things, and those who are blind of spirit bring about evil deeds, which occur in disunity. [..]

You, Jealousy, have soiled the Christian Empire, which was reinforced by God with the virtues of faith hope and love, just like the indivisible Trinity, and whose foundations stand firmly on the kingdom of Christ; you have soiled it with your ancient poison that you have spewed forth like an evil snake on the Empire and its members. And to shatter the pillars and to bring the whole structure to collapse, you have incited disunity among the seven electors, who should illuminate the Empire like the light of the seven lamps of the mind.

But in the name of the office which we hold as Emperor we are obliged to act against disunity and struggle among the electors [..] for two reasons: because of our Imperial office, and because of our rights as an elector.

In order to increase the unity among them, and to bring about unanimity during elections and to avoid disgraceful divisions and to close the door to the multiple dangers that arise from them, we have issued the laws written down here at our festive Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, in the presence of all the spiritual and worldly electors, and before a large crowd of other princes, counts, free lords, lords, nobles and urban delegates. From our Imperial throne, decorated with the imperial insignias and treasures, wearing the imperial crown, after ripe deliberation, we issued them on the basis of our unrestricted imperial powers, in the year of our Lord 1356, on the 10th of January, in the tenth year of our royal power and the first of our Imperial power.”

So begins one of the most important constitutional documents of the Holy Roman Empire, the Golden Bull of 1356. But what did it actually say, and even more important, what did it not say and how does it fit into the context of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. That is what we are going to discuss in this episode.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 160 – The Golden Bull of 1356, also Episode 23 of Season 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

“Every realm that is divided internally will go to ruin, for its princes have become the comrades of thieves. The Lord has poured out the spirit of deceit among them, so that they grope about at midday as though in darkness, and He has withdrawn the light from their dwellings, so that they are blind and leaders of the blind. And those who wander in the dark run into things, and those who are blind of spirit bring about evil deeds, which occur in disunity. [..]

You, Jealousy, have soiled the Christian Empire, which was reinforced by God with the virtues of faith hope and love, just like the indivisible Trinity, and whose foundations stand firmly on the kingdom of Christ; you have soiled it with your ancient poison that you have spewed forth like an evil snake on the Empire and its members. And to shatter the pillars and to bring the whole structure to collapse, you have incited disunity among the seven electors, who should illuminate the Empire like the light of the seven lamps of the mind.

But in the name of the office which we hold as Emperor we are obliged to act against disunity and struggle among the electors [..] for two reasons: because of our Imperial office, and because of our rights as an elector.

In order to increase the unity among them, and to bring about unanimity during elections and to avoid disgraceful divisions and to close the door to the multiple dangers that arise from them, we have issued the laws written down here at our festive Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, in the presence of all the spiritual and worldly electors, and before a large crowd of other princes, counts, free lords, lords, nobles and urban delegates. From our Imperial throne, decorated with the imperial insignias and treasures, wearing the imperial crown, after ripe deliberation, we issued them on the basis of our unrestricted imperial powers, in the year of our Lord 1356, on the 10th of January, in the tenth year of our royal power and the first of our Imperial power.”

So begins one of the most important constitutional documents of the Holy Roman Empire, the Golden Bull of 1356. But what did it actually say, and even more important, what did it not say and how does it fit into the context of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. That is what we are going to discuss in this episode.

Before I start there is an important piece of information. Apple has decided that it will take 30% of any new pledge you make via the Patreon App from November onwards. Android users and existing pledges are unaffected, so you do not need to do anything.

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And with that, back to the show

Even if you grow up in Germany, there is not an awful lot of political history of the 14th century you are likely to be taught. But two events you will hear about, one is the Interregnum and the other the Golden Bull. Why, because the Golden Bull remained on the statute books of the Holy Roman empire until 1806, and it governed its main political event, the election of a new emperor, throughout that time. It was never amended or changed. Creating a system to select a ruler that lasts unchanged for 450 years is no mean feat, and some have called it the constitution or the Basic Law of the Holy Roman empire.

That alone would be reason enough to dedicate a whole episode to it, but the significance of the document goes well beyond providing a procedure for the choice of a ruler.

When Karl IV returned from his imperial coronation in Rome in the summer of 1355 he was riding high. He had been crowned emperor with the blessing of the pope, he had made peace with the other powerful imperial families, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs and he had asserted his and the empire’s power on the western frontier against the acquisitive French.

Having reached a degree of recognition few of his predecessors could have dreamt of, he wanted to use his power to put his two realms, that of Bohemia and the Empire onto a more stable footing. We have already heard that his plan to pass a fundamental law, almost a constitution for Bohemia had floundered on the resistance of the Bohemian barons.

But that did not discourage him from trying the same in the empire. He called an imperial diet to Nuernberg for January 1356 to discuss his proposal for a decree that would be later called the Golden Bull. By the way, the Golden Bull is not the only golden bull. The term means that the document had been sealed with a golden seal, marking it out as particularly important. But there have bee dozens if not hundreds of golden bulls. Some or famous, like the golden bull of Rimini that granted the Teutonic Knights ownership of Prussia and if you ask a Czech about the Golden bull, they would think of the one that turned Bohemia into an inheritable kingdom in 1212.

But in a German context The Golden Bull is the one issued in 1356/57 by Karl IV. Before we talk about why it is so important, let’s first look at what it actually says.

The Golden Bull is an imperial decree comprising 23 chapters first issued at the imperial diet in Nuernberg on January 10, 1356 and then amended by a further 8 chapters at a subsequent diet in Metz almost exactly one year later.

The majority of the document deals with the process of the imperial election and the role of the prince electors.

When I went to school, we were told that the Golden Bull established the system of election by the seven electors, but anyone who has listened to this series knows, that this is not so. Election by seven electors, namely the three archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine and the Margrave of Brandenburg had been standard practice since at least the election of Rudolf von Habsburg, way back in 1273.

But what the Golden Bull does is making sure that from now on there should no longer be any more contested elections. And that is achieved by resolving certain open questions once and for all, and by closing down some loopholes.

The first thing was to make sure there is not going to be any confusion who these seven electors were. In the past this had been a problem since for instance the two branches of the ducal house of Saxony, the Sachsen-Wittenbergs and Sachsen-Lauenburgs each had claimed the right to elect. Equally the Wittelsbachs had set up a system of rotation between the Bavarian and the Palatinate line about who would be allowed to cast the vote. And, as we have seen in the election of Ludwig the Bavarian, ambitious candidates sometimes pulled prince-electors out of their hats, nobody had expected.

The Golden Bull made sure that there could only ever be seven men who could be the Prince lectors.

First it states that the vote for Saxony rested with the Sachsen -Wittenberg and that the Palatinate vote could only ever be exercised by whoever is the count Palatinate on the Rhine. The Sachsen Lauenburgs and the Bavarian Wittelsbachs were told that they were just imperial princes, like everyone else, something the latter in particular will resent for centuries to come.

Then a system of strict male primogenitur is introduced for the Prince-Electors. Only the eldest son of the elector should become elector and should also inherit all the lands associated with the electorate. Lands belonging to an electorate could not be divided up, sold, pawned or otherwise given away. Should an elector die without issue, his brother or his brother’s eldest son should take over. Is the elector younger than 18, his most senior male uncle was to cast the vote. And finally, if there is no male heir left, the electorate falls back to the emperor who can enfeoff it to any other suitable candidate.

The Golden Bull contains further provisions for the Prince electors that grant them pretty much all the imperial rights within their territories. They were now almost kings in their own lands. They could establish cities, build castles, set taxes, mint coins at will. Their judicial system was almost completely insulated from the imperial power, etc., etc.

Then there are very detailed procedural rules. The election has to take place in Frankfurt. The election is to be called by the archbishop of Mainz within a month of the death of the previous emperor. If he does not, the electors have to come to Frankfurt on their own accord. Electors who fail to show on the date, lose their vote. Each elector shall bring no more than 200 retainers, only 50 of whom are allowed to bear arms. The city council of Frankfurt is tasked with keeping the peace between the different groups.

Upon arrival the electors are to hear mass at the church of St. Bartholomeu, the church nowadays called the Kaiserdom. There they would also vote on the new ruler, each giving their vote in turn with the archbishop of Mainz voting last. Prince Electors could vote for themselves. If after three months they have failed to select a candidate, the electors are to be reduced to just bread and water. Whoever is elected by the majority has to be unanimously recognised as the emperor.

The coronation should take place in Aachen and the king should hold his first diet in Nuernberg

And then there are even more detailed rules and regulations, including detailed provisions about who sits where at dinner, who leads which procession and so forth.

All these rules were designed to make sure that the elections could take place peacefully and could only ever produce one legitimate King of the Romans. And in that respect, the Golden Bull was a huge success. Whenever there was an election, only one candidate was elected. That however did not mean we are completely out of the woods as regards competing kings. How that happened we will find out when we get there.

Apart from the provisions about the election and the prince electors, there are a few more, somewhat random chapters. On bans any form of associations, confederations or unions between cities or between individual lords, effectively outlawing city leagues, like for instance the Hanseatic League. But it also banned the associations that the Reichsritter, the knights had formed to protect their interests against the encroaching territorial princes. Karl also banned the practice of cities to admit local nobles as citizens, thereby removing them from the feudal context of their overlord. And finally there is an even more watered down version of the ban on feuding that Frederick II had included in the Mainzer Landfrieden more than 100 years earlier.

So, if we look at the heart of the Golden Bull, there is not an awful lot of new stuff. What it does, is sorting out the open questions and designing a procedure that reduces if not eliminates double elections and some provisions that limits the city’s and knight’s ability to fend off the encroaching territorial princes. All the rest, the idea of seven electors, the privileges to do as they like in their lands etc., had been standard practice for a long time, or go back to the Mainzer Landfrieden of Frederick II.

So, nice, but not earth shattering. So, why did contemporaries see it as something of huge importance? Why did they produce no less than 173 copies, some of which like the copy produced for king Wenceslaus IV, the son of Karl IV, includes delightful images of pretty washing girls, wild men and pretty birds .

As is sometimes the case, the real significance of the Golden Bull isn’t what was in it, but what wasn’t. And what wasn’t in the Golden Bull at all was any mention of the Pope. If anyone had listened to these last 159 episodes you have most likely retained at least one thing, that the pope was a seriously big deal for the empire. But now he does not even get ignored in this foundation document that set out the election process in enough detail that we know who walked in front of who when entering the city of Frankfurt on election day.

Was it an omission – no way. This was deliberate. A deliberate exclusion of the pope from the election of future emperors thereby removing the successor of St. Peter from the fabric of the empire that he had dominated since the days of Henry IV. And as much by luck as by design it worked.

How did the Golden Bull became the formal end point in a 300 year conflict between the popes and the emperors?

If we look back at what happened and what drove this sometimes brutal clash between Rome and the Kaiser, it boils down to three broad drivers, what we called the three roads to Canossa in episode 30.  And these three were the rise in lay piety, the reform papacy and the internal conflicts in the empire that first erupted in the Saxon rebellions of the mid-11th century.

Let’s start with Lay Piety. What happened in a nutshell was that as medieval society enjoyed centuries of economic expansion, even people outside the church hierarchy found the breathing space to care about their spiritual wellbeing. They demanded competent priests who could guide them in living a life that pleased God and would make sure they will be counted amongst the righteous at the last judgement. This pushed for a reform of the church that was initially led by the emperor and many of his magnates.

The popes only got involved in this movement when it was already well under way. Pope Leo IX, (1002-1054) was the first pope who took charge of the task to clean up what was sometimes called the Pornocracy. His successors turned out to be equally capable and over the next 200 years the church cut down on simony and corruption, consolidated the theological underpinnings of the faith, improved the quality of the clergy, supported strict religious orders and through all that wrestled control of the reform process from the emperors.

This rise of the papacy to ever greater moral authority led them to claim temporal power over kings and emperors. The two swords were no longer equal, Innocent III declared that, like the moon, the monarchs received their lustre only as a reflection of the papal sun. And on a more tangible level, the two powers clashed over the question of investiture, i.e., who selects the bishops and archbishops, over power in Northern Italy and then even more intensely over who controlled the kingdom of Sicily

The first bust-up was during the reign of Henry IV that included the famous scene of the emperor kneeling in the snow begging the pope for forgiveness. But pretty much every one of the emperors that followed, found himself in some sort of dispute with the pope, even those that had set out as papal champions. Henry IV, Henry V,  Frederick Barbarossa, Otto IV, Frederick II, Ludwig the Bavarian were excommunicated, whilst Lothar III, Henry VI, and Henry VII came close.

What tilted the balance in favour of the papacy was that this conflict wasn’t the only one the emperors had to deal with. The other frontline was the resistance of the aristocrats against a centralising, tax raising monarchy. This conflict broke out in the open again under Henry IV but it continued all throughout the Middle Ages, often somewhat inaccurately labelled as a fight between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen.

The Golden Bull is issued just at the time when all of these trends either petered out or changed direction.

Lets start at the back, the civil wars between princes and emperors. These ended more or less with the reign of emperor Karl IV.

Issuing the Golden Bull reconfirmed and strengthened the rights of the electors to act like kings in their own territories. The emperor had formally accepted the freedoms of the princes that Otto von Nordheim had so vehemently demanded in 1077.

Then he had sold or pawned almost the entirety of the resources that supported an imperial administration, which made the throne an exceedingly unattractive proposition. Only the largest of territorial princes could afford to be emperor, and with some small deviations, that is how the empire will work from here on out. Only the Luxemburgs and later the Habsburgs had enough Hausmacht to meet the imperial expenses.

And last but not least, the 30 years under papal interdict had fostered a sense of unity amongst not just the imperial princes, but the population as a whole. At the Kurverein zu Rhense in 1338 the prince electors, three of them veritable archbishops, had unanimously declared quote “that it is according to the law and ancient custom of the empire, approved that once someone has been elected as King of the Romans by the prince-electors of the empire or by the majority of the same princes, even if in discord, he does not need the nomination, approval, confirmation, assent, or authority of the Apostolic See to assume the administration of the goods and rights of the empire or the royal title.” This notion was then signed by a vast number of lesser lords and cities. No longer could the pope hope to use disunity in the empire to push his interests.

Which gets us to the second key driver of the conflict between papacy and empire, the rise of the reform papacy. We have talked about that yesterday and so we do not need to go into that much detail. But the main point is that the moral authority of the church had begun to erode after its total victory over Frederick II and his descendants. And once they had moved to Avignon that trend became an avalanche. John XXII condemnation of the poverty of the Franciscans, the shocking display of wealth by the cardinals and the papal court, the political dependency on the French king, the greed, the sale of ecclesiastical positions, all that and more put people off.

And with that erosion of moral authority, the church was no longer the institution people looked to as their guide to heaven. We already heard about the Flagellants who emerged during the years of the plague. But the writings of early reformers, of William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and so forth circulated amongst the educated classes, as did Petrarch scathing critique of the Avignon papacy and the visions of St. Bridget of Sweden. John Wycliff blamed the unworthy clergy for the plague in one of his earliest works. As literacy levels had improved significantly in particular amongst the merchant class in the cities, some of these ideas circulated more and more broadly.

By the time the Golden Bull was issued, the papacy had lost the ability to effectively fight the emperor. They had lost the spiritual leadership amongst the faithful, were politically boxed in and could no longer piggyback on the internal divisions of the empire.

And they also had a lot less reason to fight the emperors. Not since the catastrophic defeat of Karl’s grandfather Henry VII had an emperor attempted to exert effective power in Northern Italy. They were happy to declare a Visconti or Este an imperial vicar or elevate a Gonzaga to a margrave, all in exchange for cash, but apart from safe passage to Rome, they had demanded very little. And when Karl left the eternal city on the day of his coronation, he sent a clear signal to Innocent VI that he would not interfere with the papal states.

The conflict between the popes and the emperors was over. And because it was over, Karl could issue the definitive guide to an imperial election without mentioning the pope, and everybody, the pope included understood that a papal approbation would no longer be required. The elected king of the Romans was in charge of the empire from the moment he was elected and would remain so to his death.

The Golden Bull stated what should have been obvious to everybody at the time, but by stating it, made it real. That is why princes and cities all over the empire demanded copies of the document. And that is also why it was such a watershed moment.

Now that the destructive conflict with the papacy was formally over and the princes and emperor had found a permanent settlement, the empire could begin a new phase in its development. In this new phase the empire can finally establish its own institutions, the Reichstag as the political coordination mechanism between the imperial estates and the Allgemeine Landfrieden, Reichshofgericht and Kreise as a tools to provide policing and justice across the empire. The Golden Bull may not have broken new ground intellectually, but it was the kick-off document that launched the second phase of the Holy Roman empire that would last until 1806 surviving even Europe’s most devastating religious war.

Now that is my interpretation of what the Golden Bull was and what it meant. As you can imagine for such a totemic document there are many other views. So if you want to get really deep into it and can find a way to feed it into deepl or any other translation engine of your choice, there is a pretty comprehensive compendium published in 2006 called “Die Goldene Bulle Politik, Wahrnehmung Rezeption”. In it the crème de la crème of German medieval scholars investigate every nook and cranny of the document in over more than a 1000 pages.

I am afraid I could not follow up on all of these in the 25-30 minute format of this podcast. But we will touch upon some next week when we talk about the reception of the Golden Bull, in particular in Vienna where Karl’s son in law Richard IV of Austria, called the Founder is arch-irritated about some of his peers being formally elevated to a status above him. And in his anger he does what everybody else would do – he went down the archive and unearth some letters from Julius Caesar and Nero to his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.  And then there is the relationship between the empire and France, the various other constitutions that are created during that period and lots more. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go – I am afraid- you will hear the inevitable bit about the History of the Germans being advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too. All you have to do is to go historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for the cost of a latte per month. And if you sign up after November, make sure not to subscribe through the Patreon app, only through the Patreon website

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featuring Pope John XXII and William of Ockham

This week we look at the central intellectual debate of the 14th century, did Jesus own property? If yes, then it was right and proper that the church owned land, privileges, entire counties and duchies, yes that the pope was not just the spiritual but also the secular ruler of all of Christianity. And if not, then the pope as a successor to the apostles should rescind all worldly possessions and all political power. The follow-on question from there was even more hair raising: if indeed power does not come from the grace of god as determined by the Holy church, then where does it come from. One thinker, Marsilius of Padua goes as far as  stating the obvious, power comes from election by the people…

This is what pope John XXII, Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham and the cast of Umberto Eco’s the Name of  the Rose discuss. But there was also a politician, Ludwig IV, elected emperor who took these ideas – and put them into actions….let’s find out just how radical this ruler they call “the Bavarian” really was.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 151 – The Kurverein zu Rhens – featuring William of Ockham, also episode 14 of season 8 # From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull, 1250-1356.

This week we look at the central intellectual debate of the 14th century, did Jesus own property? If yes, then it was right and proper that the church owned land, privileges, entire counties and duchies, yes that the pope was not just the spiritual but also the secular ruler of all of Christianity. And if not, then the pope as a successor to the apostles should rescind all worldly possessions and all political power. The follow-on question from there was even more hair raising: if indeed power does not come from the grace of god as determined by the Holy church, then where does it come from. One thinker, Marsilius of Padua goes as far as  stating the obvious, power comes from election by the people…

This is what pope John XXII, Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham and the cast of Umberto Eco’s the Name of  the Rose discuss. But there was also a politician, Ludwig IV, elected emperor who took these ideas – and put them into actions….let’s find out just how radical this ruler they call “the Bavarian” really was.

But before we start let me remind you that the history of the Germans is advertising free, and with good reason. Regular reminders to use online mental health services or invest in crypto currencies is the #1 irritation for many listeners and causes moral dilemmas for many podcasters. Being advertising free means this show is entirely dependent upon people sustaining it financially, either through one-time donations on historyofthegermans.com/support or as ongoing patreon sponsors on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. And special thanks to Michael K., Linda A., Robert B., Kevin Scott M., Chris Gesell, Tristan Benzing and Carsten D. who have already signed up. BTW., if you want your full name read out, please send me a message on patreon so I can make sure I get this right.

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And with that, back to the show.

When we left the king of the Romans and emperor elect Ludwig IV last week, he had just won the battle of Mühldorf against his cousin and rival Frederick the Handsome from the house of Habsburg. He was now the uncontested ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, or at least he should be.

We have been here so many times that if you now say “to Rome, to Rome”, that would not give you the 10 points to Griffindor you were hoping for. Obviously, a coronation journey had to be the next step. And, again, same procedure as last time, Ludwig sought a papal invitation to be crowned above the grave of St. Peter.

Which gets us to the first of the key protagonists of this episode, the man who was to grant this invitation, the new pope, John XXII.

Pope John XXII was born Jacques Duèze in the city of Cahors, the son of a long distance merchant and banker. He studied law in Montpellier and became a lecturer in canon law and an advisor to the bishop of Toulouse. His career took quite some time to get going properly. He was well into his fifties before he caught the eye of king Charles II of Naples who made him his chancellor. In 1310 he became bishop of Avignon, part of the county of Provence which in turn was owned by his sponsor the king of Naples and at the time pretty much a provincial backwater.

His career got a further boost when the papal court appeared on his home turf, i.e., when pope Clement V set up shop in his city, the city of Avignon. In 1312 he was elevated to become a cardinal, just in time to get involved in the election of Clement’s successor when the old pope died in 1314.

By 1314 the composition of the college of cardinals looked quite unfamiliar. There were only 7 Italian cardinals left, who were broken down into various factions. The Italians had to contend with  10 gascons, most of them relatives of the excessively nepotistic Clement V and sympathetic to their duke, who happened to be king Edward II of England. Then there were a further 6 French cardinals supportive of the Capetian kings of France.

All this already made electing a new pope hard, but things got even more difficult when the heirs of king Philip the Fair died in quick succession, one of them a newborn who survived just four days.  

The first conclave in Carpentras ended when a mob of Gascons attacked their fellow cardinals shouting, “death to the Italians” and “we want a pope”. The Italian cardinals ran for their lives and hid, whilst the nephew of pope Clement V raided the papal treasury and then disappeared. For 2 years there was no head to the church, no administration, just cardinals wandering around in southern France avoiding each other.

Finally, the younger son of Philipp the Fair had enough, rounded the cardinals up and locked them into a monastery in Lyon and starved them until they had selected a new pope. And that pope was Jacques Duèze, son of a moneylender from Cahors. The reason he was chosen had nothing to do with his considerable talents as a lawyer, but was purely a function of his advanced age, he was over seventy and his sickly appearance. Jacques took the papal name John XXII and would reign as pope for another 18 years, far longer than anyone had expected.

John XXII was a gifted administrator who massively expanded the papal government. He brought the church organizations across europe under tight central control and restored papal finances. Most of these funds were then ploughed back into the papal organization or were used to pay alms. John XXII personally lived a frugal lifestyle, though when he needed to represent the power of the papacy he did. At the wedding of his great niece he threw a banquet where guests consumed 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 580 partridges and lots more foodstuff. He established a working relationship with the French king that granted him significantly more independence than his predecessor Clement V had enjoyed.

That would net, net be maybe not a perfect but a pretty decent papacy. It definitely beats that of Clement V which included leaving Rome, becoming a plaything of the French king and suppressing, torturing and burning the Templars. Still, John XXII left such a black mark on the church, it would take until 1958 before a pope dared to again take the name John, the most common of papal names ever. In contrast, there were 9 more Clements after the Clement V.

What was it that pope John XXII did that made him so despised? Those of you who have read the Name of the Rose may remember the passage where the character William of Baskerville said about John XXII: “You must realize that for centuries a greedier man has never ascended the papal throne. The whore of Babylon against whom our Ubertino used to fulminate, the corrupt popes described by the poets of your country, like that Alighieri, were meek lambs and sober compared to John. He is a thieving magpie, a Jewish usurer; in Avignon there is more trafficking than in Florence!” end quote.

The reason John XXII ended up as “he who shall not be named” of the church was not just for allowing the monetary excesses of his cardinals, bishops and abbots to run out of control, but because he tried to justify their behaviour on legal and theological grounds. Basically before John XXII the church in general and the popes in particular were at least embarrassed about the fact that they were amassing vast fortunes for themselves and their families by exploiting the faithful. John XXII took the view that there was no need to be embarrassed since Jesus and the apostles owned property and so could the church. From there it is only a short hop to pope Leo X famous quote: “God gave us the papacy, now let us enjoy it”, which btw he did not thanks to the actions of a professor of bible studies at the university of Wittenberg called M. Luther.

Now this debate about whether the church and the pope should be poor had been going on for centuries. Wave after wave of reformers had demanded that priests, bishops and popes should live by the example of the apostles, meaning living a modest life without material possessions and dedicated to prayer. Most of these reformers ended up being condemned as heretics but those very few who did not became doctors of the church or founders of religious orders. Which one it was, burnt at the stake or sainthood was pretty much pot luck given the programs were at least initially quite similar.

Amongst those reformers who were co-opted by the church and were made saints, nobody embraced the idea of the poverty of the church as stringently as St. Francis. He laid it down in the rule of the Franciscans  No Franciscan friar was to own anything, nor would the order itself hold property. Franciscan friars were allowed just one poor habit with a hood and a second one without a hood if they needed it. No shoes unless strictly necessary, no books, just a breviary. Certainly no coins or monies either directly or indirectly. And so on and so, St. Francis was pretty clear, Franciscans were supposed not to own anything more than the clothes on their backs, nothing at all.  

But that ideal rapidly collided with reality. Rich donors believed that the prayers of these holy men would be an effective way to speed up the journey through the potentially millions of years of waiting in purgatory. Very soon the Franciscan were receiving gifts of lands and treasure from devout Christian and great Franciscan monasteries rose up all across europe, starting with the Sacro Convento in Assisi, that miracle of 13th and 14th century art. And now the question arose, how can the Franciscans have these monasteries when the whole order was banned from owning anything, except for their two habits.

To square this circle the church had devised the concept that all donations made to the Franciscans were automatically passed on to the pope who would then allow the Franciscans to use these assets on the basis of a legal concept called usufruct, basically a form of unpaid lease.

And this legal construct of the usufruct was the lever John XXII used to break the Franciscan doctrine of the poverty of Christ. Under roman and still modern law, usufruct gives a person the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property, short of the destruction or waste of its substance. John XXII argued that if for example a Franciscan received a loaf of bread from a parishioner and ate it, this could not be a form of usufruct since by eating it, he destroyed the loaf. If he held the bread without owning it, eating the loaf would be theft or willful destruction of property. The only way out of that conundrum was for the Franciscan to accept ownership of the donations they received, which meant the church as a whole was allowed to own things and that in turn meant that all the excessive display of wealth going on in Avignon was therefore fine.

Did I say that John XXII was an accomplished canon lawyer? Lawyers, and I can say that being one myself, come in three flavors, incompetent, clever or good. A good lawyer is someone who understands the spirit of the law and uses this to construct an equitable solution.  A clever lawyer is one who uses the wording of the law to bend the spirit of the law to his benefit.

John XXII wasn’t a good lawyer, he was a clever lawyer. And that is why he took a concept from the law of property conveyancing to make a point about the moral standards of a religious institution. Perfectly convincing when one looks at the words on the page, complete nonsense if you look at the moral choices involved.  

The Franciscans, led by their minister general, Michael of Cesena refused to breach the rule of St. Francis and end up in hell just in order to comply with the civil code. They wanted to live the life of the apostles as they saw it, caring for the sick and poor, praying and renouncing all worldly possessions. And if that made the pope and his filthy rich cardinals look bad, so be it.

This argument began as an exchange of learned treatises between the pope and the Franciscans before getting increasingly heated. And it drew in more and more of the medieval scholars, including the great English thinker, William of Ockham of razor’s fame. William was asked by Michael of Cesena to review the various statements made by pope John XXII about the subject. William of Ockham concluded the following (quote): “a great many things that were heretical, erroneous, silly, ridiculous, fantastic, insane, and defamatory, contrary and likewise plainly adverse to orthodox faith, good morals, natural reason, certain experience, and fraternal charity.” End quote. So much for balance. These accusations made the pope a heretic, and a heretic was automatically no longer pope. That was a pretty bold move by William and Michael, followed by the somewhat less bold move of running away from Avignon immediately after posting the report to the papal palace.

The Franciscan leadership, including Michael of Cesena and William of Ockham were now, in 1327, on the run and needed a protector, and they met this protector in Pisa, and that protector was none other than our friend, the survivor of monkey abductions and chivalric battles, Ludwig IV, called the Bavarian.

Ludwig took these learned and holy men in with great joy, because he too had a run-in with pope John XXII.

The problem had been that pope John XXII was not only intensely relaxed about bishops, abbots,  cardinals and papal nephews getting filthy rich, he also believed that Boniface VIII had been right when he had declared that quote: “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff”. And specifically that nobody could be ruler of the Holy Roman Empire who had not been approved by the pope.

I will not go into the question whether previous emperors have or have not sought explicit approval for their elections from the pope. Answering that requires Latin language skills and patience I simply do not possess. The important point is that John XXII believed it was a requirement. And Ludwig did not. Ludwig had just fought for eight long years with his cousins, stretched his resources to breaking point to win the crown. He pointed at the dead and wounded at Mühldorf and asked, on what basis am I not the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.

Ludwig and John XXII fell out properly over Northern Italy, and specifically Milan. John XXII believed that in the absence of papal approval of a King of the Romans, the throne was vacant. And during this vacancy it fell to the pope to keep order and specifically appoint the imperial vicars. So he relieved the Visconti of Milan, the Della Scala of Verona and the Este of Ferrara from their position as imperial vicars in Northern Italy that they had held since Henry VII’s fateful journey. When the city lords refused to bow down, the pope placed Milan under interdict and put together a crusade against the Visconti, which however failed. The Visconti appealed to the now established Ludwig the Bavarian who confirmed them as imperial vicar.

At that point John XXII did what every self-respecting pope thwarted in his political ambitions did and excommunicated Ludwig of Bavaria for disobedience. The excommunication revived the hopes of the Habsburgs, specifically duke Leopold that they could still gain the throne after all. What further strengthened the Habsburg case was that Ludwig had angered his main ally, king John of Bohemia when he had made his son the new margrave of Brandenburg, a story we will talk more about next week.

Bottom line is that 2 years after his great success at Mühldorf, king Ludwig IV was again in trouble. There are two stories about how he resolved it, a nice, heroic and chivalric version and a more sober, analytical version.

The chivalric version goes as follows: While Ludwig’s rival for the crown, Frederick the Handsome was held in honorable captivity at Schloss Trausnitz, the two cousins who had grown up together renewed their friendship. Negotiating long into the night they agreed that Frederick would give up any claim on the imperial crown and would return some of the imperial lands he had seized. In exchange, he would not have to pay a ransom and was allowed to return home. Once back in Vienna he should obtain the support of his brothers and his main allies to this agreement. Should he fail to get these signatures, he was to return to his jail in Bavaria.

Frederick did go back to Vienna and tried to convince his brothers that the game was up. Leopold however saw things differently. He argued that Ludwig was excommunicated and hence any promise made to him could be broken. Moreover, they received letters from pope John XXII to that effect as well as financial support from the king of France to continue the war.

Still, Frederick, a man of his word, having failed in his mission, returned to captivity in Bavaria. Ludwig, deeply moved by his cousin’s  integrity, offered him what he always wanted, the crown. Ludwig and Frederick should rule jointly. If one were to go to Italy to become emperor, the other would keep things on an even keel back home in Germany and vice versa. Hearing that generous offer, the grateful Frederick embraced his cousin, became co-king and they remained firm friends until the Habsburg’s death.

The other, more constitutional perspective looks like that: This was the third time that the succession of the empire had to be decided by force of arms, Dürnkrut, Göllheim and now Mühldorf. This was not a sustainable model, in particular now when there were three roughly equal sized political blocks. And it was completely untenable if the pope in Avignon, which means the king of France, actually decided who rules or whether there was a ruler at all.

For the empire to survive, it had to go further down the road of becoming the collective responsibility of the princes instead of a traditional monarchy. This process had begun long ago with Barbarossa and his concept of being the capstone, the first amongst equals of the princes. By the 14th century the central authority had diminished so much and the power of the territorial lords consolidated so far, a command and control monarchy had become impossible. But nobody wanted for the empire to dissolve. The empire provided legitimacy and a level of coordination and legal framework that kept the overall system stable and the princes in charge of their territories.

So a period of experimentation followed that lasted through the 14th, 15th and 16th century, trying out various ways how the imperial princes could collaborate in the interest of the empire whilst still pursuing their individual interests. The joint rule of Ludwig and Frederick was such an experiment.

Though it was never repeated, it was a successful experiment. The joint rule reconciled two of the three great families and it reassured the other princes that Ludwig would not be able to seize any more lands and territories for himself or his family. And it gave a focal point for the rising anger at the papacy.

Pope John XXII’s claim that he had the ultimate authority over who would become emperor threatened the role of the Prince-Electors. The Prince electors saw themselves as the ultimate deciders, not as a some sort of pre-selection committee. This common interest in preserving their constitutional role took precedence over their territorial differences.

And another constituency shared the dislike of the Avignon pope and that was the German clergy. Pope John XXII had insisted that the selection of bishops and increasingly abbots and even lower clergy had to be the preserve of the pope, not the decision of the cathedral canons or monks. The reason for that was in part organizational, giving the pope more control over the quality of local church leaders. It also had a monetary element. Every time a new bishop or abbot was appointed by the pope, a third of the first year income was to be sent to Avignon, for lower clergy it was 100% of the income. That wasn’t new. John XXII’s new idea was to constantly shift bishops and abbots between positions. So the bishop of Basel becomes archbishop of Mainz, so a new bishop of Basel had to be found, well that post goes to the previous bishop of Lavant, meaning we need a new bishop of Lavanat, that one was previously abbot of Einsiedeln and so on and so on. Every time a post is filled, a chunk of the first year income is sent to Avignon.  

That was not only irritating for the post holder, but also for the people at his court. These incomes weren’t salaries, they were monies needed to fund the functioning of the bishopric or abbey, paying servants and granting special bonuses etc. All that went away, plus local clergy saw their careers taken over by foreign prelates.

These disaffected imperial princes and the German church founded a coalition strong enough to withstand the excommunication, even the interdict that in principle prevented the reading of mass across the whole empire. And the coalition was strong enough that Ludwig could dare to journey to Rome for his coronation without having to be concerned about coups back home.

In December 1326 he travelled to Trient and then to Milan, accompanied by just 200 knights. This was no longer an attempt to assert genuine political control over Northern Italy as Henry VII’s campaign had been. It was more of a visit to the imperial vicars who needed Ludwig to legitimize their rule. And he obliged most generously. He confirmed the Visconti of Milan, the della Scala of Verona and all the others and in exchange the Italians staged a lovely coronation as king of Italy for Ludwig and his new wife Margarete of Holland.

From there he proceeded to Pisa which resisted initially, but could be made to open its gates. By the way, this moment in the autumn of 1327 where the story of the Name of the Rose begins. In the spring of 1328 Ludwig reached Rome.

At which point the question is, what will he be doing there? He is still excommunicated. Pope John XXII has not agreed for him to be crowned emperor. He does not have any cardinals with him who could perform the ceremony as Henry VII had. So, who would be crowning him?

What happens next just shows how far and how radical Ludwig IV was. He did not even bother to go to St. Peters or dig up some malleable archbishop to place the crown on his head whilst gently poked by a spear. No, he accepted the imperial crown from the Senate and the People of Rome, the way the emperors of old had been elevated. The coronation was performed by the now superannuated Sciarra Colonna, the same man who had apprehended and allegedly slapped pope Boniface VIII with it bringing down the imperial papacy, a man so thoroughly antipapal as one could imagine. And he performed the ceremony in his role as the head of the Roman Senate. There was a mass afterwards, but that was purely decorative.

This bold act was to make visible that the empire was no longer beholden to the papacy. He, Ludwig had become emperor by the election of the Prince Electors and his coronation was a secular act, confirming what had already happened, not a religious event, constituting his position as ruler.

Now before you conclude that it was some German provincial baron who had come up with the concept of secular rule and the division between church and state almost exactly a 1000 years after the last pagan Roman emperor had breathed his last. That would be pushing it.

No, a lot of the intellectual underpinning of his rule and the idea of a secular emperor came from the court of intellectuals like William of Ockham and Michael of Cesena who had joined him after they had fled from Avignon. The most radical of those was a man called Marsilius of Padua who had been at Ludwig’s court since 1323. His main work the Defensor Pacis, the Defender of peace makes the case that all power comes from the people, that the people elect and depose the ruler and that the ruler’s purpose was to provide peace and justice. The church on the other hand had no right to temporal power, in fact Jesus had refused the offer of temporal power outright. He was the son of god after all, so power over all men was entirely at his disposal. Marsilius of Padua stated quote: “The elective principality or other office derives its authority from the election of the body having the right to elect, and not from the confirmation or approval of any other power”, and “The prince who rules by the authority of the “legislator” (aka the elector) has jurisdiction over the persons and possessions of every single mortal of every station, whether lay or clerical, and over every body of laymen or clergy”. (end quote)

That is the definition of the secular state carrying a monopoly of violence. This is written 200 years before Machiavelli and 500 years before Hobbes, Montesquieu and the French Revolution. And it wasn’t just something some weird professor had dreamed up in a remote corner of europe. No, this was doctrine at the heart of one of the most consequential rulers of the age.

So much for “Intellectuals in the Middle Ages only debated how many angels can fit on the head of a pin”.

I would have loved for Ludwig to leave it at this, pack up his gear and return to Germany, be consistent. But history is messy and never quite fits with theory. So Ludwig did not have the strength of his convictions to just rely on a secular coronation. A few days after his first coronation he became old school again and deposed pope John XXII for papal overreach and heresy. In his stead he elevated a radical Franciscan to become pope as antipope Nicolas V who crowned him with full regalia in St. Peter.

A bit irritating but what can we do.

Being crowned twice and spring with its usual risks of death and disease approaching, Ludwig packed up and went home. He reached Munich around Christmas 1330, by which time his antipope had already caved to John XXII.

For the next 8 years he focused on stabilising his regime, supporting the growth of trade and cities and passing laws.

As for his conflict with the papacy, things fell into a bit of a lull. Pope John XXII refused to lift the excommunication of the emperor and all of his supporters. The empire remained under interdict, meaning in principle no mass could be sung and no sacraments administered, which would be an epic catastrophe in the medieval perception of the world. But the German clergy largely ignored the ban coming from what they believed was a heretic pope and, as William of Ockham kept telling them, a heretic pope ceased to be pope the moment he became a heretic without any further constituent act being needed. So the German clergy continued saying mass and things kept running smoothly.

In fact John XXII in his later years, he lived all the way to 90, did indeed develop some unorthodox, possibly heretic views. Specifically he concluded that all souls, saints included, would end in purgatory and would only be brought before god on the day of judgement. When he came out with that, pretty much all the prelates in Avignon issued a collective groan. Irrespective of what the bible said, this notion would wipe out the value propositions of pilgrimages, crusades, relics, the reading of mass for the dead, donations to religious houses etc., etc., pp. everything the church of Avignon stood for.

The reason is obvious. The church had invented the concept of purgatory, a sort of waiting room for the souls before they would allowed to enter heaven. The amount of time one had to spend in purgatory depended on how sinful their individual life had been. And purgatory was quite uncomfortable. But there was a way to shorten this waiting time. The intercession of saints, in particular the virgin Mary could appease the gatekeepers and mean you get up to cloud 9 in a couple of weeks instead of millions of years. To gain that intercession was possible by doing good works, for instance donating funds to build a new church, decorate a chapel, give land to a religious house in exchange for mass being sung for the dead or going on crusade. That concept paid for quite a lot of medieval and renaissance art.

Now if John’s idea that even saints had to wait in purgatory with everyone else, all these donations were useless. What is the point of worshipping the big toe of St. Cuthbert if Saint Cuthbert is only a few places places ahead in the queue. John XXII’s great theological breakthrough was quickly dismissed and he admitted that he may have erred, something as we know isn’t possible for a pope to do.

John XXII died in 1334 and his successors took a more conciliatory approach towards the empire. But still, Ludwig was unable to get the excommunication and the interdict lifted. The pope kept insisting that he had the right to approve or reject imperial elections and Ludwig was unwilling to give in.

For Ludwig, this conundrum needed to be resolved and if the pope wasn’t willing to compromise, then the empire had to take a stance. Throughout the year 1338 the Prince-Electors, the bishops and abbots, the cities and the emperor himself wrote to the pope asserting that it was the right of the people, represented by the seven electors to choose the emperor and that “the one who is elected by the majority of the electors is the true king and emperor”.

In a meeting at Rhens on July 16th, 1338 the Prince Electors, minus King John of Bohemia came together and solemnly swore to defend their right to elect the king and emperor against all external interference, and to submit to the majority decisions of the college of electors. This agreement was then opened up to all other princes as well as vassals, Ministeriales and even the burghers of the cities.

Then they declared a law that the election automatically confers all the rights over the empire to the elected king without the need for any approbation, not even the need for a coronation.

This, the so-called Kurverein zu Rhens was the beginning of the constitution of the empire that will go through many more iterations and reforms until the end of the Reich in the 19th century. But the fundamental point that the elected monarch was automatically king and emperor was established. The pope could no longer withhold coronations or even make the elevation dependent on their approbation.

There will still be coronations in Aachen and journeys to Rome, but they were purely ceremonial, they do no longer effect a transfer of power. The long fight that began with Henry IV in the snow of Canossa and dominated the reigns of Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II was over.

It is ironic that Ludwig IV is still known by his derogatory nickname “the Bavarian” given to him by pope John XXII. John’s moniker was meant to say that his legitimacy ended on the borders of Upper Bavaria, but in reality he shaped much of what we know as the Holy Roman Empire. As for the intellectuals who helped him develop and defend these political concepts, William of Ockham, Michael of Cesena and Marsilius of Padua, they stayed in Munich and died there and their graves are still in the city.

Next week we will try something new. We will still follow the life of Ludwig the Bavarian. But we will look at it through the eyes of someone else, a woman, called Margarete Maultasch, countess of Tirol, best known from Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel the ugly duchess. I hope you will join us again.

And just a final reminder that the history of the Germans is advertising free and that if you want to hear the sound of Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major, performed and arranged by Michael Rondeau, rather than me espousing mattresses, sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support.