Henry IV

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What did the Investiture Controversy really change

In this episode we will come to the end of the Investiture controversy, the end of the Salian dynasty and the end of Season 2  – and ask the question, what was all that about?

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 42 –  A World Revolution?

In this episode we will come to the end of the Investiture controversy, the end of the Salian dynasty and the end of Season 2  – and ask the question, what was all that about?

Before we start a 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 Andrew, Martha and David who have already signed up.

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Last week we ended with Emperor Henry V and Pope Calixtus II getting within a hairs breadth of an agreement that would have brought the investiture conflict in Germany to an end.

Over almost 50 years of war the church and the secular rulers have narrowed down the so-called investiture controversy to one question, how are bishops and abbots appointed? Both France and England had settled the issue with the papacy in 1104 and 1107. In France the arrangement was that the church was free to select its bishops and abbots, however, once selected, the bishop or abbot would have to swear fealty to the king and offer him the services associated with the fiefs the church had received. In England that rule was similar with the crucial difference that the king was allowed to be present at the election and had a casting vote in case no unanimous decision could be agreed upon by the canons. Both of these compromises were a formal limitation of royal prerogatives, but left the rulers with the all important access to the church resources.

The Emperor Henry V was ready to go down a similar route in 1119 and had travelled towards an encounter with pope Calixtus II, only for negotiations to collapse at the last minute. Both sides accused each other of duplicity and last-minute changes. Everything reverted to square 1 and the pope excommunicated Henry V who in turn resumed hostilities against the Gregorian party in Germany.

In 1121 he mustered an army to attack the city of Mainz and its archbishop, his former friend and chancellor Adalbert. Adalbert had by now become papal legate in Germany and one of the most intransigent agents of the hard-line reformers. His stubbornness had lost Adalbert some support amongst the more moderate factions, including his fellow church leaders, the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, but he still had the support of the Saxons under the leadership of Lothar of Supplinburg.

When the two armies faced each other the princes in both camps decided that for the sake of the realm, battle should be avoided. Without a mandate from the emperor of the archbishop the two sides negotiated a formula for peace: “regalia vel fiscalia regno, ecclesiastica ecclesii”. To the king the king’s rights and possessions, to the church the churches’ rights.

This, all the princes jointly promised, is what they would help the king to negotiate with the papacy. Facing a united front of emperor and all the princes, Calixtus II would have to yield. The princes did not have to say what would happen to Henry V if the emperor had dared to reject their proposal.

Let me just leave this here – we will discuss why this is probably an even more important event than the actual concordat of Worms in a moment.

With Germany united in its position, negotiations started swiftly and -after a bit of diplomatic to and fro were concluded on September 23rd 1122 in a field outside the city of Worms. The agreement consisted in two separate treaties.

In the first one, the Henricianum, named after Henry V, the emperor renounces his right to invest bishops with the ring and the staff. He guarantees the churches their right to freely elect their bishops and abbots. He promises to return or help recover whatever land and rights the churches may have lost to secular lords.

In the simultaneous treaty called the Calixtinium, Pope Calixtus II grants the emperor the right to invest the bishop or abbot with his royal fiefs. The symbol for that investiture is now a sceptre. In Germany this investiture is to take place before the consecration of the prelate, whilst in Italy and in Burgundy it takes place afterwards. And the pope allows for Henry to be present at the elections of bishops and abbots and grants him some sort of involvement in resolving contentious elections. In all cases the bishop or abbot owes the king the services under the rules of the fief.

In non-legalese this means the role of the German king in the selection and investiture of bishops is very similar to the situation in England and more significant than in France. Hold that thought – we will get back to this in a moment.

The Concordat brought an end to the religious conflict in Germany but did not result in much of an increase in imperial power on the ground. Saxony remained firmly in the hands of Lothar of Supplinburg. How little influence he now has becomes clear when the counties of Meissen and Lausitz became vacant. It was the duke of Saxony, not the emperor who chose the new counts for these extremely wealthy and strategically important counties. Lothar’s choice as count of Meissen was Conrad of Wettin. Conrad’s descendants would rule the lands around Meissen until rising to become the electors of Saxony, later kings of Saxony-Poland and creators of the greatest of German baroque cities, Dresden.

Whilst Henry’s room to manoeuvre in Germany became tighter and tighter, he was looking for a way out. Anything that would help him gather enough resources to resume the fighting and return to effective power in Germany.

And that opportunity came after in 1120 thanks to a maritime disaster. On the 25th of November William Adelin, son of King Henry I of England boarded the Blanche Nef, the White Ship in Barfleur in Normandy. William being 17 and a man about town took along his entourage of some 300 retainers many of similar age. And they proceeded to do what 17-year-olds left without parental supervision have done since time immemorial, they had some hell of a party. Plus, they were on the fastest ship of the royal fleet, which meant that obviously they wanted to have a race. The king himself had set off earlier that day and bets were taken that the Blanche Nef could overtake the royal ship. The ship’s captain, probably ether sozzled or stirred in his pride set off with a bunch of pissheads in the depth of the night. Barfleur is not an especially difficult port to navigate. What you have to do is go East northeast for about 2 miles to be clear of outlying rocks before you can turn due north for England.  The pilot and the captain, keen to speed things up cut the corner and hit a rock. In the dark and cold all onboard perished except for one man, a butcher from Rouen who clung on to the fatal rock.

The death of King Henry’s only son created an opportunity for our Henry, Emperor Henry V who was married to, yes, the only legitimate daughter of King Henry I, Matilda. It wasn’t clear at this point that Henry I would not have another son, but the optionality was attractive enough for the emperor to invest heavily in the friendship with the ruler of England and Normandy.

The two of them forged a military alliance and Henry V mustered an army to support his father-in-law in his perennial struggles with the French crown. Fighting the French suited Henry V well anyway after their king had been such a strong supporter of the pope in the run-up to the Concordat of Worms.

Henry V thought the puny king Louis VI of France who controlled nit much more than the area around Paris and could call some bishops his vassals would be a pushover. In particular if the two Henrys staged a pincer movement coming simultaneously from the North and the East. And he should have been, had it not been for a sudden emergence of national sentiment amongst the French.

Henry V’s initial target was the city of Reims, the place of royal coronations and place of Clovis’ baptism. Something about the idea of the German emperor lording it over the church of Saint Remy stirred up patriotic sentiment amongst the French princes. They joined their king at the Abbey of Saint Denis, outside Paris, and raised the royal battle standard, the Oriflamme, a blood red, pointed banner flown from a golden lance for the very first time. The Oriflamme was the symbol of Saint Denis, everybody’s favourite headless saint, was believed to have been carried by Charlemagne into the Holy land and wielded by the legendary Roland. It would lead the French army into battle for the next couple of hundred years. Where the emperors had their Holy Lance, the Kings of France had their Oriflamme.

In this contest of the symbols in 1124 the shiny Oriflamme won out. The flipside of Louis’ support in France was the deafening silence Henry’s call for national unity found in Germany.

This defeat is by no means the end of the struggle for the succession of king Henry I, a process that will take decades and pitched Matilda against her cousin Stephen of Blois.

Henry V did not take part in any of these struggles. He died On Mai 23rd, 1125 in Utrecht. He was 39 years old. If he had lived it would have been him who had fought alongside Matilda for the crown of England and his sons rather than the Plantagenets would have ruled England for the next few centuries. No Eleanor of Aquitaine, no Richard Lionheart no Henry V or Richard III. Shakespeare’s heroes would have been called Henry, Konrad or Fritz and you would look at this podcast and go Ahh Salians – so boring. Can’t you talk about something we know nothing about.

His body was brought to imperial basilica in Speyer where he was buried next to his father, grandfather and great grandfather.

Henry V had no son and with that the Salian dynasty ended. Henry V designated the sons of his daughter Agnes, Frederick and Konrad of Hohenstaufen to be the heirs to his fortune.

The Salian dynasty had ruled the Empire for almost exactly 100 years, from the election of Konrad II in 1024 to the death of Henry V in 1125. It was a period of massive change, socially, economically, politically and spiritually. Debate about what had happened and what it meant for the future began amongst contemporaries and has been raging ever since.

The chronicler Otto von Freising, a grandson of Henry V who wrote just 25 years after the death of the emperor saw the conflict between the papacy and the emperor as a world-ending calamity. The fragmentation of the unity of the spiritual and the secular was a portent of the end of the Roman Empire, which according to Saint Augustin ushered in the coming of the antichrist and hence the end of the world. It was the bishops and abbots who were to blame for this. They had been made rich by the generosity of the emperors only to turn around and impale their now enfeebled benefactor with his own swords.

The German 19th century followed in that same vein. The church had stalled the progress of Germany towards statehood that ultimately resulted in the fratricidal religious wars and subsequent political decline to insignificance of the Reich. This storyline had the added advantage of blaming the catholic pope for all the misery of the 17th and 18th century.  A view that helped justify why Germany should be unified by protestant Prussia and not by catholic Austria. In 1872 Bismarck initiated the Kulturkampf, an early version of a culture war. He attempted to restrain the catholic churches political influence. When he had pushback from the pope he famously said “we would not go to Canossa”. This statement, later put on a monument erected on the Harzburg, summarizes the 19th century Prussian view that the pope was Germany’s downfall. Going to Canossa became a standing expression signifying humiliating defeat. It is the German equivalent of “eating humble pie”.

After World War II German historians began to de-emphasize the importance of the conflict between pope and emperor. Focus shifted to the reasons for the tensions between the emperor and the princes. A view emerged that the Investiture Controversy was mainly a German civil war over hegemony where the pope could tilt the balance but was not driving events. The ineptitude of Henry IV and the military success of the princes ended the command monarchy of the early Salians, not Canossa or the Concordat of Worms.

Whilst Germans were looking at the Investiture conflict more as a continuation of broader longer-term trends, English historians like Norman Cantor, Chris Wickham and most recently Tom Holland put the Investiture Conflict in a line with the French and the Russian revolution as one of the great turning points of European, if not world history.

A World Revolution they call it. Well, was it that? What is a “World Revolution”? Mike Duncan is on his 326th episode of Revolutions has not mentioned the Investiture Conflict once.

If I have taken anything away from listening to the Revolutions Podcast it is that all of Revolutions seem to have the same structure. It starts with an existing political and economic order that has some serious structural weaknesses. These weaknesses are getting exposed by a combination of specific events, lost wars, bad harvests, financial collapse etc.. The whole thing blows up because an incompetent or excessively stubborn ruler fails to see the opportunities to avoid disaster and hurtles the creaky wagon of history down the precipice.

Imperial rule being exposed to unreliable bishops and rebellious dukes, I.e., structurally weak – tick;

Untimely death of Henry III, papal schisms and abduction of the king at Kaiserswerth exposing weakness of the regime – tick

Henry IV acting like a bull in a China shop towards Gregory VII and the Saxons -tick, tick, tick

Once a revolution has started, we cycle through the degrees of extremism where last year’s hard left are this year’s conservatives until the process is led at absurdum. After that last spasm of revolutionary energy, the surviving protagonists begin to rebuild society by combining bits of the old and bits of the new.

Again tick, tick, tick. We go from moderate reformer Leo IX to revolutionary Gregory VII, inventive Urban II to extremist Paschalis II, only to end up with Calixtus II who tries to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

In episode 30 I suggested a structure for the narrative across three strains, the rise of the papacy, the conflict between the princes and the emperor and the rise of lay piety. Even now, 12 episodes later, I think this structure is still valid and a great way to look at how this new order differs from the old.

Let’s start with the papacy.

Before 1042 the pope was little more than the bishop of Rome and an authority that could be called upon to resolve conflicts within the church that could not be resolved at a lower level. There were no rules about the selection or investiture of popes and formally the emperor had a significant role to play in that selection process. Whenever the emperors were active in Italian politics, they appointed and dismissed the popes.

By 1125 the idea that the emperor could legitimately appoint popes was dead as the Dodo. Yes, Henry IV and Henry V had appointed antipopes, and future emperors will do too, but their power didn’t reach much further than the tip of the imperial spears. From now on, the only legitimate pope was the one elected by the College of Cardinals – full stop.

Again, before 1042 the pope had no direct influence in the churches outside Rome. He would hold synods, usually together with the emperor, to determine doctrine and resolve disputes. But the pope had little if any executive power. When we look at the situation in 1125, the pope, usually represented by his legates, exercised more hands-on control over church on the ground. Legates would depose or install bishops, demand changes in liturgy and enforce doctrine set in Rome. That is not to say the church in France or in Germany was at the Pope’s back and call. There are bishops like Hartwig of Magdeburg who were trying to be both supporters of the Gregorian reform and loyal vassals of the emperor. But relative to where we came from, the role of the papacy has become so much more significant.

And finally, the papacy began determining secular policy. Even though the Gregorians were focused on the spiritual world, they ended up becoming more and more political. The proposal of pope Paschalis II if we assume it wasn’t a cunning trick to discredit Henry V, would have been the most radical expression of Gregorian thinking. The church giving up its entanglement with the lay world and focusing entirely on the spiritual well-being of their flock would have pleased Peter Damian and Humbert of Silva Candida no end. But it never happened. Rather than severing the links to the world of power politics, the Gregorian reform dragged the papacy deeper into it. Calling the Crusades to Jerusalem might have been high politics but could still be seen as linked to the spiritual role of the church. When it comes to the military conflict between Gregory VII and Henry IV, that line was crossed. Using the Normans in Sicily and Matilda of Tuscany as a counterweight to the imperial armies meant the pope had to get his hands dirty. It is not just the sack of Rome by Robert Guiscard but the absolution of soldiers fighting the emperors that made the spiritual and political objectives of the church becoming indivisible.

And that is why the papacy did not really win in the investiture controversy. Yes, the pope stood now on par or even above the emperor, but he did so on the same playing field, the field of power politics. Being a significant secular player had its advantages, but in the long run undermined the role of the church as an organization, leading ultimately to the faithful searching for salvation outside the established church hierarchy, in ne monastic orders like the Franciscans, in new forms of religious communities like the Albigensian, Waldensians etc., and ultimately in the belief that salvation is to come from the individual itself, a process the culminated in the Reformation. In a way it comes full circle, because the Gregorians objective was to make the church a vehicle that allows the faithful to reach the gates of heaven. Like so many other well-intentioned plans, it failed in the end.

The rise of the papacy displaced the emperor in several of his roles. The Ottonian emperors had been universal sacred rulers. The 10th and early 11th century was the time of the sacred rulers. Saint Stephen in Hungary, Edward the confessor in England, Saint Olaf in Norway. Above these sacred kings was the sacred emperor, anointed to lead all of Christianity. His title was Vicar of Christ and most humble servant of the apostles. This is the time where people believe the king could heal diseases by laying his hand on people – like Aragorn of Gondor.

The transition to this state of sacred ruler was bestowed upon them when they were anointed during their coronation. You may remember that the child king Otto III was rescued from an early death by the mere fast that he had been anointed as king literally hours before news arrived that his father had died. A king, and even more so an emperor anointed by the pope was no mere mortal, he was a being halfway between this world and the next. And some of them, namely Otto III and Henry II live the lives of saints rather than those of worldly rulers.

Breaking an oath to such a sacred king was simply inconceivable. Untold horrors would come down on the oath breaker, in this world and the next.

Something happened around the middle of the 11th century that devalued these oaths. And that happened even before Gregory released Henry’s vassals from their oaths. It was Otto von Northeim’s speech in 1073 (check episode 31) that ends the idea that oaths are inviable. It is when he says “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.”  

Otto von Northeim denies the king sacred status. For him he is just a human in a two-way relationship with his subjects. The king has to provide peace and justice in exchange for obedience. When he fails to do his bit, the oath is no longer binding.

When Gregory VII releases everyone from their oath to Henry IV and the emperor then has to do penance in the snow outside Canossa the idea of sacred, unbreakable oaths vanish. How little they are worth becomes so clear when Paschalis II releases Henry V from his solemn, public oath made before innumerable relics to never challenge his father.

By 1125 a king is just a man, an important man, but a man nevertheless.

And that gets us to the second strain of the narrative, the conflict between the princes and the emperor. If you think back over the last 20-odd episodes, most of the time was spent talking about the wheel of fortune that pulled good old Henry IV up to dizzying heights of military and political success before dropping him deep into the depth of desperation.

All this came about because we are in a period of transition. This is the transition from a time where wealth and power was tied to large agricultural estates to a more martial time where all that mattered was the strength of your stone castle. Encastellation had been held back in Germany until Henry III but went stratospheric during the minority of Henry IV. The king’s mother, Agnes of Poitou was unable to stem the process and the subsequent government of Anno of Cologne had no interest in doing so.

In these barely 15 years royal authority was gravely undermined. Once the vassals had gained a castle, they could very much do whatever they wanted, as no one could touch them on their mountain tops. Castles were a bit like nuclear weapons today.. All those who have them want to prevent anyone else to get them. Whilst the world in the 20th and 21st century was somewhat successful with its non-proliferation policy the medieval empire wasn’t. On top of that the size of the nobility grew alongside or faster than overall population. Chroniclers of the Ottonian era like Widukind and Thietmar mention roughly 500 individuals amongst the aristocracy from presumably a much smaller number of families. By 1125 this number has likely doubled. Add to that the proliferation of Ministeriales who also often held castles, you can easily assume a tripling of the numbers. In the end there will be 20,000 castles across Germany.

And when the king himself wanted a piece of the action and get his own superweapons in Saxony, the civil war started. And that was a war nobody could win because everybody by now had castles. Presumably some aristocrats did not build castles, but they were never heard from again.

With castles came something else, territorial power. Once you have the castle that overlooks the local town, the bridge and the market, it is only a question of time before the castellan will have gained control of the town, the bridge and the market, even if these rights had been granted to someone else, a bishop, a monastery or another knight.

By 1125 we are well en route to territorialization of the empire. The princes are consolidating their holdings both horizontally as well as vertically. The emperor is no longer able to prevent this process. Even worse, there are large parts of the country like Saxony where effective power has transitioned from the emperor to the territorial princes, like for instance in Saxony. The five duchies are no longer enough to satisfy the demand for status amongst ambitious families like the Babenberger, Zaehringer, Welf, Wettin etc., and gradually we see a proliferation of ducal title combined with a deterioration of the ducal function as one of the few institutions the empire possessed.

The same thing had happened in France, only some 50 years earlier. Where the story differs is that the French monarchy over time consolidated into an absolutist regime, whilst central authority in Germany continuously weakened. As always in history there is never just one reason or one event that creates a specific outcome, but during the hundred years of Salian rule decisive steps were taken that facilitated the outcome.

The first one we already talked about, the collapse of the sacred kingship under the battlements of Canossa which was never really recovered. In France the Investiture conflict had the opposite effect. It created an alliance between the pope and the French king that materially enhanced his prestige. Several subsequent rulers could expand on that prestige, recuperating some of the sacred component of kingship, which culminated in the reign of Louis IX, later to become Saint Louis.

The second key decision point was the assembly in Forchheim in 1077. There the nobles asserted their right to freely elect their king purely on merit. The kingdom they claimed was not a personal property that could be passed from father to son like a horse or a castle. It was the res publica, the common good in which all members of the aristocracy had a stake. We will see that there will be transfers of royal and imperial power from father to son, but these will still be based on elections which at least in principle were based on merit or size of bribe.

Making the empire an elective monarchy created an incentive for the holder of the position to transfer as much of the royal rights, lands and other assets to his family, rather than expanding central authority. Any subsequent occupant of the throne will then have to dig deep into his own wallet to maintain his authority. At the end of the process the emperors will derive their power not from the fact that they were emperors, but from their personal territorial wealth. Politics are driven by the dynastic interests of the Staufer, Luxembourger and Habsburgs, not by the interest of the empire. This is the second crucial difference with France, where the Capetians were better at producing sons, they usually promoted to co-king during their lifetime until the election process became a pure formality and fell into disuse.

Was the decision in Forchheim irreversible? Surely not. If one of the emperors had been able to expand their personal territory to ultimately comprise all of Germany, surely the Empire would have turned into a hereditary monarchy. But that was made harder thanks to some of the political choices the Salians had made. 

One was the excessively generous sponsorship of the Imperial church. Compared to France in particular the imperial church was extraordinarily rich not just in private goods but also in territorial lordships. Under the Ottonians and the early Salians these donations did not diminish the royal position as the bishops and abbots on the whole though with exceptions acted as organs of the emperor. During the later years of the Salian reign the imperial church stopped being an organ of the state and the bishops began operating like territorial princes. You remember Anno of Colognes acquisition of the territories of the Ezzonen and Adalbert of Mainz attack on Trifels. This development is usually believed to have been caused by the Investiture Controversy and specifically the Concordat of Worms. Modern historians take a more differentiated view. The concordat did not differ much from the settlement in England where the church remained under closer control of the king – Thomas a Beckett notwithstanding. And the trend to consolidate the territorial position started before the investiture conflict. For instance, the Lothringian bishops in Toul, Verdun, Liege and Utrecht were proactively pursuing territorial policies against Godfrey the Bearded in the 1050s. It feels that the urge to create a territorial power was a combination of opportunity and simple, old-fashioned greed, something not even a bishop is immune to. I would also throw in the betrayal of the bishops in 1111. When Henry V agreed with Paschalis II to expropriate the clergy, the remaining sense of fealty to the emperor evaporated.

Having lost so much of the royal resources to the church the emperors were now dependent upon their own territorial power. And again the Salians came up short. Henry IV tried create a territory under direct royal control outside interference of local dukes or counts around Goslar in Saxony. Henry IV defeat in the Saxon wars meant that the most valuable of the directly held royal territories was lost. Subsequent attempts for instance by Henry V around the family holdings in Worms were kept in check by a united front of the princes. With expansion in Germany blocked, the emperors had to find resources abroad. Henry V tried England, the Staufer looked to Italy, the Luxembourger and Habsburgs to Bohemia and Hungary and finally Prussia occupied lands to the east that were formally outside the empire.

That seemed a viable shortcut at the time but was not sustainable. Ruling Germany based on foreign resources was something even Emperor Charles V in whose empire the sun never set failed. In contrast  The kings of France  built their territory slowly and methodically, one castle at a time using only their domestic resources and a bit of help from the popes.. Again, the forks in the road the Salians went down or were dragged down were not roads that inevitably led to the fragmentation of the German states that could only be overcome by a militaristic regime. But it was a major contributing factor.

The flipside of imperial weakness is the enhanced role of the princes. Under the Ottonians the role of the dukes, counts and bishops was to support the emperor who was the sacred incorporation of the empire. By the time of Henry V’s death, the princes saw themselves as guardians of the empire. They had both the right and the obligation to defend it against its foes, to maintain peace and to protect the church. The emperor and the princes were the pillars on which the empire rested. That meant the princes can call royal assemblies, even royal assemblies where the emperor is not present or even NFI. The empire becomes a coordination mechanism that settles disagreements between the princes by consensus, rather than a state that settles it by force.

We have talked about the change in the relationship between emperor and pope and between emperor and princes which leaves the third strain in our narrative, the rise in lay piety.

As we talked about before, the period between 1000 and 1300 is a period of massive demographic and economic change. Population numbers overall roughly doubled thanks to improved agricultural technology, the abolishment of slavery and an absence of deadly pandemics. The improvements in agriculture allowed for a repopulation of the ancient Roman cities and the growth of new ones. Urbanization went hand in hand with the growth in trade. The large cities created markets for goods and ideas that travelled along the great rivers, the Rhine, Main, Danube and Elbe. These increasingly prosperous people demanded better from their clergy and better from their rulers.

These demands transformed from specific calls for say celibacy of the cathedral canons to broader claims for participation in city politics. The process started in Milan with the Pataria uprisings in the 1070s and then spread rapidly. Cologne rose up against its Bishop in 1074. That same year Worms sides with the emperor against their bishop. Once independent, the cities themselves became political players. Henry IV allied with Pisa and Lucca against Matilda of Tuscany. Mainz and Cologne were Henry IV’s strongest allies in his fight with his son. By Henry V’s time a city like Mainz would negotiate with its archbishop as equals, demanding freedoms and privileges in exchange for support in war.

On the underlying issue, the improvement in the quality of the clergy, the years 1024 to 1125 saw major shifts. Under the Ottonians we find many learned and sincere bishops, monks and abbots. But their ability to expand and project their knowledge was limited. By 1125 more and more Christian doctrine is written down and passed around the clergy along the same routes the goods are now shipped from Venice to Norway and from Cordoba to  Kiev. We find that by 1076 most bishops owned a more or less comprehensive compilation of canon law that they consulted to determine how to react to the excommunication and deposition of their king. The scholastic method, this great invention of the Middle Ages begins to spread amongst the intellectuals of the age. An early form of university opened its doors in Bologna in 1088, teaching amongst other things Roman law.

For the layman, on the still unpaved street these debates mattered. All they wanted was a priest who could help them into heaven. But that was no longer so easy. Is my vicar properly ordained by the right bishop? If not, what does that mean for the sacraments I have received. If not, how do I get a priest who will be able to pave the road to the final judgement? Can I make sure my town is loyal to whoever I think is the true pope, rue archbishop and bishop.

Mostly they had little ability to determine political outcomes. To mitigate their risk of ending up in purgatory or even hellfire, laymen became ever more pious. They tried to incorporate some of the habits of the apostles into their own life, fasting, regular prayer, good works and the like. In many ways this upped the ante for the priests who had to be even more devout in order to stand out and justify their elevated status. Most bishops saw these developments which is why, on the whole, they were supportive of church reform even when they were not supportive of the Gregorian popes.

This urge to find a way to heaven for oneself found its culmination in the First Crusade. Finally there was one thing any individual, rich or poor could do that was quite obviously in line with God’s wishes, that was outside these debates and civil wars. The first Crusade, though an amazing and unexpected military success must have been a terrible let-down for its participants. Instead of experiencing a period of bliss within the grace of god, the crusaders unleashed unimaginable horrors. We talked about the death and destruction the German participation in the First Crusade caused but even those who made it to Jerusalem must have wondered whether the slaughter of the cities Muslim population, the burning of its Jews inside their Synagogue was synonymous with walking in the footsteps of the apostles.

We asked at the start of this section whether the Investiture Conflict was a “World Revolution”. Sure, the Investiture conflict has all the hallmarks of a revolution, an old order is replaced with a new structure. That makes it a Revolution, but a “World Revolution”. That would be a revolution that fundamentally changed the whole of the humanity. It describes a series of events that stands unique in history as a turning point that, if it had not happened, would have left us with a materially different world.

Of all the things we talked about so far, the rise of the papacy, the loss of a central power in Germany or the emergence of cities and city states is not something that in similar form had happened before in other parts of the world and even in Europe itself. What could make it a “World Revolution” is that last consequence of the Investiture Conflict, bringing people the obligation and the right to choose your spiritualty.

That unleashed the scholastic method, universities, disputations, the Franciscans, the early heretics, the Hussites and the Reformation. Without the Reformation and the plethora of belief systems it seeded, the philosophers of the Enlightenment would not have dared to replace God with reason and modern life would indeed be fundamentally different. The crusades manifested a restlessness of spirit and body that drove European society to expand both their intellectual and their physical horizon until it had consumed the whole world.

So maybe it was a World Revolution. And even if it wasn’t, it was an epic tale, one I hope you enjoyed.

I will take a break now until early January to prepare for the next season, the Hohenstaufen. These ultimate glamour emperors may now have to work in this unwieldy new order, but hey do they make a story out of it. You can look forward to Emperor Fredrick Barbarossa still asleep under the Kyffhauser mountain waiting for the day his people need him to protect them from harm, Henry VI who used the ransom paid for Richard Lionheart to buy himself a kingdom, Frederick II the child of Puglia who allegedly grew up on the streets of Palermo to become one of best educated men in Europe living the lifestyle like his friend Salah ad Din. His son Enzo who was betrayed by his golden locks and his grandson Konradin who was beheaded on the market square in Naples.  I can barely wait. I hope to see you then.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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Mathilda of Tuscany Marries a much Younger man

This week the wheel of fortune will turn again, tumbling our antihero Henry IV down from the heights he had so recently scaled. We will see him sink to the point of utter despair. And all that because a 43 year old woman marries an 18 year old.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 37 – The Two Grooms

This week the wheel of fortune will turn again, tumbling our antihero Henry IV down from the heights he had so recently scaled. We will see him sink to the point of utter despair. And all that because a 43 year old woman marries an 18 year old.

Before we start a 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 Steven and Jay who have already signed up.

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We should probably quickly recap where we are in the year 1090.

Things aren’t looking too bad for Henry IV. He has a modicum of control over most of Germany. The 17 year long war with the Saxons had been brought to an end, largely by giving them what they wanted, but peace is peace. In Italy his bishops were in charge of the northern part of the country and his anti-pope Clement III was on and off in control of Rome.

As for his enemies, there were essentially three centres.

In Swabia the deposed dukes of Bavaria and Carinthia, Welf IV and Berthold of Zaehringen kept fighting. Henry had entered peace negotiations with both, but their demands were unacceptable. They required the anti-pope Clement III to be removed and they themselves re-instated as dukes.

The second key enemy was the great countess Matilda of Tuscany, one of, if not the most formidable woman in 11th century Europe. Matilda had been reigning an area of Northern Italy, ranging from near Verona down to the papal states, including important cities like Mantua, Lucca, Pisa, Modena, Reggio and Florence. Matilda had been at war with her imperial kinsman and overlord since at least 1082, though the conflict dates back to the marriage of her mother to Godfrey the Bearded in 1054. She had stood loyally with her friend Pope Gregory VII until his very end at great personal expense.  At times she had been reduced to her indomitable mountain fortresses around Canossa and even needed to melt down her gold and silver treasures. Once Henry had left Italy, Matilda could free herself from the encirclement and won a great victory against the Lombard Bishops at Sorbara. That brought her back into her previous position as the most powerful secular ruler in Italy.

And finally, there was the Gregorian papacy. After Gregory VII had died in 1075 his remaining cardinals refused to recognise Pope Clement III, the man Henry had elevated to the seat of Saint Peter. Instead, they elected one of their own as Pope Victor III. Barely ever had anyone been so reluctant to become pope as Pope Victor III. He had been the abbot of the great monastery of Monte Cassino, founded by Saint Benedict and under his leadership the foremost seat of learning, literature, arts and monastic life in Italy. He had not just been an outstanding abbot but also a great negotiator on behalf of the church. He had good relations with his neighbours, the Normans. It was thanks to his efforts the initial agreement between the papacy and the Normans came about in 1059 and he also helped bringing Robert Guiscard to Rome in 1084.

And Victor III was a realist, not a fanatic like Gregory VII. He knew too well that after what Guiscard had done to Rome, the Romans would not voluntarily accept a Gregorian pope. Ad that meant getting into Rome was only possible in the train of a Norman army. What is a pope whose authority comes from the bloodied swords of Northmen and their Saracen soldiers? Well, not one Victor III aspired to be.

Having resisted the election for a year he was finally coerced into accepting the election in Rome. But just 4 days later, before he could be consecrated, he had to leave the Holy City as riots broke out. He returned to Monte Cassino and put the papal regalia into the bottom drawer. He remained as an elected but not consecrated pope for another year before The Normans again smashed into the Holy city. Victor III was finally consecrated. The Romans were still unconvinced of the benevolence of the Papal allies and so Victor III ran away after 10 days and hid in Monte Cassino, before the Normans dragged him back into Rome in June. He stayed a month before claiming he needed to go home for health reasons. He died in Monte Cassino in September 1087.

That should have been that. By now the Gregorian papacy had proven to be nothing more than a Norman plaything. The Antipope Clement III could hold at least parts of Rome and enjoyed the support of the local population. Clement III was also not against church reform so that the urban population saw some of their demands to get a better sort of vicar for their churches fulfilled.

The reason the Gregorian ethos survived owed a lot to Victor III’s successor, pope Urban II. He became pope in 1088 and – since Rome was in the hands of Clement III – was elected and consecrated in the stunningly beautiful, but tiny city of Terracina, halfway between Rome and Naples.

Urban II had grown up in France, son of a local aristocrat in Champagne and had joined the fabled monastery of Cluny. He rose through the ranks and was made prior of the abbey. In 1080 Pope Gregory invited him to become Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, the highest-ranking member of the college of cardinals.

Urban II shared Gregory VII’s view of the role of the papacy as the preeminent institution of Christendom, superior to kings and emperors. Where he differed was in his methods.

Where Gregory was rigid and doctrinal to the very end, Urban II had the polish and diplomatic finesse needed to get the papacy out of the hole Gregory had dumped it in.

The first order of service was to get out of the dependency on the Normans without irritating them. On that front he was lucky as Robert Guiscard died in 1085. His successor as duke of Apulia was Roger Borsa. Borsa means “Moneybags” in English suggesting he had less ambitious goals than his father more interested in “counting and recounting his money”.

Leadership of the Normans fell to Roger I, count of Sicily, the youngest of the 12 brothers of Robert Guiscard. Roger had been busy conquering the island of Sicily since 1063. Sicily had been an Arab emirate since the 9th century but had broken apart in the 11th century into small warring factions which created the opportunity for Roger. By 1090 he had removed the last of these mini emirs and set out to conquer Malta. What I am saying is that Roger was busy consolidating his rule over Sicily and less in need of a pet pope.

Urban then applied the old rule that my enemy’s enemy is my friend and concluded that in order to get rid of Clement III he needed to remove Henry IV. And that means he needed to forge a coalition of Henry’s enemies.

And that coalition came about in the form of a marriage, a marriage that even today would be seen as scandalous. Urban II’s proposal was simple, Matilda of Tuscany should marry the son of Welf IV, leader of the German opposition. That would give the anti-henry forces control over a coherent area stretching from the border of the Papal State all the way north, across the alps into Switzerland and Southern Germany. Henry IV and his pet pope, Clement III could be shut out from Rome.

Sounds great. Only issue was that Matilda of Tuscany was no spring chicken anymore. At 43 years of age she had little chance of further offspring, which was according to the doctrine of the church, the main purpose of marriage. And Matilda’s track record as a wife had not been quite in line with the expectations of the time.

She had separated from her first husband, Godfrey the Hunchback after a short marriage. The marital differences had come less from the lack of mutual attraction but from her reluctance to grant him political control over her rich lands. Matilda very much took the view that these lands were hers and hers alone and that no man, husband or otherwise were to command them. To put that into context, it took until 1963 before Italian women were allowed to hold a public office contested by a man.

For an 11th century red-blooded nobleman Matilda as a wife was a nightmare. 

And now let’s talk about the groom. His name was Welf V, son of -guess it – yes Welf IV. Not only was his name unimaginative in the extreme, but he was also no more than 18 years’ old.

The logic of the union was so blatantly obvious, it barely needs explaining. The lands of Matilda were to fall into the hands of the Welf family upon her soon to be expected demise, making the deposed dukes of Bavaria the most powerful princes in the empire.

Matilda was not keen, but a silver tongued Urban II convinced her that she had to make this last great sacrifice for the cause of god and the papacy. Young Welf V presumably was told to grin and bear it for a few years.

The betrothal of this unlikely couple took place in 1089.

With this announcement all peace negotiations between Henry IV and the Southern German opposition ended. War was to resume; the question was where? Henry IV could either continue his operations in Southern Germany and subdue the Welf and their allies, leaving Matilda well alone until that was resolved. Or, he could go down to Italy, knock out Matilda and end the schism once and for all by capturing Urban II.

Option 2 was bolder and – we know our Henry – for him bolder is better.

He appears in Italy in May 1090 at the head of a sizeable army. This time he brought along some of his German followers including Frederick von Hohenstaufen, his son in law and closest ally. That suggests he was looking to make Italy the place where the final battle was to be fought. Equally Welf V joined his new wife in Tuscany, together with a contingent of his German allies. 

As before Henry can count on the support from the Lombard bishops though their numbers are somewhat depleted as the archbishop of Milan had changed sides. Henry also no longer commanded the cities of Pisa and Lucca who returned into the fold of Matilda, having received all they needed from the emperor.

Hostilities in the first year are taken up by the siege of Mantua, forever one of the military linchpins of Italy.  Mantua barred the way to the heart of Matilda possessions south of the Po river. After 12 months of siege the city yielded and Henry entered the city in triumph. Two further strongholds nearby fell too opening the road towards the Po river and the heart of Matilda’s possessions.

This success was significant enough for Welf IV, father of Matilda’s husband to resume peace negotiations. It seems the marriage alliance has failed to yield the desired benefits. And with some of his supporters amongst the bishopric having passed this last year, it was time to look for a compromise.

As before Welf’s demands were twofold, return the duchy of Bavaria to me and abandon your antipope Clement III. With henry now in an even better position that two years before, he saw no reason to accept these demands and by summer 1091 hostilities resumed.

The year ended with another success for Henry. Matilda had sent out 1,000 of her knights to capture the emperor she had been informed had travelled with a small contingent close to her lands. Well it was a trap and her soldiers were routed by a much superior imperial force. 

At that point Matilda did what she had done previously when things had turned against her, she returned to her string of fortresses around Canossa and employed a defensive strategy.  In spring 1092 Henry began to systematically besiege and break these fortresses. First Montemorello, then Montalfredo. When he proceeded to Monteveglio, progress slowed. He wasted the whole of the summer before the walls of that castle.

There were around nine strongholds around her heartland of Canossa. Having lost two and one on the verge of going, Matilda’s vassals became concerned and wanted to bring this process to an end. Matilda was initially reluctant, but negotiations began in October 1092. But they went nowhere. A hermit, named John showed up and declared a vision that Matilda would prevail, and salvation was close at hand.

I usually do not set much store by hermits, but this one was right.

After the failure of the peace negotiations, Henry feigned a retreat towards Parma, but doubled back to attack her home and the heart of her defensive system, Canossa itself. Matilda left the castle with most of its garrison and moved a few miles down the road to another of her castles, Bianello. Bianleeo was by the way where most of the initial negotiations over the lifting of the excommunication had taken place 14 years earlier. This time the roles were reversed. Henry was at Canossa and Matilda in Bianello. But as before, Henry was not inside Canossa but besieged the castle from below.

It might well be that Henry thought that Matilda and most of her soldiers were inside the castle of Canossa or thought she had left for somewhere far away. In any event, on one foggy afternoon Matilda’s garrison came down from Bianello whilst the troops inside Canossa attempted a sortie. In the dark and foggy chaos henry’s troops had a hard time distinguishing friend from foe. The most dispiriting moment came when Matilda’s soldiers captured the royal banner, creating panic in the royal army.

Henry fled the site of his now second humiliation and took his remaining army north. News of his defeat travelled fast and two of the fortresses he only just had captured were returned to Matilda. One of them held the imperial train with supplies and  the campaign funds.

Christmas was a difficult feast for Henry who had lost most of the progress he had made that previous year. At the same time his German enemies smelled the morning air.  Berthold von Zaehringen had himself elected duke of Swabia though there was already a duke of Swabia, Frederick von Hohenstaufen. And so, Frederick von Hohenstaufen who had been with Henry these last 2 years has to go back home and take his remaining troops with him.

Another member of Henry’s entourage had also left, his eldest son Konrad. Konrad had lived in Italy for neigh on 10 years by now after his father had left him in the care of the Lombard bishops when he returned to Germany in 1084. He was now 20 years of age and his father entrusted him with an important mission.

Henry’s mother-in-law and Konrad’s grandmother, Adelheid countess of Savoy had died at the end of 1091. She was, like Matilda, one of these exceptional women who ran a state against all the laws and customs of the time. Her state was the margraviate of Turin and the county of Savoy, in essence what is today the Italian province of Piemonte and the French region of Savoy. And most importantly she controlled a number of Alpine passes, including Mont Cenis which you may remember her daughter Bertha tobogganed down.

Adelheid had no heir in the male line and had designated one of her grandson’s to inherit her lands. To Henry’s annoyance this grandson was not Konrad. But as emperor he could determine the succession of his vassals should they die without direct male heirs. That was the law of the land, but to enforce it, an army needed to be deployed against the obstinate new count of Savoy. Konrad was put in charge of that army and dispatched west.

So far so good. Konrad campaigned gingerly around Asti and Turin until in the summer of 1093. But then disconcerting news reached Henry at his camp in Verona. His own son had joined up with Matilda and pope Urban II.

What brought this treachery about has long been debated. Some later writers point out that Konrad was a bookish man who preferred reading over riding into battle. Some suggested that he had a falling out with his father over points of canon law and the claims of papal supremacy. The imperial propagandists describe him as a feckless boy who had lent his ear to bad councillors.

Modern historians like I.S. Robinson and Egon Boshof attribute him with more political intelligence. Konrad saw his father’s position deteriorating rapidly after the rout before Canossa. His army shrunk and the ranks of his enemies were swelled by formerly loyal Lombard bishops and  emerging independent cities. And there was no way this could be resolved as long as Henry clung to his anti-pope Clement III. And Henry could not let go of Clement III, because that would invalidate his Imperial Coronation.

Konrad may well have come to the conclusion that the only way the Salian house can remain in possession of power was if he would be crowned emperor by the right pope, i.e., Urban II. If that happened, he could fulfil the two conditions Welf IV had set for a lasting peace, setting aside Clement III and giving him the duchy of Bavaria. Peace with Welf IV and an arrangement with urban II would end all conflicts and bring Konrad on the throne of a now united empire.

That sounds like a plan. A plan Konrad went into without reservation. He met pope Urban II in Cremona. When the pope approached, Konrad went out to meet him and there performed what is called “the office of the groom”. Konrad would get off his horse and he would take the papal bridle, guiding the  vicar of Christ into the city.

This act of imperial submission to the papal authority had not been performed since the emperor Louis II, who was in fact no more than an Italian warlord. Allegedly it had been introduced by the emperor Constantine who performed it for Pope Sylvester after he had cured his leprosy by bathing him in the blood of young boys or some such nonsense.

By performing the office of the Groom or Stratordienst Konrad accepts the Dictatus Papae of Gregory VII and becomes a vassal of the Pope. And from now the popes will demand the office of the Groom at every Imperial coronation

For Henry this must have been a stab through the heart. All he fought for was the preservation of the Salian rule he had inherited from his father and grandfather. His son joining the papal camp makes all that worthless.

And this is not all. The next attack comes from his new wife. Empress Bertha who had faithfully followed her husband to Canossa had died 5 years earlier and Henry had married Eupraxia, a Russian princess. This marriage seemed to have been quite unsuccessful. Eupraxia does appear in only one charter during their marriage, which is a very low number compared to other Salian empresses and Henry’s first wife who appeared very regularly. That suggest she had little if any influence at court.

Early in 1094 Eupraxia sent a plea for help to Matilda of Tuscany.  Matilda then sent a small elite force who extracted Eupraxia from the imperial court at Verona and brought her to Canossa. There she quote  “complained that she had suffered so many and so unheard-of filthy acts of fornication with so many men as would cause even her enemies to excuse her flight”.  End quote.   eupraxia will repeat these allegations of gang rape by her husbands me. in public at a Papal Synod in 1095 and they have been recounted again and again ever since. There is no way to determine the veracity of these statements since propaganda in the 11th century generally pays no regard to facts.

And it does not matter, Henry had been betrayed by his son and accused of infernal crimes by his wife. His military position is now absolutely dire. His empire has shrunk to a couple of counties in Northern Italy held by his ally, the duke of Carinthia. He cannot return to Germany because his enemies control the Alpine passes. He cannot overcome his Italian enemies whose numerical superiority is now overwhelming. It may well be that he contemplated suicide or its 11th century equivalent, riding your horse into the middle of a melee.

As Henry’s star had sunk, Urban II is heading to the crowning moment of his papacy. On November 27th, 1095 in a field outside the French city of Clermont Urban II had gathered not just the bishops and magnates of the council, but also the local landowners, the castellans, their knights and the common people, the peasants, the artisans of the city and even the urban poor

 “A barbaric fury has deplorably afflicted and laid waste the churches of God in the regions of the Orient” Urban declares and this barbaric fury has “even grasped in intolerable servitude its churches and the Holy City of Christ, glorified by His passion and resurrection”. He calls upon all to “free the churches of the East”, and promises that “If any man sets out from pure devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance” “Deus vult, God wills it” is the crowds response, not just in Clermont but all across Europe. The crusades have begun.

Whilst Urban is making world history up in France, the wheel of fortune turns again, unexpectedly. It is not just Henry’s marriage that is on the rocks, the match made in heaven between Matilda and Welf V had also run its course. The marriage that brought all this misery about in the first place is now over.

We do not know who left who, but the bottom line is the same as in Matilda’s first marriage. The Lady is not for turning. Welf V may be a strapping young lad, but that does not mean Matilda will leave him her lands or take his political advice. Matilda’s life and work is bringing about her friend Gregory VII vision of an all encompassing and all controlling papacy. And hence the heir to Matilda will be the one who had been her master all along, The Lord and his representative on earth, the Pope. Little Welf will get nothing.

When this notion trickles through to the older Welf IV, deposed duke of Bavaria, he realised that everyone was in it for themselves, surprise. Time for Welf to finally get something for himself.

He opens negotiations with Henry and the two men quickly reach an agreement. Welf IV offers fealty to the emperor in exchange for the duchy of Bavaria. There is no mention of Pope Clement III or the schism or church reform. Let’s just bring this nonsense to an end.

In spring 1097 Henry IV returns to Germany after 7 years, most of which spent in despair and inactivity. He was so inactive that there is not a single imperial charter for the year 1094. None, nada, zilch.

Next week we will leave Henry to his own devices and talk a bit about the next great achievement of the Gregorian papacy, the First Crusade. We will talk about the horrors it unleashed for the Jewish communities in Germany and the misery it brought to the children and adults who walked all the way to Turkey only to be mercilessly slaughtered. And the men who in the main went, not for pure devotion but for reputation and monetary gain. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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Today we will look at what went on with Gregory VII after Henry had left to fight his rivals in Germany. Spoiler alert, things will not turn out the way he had hoped.

Transcript

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans, Episode 35 – To Rome to Rome

Today we will look at what went on with Gregory VII after Henry had left to fight his rivals in Germany. Spoiler alert, things will not turn out the way he had hoped.

Before we start a 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 Alon and Bengt who have already signed up.

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When Henry IV left Pope Gregory in Canossa in January 1078, Gregory thought he had won the ultimate victory and Henry would from now on be an obedient son of the church. And that should give him room to look after his other ambitions, namely, to bring the King of France to heel and to cash in on the support he had given to William the Conqueror, you know the guy who invaded England whilst Henry was fighting to establish his personal rule in 1066.

Let’s start with the  conqueror, Gregory had ensured he had the full support of the papacy and even received a papal banner to be carried into battle. His objective was to gain control over the English church. And William it seemed delivered, at least initially. He removed the existing Anglo-Saxon bishops wholesale and replaced them with reform-minded Norman clergymen. His new archbishop of Canterbury, Llanfranc was a man of international standing, originally from Italy. And though Lanfranc did all the right things and collected his Pallium in person in Rome and swore to be obedient to the pope, relations soured. When it came to Gregory’s claim to be the overlord of all secular rulers, Lanfranc was not falling in line. His allegiance was first and foremost to the man who put him in his post, William the Conqueror. He sided with his lord when Gregory insisted on the appointment of the bishop of Dol and even more importantly when Gregory insisted on splitting the country between the archbishops of York and Canterbury. Gregory wrote a string of angry letters to William and Lanfranc, but England being a country far, far away and his ruler well established, all he could do is write and be angry.

Geography matters – like a lot. And on that score, France looked like an easier place to assert papal authority. And Gregory had good reason to castigate the King of France for the way he selected his bishops. In the second half of the 11th century the kings of France were by all accounts the poor relations of the European rulers. Their land barely extended beyond the Ile de France. One of the few sources of income to the king was the right to invest his bishops and charge handsomely for that. Gregory’s man for French affairs was Hugh bishop of Die and later archbishop.

Gregory’s letters were a lot more effective in France then they were in England as the powerful magnates used it to further constrain the power of the king.

It was mostly with an eye to France rather than Germany that Gregory VII declared in 1080 (quote):

Following the statutes of the holy fathers, [] now we decree and confirm: that, if any one henceforth shall receive a bishopric or abbey from the hand of any lay person, he shall by no means be considered as among the number of the bishops or abbots; nor shall any hearing be granted him as bishop or abbot.

Moreover, do we further deny to him the favour of St. Peter and the entry to the Church until, coming to his senses, he shall desert the place that he has taken by the crime of ambition as well as by that of disobedience – which is the sin of idolatry. []

Likewise, if any emperor, king, duke, margrave, count or any one at all of the secular powers or persons shall presume to perform the investiture with bishoprics or with any ecclesiastical dignity, – he shall be bound by the bonds of the same condemnation” (unquote).

This is the famous ban on lay investiture. And what it says is quite simple. If any bishop, abbot or priest has been put into his role by a layman he is automatically excommunicated and so is the layman who had put him there.

There were bans on lay investiture before, but they were rarely as clear and uncompromising as this.

The real investiture conflict starts here, in 1080. Sure, the struggle between Gregory and Henry had its beginnings in the conflict over the investiture of the bishop of Milan. But the heart of the conflict had not been over the investiture of bishops but over whether the pope ranks above the emperor.

This ban turns it from a struggle for supremacy into a fight over the institutional integrity of the empire. The. An emperor who cannot appoint his bishops means the imperial church system collapses, and without the bishops the emperor has no soldiers. And that does just apply to the empire. As we saw some episodes ago, the power of the Norman dukes and later the kings of England was as well dependent on their control over the bishops. The. Inflict has become a fundamental question over the respective responsibilities o, the ecclesia, the church and the mind us, the world

Initially ban on investiture as well as the second excommunication of Henry IV on the same synod went nowhere. Gregory’s excommunications have been raining down on people in such frequency that people stopped caring. Practically all Lombard bishops had been excommunicated for years already. Many of Henry’s supporters in Germany are now excommunicated for the second time. And now the king of France and even the king of England were on the verge of being banned. But it wasn’t just the die-hard supporters of Gregory’s direct adversaries, neutral bishops were required to come to Rome and receive the Pallium or were refused consecration. Their reform efforts were criticized and constant demands to do this or that issued. And if one takes the wording of the ban on lay investiture literally, more or less everybody was excommunicated, because pretty much every bishop, abbot and priest had received at least his worldly fiefs from a secular lord. And these secular lords were now also technically under the ban. And as they say, if everybody is excommunicated, nobody is. Never will a ruler kneel in the snow before a pope again. The greatest weapon of the papacy had been utterly spent in just 3 years.

Henry’s reaction to this Synod of 1080 was his own synod of Brixen. Having first gathered his support amongst the bishops in Germany he brought his Italian and German support together, a total of 30 senior clergy. This synod did something the Synod of Worms did not dare to do, it “canonically deposed and expelled Gregory and condemned in perpetuity, if, having heard this [decree], he does not step down.”.

The synod accused Gregory of various misdeeds including of simony, violence, false oaths, the support of heresy, murder, watching pornographic floor shows and even of having a demon, all based on testimony of Hugo the White, cardinal bishop of San Clemente and sworn enemy of Gregory VII. So far so traditional. These kinds of arguments had been made as far back as the deposition of John XII by Otto the great who was accused of congress with all sorts of occult spectres.

But as time went on, the arguments for a deposition of Gregory changed in quality. It is right around this time that Roman law, specifically the Justinian Code was being studied again for the first time in centuries. Until now, most secular law had been Germanic law codes that had very limited internal coherence and some argue have actually rarely been applied. Royal judgements tended to be a bit ad hoc and often political. The church had raced ahead, and Canon Law had gained a lot of internal coherence during the 11th century. By the time of Gregory, most bishops would have a collection of Canon Law in their possession and would base their decision who to support in the ongoing conflict on these compilations. There are conflicting sources who ordered the codification of canon law and who actually produces the first approved version, but by the end of the century Canon law had a solid structure and coherence.

If the church has a coherent system of law, then secular lords needed one too. And that law was the Roman law compiled during the reign of the emperor Justinian in the early 6t century. If in canon law the pope was the source of all justice ad truth, under the Justinian code, that role fell to the emperor. Secular ruler really fell in love with the Justinian code once they could interpret it such that Emperor does not mean Henry IV, but any king, prince, count or baron.

One of the key provisions of the Justinian Code was the Lese Majeste – disrespecting the crown, a crime punishable by death. And that is what Gregory was accused of. He had offended the dignity of the ruler by claiming his excommunication.

For now, these arguments did not carry much weight, nor did other legal constructs from the Justinian code used in the case of Henry IV. But as we will see, the Roman law and its notion of the role of kings will become a key justification for the expansion of royal power, culminating in absolute monarchies almost everywhere in Europe, except for outliers like Britain, Poland and Venice.

This split of law into church law and secular law rare outside Europe is just another result of the events we describe here and call the Investiture Conflict or just Canossa.

The synod of Brixen did not just depose Gregory, it also elected Wibert archbishop of Ravenna as successor to Gregory VII. Clement III was of the same age as Gregor but different in background. Wibert was an old-school prelate in the mould of Leo IX. Of aristocratic stock he had pursued his career in the wind shadow of Emperor Henry III and rose to be Imperial chancellor for Italy. Empress Agnes made him Archbishop of Ravenna and despite his initial support for the antipope Cadalus was given his pallium by Pope Alexander II. Gregory thought him insufficiently fervent in his support for reform and excommunicated him – another one.

He took the name of Clement III but declared that he would not act as pope until he had been properly enthroned on the seat of Saint Peter. That might have been Clements’s own choice or a move by Henry IV to leave a way open for reconciliation with Gregory is not clear.  What is clear is that for the policy to work, Henry will have to bring Clement down to Rome, remove Gregor and affect a proper coronation of his pope. To get that done proved time consuming.

By 1081 Henry had suppressed the rebellion in Germany sufficiently to mount an attack on Italy and took a small army across the alps. The Lombard bishops swelled the ranks of his army and he was thinking that he would be back into Germany within a mere 4 months.

Gregory had not only lost a lot of ground within the church, he had also excommunicated Robert Guiscard the Norman lord the church had been relying on for the last decade. Gregory and Robert did patch up things in 1080, but the Norman was anything but an obedient vassal. His main focus was Constantinople which had fallen into complete disarray after a terrible defeat against the Seldjuk Turks at Manzikart. Robert, freebooter to the last instead of defending Christendom against the Muslim onslaught thought of benefitting from the chaos and pick up as much of the Byzantine empire as possible. So, not much help to be expected from that side.

Matilda was forever loyal, but powerful as she may be, could she hold out against the combined forces of the Empire and the Lombard bishops.

The last part of Henry’s calculation was that the population of Rome should be on his side. The former praefect Censius had already tried to abduct Gregory in 1075 and now assured the king of the support he should encounter in the city.

Henry marched gingerly through Italy which had become a lot more supportive of the Imperial party since his last visits.

Henry arrived in Rome at Pentecost expecting to be greeted by a procession of the senate and people of Rome accompanying him into the city under the singing of hymns and prayers. He was sorely disappointed. The people of Rome stuck by their pope. The church reform movement was a movement of the people and that is why they supported Pope Gregory as a representative of reform versus the conservative backlash.

Rome’s defences, built by the emperor Aurelian in the 3rd century were still strong and well maintained. And Gregory had created the Papal militia as his own military force that now manned the fortifications. Henry’s supporters came dressed for a party, not for war. They had no siege equipment, and their army was small.

But most importantly, it is already Pentecost, i.e., early May and Rome’s greatest defence mechanism, Malaria is getting into gear. There is nothing Henry can do but retreat with his tail between his legs. This is the first time an imperial progress towards a coronation had failed. The embarrassment of the failed coronation was almost as detrimental to his standing as the kneeling in the snow of Canossa.

As things stood, Henry now needed to get crowned, cost it what it may. If he did go back to Germany without a crown his enemies would feel vindicated, and the wavering middle would believe that God had made it clear that Henry should not be king.

The next 2 years Henry roamed around Italy, fighting Matilda od Tuscany and gathering armies he brought before Rome to besiege the city.

His army consisted initially mostly of the contingents of the Lombard bishops. But over time he gathered ore supporters. Amongst them were the Tuscan cities of Lucca and Pisa. Lucca had been the pre-eminent city of Matilda’s lands. Lucca was most famous for its silk weavers who initially imported their raw materials from the near East via Genoa before producing it themselves. Their silks replicated and improved Byzantine designs that proved extremely popular. Lucca was also home to prominent members of the Kalonymos family, which must count as one of the most creatively productive families in history. They can trace their lineage back to the 8th century and numerous rabbis, preachers, poets, teachers, authors, moralists, and theologians, and many prominent leaders of Jewish communities up to the 15th century came from its ranks. The family had branches in both Italy and Germany where they had been invited to settle by Charlemagne or one of his successors. They played a major role in the great Jewish communities of Speyer and Mainz.

Sorry, I digress. I simply cannot help myself looking at history I frankly did not know anything about before researching this episode but clearly features heavily in the history of other communities.

Back to Lucca. Henry IV offered the city more or less total freedom from oversight by either the margrave of Tuscany or the emperor himself. The city was allowed to build and maintain its own defences, was no longer obliged to build or maintain the imperial Pfalz, could no longer be billeted with soldiers, received market rights, customs privileges, and jurisdiction over everything but the most severe crimes. Lucca became thereby the first city in the empire to be officially granted the full rights of an imperial free city.

But Lucca was not the first free city in Italy. Seafaring cities like Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi and Naples had been de facto free cities for a long time already. But even these saw value in being granted rights and privileges by the empire. Pisa valued the confirmation of its rights sufficiently to side with Henry IV.

Whilst Henry was gathering troops in Italy, the situation in Germany oscillated. At times the new anti king Hermann managed to gain control of Saxony and the bits of Swabia and even at some point contemplated a march on Rome to support the pope. That effort collapsed when Otto von Northeim finally died, and Herrmann had to focus on holding Saxony.

For Henry that meant he had to rush back and forth between Rome, the lands of Matilda of Tuscany and the Alpine passes, never able to fully deploy his forces for a lengthy siege.

He showed up in Rome in February of 1082 with an army. But that siege failed again at the staunch defence of the Roman population.

Despite Henry’s efforts going nowhere, Gregory’s position also became desperate. He was simply running out of funds. He had called a synod for Lent in Rome, but hardly any bishops made it through and when Gregory asked for approval to pawn church property to fund the ongoing war, the few bishops who had gathered refused. Matilda, herself under enormous pressure had the great gold crosses and liturgical objects held at Canossa melted down and sent to the pope as bullion. 

By 1083 Henry found a new ally, Jordan of Aversa, the other Norman. You may remember that Pope Nicolas II had elevated two Norman warlords to become dukes, Robert Guiscard and Rainulf of Aversa. The idea was to split the Norman power in the South to ensure the papacy does not get too dependent on just one ruler. Robert Guiscard was a lot more successful than his countrymen, but the Aversa Normans were still around. These now joined Henry’s side in an attempt to push back Robert Guiscard. Guiscard himself was at the time fighting in Greece and what is now Albania, having upgraded his ambition from just taking over chunks of it to making the whole lot a Norman kingdom.

In the year 1083 Henry showed up before the gates of Rome again. As before he set up camp on the Vatican side of the Tiber. His troops made two attempts to overrun the Leonine walls that protect Saint Peter but were rebuffed. At the third attempt, the Romans attempted a sortie to break the siege. Fighting ferociously driven by the pangs of hunger and desperation, they pushed Henry’s forces all the way back into their camp. Henry, seeing that his rule may come to an end in this skirmish joined the fray and his soldiers followed him with renewed vigour driving the Romans back behind the walls of the city.

This fight had broken the resilience of the Romans who found themselves bereft of food, supplies and any hope of relief. Matilda was unable to help, the Normans were overseas. Morale deteriorated and discipline became slack. A few days later Henry’s soldiers noticed that a stretch of wall had no guards on them. In the dark they brought the ladders and climbed in without encountering any resistance. They opened the gates and the Imperial soldiers flooded in.  Gregory and his closest associates rushed for the safety of the Castello di Sant Angelo whilst resistance on the Vatican side of the city was quickly overcome. The papal militia was however able to hold the bridge over the Tiber and the main city of Rome remained in Gregory’s hands.

After that, negotiations started again. From Henry’s perspective the best solution would be if Gregory could be made to crown him. That would remove the stain of excommunication and end the conflict. Hence he and his pope-elect Clemet III left Rome. He kept a garrison there and tore down the walls of the Vatican city.

Thigs looked good for a while as Gregory, pressured by the Roman people, called a synod and promised to subject himself to whatever that synod decides about how the conflict could be resolved.  How sincere this promise was soon became quite clear. His invitation to the synod included clear instructions to the bishops attending. They were told to defend the church against the king a king he had once again excommunicated  from the walls of the Castello di Sant’Angelo. Gregory really did not care for compromise. Henry had no option than to sabotage the synod by apprehending the Gregorian bishops travelling to Rome.

In the meantime, he had received some financial support from the emperor in Constantinople who had come under pressure from Robert Guiscard. The Byzantine emperor wanted Henry to invade Robert Guiscard’s lands in Southern Italy and thereby forcing him to abandon his attacks against the Eastern Empire.

Henry used these funds to bribe the Romans who were now seriously tired of the stubborn Holy Father. They may support church reform, but they were even more keen on bringing these endless sieges to an end. And even in his college of Cardinals dissent was rising. His autocratic style had already irritated some of these eminent churchmen, but his insistence on fighting to the death was the last straw.

In 1084 16 cardinals went over to Henry’s camp and finally Rome opened its doors. Henry and the archbishop of Ravenna moved into the palace of the Lateran. A synod was called which deposed and excommunicated Gregory VII. Clement III was elected (again) and consecrated by the cardinal bishop of Ostia as was right and proper.

And then, finally, finally Henry IV. King of the Romans since 1056 was crowned emperor in St. Peter in the 28th year of his reign by Pope Clement and in the presence of many bishops, cardinals dukes, counts and the Roman people. If it wasn’t for the previous pope still holding out in the Castello di Sant’Angelo, it would have appeared as if finally, the good years of Emperor Henry III were back.

Are they? Well, we will see next week. Gregory is still around, and there is Robert Guiscard whose adventure in Byzantium is going pear-shaped. When he returns to defend his lands now under threat from henry in Rome, the rollercoaster that is Henry Iv’s reign will take another turn, a turn the brunt of which will be borne not by Henry but by the people of Rome who will see their worst fears realised. I hope you will join us again next week.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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Catch-up episode

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

The Territory of the Empire

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

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

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

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

Traditionally the empire is seen as comprising 3 kingdoms.

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

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

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

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

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

The Economy of the Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pope and the Emperor

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

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

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

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

The first one was the rise of lay piety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Empire and the Princes

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

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

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

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

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

Canossa and beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding the empire under Barbarossa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hohenstaufen in Sicily

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

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

Civil war between Philipp of Swabia and Otto IV

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

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

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

Emperor Frederick II and the Mainzer Landfrieden

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

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

Things hold together more or less until 1245.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of the Hohenstaufen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Our history of the Hanse has come to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Of the things that have remained we have already talked a lot, the ideal of the honourable Hanseatic merchant, the cultural and political links to Scandinavia and the stories. The stories of the famous pirates, Klaus Störtebecker and Hans Benecke, the heroics of the wars fought with Denmark and the antics of Jurgen Wullenwever.

But there is something that reminds us of the days when traders speaking low German fed Europe fish, beer and grain. And that are the cultural achievements, the town halls, weighing houses and stores that became symbols of civic pride, the artists whose works adorn churches and palaces across the Baltic sea and last but not least the brick churches that shaped the way these cities still appear..…let’s have a look.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 127: The Art and Culture of the Hanse.

Our history of the Hanse has come to an end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Of the things that have remained we have already talked a lot, the ideal of the honourable Hanseatic merchant, the cultural and political links to Scandinavia and the stories. The stories of the famous pirates, Klaus Störtebecker and Hans Benecke, the heroics of the wars fought with Denmark and the antics of Jurgen Wullenwever.

But there is something that reminds us of the days when traders speaking low German fed Europe fish, beer and grain. And that are the cultural achievements, the town halls, weighing houses and stores that became symbols of civic pride, the artists whose works adorn churches and palaces across the Baltic sea and last but not least the brick churches that shaped the way these cities still appear..…let’s have a look.

And since podcasting is a most unsuitable medium to talk about visual art, I have added a few images to the episode webpage which you can find at historyofthegermans.com/127-2

But before we start it is my privilege to thank all the patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com. Your help is much appreciated. And for those of you who are still on the sidelines, come and join. You can become a knight of the realm for the price of a cappuccino per month, equally stimulating, less calorific and much more prestigious. And here are the names of four amongst your number who have already taken the plunge: John C., Ole S., Luis-Felipe M. and Edward B. Thanks you guys so much.

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Now back to the show. The Hanse ended officially in 1669 with the last Hanseatic diet. But for centuries afterwards the cities of Hamburg, Lubeck and Bremen were the caretakers of the remaining tangible possessions of the institutions, specifically the Kontor Buildings in London, Bruges and Antwerp. The three cities would also maintain joint embassies and consulates abroad and after the unification of Germany in 1871 maintain a Hanseatic representation in Berlin that lasted until 1933.

Thanks not only to this cooperation but multiple other factors, the three cities weren’t integrated into territorial states until the 20th century when Lubeck became part of Schleswig-Holstein. Hamburg and Bremen are still city states with their own state government and a seat in the Bundesrat, something the other great free imperial cities, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Augsburg and Cologne to name just a few, did not achieve.

So, in a way one of the legacies of the Hanse is the existence of the city states of Hamburg and Bremen. But beyond the political, what is left today?

Let’s start with the language. One of the defining factors and some of the glue that kept the Hanse network together was the common language spoken by merchants from Novgorod to Bergen, Low German. As you may have noticed by now, I am no linguist and every time I comment on this topic, I find myself in hot water. So, I will not go into a detailed analysis of Low Middle German, Low Saxon and Low Franconian. There were clear differences between these languages/dialects but one important point was that they could understand each other easily, much more easily than they could understand people living south of a line from Cologne to Frankfurt an der Oder who spoke a version of High German. Whether this linguistic gap was a function or a cause for the great rift between the Emperors and the Saxons that dominated the 11th to 13th century, I am not qualified to comment on.

Low German-speaking area before the expulsion of almost all German-speakers from east of the Oder–Neisse line in 1945. Low German-speaking provinces of Germany east of the Oder, before 1945, were Pomerania with its capital Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where east of the Oder East Pomeranian dialects were spoken, and East Prussia with its capital Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), where Low Prussian dialects were spoken. Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) was also a Low German-speaking city before 1945. The dialect of Danzig (Danzig German) was also Low Prussian.

Low German was not only the language of the common people, but also the language of business and of law. Since most of the Hanse cities on the Baltic had adopted the law of the city of Lubeck, the court cases were held in the dialect of that city. Likewise, the cities who had adopted Magdeburg Law often adopted that dialect for their legal procedures.

In the 14th century Low German, in particular the version spoken in Lubeck, replaced Latin not only in the local courts but also as the language of diplomacy and politics. The records of the Hanseatic diets had originally been kept in Latin. But from 1369 onwards, i.e., from the time of the victory over the Danish king Waldemar Atterdag, the Hanse kept their records in Low German. Not only that, the Hanse was in such a powerful position, it could insist on the use of Low German even in correspondence with the Scandinavian rulers and the Flemish cities. This transition to the common tongue instead of Latin happened somewhat earlier in the Hanse than for instance in France, where Francois 1 declared French the official language only in 1539. Why that is we can only speculate. One reason may be that many city officials who had spent their life trading, simply never learned enough Latin. Equally, some of the smaller Hanse cities could not or did not want to pay for a scribe proficient in Latin. And finally, the church and its Latin-speaking clergy played a much smaller role in the world these men and women inhabited than they did in the rest of Europe.

Low German may have become the language of business, law and politics, but did not gain much traction as a literary language. Most of the literature of the time, like the Minnelieder and chivalric Romances were written and read in Middle High German. The one literary works that gained national significance was Reineke Fuchs, the story of the wily fox who escapes from an ever-mounting pile of evidence of his wrongdoings by framing his archenemy, Isegrim the wolf. The story of the clever fox is just one iteration of a well-known tale that goes back the Aesop and the Roman de Renart in the 13th century and continued well into the Fantastic Mr. Fox. But Reinecke Fuchs was the most successful version in the German lands and after translation into High German was even picked up much later by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Reynke de vos: Incipit der Lübecker Inkunabel von 1498

Really great literature from the Hanse cities came in the 20th century, to name just the giants, there is the Mann family, Thomas, Heinrich, Erika, Klaus and Golo probably the most gifted literary family in the German language. Gunther Grass you already met. Wolfgang Borchert is another one of my favourites. I could go on. They all wrote in High German.

Though the belletristic literature wasn’t exactly the late medieval Hansards cup of tea, history was. From very early on the cities or the patrician societies sponsored writers to record the past of their cities, which is why we have a fairly uninterrupted record of historic events all throughout the Middle Ages.

The use of Low German in commercial and political communications declined almost exactly in line with the decline in the influence of the Hanse. In part that was due to the Lutheran church that emphasised Luther’s translation of the bible into high German and from 1530 published all church communications in high German. At the same time the southern German traders like the Fugger took an ever-larger role as counterparts to the Hanse merchants and they insisted on High German. The reforms of the imperial administration and legal system by Maximilian I and Charles V shifted the legal language to High German. Finally, the Renaissance led to a revival in the use of Latin.

By 1631 even Lubeck had changed the language of its announcements to the general population from Low German to High German. Low German became the language of the lower classes whilst the patricians and university educated professionals spoke High German. The same process took place in the Hanse cities along the Baltic Coast, in Gdansk, Riga, Tallin and East Prussia. Since the late 19th century efforts have been made to rehabilitate Low German. Authors write in the language and one of Hamburg’s largest parks is called Planten un Blomen, a forthright description so characteristic for Northern Germany.  Today Low German or Plattdeutsch is recognised as a regional language and submissions in low Germans have to be accepted by courts and authorities.

Plamnten un Blomen – Hamburg

A rather unexpected element of Hanseatic culture was a love for chivalric romances and their heroes. As we mentioned before a couple of times, the patricians despite most of them being in trade, saw themselves the equals of the knights and lower aristocracy. They did engage in aristocratic pastimes like hunts and tournaments. Moreover, they did get very fond of the nine great heroes or nine worthies. This is rather motley crew comprising three heroes of antiquity, Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar, three chivalric heroes of the Old Testament, Joshua, David and Judas Maccabaeus, and finally three Christian heroes, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon. Nobody can explain what drove this choice, but we find them most beautifully depicted in the Hansa hall of the Rathaus of Cologne and the Beautiful Fountain in Nurnberg.

9 gute Helden im Hansasaal des Rathauses Köln

One of those, King Arthur seemed to have struck a particular chord with the citizens of Prussia. The cities of Danzig, Elbing, Riga and Stralsund all had Artus Courts where the patricians met and pretended they were the knights of the round table. Chivalric heroes were pressed into service as defenders of citizens’ freedoms. Reinold of Montauban, one of the four sons of count Aymon became the patron saint and defender of Dortmund whilst statues of the mighty Roland proliferated from Bremen across the Hanse world.

Chivalric heroes were pressed into service as defenders of citizens’ freedoms. Reinold of Montauban, one of the four sons of count Aymon became the patron saint and defender of Dortmund whilst statues of the mighty Roland proliferated from Bremen across the Hanse world.

Reinoldus – patron saint of Dortmund

Painting and sculpture is something that rarely comes to mind when talking about the Hanse. Many great museums in Germany are today in the cities that had once been the capitals of powerful princes with huge budgets for representation, rather than in places dominated by sober merchants. Berlin, Munich, Dresden inherited and then expanded these princely collections. Others like Cologne and Nurnberg had been made centres for the great national collections in archaeology and art. But Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck do not often feature on the bucket list of art lovers. A bit unfairly I have to say since for instance the Kunsthalle in Hamburg houses very interesting exhibitions.

That does not mean that there weren’t some astounding artist active during the heyday of the Hanse. Like everywhere in Europe the congregations in the Hanse cities did their utmost to fill their churches with great pieces of art. Wooden sculptures and monumental altarpieces were their preferred donations. There are a few names of artist we know, like Bertram of Minden and Master Francke from Hamburg. If you want to see works by the latter, there are some in Hamburg, but the largest, most complete work is in the Finnish National Museum. It got there because it was in a small church in a place called Kalanti, today part of modern town of 14,000 people that I cannot pronounce. Seemingly Kalanti was a large enough trading post in the 14th century to order a piece of art from a Hamburg master.

The greatest of these Hanse artists was probably Bernt Notke (1440 to 1509). He had travelled extensively, learning his craft in the Netherlands and in Italy, where he got heavily influenced by Mantegna. He set up shop in Lubeck stayed in Sweden for 15 years where he became the master of the royal mint before returning back to Lubeck. His works can be found in many Hanse cities, including in the church of St. Mary in Lubeck. But again, if you want to see his masterpieces you need to take a ship or plane. Though he was a renaissance artist he remained in many ways wedded to medieval themes and imagery. That is most visible in the Totentanz or Dance Macabre. A Totentanz is a motif that had emerged after the Black death and shows the whole of society from the emperor down to the lowly peasant dancing with grinning skeletons, reminding the viewer that the worldly joys of beauty, health and wealth are temporary and that the grim reaper is waiting for us all. Exceedingly cheerful I know. But Notke manages to depict the skeletons with so much verve and joy, one is almost compelled to join them in their pogo. There used to be two versions, a short one with 13 figures in Tallin and a 30 metre long and 1.9m high high freeze in the Marienkirche in Lubeck.

The Lubeck version had already deteriorated badly by 1701 and was replaced with a faithful copy that was much admired. In 1942 the authorities had a wooden cover built to protect the image against bomb damage. The Royal Air Force attack on Lubeck was the very first of the WWII bombing raids and the city was ill prepared. In particular the use of firebombs was unexpected. As the firestorm raged through the Marienkirche, the wooden cover caught fire and the Danse Macabre came to its long prophesised end.

Fortunately Notke’s greatest work survived World War II and it isn’t in Germany either. It is the altar of St. George in the church if St. Nikolai in Stockholm, the Storkyrkan. I have only seen pictures of it and if I ever get a chance to go to Stockholm this is #1 on the list. Commissioned by the Swedish regent Sten Sture who had made a solemn promise to honour St. George before the battle of Brunkeberg. That was the battle that threw out king Christian I of Denmark and led to the collapse of the Kalmar Union. Episode 123 if anyone wants to refresh your memory.

The battle of Brunkeberg was a hugely important event, but hey did Notke do it justice. Depictions of St. George are one a penny in European art, but I have not seen one before where St. George is sculpted in Wood, and including horse and Plinth is 20 feet tall, his sword raised, his horse rearing up in fear before the dragon. And what a dragon it is, not one of those cute little salamanders you normally see cowering at the feet of the saint, ready to be pierced by some dainty lance. No, this is a real dragon, a terrifying monster whose gargantuan mouth could easily swallow a horse’s head in one gulp. The animal has captured the lance and only a well-placed hit with the sword raised high can save St. George and the damsel in distress who praying nearby.

This was made at the same time as the much more famous early equestrian statues of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice and Gattamalata in Padova but as Wilhelm Pinder said, it stands up to them as their Nordic counterpoint.

As amazing the St. George is, or seems to be, given I have never seen it in the flesh, painting and sculpture isn’t the most important legacy of the Hanse.

When we think of the great artistic achievements of the Hanse, we think of the humble brick and what could be created with it.

Now before we go into the whole topic of brick gothic, let us not forget that the Hanse comprised more than the towns on the Baltic and North Sea. The inland cities of the Hanse, Cologne, Dortmund, Muenster, Soest, Braunschweig did not build in brick, but in stone and boy did they create some amazing things. The city of Cologne is proud of its history as a free city and conveyed that pride in its town hall and the Gurzenich, a sort of party house with the largest dance floor in the Empire. And since the citizens of Cologne are a sensible bunch, they put a market hall on the ground floor. Muenster too has an impressive Rathaus dating back in parts to the 13th century and famous as the place where the peace of Westphalia was negotiated.  Dortmund has one of the oldest town halls amongst the stone-built cities, and Brunswick one of the most beautiful.

The cities in what art historians called the Hausteinzone or quarried stone area differed not just in terms of material from the brick-built cities from Riga to Bremen. The inland cities were much older than the Hanse cities east of the Elbe River. Not all have roots as deep as Cologne, but Brunswick, Muenster, Soest and Dortmund date back to the conquest of Saxony and featured Romanesque cathedrals and palaces that had already shaped their structure when the Hanse got going.

The cities of the brick-zone, with the exception of Bremen, did not have much if any stone buildings in the 12th century. Some were entirely new settlements like Riga and Tallin or grew up alongside Slavic settlements like in Danzig or Stettin. That left the merchant elite with carte blanche to build cities that reflected their idea of beauty and functionality. And by coincidence, just as they got going, a new architectural style was created back at the Abbaye of St. Denis in France, Gothic. And what added to the sense of consistency in the Hanse cities was that the Gothic style largely persisted well into the 16th century, after which many of these places declined in wealth and importance precluding major rebuilding projects.

The Hanse cities were often planned as rectangles with a market square in the middle. And that market square was to be fronted by a town hall, offering a place to trade, to meet your fellow citizens and to engage in politics. Most often the actual city hall was built on the first floor above the cloth hall whilst the cellar held the wine stores.

The Rathaus in Lubeck became the blueprint for many other brick-built town halls. It initially consisted of two separate comparatively modest buildings, one was the cloth hall and the other a place for social and political gatherings. These two buildings were connected and given a new joint facade. In the 14th century a new wing was added on the eastern side of the market square. And then in the 15th century a further extension was built, and all of that was built in brick.

One of the important things to know about brick is that it is a terrible material if you set your heart on decorating your brand-new town hall with statues, capitals and gargoyles. Brick just cannot really do that.

But still they did want some decoration and came up with a unique way to impress the importance and wealth of their city upon its visitors. They created monumental facades before the actual buildings that also reached well above the level of the roof line behind, serving no other purpose than decoration. The architects designed large round or pointed gothic openings that they then decorated with quatrefoils, rosettes or more intricate designs. They added finely chiselled gables and columns to add even more decoration. Stralsund is probably the most successful of these designs.

Beyond the town hall, we find similar features on other public buildings like the weighing houses, exchanges and city stores for salt, grain etc. And then the city’s merchants and artisans would compete to have the most impressive guildhall on the best spot on the market square.

But overlooking all of these were the churches. And that is another way in which the Hanse in the north differs from most cities. With the exception of Bremen there is no mighty cathedral that exceeds all other churches in size and splendour of decoration. Even in the cities that had their own bishop like Lubeck, Riga or Tallin, it was the parish church funded by the merchants that was the largest, the most sumptuously decorated and the one featuring the tallest tower.

The Hansards had a thing about having very tall towers. 125 metres seems to have been the standard to beat which keeps Lubeck, Riga and Tallin in the top 20 of highest churches in the world to this day, all taller than Salisbury Cathedral.  Allegedly St. Mary in Stralsund was even 151m high, which would have made it the highest building in the world until it was hit by lightening in 1549. These towers had a specific Hanse-related purpose. They could be seen from miles out at sea or downriver and as sailors returned from long journeys, they are cheered by this first glimpse of their hometown.

Brick architecture remained a key identifier of Hanse architecture, even though many masterpieces of brick gothic like Chorin monastery or the Teutonic Knights castle in Malbrok had little or no connection to the Hanse. When Hamburg reconnected culturally and architecturally with its Hanse roots, they chose visible brick to build the Speicherstadt and then in the 1920s developed an architectural style called Brick expressionism that gave us the Chile Haus, that rises like a curved red ocean liner out of the mass of houses near the Elbe.

It is this reconnecting to the Hanseatic traditions in the 1880s that did not only materialise in the architecture of Hamburg.

When Georg Sartorius sat down in 1802 to write the very first modern history of the Hanse, he did so because he sought refuge from the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, believing that nothing could be further from contemporary politics that this “half-forgotten antiquity”.

But he was quite thoroughly wrong. As a faithful listener to the History of the Germans you know that right around this time historians and pseudo historians began combing through Europe’s past in the hope of finding some German hero stories that could be woven into a new national narrative.

And what could be better than a story of a maritime empire that once controlled the Baltic Sea, beat the Kings of Denmark and England in war and left behind magnificently romantic cities. Quickly the Hanse, that famously had nor organisation, no army and, crucially, no desire to go to war when it could be avoided, was painted as an expansionist united maritime power that rivalled the English and French and was only prevented from conquering the new world by the lack of a strong German state.

Now I initially wanted to go into this in a lot more detail. But as it happened, I may have secured an interview with the person who has literally written the book about the perception of the Hanse in the 19th, 20th and now the 21st century. So, I do not want to forerun this interview, which may come out in mid-December.

And that gets me to the plan for the next Season, the Teutonic Knights. I will probably need as usual 2 to 3 weeks of preparation for that. That might mean no episodes until the end of November, except for maybe some short pieces on little gems I came across along the way.

And just to keep you guys excited about coming back, let me tell you what comes after the Teutonic Knights. We will get back to the chronological narrative. We will resume the story of the Holy Roman empire where we left off, at the death of Konradin. We will wade through the blood-soaked decades of the interregnum that brings one Rudolf von Habsburg to the throne, just in time for him to gain his family the duchy of Austria with well-known consequences. But before the Habsburgs get to settle on the imperial throne for good, history has granted us the Luxemburgers, Henry VII, Charles IV and Sigismund, fascinating figures who shaped Europe from their capital in Prague. I hope you will come along for the journey.

by on

Bremen was geographically and politically quite different from the other cities, ploughing its own furrow. In response the other Hansards did not trust the citizens of Bremen. There is also the minor issue that Bremen sheltered a lot of pirates. Still as the Hanse declined politically, Bremen took on an ever-larger role until becoming one of the last three Hanseatic Cities that kept that long-dead medieval relic plodding along until the late 19th century. A story of rebellion, stubbornness, piracy and emigration to America, I thought worth telling.

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Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 126 – A brief History of Bremen

The initial idea for this episode was to draw this season to a close with a talk about the art and culture of the Hanse. But then, when I started drafting, I realised that I have almost entirely omitted one of the great Hanseatic cities from our narrative, Bremen. And that isn’t right. One cannot have a 20 episode podcast series on the Hanseatic League and not talk about Bremen. But it wasn’t that I skipped Bremen on purpose. The reason Bremen barely featured in our narrative is that Bremen had a very ambivalent relationship with the Hanse.

Bremen was geographically and politically quite different from the other cities, ploughing its own furrow. In response the other Hansards did not trust the citizens of Bremen. There is also the minor issue that Bremen sheltered a lot of pirates. Still as the Hanse declined politically, Bremen took on an ever-larger role until becoming one of the last three Hanseatic Cities that kept that long-dead medieval relic plodding along until the late 19th century. A story of rebellion, stubbornness, piracy and emigration to America, I thought worth telling.

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Back to the show. When I said Bremen hadn’t featured much in the History of the Germans, what I meant was the city of Bremen, not its archbishops. Those we have met many times. In Episode 96 we talked about Ansgar, the 9th century archbishop of Hamburg who had to retreat to Bremen in the face of Viking raids.

From the 10th century onwards the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen kept clashing with the great Saxon nobles over the treatment of the Slavs on the other side of the Elbe. The archbishops wanted to convert them so that their bishopric could expand into Scandinavia and the Baltic States. The dukes and counts mostly just wanted to plunder. You may remember the story of Adalbert, one of Bremen’s most formidable archbishops and Gottschalk, the prince of the Abodrites in episode 101.

The reign of Adalbert in the 11th century was the highpoint of archepiscopal influence. He had been the almighty chief minister of Henry III and later the young emperor Henry IV. Adalbert had been offered the papacy by Henry III but turned it down, preferring to build out his archepiscopal see in Bremen and Hamburg. That ended in 1066 when the emperor had to dismiss Adalbert under pressure from his court, an event that led ultimately to a hardening of the imperial position, which led to the Saxon revolt which contributed to the Investiture controversy and Canossa, basically most of Season 2 of the Podcast.

After Adalbert it went sharply downhill with the archbishops of hamburg-Bremen. They kept faith with the imperial side during the wars between the Saxon nobles and the emperor and supported him in his conflict with Pope Gregory VII. That put them straight into the crosshairs of the dukes of Saxony. The dukes, supported by their friends amongst the Saxon nobles and even emperor Henry V constantly degraded the power of the archbishops. The archbishopric was at one point the metropolitan see for all of Scandinavia from the Faroer islands to Uppsala, but that ended when the pope elevated the bishop of Lund to archbishop. At which point the archbishopric had only three subordinate bishoprics, Oldenburg, Ratzeburg and Schwerin.

One last moment of hope came when Hartwig, the heir of the wealthy county of Stade became archbishop and proposed to make the archbishopric the heir to his fortune a story we looked at in episode 108. That could have made a huge difference to this archdiocese which was now by far the poorest and least significant archbishopric in the empire. But that was not to be. Henry the Lion coveted the lands of Stade and being best mates with the emperor Barbarossa, managed to expel Hartwig from his ancestral lands. And as a final nail in the coffin, the emperor also removed the three remaining suffragan bishoprics from Bremish control, handing them over to Henry the Lion.

That is the situation in the 12th century when the Hanse is getting going. Bremen, an ancient city is the seat and only possession of the poorest archbishop imaginable.

The archbishop may have become poorer and poorer in the 300 years from 900 to 1200, but the city and its burghers had prospered in the medieval economic boom.

Bremen is in a very attractive geographical position. It sits near the mouth of the Weser River, roughly 50 km from the North Sea. That sounds like a long way, but the river is still tidal down to the city which allowed even larger ships to come up all the way. Moreover, the city sits on the highest point of a 23km long ancient sand dune that gives it a mighty elevation of 15.2m above sea level. Not exactly alpine but given the vast marches between Bremen and the sea averaging an elevation of just 3.3m, the significance of this dune becomes clear. Bremen was one of the few places for miles around where your feet remained dry even in High Water.

The Weser is one of the three main German rivers going into the North Sea. The largest and commercially most important is the Rhine, which gave rise to the wealth of Cologne. The next significant is the Elbe which comes all the way from beyond Prague and through its various tributaries connects Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, Halle, Magdeburg, Berlin and Luneburg to Hamburg.

The Weser is the shortest of these three, less than half the length of Elbe and Rhine. But still the river connects some important medieval trading centres with the North Sea, namely Hannoversch Munden, Eisenach, Hameln, Minden, Hannover, Celle and foremost of all, Brunswick.

Being able to collect products from such a large hinterland, Bremen embarked on fruitful trading relationships with England, the Low Countries, Norway and Scotland well before the Hanse and Lubeck in particular got going.

Bremen traded in many of the wares other Hanse cities traded in. Grain, Wood and most importantly Beer were great exports going North. One of Bremen’s beer specialities was Grut-beer made without hops but with a variety of herbs, which made it stronger and more aromatic. Bremen was the first of the German cities that exported beer into the Low Countries. But that position did only last until the early 14th century when Hamburg took over. The difference was that the council in Hamburg maintained strict quality controls in beermaking, whilst Bremen did not. Unscrupulous makers of cheap beer eroded the Bremen beer brand. For the avoidance of angry mail, let me assure you that this problem has been resolved by now and Bremen hosts Becks, one of Germany’s most famous and most delicious brands of beer.

The Wine trade seems to have been of huge importance too. The Bremer Ratskeller, technically a restaurant in the vaults under the Rathaus but in reality one of the preeminent distributors of quality wine in Germany was first mentioned in 1342. One key export market for wine from Bremen was Scotland, a rather unexpected pairing.

In the other direction Bremen merchants brought fish from Norway and Denmark as well as cloth from England and Flanders up the Weser River into what is today Lower Saxony, Thuringia and Hesse.

One trade that would start much later in the 17th century was Coffee. Bremen had the first coffee house in Germany and still today some of Germany’s best known coffee brands like Jacobs, HAG and Eduscho come from Bremen.

So, in many ways Bremen was a perfect fit for the Hanse. Similar products and similar target markets in Flanders, England and Norway.

But in many other ways it wasn’t. Bremen was oriented on a North-South direction, similar to Cologne. The Hanse’s focus on the Baltic and the trade between East and West had little interest for Bremen. In fact, many of the Hansards provided unwelcome competition to the traders in Bremen.

Beyond the differences in economic conditions, the city of Bremen was also politically in a very different position. Bremen lay at the outer edge of the Hanse territory. The closest Hanse cities were Stade and Buxtehude, both more than 80km away. Instead, their neighbours were to the south the powerful dukes of Brunswick, the descendants of Henry the Lion. To the West and North were the Frisian chieftains and the counts of Oldenburg, powers who played little role in imperial politics but had a habit of devastating each other’s lands with a sheer incessant set of feuds.

The major flashpoint between Bremen and its neighbours was the control of the Weser River all the way to the sea. The city tried to reduce attacks on shipping in the river by first building castles along its banks. When that failed, they tried to wrestle the whole territory from their rulers, which made Bremen one of the few, if not the only Hanse city with serious territorial ambitions.

And the social structure is different too. The ruling families, at least until the mid 14th century were landowners and rentiers who had become rich in the service of the archbishops, not the successful merchants. In 1304/5 a first crisis was caused by the murder of a member of that city aristocracy. The subsequent feud ended with the creation of a new statute for the city that reduced the power of some of the Geschlechter, the great aristocratic houses. The story repeated itself in 1349 when an aristocrat accidentally murdered a merchant member of the council, creating another armed conflict that ended with the expulsion of another batch of aristocrats. The council is reorganised in 1308 and 1330 and now recruits from three separate groups, the first are members of the 30 patrician families, the second, the Meenheit, are representatives of the upper middle classes, the artisans and smaller merchants  and finally the Wittheit, a sort of assembly of experts.

And finally, there was still the archbishop, technically the overlord of the city.

These differences may explain why Bremen had been expelled from the Hanse on multiple occasions. The first time in 1285 when the Hanse was forcing the king of Norway to accept the privileges for the Kontor in Bergen. Bremen had been trading with Norway and exporting stockfish from before Lubeck was even re-founded by Henry the Lion. They hence saw no reason to support the Hanse interlopers in their embargo. Their calculation was that if they would support the Norwegians, they would gain all the privileges the other Hansards were trying to gain by force. Let’s just say it did not work out and Bremen took a long time to get back into the Stockfish trade.

One of the problems with a history of Bremen is that material and secondary sources are much thinner on the ground than elsewhere. Why that is I have no idea, but even the simple question of whether Bremen was involved with the Hanse after the expulsion of 1285 seems hard to answer.

If they were, they were at best a junior partner. But maybe they were just ploughing their own furrow for the next 70 years. Because the next confirmed interaction with the Hanse in in 1358 when Bremen is begging to be admitted back in.

In 1358 Bremen is on its knees. A whole host of night soil men had decanted their commodities over the heads of its unsuspecting citizens. 

It started with what should have been a routine affair. The old archbishop, Otto I was gravely ill and had left the administration of the archbishopric to his nephew, Maurice of Oldenburg. When Otto died in 1348, Maurice was duly elected by the cathedral chapter to get the title for the job he was already doing. But he wasn’t the only candidate.

Godfrey of Arnsberg, the bishop of Osnabruck also wanted to be archbishop and so he bribed the pope Clement VI in Avignon to make him archbishop, which he duly did. The city council initially supported Maurice of Oldenburg. But when Maurice was out of town on business, Godfrey came in and managed to get the city council to accept him.

As was entirely predictable Maurice returned with his supporters and besieged the city. The walls were strong, but the attackers were many. As the battle was waving back and forth, people started to complain about unusual symptoms. Many reported fever, abdominal pain and bleeding. Their skin and tissue had turned black and shortly after the first symptoms appeared, most fell over dead.

The Black Death had arrived. It raged much more ferociously on the Weser than in any other Hanse city. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of its 15,000 inhabitants perished. Warfare had to stop, and the two combatants decided that Godfrey would get the title and Maurice would get the job.

Once the plague had subsided the city needed to rebuild its population. The council therefore opened its gates to anyone, including serfs to come and live in Bremen as free men and women.

That sat increasingly awkward with the count of Hoya who had become archbishop Godfrey’s strongest supporter. The count whose lands lay south of Bremen was losing tenants and serfs by the busload, something he could ill afford since half of his labourers had died as well and the land lay fallow. So, he demanded, in the name of the archbishop, that the serfs and tenants were to be sent back to him. In an unusual act of mercy and compassion, or out of fear the city could simply empty out, the city council refused.

At which point the parties decide to resolve the problem of depopulation by resuming hostilities. Things do not go well for the city and Bremen loses a battle in which several members of the council are taken hostage. The cost of the war and the ransom for the captured councillors ruin the already fragile finances of the city.

In an attempt to restore their fortunes, the citizens of Bremen beg the Hanse for admission after having tried to go it alone for so long. They are admitted and the burghers are preparing to get ready for some much-needed uptick in trade activity.

But no, bad timing. Just as Bremen was joining up things in Bruges had hit boiling point. 1358 was the year the Hanse issued one of its embargoes against Flanders. Trade with one of Bremen’s most important markets had to stop.

The desperate Bremer merchants say sod this for a game of soldiers. So, they break the embargo. At which point the Hanse comes down on them like a ton of bricks. Stick with the embargo or you are expelled and blocked from all Hanse ports. So, they go along, join the embargo taking even more pain.

Meanwhile on the enemy’s side things aren’t going well either. The count of Hoya also spends a lot of cash on war and weapons, cash he does not have. So, he looks for help and finds it in the form of the duke of Brunswick. But the duke’s help has a price. You guessed it, that price is the archbishopric of Bremen.

The count had to get his ally Godfrey to surrender the archbishopric and pass it on to the son of the duke of Brunswick, Albrecht II. A deal is made, Albrecht is confirmed by another bribeable pope and hey presto, we now have three archbishops. Maurice, Godfrey and Albrecht. But thanks to the superior weapons of the duke of Brunswick we find ourselves in 1362 in a situation where there is only one archbishop left, Albrecht II. Albrecht II brokers a peace agreement between the count of Hoya and Bremen. The embargo against Flanders had ended in 1360. Everything should now be fine.

It should, but it wasn’t. The city was still broke from paying the ransom for the captured councillors. Hence a special tax was introduced to repay the debt.

I guess we all know about what happens when special taxes are levied on the artisans and middle classes for projects that provide them with few or no benefits. If paying for the Stecknitz canal caused a large rebellion in Lubeck, guess what happened in Bremen when they asked the little people to pay the ransom for the moneybags on the City Council.  

The lower classes gathered together in what they called the Grande Cumpanien first to vent their grievances about the tax but that soon turned into demands to overthrow the 30 families, to have elected council members and just generally freedom!. On the morning of September 16, 1365 a large crowd assembled for a demonstration that quickly got out of hand. Leaders of the Grande Cumpanie raised the city banner and armed their followers. They broke into the homes of prominent council members, pushed and shoved them around and said very rude things about their mothers. But they did not apprehend or seriously harm anyone.

The retaliation of the patricians came swiftly. Remember that a wealthy city councillor lived a lifestyle not very different to a knight in the countryside. Most of them were trained in all the knightly arts, namely in the art of killing. These guys put on their armour, closed the gates and rode out to slaughter the insurrectionists – successfully as you would imagine. By the evening 18 leaders of the rebellion have been captured, convicted and executed.  The surviving insurrectionists fled in the night. Their possessions are seized and used to repay the city’s debt.

Ok, that was painful, but now things should be ok, right?

Ah, no, still not. There is our archbishop, Albrecht II, who turns out to be a bit of a bad egg. Albrecht’s biggest problem was that he liked to spend money, including money he did not have. Well, mostly money he did not have.

And the need for money made him do some odd things, including becoming a pirate. The archbishop had an accomplice, Johann Hollemann, the black sheep of family of Bremen patricians. Hollemann had been a successful pirate since the 1350s causing no end of problems for his hometown. But they couldn’t really do much about him since he lived in a fortified castle inside the city of Bremen and had lots of money and connections. Archbishop and noble pirate kept plundering ships that had taken the ground at low tide, claiming they were subject to salvage.

Given this level of financial urgency, archbishop Albrecht was very excited when the surviving insurrectionists from Bremen knocked on his door, a group that included his pirate buddy, Johann Hollemann. Together they came up with a plan to get hold of the city of Bremen and seize the wealth of its great patricians. The archbishop was to hire some mercenaries and Hollemann and the others would organise another uprising.

In the night of 28th to 29th of May the conspirators opened the gates to the archbishop’s soldiers. They quickly take the strategic positions inside the city. The Patricians had erected a wooden statue of Roland, the paladin of Charlemagne and by some warped logic the representation of the city’s independence. That statue was burned. And the usual murdering and settling of scores occurred. Now it was the turn of the patrician members of the Council to flee the city.

A new constitution was introduced that granted the artisans and their guilds the deciding vote in the selection of the members of the council. Bremen was to become a city ruled by the Middle classes under the benign overlordship of the archbishop-pirate Albrecht II.

That experiment in church-sponsored democracy was cut short. The exiled old council, much like their opponents had done only a few months earlier looked round for support. The Hanse immediately expelled the rebellious city. But Konrad of Oldenburg was the man to bring the old order back. After just 4 weeks, the regime of the lower classes, led by the pirate Johannes Hollemann collapsed. The Oldenburger’s army entered Bremen with the help of those who did not want to return under archepiscopal control. The insurrectionists were caught and killed on the spot. Johannes Hollemann was besieged in his castle in the city and once the soldiers had entered, they hanged him and his men in front of the house, or according to other accounts had him broken on the wheel.

Only after that does calm return to Bremen. The patricians accept that to avoid future rebellions the artisans and their guilds need to get better representation on the council. The archbishop Albrecht II is forced to give up most of his rights in the city, apart from a small district around the cathedral.

The role of the bishop in the city’s affairs diminishes even further when Albrecht II’s money problems compound after his capitulation. He offers rights like coinage and market rights as security for loans from the city. When he cannot pay back the city seizes these rights and mints coins until 1862.

And there is a final humiliation left for Albrecht II. In 1376 a member of his cathedral chapter claimed the archbishop was a Hermaphrodite. Albrecht II had to counter these claims by submitting to a public examination of his private parts, not something that increased his standing much.

The subsequent period of peace and independence from the archbishop brings about a huge improvement in the prosperity of the city. Bremen conquered the lands on the left and right bank of the Weser going down to the mouth of the River.

Its most famous monuments date from that time. The City Hall was built in 1405 to 1410. And obviously the mighty Roland, symbol of the city is rebuilt in stone. He looks straight at the front gate of the cathedral on the other side of the market square as a sign of defiance of the independent city from the archbishop. The merchants erect their guildhall, the Schutting on the market square. The current splendid building dates from the 16th century but there was a great assembly hall there since 1444.

Despite the economic improvement social tensions remain. Bremen’s history in the 15th and 16th century is punctuated with regular uprisings. In 1427 they kill their patrician Burgomaster which results in a renewed expulsion from the Hanse and even an imperial ban  that lasted until 1438.

The reformation came in 1524 and the city quickly converted. In 1532 Bremen saw a populist uprising similar to the Wullenwever episode in Lubeck but without the foreign policy lunacy that followed there. Bremen oscillated between Lutheranism and Calvinism for nearly 120 years. In 1563 Bremen declared for Calvinism and was expelled from the Hanse for it, but just 13 years later was re-admitted without having changed its religious position.

In 1599 Bremen begins the construction of extensive fortifications. The change in military technology required a fundamental rethinking of the way a city could withstand attacks. The works lasted all in until 1664 but by the time the 30-years war comes around, Bremen is one of the best defended cities in the German lands. In fact, the same is true for Hamburg and Lübeck. Thanks to these enormous walls and bastions the three Hanseatic cities survived the catastrophe largely unscathed. In fact even the inland members of the Hanse did manage comparatively well with the exception of Magdeburg that suffered one of the most famous atrocities of this brutal conflict.

But their survival wasn’t enough to revive the Hanse. Sweden and Denmark have become the dominant territorial states in what used to the naval monopoly of the Hanse. Many once great Hanse cities have accepted Swedish control, like Riga, Visby and Tallin. Wismar and Stralsund too were taken over by the Swedes, whilst Rostock was incorporated into Mecklenburg. The archbishopric of Bremen had become a duchy that was held by the king of Sweden, surrounding the city and incorporating Stade. Denmark stretched to Altona once a town outside the gates of Hamburg and now a part of the city. Many of the inland cities too have finally succumbed to the constant pressure from their territorial overlords, with Cologne and Brunswick the notable exceptions.

In 1629 the Hanseatic diet proposed that only three cities, Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck were to represent the Hanse from now on. There were more Hanseatic Diets in the 40 years thereafter. In 1669 the last gathering took place.  At that diet no major decisions were taken. It is likely that most participants despite the gloomy atmosphere and meagre attendance realised this was the last time.

There was never a formal decision to dissolve the Hanse. It simply vanished from the political scene. The three cities, Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck remained legally in charge of the Hanse assets, namely to Kontor buildings most if which were barely used and no longer held any privileges. Weird traditions continued. Lubeck would for example send an emissary to the now entirely empty beach where once the great herring market of Scania had taken place and declared the privileges of the Hanse of the Merchants of the Holy Roman Empire. Only the gulls were listening.

As for Bremen, the city found a new trading destination, the United States. From 1783 Bremen became the #1 port for ships going from Germany to North America. The main export goods were people. Between 1832 and 1960 about 7 million Germans emigrated to the US via Bremerhaven, the port Bremen had built on the mouth of the Weser. 

Bremen and Hamburg survived the tides of history as independent city states until today. That status changed only twice. During the time of the Napoleonic Bremen became part of the French department of the Bouches de Weser and Hamburg of the Bouches d’Elbe. And during the Nazi Regime Bremen and Bremerhafen were incorporated into the Reichsgau Weser-Ems whilst Hamburg was extended to become Gross-Hamburg.

Bremen the smallest of the German Länder maintains many of its historic traditions. The Haus Seefahrt is one of Europe’s oldest charities looking after retired captains and their wives and widows since 1545. They will hold the annual Schaffermahlzeit a splendid dinner for up to 500 people in the great hall of the Rathaus for the 480th time in February 2024. Standing at the windows the guests can see the mighty Roland that still staring defiantly at the gates of the Cathedral from where a higher authority once unsuccessfully tried to suppress the city’s independence. On the right they see the Schutting with the merchant guild’s motto embossed in gold – Buten un Binnen, Wagen un Winnen, away and at home we risk and we win.

We may have reached the end of the Hanse’s history, but that is not yet the end of the series. You have been here long enough to know that the History of the Germans does not close a series with the demise of its subject. Everything in German history has an afterlife, and the Hanse is no exception. So next week we will take a look at the tangible and intangible remains of the Hanse. I hope you will join us again.

And as always let me thank all the patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com. Your support is what has kept this show going for 2 and a half years and should keep us moving forward for many years to come.

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The end of Emperor Henry IV

It is hard to believe, but the last years of Henry IV’s tumultuous reign still held one final humiliation that capped the pain this man had already endured.

And that despite a period of relative stability which began after his return to Germany in 1097. Henry IV had accepted that his rule could not be one more than a First amongst Equals. He reconciled with his enemies in Swabia and Bavaria, largely by bribing them with valuable crown lands and settled into his new favourite residence in Mainz. The only one he did take issue with was the archbishop of Mainz for his involvement in the murder of the Jewish community under his protection.

He even attempted a lasting reconciliation with the Gregorian papacy admitting to having broken the unity of the holy mother church. But the new Pope, Paschalis II was not playing ball, leaving this issue as an open wound…long after the antipope Clement III had died.

The internal weakness of his regime became apparent when one of the guests at his imperial assembly in Regensburg ends up murdered by Ministeriales…..

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 39 – The End of Henry IV

This week we will talk about the last years of Henry IV, which, as hard as it is to believe, holds a final humiliation that capped the pain this man had already endured.

Before we start a 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 John, Jason and Demetrio who have already signed up.

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At the end of episode 37 Henry IV was finally allowed to return home thanks to the reconciliation with his Southern German enemies, Welf IV and Berthold von Zaehringen. The price Henry had to pay for this reconciliation was fairly straightforward. He had to reinstate Welf IV as duke of Bavaria, and most painful of all, accept that Bavaria became a hereditary duchy, in other words, the king could no longer appoint the duke of Bavaria, let alone manage the duchy himself as he had done for the past 14 years.

As for the Zaehringer who had himself elected as anti-duke of Swabia against Frederick of Hohenstaufen, the deal was that Berthold retained the title of Duke, even though he was no longer duke of Swabia. He also received the royal demesne around Zurich, one of the most valuable of the crown’s possessions.

The net effect of that was that Swabia was divided into the ducal Swabia ruled by Frederick of Hohenstaufen and the Zaehringer Duchy in the south. Some argue it was even a three-way split, as the possessions of the Welfs in the eastern part of the duchy around Ravensburg were also out of ducal control.

The reconciliation with his last enemies meant that Henry IV could finally reign as emperor recognised across the whole of the empire. But this reign was now very different from the reign his father and grandfather exercised. Henry IV was now a First amongst Equals, a bit like his namesake Henry the Fowler had been. 200 years of expansion of central authority have been reversed.

The only right he still held on to was the right to invest bishops. These last 20 years, the bishops were often the only support Henry IV enjoyed. Amongst the secular princes only Frederick von Hohenstaufen had been unwaveringly loyal. The rest had to be bought or otherwise placated.

Before we get to the attack on this, the last real royal prerogative, there was one other thing that he believed his royal authority extended to, the protection of the Jews.

Those of you who have listened to the whole of Episode 38 may remember that Henry IV had declared himself the protector of the Jews in the empire in 1090. That was probably less of an act of religious tolerance than an attempt to raise funds for the depleted imperial coffers. Whether it was greed or enlightened self-interest does not matter because the imperial protection counted pretty much for nought when the crusaders massacred Jewish communities in Worms, Mainz, Trier and elsewhere.

Upon his return Henry IV initiated an investigation into these horrific atrocities, specifically the events in Mainz. He explicitly condemned the enforced conversions and allowed the Jews to return to their faith. Pope Clement III seconded this by declaring their baptisms uncanonical, which means they could return to their faith without being deemed apostate. That mattered because the sanction for apostasy was death.

Henry then followed the money trail and detected that a lot of the property of the murdered Jews had miraculously ended up in the hands of kinsmen and followers of the archbishop of Mainz, Ruothard. In fact a significant chunk of the assets had gone directly to this great prelate.

Henry could not let that go since Ruothard had been specifically ordered by the emperor to offer protection to the Jews. Ruothard had gone through the motions and offered the large Jewish community shelter in his fortified palace in the city. But when the troops of Emrich of Leiningen came knocking, the archbishop and his knights fled by the back door, leaving the unarmed men, women and children to their fate.

It transpired that the archbishop took 50 of the most prominent members of the community along and held them in a castle nearby. There they were offered freedom for conversion and compensation, which most refused resulting in them being killed or killing themselves in front of the archbishop.

Before the investigation was completed the archbishop and his kinsmen decided to run for it and hid in Thuringia for the next 7 ½ years.

That suited Henry well who took over Mainz as one of his preferred residences. It suited the citizens of Mainz even more as they thoroughly disliked their archbishop. This trend of citizens throwing their bishops out and forming their own independent city states is now really taking hold with Worms and Cologne leading the movement..

These next five years are a period of calm, most unusual for the reign of Henry IV. His rule is recognised by almost everyone. Once the Welf and the Zaehringer had reconciled themselves to the king, the only truly Gregorian base was the bishop of Constance, Gebhard. Though he remained the legate of the Gregorian pope in Germany, he had no more influence outside his own diocese, where Henry IV left him alone.

With his authority recognised across the land, Henry IV could move on to plan for his succession. He was now 48 years old, older than his father and grandfather when they died.

His eldest son, Konrad was still alive. You remember that he had betrayed his father and joined the Gregorian party. Pope Urban II and Matilda had promised him the world, including the imperial crown. He was even given a rich bride, the daughter of king Roger of Sicily. But, once the alliance between Matilda and the House of Welf had fallen apart and Henry IV had returned to Germany, young Konrad served no further purpose. He was given a modest castle to live in with his bride and was left to rot. Nobody called on him and even the pope who had promised to be his guardian and advisor never contacted him again.

But he was still technically King of the Romans and the future emperor, which meant he had to be formally deposed. That happened without much fuss in May 1098. Konrad ultimately died a broken man in 1101.

At the same royal assembly, Henry IV pushed through the election of his second son, also Henry. He was crowned King Henry V in Aachen in January 1099. His father had become a bit suspicious after the treachery of his eldest. Hence Henry V had to guarantee the emperors life and safety of his person on oath and was made to swear that he would never interfere against his will and command with matters of the kingdom, his honour and current and future possessions during his lifetime.

Hmm, this sounds long enough and legalese enough an oath to be broken some day…

Part two of the program was to make the current peace a lasting one. At the royal assembly in 1103 Henry IV declared a comprehensive peace to last for four years. He committed his nobles to preserve the peace for the churches, clergy, monks and lay brethren, for merchants, for women and Jews. Penalties for breaching the peace were severe. Perpetrators were to be blinded or would lose a hand for attacking and burning another one’s house, taking prisoners, wounding or killing a debtor, persistent theft or defending a peace-breaker. A castle where the peace breaker had taken refuge could be destroyed and his benefice could be seized by his lord and his possessions taken by his kinsmen.

That sounds again like a peace of god his father could have declared. But in the end it was not. The administration of the penalty was not to be done by the emperor or his appointees, but by those who had sworn the peace. It wasn’t the central authority that delivered the peace, it was the community, or so they hoped.

This peace is sometimes seen as the first act of imperial legislation within the context of the Holy Roman Empire, a construct not of a central monarchy but a mixed monarchy built around co-operation rather than command. It sort of was as the imperial peace or Reichsfrieden and its smaller cousins, the Landfrieden which became regular instruments of imperial rule. Yeah, maybe the Holy Roman Empire starts here, at the royal assembly of 1103. It is not called that for another 150 years, but the foundations are being laid.

The third part of his program to stabilise his reign was a reconciliation with the papacy. After Urban II’s propaganda coup with the crusades and even more so after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, the old conflict between pope and emperor was resolved. The pope had won. No ifs, no buts.

The last obstacle was the anti-pope Clement III. As long as he lived Henry could not accept a Gregorian pope since that would have invalidated his coronation. Clement III was kind enough to die in 1100 removing this particular obstacle. Though. Cement’s cardinals elected a number of successor anti popes and held parts of the city of Rome, Henry ignored them. 

So, all could now be resolved. Henry IV called a royal assembly in Mainz where he proposed to send envoys to the pope to negotiate a settlement. And from 1100 to 1103 he made regular attempts to agree with Paschalis II.

With the question of who has the biggest now resolved, the pope came up with the next set of demands set out in the Dictatus Papae, the investiture of the bishops.

This whole fight between emperor and pope has been labelled the investiture conflict but you may have noticed that I barely mentioned investiture much in previous episodes. The issue made appearances all throughout the reign of Henry IV, going back to 1059 and it was usually included in the list of papal prerogatives.  But in reality, it wasn’t the big issue in the previous conflicts. All throughout this period henry IV had invested bishops and the Gregorian popes would happily receive bishops into their party who had been invested by Henry IV. Several of the reform popes had been present at investiture ceremonies performed by the emperor and kept stum.

But now, as the emperor was down, the popes saw the opportunity to tackle the issue.

What was the issue? The bottom line of it is, who appoints the bishops and abbots. In canon law, the question is a bit more complex. Because of the way the imperial church system had evolved over the previous two centuries, the German bishops were both religious leaders for the people in their diocese and feudal lords over the counties, castles, privileges and estates granted to their church. Under the early Ottonians the process of making a bishop consisted in two separate acts. Part one was the election as a religious leader by the congregation, specifically by the cathedral canons. Once elected, the bishop would then ask the king or emperor to be enfeoffed with the various secular rights of the bishopric. These two separate appointments were represented by the ring as a sign of the religious marriage of the bishop with his diocese and the staff as his sign of secular power. That sort of made sense, reflecting both the religious and the political dimension of the role of the bishop.

But as time went by the weight of the king and emperor in the decision who would be bishop had become ever more significant. The canons were aware that the king could refuse to enfeoff their chosen bishop with the lands, making them all suddenly very poor. Hence, they would ask the emperor for guidance in advance of an election. That then mutated in a process of direct orders of the king to elect so and so. Finally, under Henry III they dispensed with the niceties entirely and the king would invest his bishops directly with both the ring and the staff.

For the popes who saw themselves as the leader of Christendom and the immediate superior of the bishops, this system was unacceptable. How could a layman appoint a church leader, in particular a layman whose morals were not just in doubt but who was even excommunicated.

On the other hand, Henry IV could not relinquish the right to appoint bishops. That was literally the only power base he had left. The crown lands had been diminished and after the disaster in Saxony earlier in his reign there was no chance of building his own territorial power base.

We are at a complete impasse. Both sides want to come together, but they cannot get over this hurdle. Henry IV will send messages of peace and reconciliation to Paschalis II whilst at the same time investing bishops as before. Paschalis never writes back. Instead, he calls him “the chief of the heretics” and grants the soldiers fighting against henry in the constant border conflicts the same absolution crusaders received for going to Jerusalem. In 1102 he solemnly repeats Henry IV’s excommunication at a council in Rome and again releases everyone from their oath sworn to the king.

Henry’s response was to brush up his PR. He would make a big show and dance of his efforts to protect the priests and abbots against their rapacious secular neighbours. He would make another string of donations to the churches of Worms and Speyer. The cathedral in Speyer is by now reaching its completion as the extraordinary building that still stands today. He talks about going on pilgrimage to the Holy land to atone for his sins and he even writes to his godfather, abbot Hugh of Cluny, that he wants to do penance for his acts that ruined the unity of the holy church.

Did he mean all that? Maybe he did. He is now really old by the standards of the time and had been through the wringer so many time, I am wiling to believe he had enough. All he now cared about is leaving the empire to his successor in a reasonable shape and the conflict with the papacy resolved.

And most people in Germany agreed. 30 years of civil war had been enough, and nobody wanted a repeat. But as the failure to resolve the investiture conflict dragged on, the outward appearance of peace and stability hid some profound disagreements.

All came to a head at an assembly in Regensburg, capital of the duchy of Bavaria in the winter of 1103/1104. Many princes from all over the realm joined the emperor and his son for great festivities.  One of them, Count Sieghard of Burghausen, a rich noble from Southern Bavaria showed up with an unsuitably number of retainers. He argued that he needed so much protection because the court was too friendly to the Saxons and Franconians and that he feared for his life.

He may have been right about that. On the 5th of February 1104 Count Sieghard was murdered in his lodgings in Regensburg by a mob of Ministeriales. Ministeriales you may remember were unfree knights who were obliged to follow orders of their owners, usually princes, bishops or the emperor himself. But they weren’t just salaried soldiers. They had received fiefs to fund their weapons and cover their expenses. They would build castles on these lands and -over time- become indistinguishable from actual knights.

 According to some chroniclers, the Ministeriales had been enraged by some judgement count Sieghard had made in respect of one of his own Ministeriales. It was clearly not a smart move to antagonise a group of heavily armoured thugs with a chip on their shoulder for not being real knights. The Ministeriales besieged the lodgings of Count Sieghard for six hours and even the entreaties of the crown prince King Henry V could calm them down. The Ministeriales finally broke in and killed the Count and his household.

Public opinion blamed Henry IV for this murder. Sieghard was a guest of the emperor and was hence under his protection. Henry IV had sponsored the Ministeriales throughout his reign and his voice should have carried favour with them. In other words, Henry IV had failed to do his job, which led to the accusation that he was condoning the murder.

Feuds broke out across the empire, and particularly in the Northern provinces of Bavaria where many of the local counts had Gregorian leanings. The rebellion than extended to Saxony where another count apprehended the imperial candidate for the archbishopric of Magdeburg.

It is civil war again and Henry IV musters an army at Fritzlar in December 1104. And in the night of December 14th, 1104 young King Henry V, son of the emperor and sworn to obey him in all his commands, leaves the imperial camp. He runs for Bavaria where he finds support amongst the relatives of the murdered Sieghard.

Henry IV has to abandon his expedition to Saxony and returns to Mainz.

Henry IV’s enemies rally around his son. The pope, who had almost given up hope to unseat Henry IV was clearly surprised to receive a letter from young king henry V offering him allegiance in exchange for support in his fight with the father. He also urgently needs to be absolved from his solemn oath to obey his father. An oath he had made before the whole of the realm and on the most precious relics and regalia of the land. Without absolution, his soul and his rebellion would be lost.

But hey, that is one of the easiest things to sort out. Paschalis argument is simple. Henry IV has been excommunicated since, like forever. What is an oath to an excommunicate – just hollow words.

Being absolved meant that more malcontents could join young Henry Vth’s banner. And malcontent the Saxons always are. Archbishop Ruothgar of Mainz is another obvious supporter, as is the nominal leader of the Gregorian party in Germany, bishop Gebhard of Constance.

Most of the year 1105 was spent in military walkabout whereby Henry V failed to successfully challenge his father but gradually gains control of Southern Germany. One great coup was to get hold of the 15 year old Frederick II of Swabia, the son of Henry IV’s great ally Frederick of Hohenstaufen who had died the year before.

The elder Henry made a last attempt to take Regensburg with the help of the Austrians and the Bohemians. But after 3 days of a standoff outside the ancient city, Henry IV was betrayed by his allies and had to flee back to the one loyal area he still had, the cities of the Rhineland, namely Mainz, Speyer and Cologne.

Speyer fell at the end of October and Mainz was considered too dangerous, so he retreated towards Cologne. His son caught up with him near Koblenz.

Father and son finally met and first the elder Henry fell on his knees and begged his son to end the inhumane persecution. Then his son fell to his knees and said he would make peace with him if only he could reconcile with the pope.

The father accepted to come to a royal assembly in Mainz to debate the issue with the nobles and subject himself to whatever conclusion the assembly may reach. On the promise of safe passage to Mainz, Henry IV dismissed his army and joined the camp of his son.

On the first day his advisors told hm that they feared his son would break the oath and imprison him. When he confronted him, Henry V repeated his guarantee to take him to mains.

And when on the second day the number of armed men in Henry V entourage increased, the father asked the son again, are you taking me to Mainz to state my case, and again the son guaranteed the emperor’s safety.

And on the third day…well do I have to tell you, yes and for a third time Henry V guaranteed his father’s safety.

On the fourth day Henry IV was imprisoned in the castle of Boeckelheim. His goaler was a particularly Gregorian minded bishop who had little regard for an excommunicate imprisoned emperor. The former ruler’s followers had been dismissed except for three laymen, he was left without a bath and unshaven but worst of all, without being allowed communion during the holy days of Christmas.

There was no way Henry V would let his father appear in Mainz, a city staunchly supportive of the old emperor. He was allowed to come before an assembly in the imperial Pfalz of Ingelheim, but that was an assembly of henry V’s supporters. All the undecided and the supporters of the old king were left in Mainz.

Henry IV tried one last time to get himself out of the pickle he was in by displaying excessive penance. In a rerun of Canossa he threw himself at the feet of the apostolic legate, confessed his sins including his unjust persecution of the apostolic see and even performed the prescribed abdication. He then begged the legate to give him the absolution, having done all that was required of him. And if the man in front of him had been the pope, henry IV would probably have been absolved from the excommunication again, letting him fight another day. But the man in front of him was a mere apostolic legate who came up with the eternal rebuttal of the bureaucrat – I do not have the authority to release you from the ban. I will write to the pope who will sure acquiesce to your request. And even when he claimed he was in immediate mortal danger running the risk of dying without reconciliation with the church the legate remained unwavering – No can do. Do I need to tell you that under canon law he had been obliged to absolve the king under these circumstances? I presume you have heard enough about the Gregorian papacy by now to know the answer to that.

As Henry IV had now abdicated, his son Henry V was crowned in the cathedral of Mainz with the regalia he had forced his father to surrender and by that self-same archbishop Ruothard of Mainz who still had the blood of hundreds of Jews on his hands.

Henry IV was left in Ingelheim, apolitical and probably also emotional wreck. At some point he realise that his son could not let him live much longer and he fled. First to Cologne and then to Lothringia.

I have no idea how he did that, but somehow even after this last hammer blow, Henry IV did not give up. He retired too liege and when henry V send troops to capture him, his allies beat them. He then returned to Cologne where the citizens urged him to resume his role as emperor. When his son came to besiege the city he had to retreat twice experiencing heavy losses.

The father began to rebuild his power base and some disaffected nobles and bishops joined his side. He even opened up the possibility of giving in on royal investiture to split the Gregorian party. Things were looking up for old emperor henry in the spring of 1106 when he was suddenly struck by an illness. He died after nine days in Liege surrounded by his closest friends and advisers having received the last rites.

What a life. Henry IV had been emperor from 1056 to 1105, 49 years in total. In that time he was abducted by a faction of his nobles, abandoned by his mother, forced to marry a girl he saw as a sister, betrayed a hundred times by his nobles, forced to stand in the snow for three days to do penance, stabbed in the back by his eldest son , publicly accused of the worst misdemeanours by his second wife, and finally deposed by his youngest son. Where is the scriptwriter who sells the story to Netflix?

He was initially buried in the cathedral of Liege but was soon exhumed as the archbishops and bishops objected to an excommunicate to be laid to rest in consecrated ground. His body was then buried in un-consecrated ground outside the city. A few weeks later henry V demanded for his father’s remains to be brought to Speyer, but the citizens of Liege tried to keep hold of the body who they began to believe to be sacred. They would touch the bier for a blessing and spread the earth from his grave on their fields to ensure an abundant harvest.

Finally one of Henry IV’s most faithful servants was able to extract the body and transport it to Speyer where it was placed in a stone sarcophagus that was kept outside his magnificent cathedral for five years. Only once his son had achieved a breakthrough in the conflict with the papacy that from now on is indeed the Investiture conflict did he obtain absolution from the excommunication. He was finally buried in the magnificent cathedral he had built in the year 1111. His son held a eulogy of his great and beloved father, emperor Henry IV of happy memory.

Next week we will look at how Henry V, champion of pope Paschalis II finds himself caught in the same gridlock that prevented his fathers reconciliation with the mother church. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.

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Crusaders attacking the Jewish communities in Mainz, Speyer and Worms

In 1095 Pope Urban II launches the First Crusade. Emperor Henry IV and his allies would rather be strung up below a beehive covered in honey than join a scheme devised by the Gregorian Pope.

Does that mean no Germans take part? No, the lack of support by their high aristocrats did not stop the common people. While most of them perish before the crusade had even really begun, some turn their religious fervour into a very different endeavour, bringing untold pain to the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, Trier, Metz, Prague and elsewhere

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 38 – The First Crusade

Today we will leave Henry IV to fend for himself. Instead, we will be looking at the First crusade and most specifically the role of Germans in that First crusade. A word of warning. In this episode we will have to discuss extreme violence, religiously motivated crimes and suicide. I will give a specific warning when we get there. Feel free to skip from that point onwards. I will make sure that you can pick up seamlessly at episode 39.

Last week we talked briefly about Pope Urban’s famous speech in the field outside the city of Clermont in France that kicker off the crusades. I must confess that I took a bit of artistic licence there and put words into Urban’s mouth that reflect only one of the five different versions of that speech. I felt that was ok given that by and large the gist of the speech is the same in all five versions. Urban calls upon the Christian faithful to free the holy land from the infidels.

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I will not give you a full rundown of the whole of the First Crusade. There are a number of excellent indie podcasts on the topic, namely my old colleague from a different world Nick Holmes who has a great show called Byzantium and the Crusades and obviously Sharyn Eastaugh’s epic History of the Crusades. And if you want to read about the crusades, check out Steven Runciman 3 books on the crusades. Brilliantly written and for me still the “go to” source.

Though we are not going to go through the Crusades in detail, there are some elements that had a bearing on German history.

The first of those is the question Why Urban asks for a crusade at this exact point in time, and even more importantly, why was his call successful now? He was not the first to call for Christian knights to aid in the fight against the infidels. There might have been a call for a crusade as far back as 1010 under pope Sergius IV. Pope Alexander II supported the recruitment of Christian knights in the fight against the Muslims in Span and Sicily. And in 1074 Gregory VII proposed a march on Jerusalem to none other than the emperor Henry IV, the man he would excommunicate just a year later. So what are the reasons it worked this time when it had not worked before?

Reason #1 was the rise and rise in lay piety that lay behind the church reform movement.  As their economic conditions improved people began seeking self-actualisation, which in 11th century society meant finding a way to get to heaven. The crusades offered a nearly perfect deal. If you do something, i.e., travel to the holy land to free the sites of Christ’s birth. Life and passion, you will be automatically cleansed of your sins and have a free ticket to heaven. It is the same logic that is behind gym memberships and Yoga classes. The difference is that if halfway through your Yoga class you realise the Tripod Handstand with Lots legs is not for you, you simply stay home numbing your bad conscience with a cup of cocoa. If you go on crusade, halfway through means you are somewhere in Hungary with no food, no horse and under attack from hostile locals.

Reason #2 was more short term. The same economic growth that drove piety had also resulted in a surge in population, leaving the world with an excess of younger sons and daughters. These young people had no chance of an inheritance. There was little chance of gaining land by force after the expansion of the realm of the Christian faith into the east and north had stalled a 100 years ago. The population pressure was brought to bursting in the last 10 years thanks to a series of draughts, freezing cold winters and other freak weather events that had destroyed the crops.

Reason #3 was the weakness of the Truce of God movements. As central authority had almost vanished in France and deteriorated in the empire, the church attempted to maintain some semblance of security by making the feuding lord and castellans swear on powerful relics that they would refrain from fighting on certain days of the week and holy days. That was a suboptimal system to start with since on the free days, feuding, i.e., killing of each their peasants and burning of their fields was perfectly ok. Moreover, these arrangements tended to be forgotten after a few years and normal service resumed until the bishop called another truce. The crusades offered a way to reduce the feuding, since the most aggressive armoured horsemen would join the crusade in search of riches or just sport, whilst those who stayed behind swore not to attack the lands of the absent crusaders.

Reason #4 was the one officially given, i.e., that Jerusalem needed to be freed. It is also the least compelling.

By the time Urban II made his stirring speech, Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for 460 years. Jerusalem had been captured in 636 by an army of the Caliph Umar, the father-in-law of Mohammed.

As had been the case in most conquests during the caliphate, the Arabs did not force the locals to convert to Islam. That did not mean they could live as they pleased. They did have to pay special taxes, could only maintain their old places of worship but not build new ones, and were generally treated as second class citizens though. But there was little persecution, and the Arabs did not mind in the slightest if Christian tourists came and generously spent their gold and silver. As long as the pilgrims behaved and paid for services, they were welcome.

In the early 11th century travel to Jerusalem had become relatively easy. The Byzantine empire had recovered from the initial dual assault by the Arabs and the Bulgars. It ruled over a coherent landmass from the Hungarian border to Syria. Hence pilgrims could either travel through Germany and Hungary and enter the eastern Roman empire in Belgrade or get there by crossing the Adriatic from Bari to what is today Durazzo in Albania. Once inside the Eastern Roman empire, the excellent roads would bring them via Constantinople and Anatolia to Antioch. Another 200 km on, the pilgrims would enter the Caliphate in Tartus in Syria from where it was just 500 km to Jerusalem.

The journey would take a whole year but was not much more dangerous or strenuous than travel in the Middle Ages was anyway. The comparative ease of the journey meant that pilgrim numbers surged. There were pilgrim hospices run by monks along the way, including the famed hospice of Saint John in Jerusalem had been set up in the 7th century well before the crusades.

For instance, in 1064/65 a large pilgrimage set off from Germany. It was led by the archbishop Siegfried of Mainz and comprised amongst others the bishops William of Utrecht, Otto of Regensburg, and Gunther of Bamberg. This pilgrim group numbered somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 including women and children looking to see the holy sites.

After 1064 the journey had become more dangerous. The Caliphate had begun to crumble under its own internal problems and attacks from Seldjuk Turks. The Turks had been around for a long time controlling the lands between the caliphate and India. In the 11th century they began exploring the opportunities arising from the weakness of the Caliphs. A long conflict between Arabs and Turks ensued during which warlords carved out smallish territories that regularly changed hands whilst the two major Islamic powers, the Fatimids and the Turkish sultans tried to gain control.

At the same time the Turks had begun attacking first Armenia and then the Byzantine empire itself. The Byzantine empire had its own problems as the Macedonian dynasty had failed to produce a male heir. The empresses Zoe and Theodora held things together for 30 years after the death of the great emperor Basil II.  But when Empress Theodora died in 1056, the state fell into civil war as a succession of civil and military potentate vied for the throne. In this midst of this infighting the Turks advanced. In 1071 they won their great victory at Manzikart. Though they did not immediately take advantage of the defeat of the emperor, Seldjuk warlords would capture most of Anatolia during the 20 years that followed.

Bottom line was that by 1095 the Byzantine empire no longer controlled the route across Anatolia. Not could the caliphs offer safe passage across Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.  Pilgrims were molested and occasionally relieved of their possessions. There were even selected cases where travellers were provided with accelerated entry into heaven.

In other words, the route to Jerusalem had become dangerous because of the absence of a central authority. What wasn’t the case was that a central authority blocked the route to Jerusalem, as Pope urban and his preachers had claimed. Realistically, without the crusades, the situation in the levant would probably have stabilised after some time and whoever one the contest would have reopened the lucrative pilgrim route again. Instead, we ended up with a conflict that in some ways is still continuing today.

And Reason #5 is purely political. It all kicked off with Alexius Komnenos, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire asking the pope whether he would be allowed to recruit some mercenaries in the west to fight against the Muslims. Well, that may well be what he meant, but what Urban understood is that Alexius asked him for help fighting the Muslims.

Pope Urban received the appeal early in 1095 and pondered it on his journey to Clermont. Clermont had initially been scheduled to be an important council, but no one expected a call to free the holy sites of Christendom. The great plan must have formed in his head as he travelled up the Rhone River. His Eureka moment might even have come when he stopped at his former home, the abbey of Cluny to consecrate the (second) largest church in Christendom.

Urban II realised that a successful expedition to Jerusalem under the leadership of the church could resolve all the conflicts of the last decades in one fell swoop.

Just think back and ask yourself why the emperors had such a stronghold over the church for so long? Where does their claim to lead Christianity come from?

It starts with Charlemagne who could claim that he had expanded the reach of the word of Christ into the pagan lands of the Saxons and that he had defended Christianity against the Saracens in Spain.

When Otto the Great came to Rome in 962, he could claim the conversion of the Poles and the defeat of the Hungarians as the Lord’s work. Under Otto II the eastward expansion stopped following the Slav uprising. Otto III reinvigorated the idea of the emperor as the bringer of Christian faith to the east through his pilgrimage to Gniezno.

But after that progress stalled. The Kievan Rus went to the Orthodox church, the Lithuanians remained pagan until 1387 and the emperors failed to control the pagan lands between Poland and Saxony. Expansion of the Christian faith was now the job of the Christian Spanish kingdoms and the Normans in Sicily. What these had in common were two things. One, they were fighting Muslims, not pagans and secondly they were both vassals of the pope, not of the emperor.

The logical conclusion from here is that if the Gregorian Reformers could scale up this effort, the leadership of Christendom would permanently shift from the emperors to the papacy. Henry IV or whoever was his successor would have to submit to the pope and the antipope Clemet III would lose all his remaining support.

The cherry on the cake was that if the expedition was successful, the emperor in Constantinople would be compelled to acknowledge the pope as the spiritual lead, ending the schism between Latin and orthodox Christianity.

And then, finally, all the princes will kiss the feet of the pope, as Gregory VII had set out in his Dictatus Papae of 1075.

All of this made overwhelming sense to the men and women standing in the November mud outside the walls of Clermont, as it made sense to congregations all across France, England and Italy.

Whilst still at Clermont, Urban II received the first major pledge to go on crusade by Count Raymond of Toulouse. Soon the offers to take the cross came in hard and fast. The brother of the King of France, Hugh of Vermandois signed up, as did the count of Flanders and the duke of Normandy. The Normans in Sicily quickly realised that this effort was an easier way to gather some lands in the east than going it alone as they had before. Hence Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard and his nephew Tancred joined up as well. These high aristocrats began pawning their lands to raise funds to equip and feed an army for a campaign much longer than anyone had undertaken before in medieval Europe. There was however one subsegment of the European nobility who could not see the point of this at all, the German bishops and high aristocrats.

Obviously, Henry IV would rather be hung beneath a beehive covered in honey than join any of Urban II’s schemes. And that would go for most of his allies as well. If Henry and his mates are not going, then the rebel dukes and counts had to stay as well. They could hardly expect Henry IV to respect the Crusader’s immunity issued by Urban II.

There we go. A great war is on, and the Germans stay home – who would have guessed? All the Germans? No.

One of the great vassals of the empire would go on crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lothringia. Godfrey was free to do what he wanted as he had made his peace with the emperor back in 1087 but was not close enough to him to be a target of the rebels. Godfrey raised one of the largest crusader armies, became the Crusades unacknowledged leader and was ultimately crowned the first king of Jerusalem. Godfrey’s leadership eclipsed the official leadership established by Urban II, that of bishop Adhemar de Puy. And with the crusade ultimately under secular, not papal leadership, the big political bet of Urban II did not come through.

The loss of church leadership in the crusade was not the only thing that did not go according to plan. Whilst Urban II organised his professional crusader army, the idea of a crusade went viral. Several preachers, usually monks began calling the common people to go to the holy land. Not next year when all the preparation is done, but right now. Salvation and eternal life is waiting for you. Go now. Drop everything and come along. The most famous of these preachers was Peter, an itinerant monk. Steven Runciman describes him as follows: Peter was an oldish man, born somewhere near Amiens. His contemporaries knew him as “little peter” -chtou or kiokio in the Picard dialect. – but late the hermit’s cape that he habitually wore brought him the surname “the hermit”, by which he is better known to history. He was a man of short stature, swarthy and with a long, lean face, horribly like the donkey he always rode, and which was revered almost as much as he was. He went barefoot and his clothes were filthy. He ate neither bread not meat, but fish and drank wine.

Despite his unassuming physique he clearly inspired people. Guibert of Nogent tells us the “Whatever he said or did, it seemed like something half divine”

Peter started preaching almost immediately after the council of Clermont and he gathered supporters amongst the poor, the townsfolk and the younger sons of knightly families of Northern France, Flanders and the Rhineland, so that when he appeared in Cologne in April 1096, his peasant army had grown to 15,000 people. There was no way such a mass of people could be fed and watered anywhere in 11th century Europe. They were condemned to keep moving. An initial contingent of about 7,000 set off right after easter. This group travelled through Hungary and entered Byzantine territory at Belgrade. There were some hiccups along the way as nobody was expecting the crusaders to arrive that early, but they managed to get to Constantinople in the end.

Peter stayed behind in Germany for a few weeks preaching. That refilled his ranks and he soon had 20,000 followers, mostly men but also women and children hungry for salvation. They as well set off on the land route to Constantinople. Everything went well until they reached the border between Hungary and Byzantium. It seemed the Hungarian governor of the border fortress of Semlin was trying to instil some discipline in the huge horde. Things went out of control over the sale of a pair of shoes in the bazaar. An altercation turned into a brawl, which turned into a riot which turned into a pitched battle, at the end of which the Hungarian city burned down and its garrison was slaughtered. The Byzantine governor watched this in horror from the other side of the Danube. His Petchenegg soldiers tried to establish order, but they quickly realised they had no chance against that huge press of humanity. The garrison fled to Nish with the inhabitants of Belgrade in tow. The pilgrims storm Belgrade but finding little of value burn it down.

As I said at the beginning there are scenes of extreme violence and religiously motivated crimes in the sections that follow. If you are concerned about the impact these could have on you or on other people around you, please close the episode here. You should be able to follow the narrative from the next episode, Episode 39.

After that the emperor sends what must have been a regular army as an escort to lead them to Constantinople. Still too large to stay anywhere for long, the horde is packed off across the Bosporus towards the frontier. Though they were told to wait for the whole army to assemble, they kept moving slowly towards Nicaea, the capital of the Turkish sultan. As they moved, they made no difference between Muslims and Greek Christians, either was robbed of their possessions, their wives and daughters raped, and the men tortured. Months on the road had ripped the last bit of Christian charity out of them.

What this army now often called the Tafurs looked like is best described by Norman Cohn in his book Millennium: “barefoot, shaggy, clad in ragged sackcloth, covered in sores and filth , living on roots and grass and also at times of the roasted corpses of their enemies, the Tafurs were a ferocious band that any country they passed through was utterly devastated. Too poor to afford swords and lances, they yielded clubs weighted with lead, pointed sticks, knives, hatchets, shovels, hoes and catapults. When they charged into battle they gnashed their teeth as though they meant to eat their enemies alive as well as dead”, end quote.

As this army came up against the Sultan’s capital at Nicaea, they believed they could take the city with the help of the lord. Against the disciplined Turkish troops that had defeated the greatest powers of the east, the peasants stood no chance. They were ambushed and within minutes their undisciplined march turned into a chaotic rout. They were back in their camp even before the older folk who were left behind had even woken up. There was no real resistance. Soldiers, women and priests were killed before they even moved. The prisoners were killed except for the boys and girls that were of pleasant enough appearance to be sold as slaves. No more than 3,000 of the 25,000 who set off from Cologne survived. They joined the main crusade and some of them even entered Jerusalem, creating a bloodbath amongst the Muslims whereby the city was covered knee deep in blood and gore.

Peter the hermit had left some of his disciples behind in Cologne to gather even more followers for his doomed adventure. Three leaders emerged, Volkmar, Gottschalk and Count Emich of Leiningen. Volkmar sets off first, followed a few weeks later by Gottschalk.

Emich, count of Leiningen’s army was somewhat different. Though equally driven by lay piety, his followers tended to include more knights and counts and less peasants. And he had better access to information. One piece of information he found particularly useful was about Godfrey of Bouillon. Godfrey of Bouillon, great noble and future king of Jerusalem had found it hard to raise funds for his expedition. Relief came from an unexpected source. Kalonymos, the chief rabbi of the great Jewish community of Mainz had offered Godfrey 500 pieces of silver. The equally famed Jewish community of Cologne paid the same. That generosity was prompted by rumours that Godfrey had vowed to avenge the death of Christ with the blood of the Jews before he set off on crusade. I mean, I would be the last to suggest that Godfrey may have spread the rumour himself or actually made such a vow. A man who supervised the valiant slaughter of the civil population of Jerusalem and the burning of its Jewish congregation in their synagogue is beyond reproach.

Let’s talk briefly about the status of Jews in the empire. I am relying here on Peter Wilson’s great book, The Holy Roman Empire”. According to him, Charlemagne had revived the late imperial patronage of the Jews. They played an important role in the economy as they were able to sell slaves from the Eastern pagan lands to Spain where they would become slave soldiers. He estimates that around the year 1000 there were about 20,000 Ashkenazi Jews in the empire north of the Alps. Under the Ottonians the imperial protection was inconsistent. Otto II allocated the protection of the Jewish communities to the bishops, whilst Henry II expelled 2000 Jews from Mainz in 1012 but had to revoke this decree the following year.

In 1090 our friend Henry IV implemented a wide-ranging reform. He issued a general privilege to the Jews and made himself the Advocatus Imperatoris Judaica, or general protector of the Jews in the Empire. This arrangement persisted until the end of the empire in 1806. The safeguarding of legal, economic and religious rights became a prerogative of the emperor. Implementation of that varied throughout time and we will certainly talk about the successes and failure of this construct as we go along. But is should be note that the general rule stood for over 700 years and, as it was woven into the fabric of the law, granted what Wilson calls a surprising level of autonomy to the Jewish population, notwithstanding their status as second-class citizens.

But we are in the year 1096 and Henry IV is bottled up in Verona and his protection is not worth much.

All that gave count Emich of Leiningen an idea. Maybe the Jewish communities along the route could be made to support the cause. He started in Speyer on May 9th but struggled to get past the bishop’s troops who protected their Jewish community, probably in exchange of a generous donation to the still ongoing building works of the great cathedral. Or maybe for once a prelate was doing his job. Note that the German Bishops had been ordered by Henry IV to protect the Jewish communities after he had heard about persecutions in Northern France.

After the failure in Speyer, Emich and his rabble moved a bit further to Worms. There he spread the rumour that the Jews had drowned a Christian and use the water he had died in to poison the wells. That brought the townsfolk onto the side of the crusaders. They broke into Jewish homes and killed everyone who was not willing to convert. Many Jews had fled into the bishop’s palace. Emich and his men broke down the doors and despite the bishop’s pleading killed all of them, men, women and children, a total of 500 dead.

From Worms he then travelled to Mainz. If you have any notion of geography, you might realise that Emich and his followers are travelling North, not exactly the direction of Jerusalem. Archbishop Rothard did close the gates against the crusaders. But Emich’s arrival triggered riots within the city during which a Christian was killed. The rioters opened the gates and Emich’s forces enter. Again, the Jews seek shelter in the bishop’s palace, and again it is overrun. Resistance against the overwhelming numbers was futile. Some may have been prepared to convert, or at least pretend to convert, but many preferred to die for their faith, either from the enemy’s sords or by suicide.

Here is the report by Salomon bin Simson of what happened then (quote):

“As soon as the enemy came into the courtyard, they found some of the very pious there with our brilliant master, Isaac ben Moses. He stretched out his neck, and his head they cut off first. The others, wrapped by their fringed praying­ shawls, sat by themselves in the courtyard, eager to do the will of their Creator. They did not care to flee into the chamber to save themselves for this temporal life, but out of love they received upon themselves the sentence of God. […]

The women there girded their loins with strength and slew their sons and their daughters and then themselves. Many men, too, plucked up courage and killed their wives, their sons, their infants. The tender and delicate mother slaughtered the babe she had played with, all of them, men and women arose and slaughtered one another. The maidens and the young brides and grooms looked out of the Windows and in a loud voice cried: “Look and see, O our God, what we do for the sanctification of Thy great name in order not to exchange you for a hanged and crucified one….”

Then the crusaders began to give thanks in the name of “the hanged one” because they had done what they wanted with all those in the room of the bishop so that not a soul escaped.” (unquote)

This slaughter cost another possibly more than 800 lives.

Emich then tried his luck in Cologne but was less successful as the news had arrived before him and Jews had left the city or hid with their Christian neighbours. Some of his troops separated from the main army and diverted even further away from Jerusalem and attacked the Jewish communities in Trier and Metz. This group then looked for their valiant leader near Cologne killing Jews in Neuss, Wevelinghofen, Eller and Xanten. Not finding him they returned home, their holy work done.

Meanwhile the two other groups under Volkmar and Gottschalk heard about Emich’s pursuits and emulated their efforts by murdering Jews in Magdeburg, Prague, Regensburg, to name a few. 

None of these three groups made it to Jerusalem. By now the king of Hungary had become wary of these peasant crusaders. They were held up at the border and when they began raiding and pillaging, the king deployed his armoured cavalry who killed and dispersed them.

Emich’s unit was the last to arrive. They fought a veritable battle with the Hungarians and even besieged the border fortress of Weissenburg. The arrival of a royal army and a sortie of the garrison brought that to an end. Emich’s troops fled in panic.

Emich himself returned to his possessions in Leiningen, forever disgraced. Disgraced not for his crimes, but for not fulfilling his vow to go to Jerusalem.

I leave it to you to decide whether the First Crusade was a glorious moment in European history. As for German history, I can only look at it as a moment of shame and horror. It was the first large scale persecution of the Jews in the Middle Ages, containing all the hallmarks of what was to come. The blood libel, the poisoning of wells and the inability of the authorities to protect them.

Next week we will return to the rollercoaster that is the life of Henry IV. He is back in Germany, reconciled with the southern German dukes and all could now go smoothly. But history still has one last humiliation in store for him, the longest ruling, or not really ruling medieval emperor. I hope to see you then.

And remember, 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 Steven and Jay who have already signed up.

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The Pacification of the Empire after a Decade of War

His coronation barely two months hence, Henry IV leaves Rome without being able to capture Pope Gregory VII. The Pope’s powerful vassal, Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and greatest of Norman warlords was approaching with an army of 36,000.

Henry does not fancy a long siege in a malaria infested swamp with a hostile city population. He no longer needs Rome, what he needs to do is get back to Germany and bring peace to the war-ravaged country.

A U-turn in his policies helps to gain support amongst bishops and magnates so that by 1089, the country is largely pacified for the first time in 17 years.

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 36 – Henry IV is Coming Home

Today we will talk about the return of Henry IV to Germany and how he brings the civil war to at least a more than temporary halt.

Before we start a 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 Tom and Michael who have already signed up.

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Last week we left Henry IV celebrating his coronation in Rome. The ceremonies of emperor making had become ever more elaborate since pope Leo had surprised Charlemagne by putting a crown on his head on Christmas Day 800.  Ian Richardson describes the festivities as follows: The ceremonies lasted 4 days, during which the emperor entered five churches, St. Peter, St. John Lateran, Saint Paul outside the Walls, Santa Maria Maggiore and the church of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. For the main events, the consecration on March 31st and the Coronation on April 1st, the emperor wore linen tunic embroidered with gold and precious jewels, the imperial mantle, golden spurs and the imperial sword. On his hands he wore linen gloves and the episcopal ring, and on his head the imperial diadem. He went in procession to St. Peter’s, carrying in his left the golden orb, which signifies the government of all the kingdoms and in his right the sceptre of empire, in the manner of Julius, Octavian and Tiberius. He was preceded by the empire’s greatest treasures: the double relic of the holy lance of the leader of the Theban legion, St. Maurice, which had been refashioned so as to contain a nail of the holy cross. These relics were followed by the venerable order of bishops, abbots, priests and innumerable clergy, followed by the emperor accompanied by the pope and the archbishop of Milan and they were again followed by the dukes, margraves, counts and orders of the various princes.

It was almost like in the good old days of his father, Henry III.

The only fly in the ointment was that the previous and to many, only legitimate Pope, shouted bans of excommunication down on the procession as it crossed the Tiber bridge below the Castello di Sant’Angelo.

Unbeknownst to Gregory in his futile rage, help was on its way. Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and most senior of the Norman leaders in the South of Italy had mustered an army of allegedly 30,000 men to bring relief to Rome. This army had been put together in a rush as Robert wanted to prevent Henry from invading his territory as Henry had promised the Basileus in Constantinople. With time being of the essence, he took all comers and promised them the earth. Normans for sure formed the core, but he also hired Southern Italians, Greeks, Albanians, allegedly even some of King Harold’s men who had fought against the Normans at Hastings. But most shocking of all, a large part of his army consisted of the Saracen militia from Sicily, who were not only allowed but encouraged to retain their Muslim faith. These were the men who came to free the Vicar of Christ.

When Robert approached Rome from the South by the end of May, Henry, his Pope Victor III and his army left for the North of Italy. Without a single arrow shot, a single stroke of the sword and not a single lance thrown, Robert Guiscard entered Rome and freed Pope Gregory from his refuge on the Castello di Sant Angelo.

German historians have often wondered why Henry gave up Rome, a city he had besieged for four years and that had cost him gargantuan amounts of blood, treasure and time. Why did he give up a city that was the symbol of his empire and that still held a pope he needed to have removed? I find the answer is fairly obvious.

Rome in 1084 was an odd-shaped city. Its ancient Aurelian Walls encircled an area that held almost a million people when they were built in the 3rd century. By 1084 at best 50,000 people lived in the city. Defending these walls required either an extremely large army or a militia of volunteers who could stand watch. The Romans may have been exhausted enough to fall for Henry’s bribery and let him in. But that is not at all the same as being willing to fight to the death for a German emperor against the allies of the pope they had raised themselves to the Throne of St. Peter.

Without the full support of the Roman population and given the size of his army, Henry could not hold Rome even at the best of times. No medieval emperor had tried it since Otto III. And it wasn’t the best of times. The largest of Rome’s fortresses, the Castello de Sant Angelo was still in the hands of Gregory VII, and so were two others, the Capitol held by the Corsi family and parts of the palace of the ancient emperor Septimius Severus held by a nephew of Gregory VII.

But the main reason to leave Rome is the one, listeners of this podcast are very familiar with, Malaria. It is May, and in May is when the Germans die in Rome.

3 days before Robert Guiscard’s arrival, Pope Clement III retires to Tivoli and Henry leaves for Northern Italy. Again, German historians have described that as being a flight. But if you look at the timeline of the imperial charters granted along the way, it is clear this was a typical slow imperial progress, not a flight. The leaders of Northern Italy paid him Homage along the way and congratulated him to his success. Henry could take it easy because he had nothing to fear from Robert Guiscard. All Guiscard wanted was to protect his lands and once the emperor had handed Rome back to the Gregorians, he could no longer attack the South of Italy.   

The people who had to fear Robert Guiscard were the Romans. Guiscard’s army had not come to fight for church reform and the freedom of Gregory VII, its great advocate. They had come for plunder. When they arrived and realized that both the papal and the imperial treasury had left or were out of reach, Guiscard’s soldiers began to go from door to door taking all that was left from a population that had just endured four years of consecutive sieges. With nothing to be had to satisfy their demands, they turned to violence. They flattened a considerable part of the city between the churches of San Lorenzo and S Silvestro in the North and between the Colosseum and the Lateran Palace.  Finally, they set fire to what was left of the imperial palaces on the Palatine and many churches. They even raided the Vatican. This Sack of Rome stands in a line with the more famous Sack of Rome by the Goths in 408 and the Sacco di Roma by the troops of emperor Charles V in 1527. The chronicler Hildebrand of Tours described Rome 20 years later as a “desert, strewn with ruins”.

The sack also led to the demise of the previously all-powerful clans of the Crescenti and the Theophylacts. Their power had been fading ever since the church reformers had taken control of the papacy. But after 1084 they are being replaced by an emerging “new aristocracy” of Rome. These new families, the Frangipani and Pierleoni will ultimately merge into the better known Colonna and Orsini. These families will rise within the papal administration and dominate Roman politics from now on.

A more immediate effect of the Sack of Rome was that Gregory VII’s position in Rome had become untenable. The population who had suffered four sieges on his behalf, endured his stubborn refusal to compromise lost it completely when the Papal relief troops stole their meagre remaining possessions and raped their wives and daughters.

Gregory VII had to leave in the baggage train of Robert Guiscard’s troops. Robert installed him in the town of Salerno where he kept writing letters to all and sundry asking to support the one true pope or be excommunicated for not doing so. Nobody came and in 1085 Gregory VII died in Salerno. His last words were: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, that is why I die in exile”

We will do a whole episode on the significance of these fifty years between 1070 and 1120. But it is still worth reflecting on Gregory for a moment. Even though he ends his life in defeat, he was one of the most important Popes in the history of the church. He had dominated the papacy long before he took the Holy See himself. Over these 40 years he relentlessly pursued his aim of making the papacy independent and superior to secular rulers and improve its moral standards. Even if I personally think that some of his reforms like the celibacy of the clergy had brought untold pain to both the members of the church and their adherents, I do admire Gregory’s unwavering commitment. He did not care about his own life or the life of his supporters when he resisted Henry IV alone in the Castello di Sant’ Angelo for nearly 2 years.

His genius was less in theology, in fact most would argue that Peter Damian and Hubert of Silva Candida were much deeper thinker and the true intellectual powerhouse of church reform. Gregory just copied what he liked from there and stubbornly stuck with it.

His genius was public relations. With very few exceptions all chroniclers have sided with Gregory against Henry. For some this was simply a function of their role, like Bruno and Lambert of Hersfeld. But for most it was a choice. Gregory managed to portray his acts not as acts he undertook as an individual but as a channel of the apostles or of God himself. And that allowed him to portray his ultimate defeat not as a failure of his policies, but as martyrdom for the cause. That is why his vision of the role of the papacy and the standards of moral rectitude survived his demise. 10 years after his death, Pope Urban II his direct successor will call Christendom to its most ambitious and most ill-fated endeavour, the Crusades.  Without Gregory no pope would have dared to call a crusade nor would have any secular ruler understood why he should follow this call.

When Henry IV hears about the demise of his archenemy he is back in Germany. After leaving Rome he had spent some time arranging the affairs of Northern Italy. He placed his 11-year-old son Konrad into the care of the Italian bishops as a focal point for imperial power in Italy.

Henry returns to a country devastated by more than a decade of relentless war. Saxony and parts of Swabia are still in the hands of the rebels. Henry’s main support base is Bavaria, the Rhineland, namely the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier and the lands of Frederick of Hohenstaufen. On the outside it seems not much has changed.

But stripping away the outer layers, a lot has changed. Henry seems to have realised that his previous policies have failed. Acting as an autocratic ruler towards either the princes or the Imperial Church system was no longer possible. He would not even be able to carve out his own territorial lordship as he had tried around the Harzburg. His new policy could be best described as a back-to-basics approach.

After 1085 he would be very careful with the appointment of bishops. Rather than running roughshod over the cathedral canon’s right to election, Henry would make sure that any of his bishops would be elected in line with canon law. He would choose candidates who had impeccable credentials both as scholars and as pastoral leaders. He supported candidates who were recognized for their efforts in implementing church reform. All he asked for is for them to be loyal to him and his Pope, Clement III.

He would be particularly careful in choosing bishops for the episcopal sees of his enemies. Pope Clement III had excommunicated and deposed all the bishops who supported the rebels, in particular the archbishops of Salzburg and Magdeburg, the bishops of Wuerzburg, Halberstadt, Hildesheim and many other Saxon sees. Henry could now go and appoint new bishops for these bishoprics. Apart from the above credentials he also made sure that the new bishops had strong support in their diocese, usually because they were members of a local aristocratic clan. That way he gradually dragged more and more parts of the country to his side.

His approach to secular princes also changed. When before he would just order them around and rarely listen to their advice, he now included them in his inner circle. Henry still relied on his Ministeriales, but these themselves gradually turned into aristocrats, building castles and marrying into the great families of the realm.

It is not just the inner workings of the regime that made it more attractive, the opposition also weakened.  The two towering figures of the early years of the rebellion, Rudolf von Rheinfelden and Otto von Northeim are both dead. The new anti-king, Hermann von Salm never really managed to get a foothold, largely because he was not as rich and as powerful in his own right as his predecessor.

The death of Otto von Northeim created a power vacuum in Saxony where various magnates competed for the leadership, the Archbishop of Magdeburg, the Margrave of Meissen, various sons of Otto von Northeim and the actual duke of Saxony. The struggle for leadership was often brutal and did not refrain from murdering of opponents.

Henry IV tried to take advantage of the disarray and invaded Saxony on multiple occasions. Bruno’s History of the Saxon Wars count a total of 15 invasions overall in the 17 years the war lasted. But none of these invasions was successful. Every time Henry manages to bring his troops into Saxony, the warring factions united against the external enemy, whilst Henry’s own army fell apart under the friction between its warlords.

I am not going to take you through the back a fourth of these 4 years of fighting. It ended around 1089 after some of the most stubborn opponents of Henry IV had died and Henry offered a compromise acceptable to all. He promised not to go back to Saxony, neither in peace nor in war, to respect the ancient rights of the Saxons that went back to Charlemagne and allowed the Saxons to rule themselves as they liked. He embraced Hartwig, archbishop of Magdeburg and one of the leaders of the Saxon rebellion since the very beginning as a member of his court and his inner circle of advisors. I like Ian Robinson description of this solution as a vice-regal system of government. The leader of the Saxons allowed them to do more or less as they liked, as long as they formally profess allegiance to the emperor and refrain from military action.

As for the other main opposition group around Welf IV, former duke of Bavaria and Berthold von Zaehringen, former duke of Carinthia, a solution was harder to find. By now the two lords have turned their fortified keeps on the tops of the mountains on the upper Rhine and in Switzerland into an impregnable string of fortresses. They enjoyed the support from some of the most revered bishops of the realm, including Gebhard von Salzburg, Altmann von Passau and Adalbert of Wuerzburg. Though these guys had all lost their diocese to Henry’s appointees they carried moral authority, further underpinned by the Gregorian papal legate, Odo Cardinal Bishop of Ostia.

They offered peace on condition that Henry would recognize Gregory’s successor, Victor III as the true pope and accept the excommunication of his pope Clement III. That was impossible since that would invalidate Henry’s coronation as emperor.

The only possible strategy for Henry was to keep the pressure on and wait for the old bishops to die. That they did, though slowly. But by 1089 the contingent of truly Gregorian bishops in Germany was down to 6 only one of them holding his own diocese.

By 1089 the kingdom was hence largely at peace for the first time since 1073. But this peace is very different to the peace under Henry III in the 1040s.

Henry III had ensured his peace through regular reconciliation assemblies where he would forgive his enemies and his enemies would forgive him, before everybody present would reconcile with everyone else. These events were followed up with imperial edicts banning feuds and these bans would be enforced by the imperial troops.

His son, Henry IV was no longer able to mandate peace in his realm. His aristocrats had used the preceding decades to build castles on their lands, increasingly in stone, that provided shelter from even the largest of armies. These castellans would settle their differences by raiding and pillaging their opponents’ lands, very much as has been the case in Capetian France. Central power had deteriorated so much that the bishops had to step in and declare a Peace of God for their diocese banning fighting during certain periods of the year. In 1082 Henry IV himself declared a Peace of God, together with his bishops. This time there was no edict of the king. Sanctions of the breach of the peace of God were spiritual, not secular. No imperial army would attack the castle of a castellan who breached the Peace. Henry had no military or political capacity to stop the feuding between his vassals. Where he intervened such as in the case of a feud between the archbishop of Salzburg and a local count, it was by bribing both sides with royal lands.

Whilst his rule stabilised, Henry also had been able to improve the position on the eastern border. Hungary had been lost the empire for a long time already despite the occasional marriage alliance. But the threat of Hungarian power meant that the Duke of Bohemia was looking for a closer association with the empire. Vratislav II, duke of Bohemia had been one of the most reliable of Henry’s allies all the way since 1075. In recognition of this loyalty, he raised him to be King of Bohemia. This royal title however came with a kink. It was a personal title, I.e., the sons of Vratislav would not be kings, unless the title was personally conferred on them by the emperor. To soften this blow he had Prague raised to be an archbishopric directly reporting to Rome, a privilege the dukes of Poland and Kings of Hungary had been enjoying for a long time and the Bohemians really, really wanted.

Even Poland came gradually back into the fold. The Polish rulers had used the weakness of imperial rule during the 1070s to distance themselves from the empire. That was made easier by the fact that the Saxons, Poland’s neighbours were busy fighting the royal armies rather than attacking Poland. When the Henry returned from Rome, the equation changed again, and Poland saw a benefit in supporting the emperor as a counterweight to the Saxons.

On the Western border of the empire the situation had remained challenging. You remember the endless wars between Henry III and Godfrey the Bearded. There was a period in the 1070s where the situation had improved for the imperial side. Empress Agnes had arranged a peace arrangement with the Counts of Flanders and Counts of Holland that held, at least for a while. When Godfrey the Bearded’s son. Godfrey the Hunchback became duke of Lower Lothringia, things improved even further. Godfrey the Hunchback had been one of Henry’s great supporters and potential trump card when he first contemplated a journey to Italy. I mentioned Godfrey some episodes ago because he had been married to none other than the great Countess Matilda of Tuscany. That marriage did not go well, and the couple separated. That may have been a reason for Godfrey to seek the support of Henry IV. It also could have facilitated Henry’s progress through the lands of Matilda of Tuscany. But none of that happened. Godfrey the Hunchback was run through by a spear in 1076 whilst answering a call of nature on campaign. His early death initiated a long and drawn war. Godfrey had appointed his nephew, also Godfrey to be his successor. Henry IV disagreed and appointed his own son, Konrad to be duke. After 11 years of war Godfrey ultimately won the conflict and was appointed duke of Lower Lothringia. This Godfrey was known as Godfrey of Bouillon after one of his possessions. And if you have some interest in the Middle Ages, this name might strike you as familiar. Maybe the first one you hear on this podcast. Godfrey of Bouillon will rise to prominence as the leader of the first crusade, which will kick off in less than a decade from where we are now.

The pope who will start the Crusades, Urban II had been elected pope in 1088 by those cardinals loyal to Gregory VII. The Gregorian reformers had gradually recovered from the loss of their great leader. Their main military supporter Matilda of Tuscany had regained her lands after winning a battle against the Northern Italian bishops.  The  Normans had provided the new pope with access to at least parts of the city of Rome with others held by Clement III. And Urban II was a dynamic and competent pope very much like a Gregory VII bringing bishops in his native France, in England and even some Cardinals back to the Gregorian side.

For Henry and his supporters, it had become clear that true and lasting peace could only be achieved by ending the schism. Only once Clement III was recognised across the whole of Christendom would the Swabians relent. And for that he had to go back down to Italy and end these Gregorians once and for all. Whether he will achieve that you will hear next week. I hope to see you then.

And in the meantime, should you feel like supporting the show and get hold of these bonus episodes, sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes or on my website at historyofthegermans.com.