Mainz

by on

The Mainzer Landfriede on 1235

What do you do once you have condemned your eldest son and heir to life imprisonment? Exactly, you have a party, or more precisely you have two parties. But as always with Frederick II, these are not just knees-up for entertainment, but elaborately staged political events. The first is a wedding, the second a grand get-together of the whole realm and then there is a third, a funeral of a kind you would not have expected from our rational, seemingly agnostic hero. Lots to unpack as always…

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans: Episode 82 – The Constitution of the Realm

What do you do once you have condemned your eldest son and heir to life imprisonment? Exactly, you have a party, or more precisely you have two parties. But as always with Frederick II, these are not just knees-up for entertainment, but elaborately staged political events. The first is a wedding, the second a grand get-together of the whole realm and then there is a third, a funeral of a kind you would not have expected from our rational, seemingly agnostic hero. Lots to unpack as always…

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

Last week we left Frederick sitting in judgement over his wayward son. This family rift was not based on a fundamental personality clash as had been the case with his namesake, Frederick II of Prussia, nor was it a case of unbridled ambition as it had been when Richard Lionheart and his brothers rose up against their father Henry II. This rift had been almost entirely political.

Henry (VII) in brackets believed that all the resources of the family, which meant basically the resources of Sicily, should be employed in rolling back the encroachment of royal power. He wanted to force the princes to disgorge the rights and privileges they had extracted from Philipp of Swabia and Otto IV during the recent civil wars.

Frederick’s priority was the exact opposite. Forcing the pope into a recognition of the emperor as his equal and as temporal ruler of Christendom was his great objective. And this objective could only be achieved by surrounding the papal lands on all sides. He already had the south where his kingdom of Sicily began just 100 miles from Rome. He also had a hold on Tuscany north-west of Rome. That left Lombardy, the North-eastern flank of the papal states.

Lombardy had only recently revived the Lombard League, the mighty association of Northern Italian cities that had broken the armies of the great Barbarossa. To bring Lombardy into submission required a huge military force and almost unlimited funds. The Lombards were rich, extremely warlike and their cities were well fortified. The latter is the expensive bit. Before the advent of canons, city walls could not be broken. To force entry required expensive siege towers and the stamina to starve out the population sometimes for years. You remember the sieges of tiny but fierce Crema and Alessandria, the city of straw? Frederick II needed to prepare for that and more.

And that meant he needed Sicily for the money and he needed the fierce warriors of Germany, “a land rich in soldiers” as Italian chroniclers had called it since the 10th century. By 1235 these German fighters were controlled by the princes, whether he liked it or not. A reconciliation with great imperial princes had to be made.

And that is where the aforementioned wedding comes in. Frederick’s second wife, Isabelle of Brienne, the queen of Jerusalem had died aged 16 when she gave birth to her son Konrad. This just for reference was not her first pregnancy. Since Isabella’s death in 1228 Frederick had negotiated various marriage alliance options but nothing had come of it. Now, in 1235 he was prepared to wed again. The bride he chose was another Isabelle, Isabelle Platagenent.

She was 21 years old and the sister of King Henry III of England. This marriage was a major shift in Hohenstaufen politics. Until now the Hohenstaufen tended to support the King of France in the perennial Anglo-French conflict. Meanwhile the House of Welf, their rivals had been closely related to the Angevin rulers of England. Otto IV had grown up at the English court and one of his major supporters were the merchants and citizens of Cologne who had close trading relations with the sceptred isle.   

The reason for this shift in alliances and hence the marriage was again all about Northern Italy.

Henry III had promised a dowry worth as much as 30,000 marks of silver as a contribution to the war chest, a sum significant enough, the rich king of England had to raise a special tax for it. But it is not all about money. The kingdom of France had by now stretched down south courtesy of the Albigensian crusade. That brought them uncomfortably close to the wealth of Italy. So it was quite handy that Henry III was preparing another campaign against the French to regain the lands of Anjou and Normandy, an effort that would keep the French busy.

The final and probably biggest benefit was that the marriage paved the way to a reconciliation between Welf and Hohenstaufen. As we have heard, the conflict between these two houses was not the dominant strain of domestic policy during the entire High Middle Ages. But it was a significant component, particularly these last 35 years. Though the Welf were much diminished in power, they still had some following, amongst it the city of Cologne, by now the richest, largest and most important city in Germany. To bring them into the fold, Frederick II had to address the Welf’s most painful grievance.

The mighty Welf, descendants of kings, whose family line goes back not just to Charlemagne but Odoacer and Attila the Hun, who lived in a palace in Braunschweig that rivals any imperial residence and who had been the most preeminent magnates in the empire and whose last head of house had been crowned emperor, these proud nobles had lost their status as imperial princes when Henry the Lion was stripped of his dukedoms of Bavaria and Saxony. The current head of the house of Welf was a simple noble, no duke, no landgrave, not even a meagre margrave. Nothing, just a free man with a lot of land.

In the status-ridden society of the 13th century that was a constant humiliating reminder of their fall. Frederick II was prepared to resolve that. A few months after the sumptuous wedding to Isabella in Worms he created a new duchy, the duchy of Brunswick.

The way this happened is somewhat revealing about the way vassalage worked in Germany. The current head of the house was Otto von Luneburg, called “the child” though he was now 31-years old. Otto had inherited the family possessions around Brunswick and Luneburg from his uncle, the Count Palatinate.

It is these lands that were now to be made into a separate duchy. A a duchy is by definition a fief of the emperor. In order to grant Otto these lands as a duchy, Otto first had to hand those lands over to the emperor. Legally it was a present, without recourse. Frederick then declared that: quote “Otto von Luneburg hath done us homage, and unmindful of all the hate and harassment that existed between our forefathers hath placed himself under our protection and at our service.” Unquote.

As a faithful imperial vassal Otto could expect to receive a fief that allowed him to fulfil his military obligations towards the empire. And so he received his lands back, plus Goslar and surroundings, not as his property, but as a fief, so technically a loan from the emperor. Since it was an imperial fief it could be elevated to a duchy, the duchy of Brunswick. So just to recap, Otto hands his privately owned lands to the emperor who makes them now royal lands that can be enfeoffed to that same man who previously owned them outright. This sounds like an awful deal for Otto, but it was not.

Yes, in principle the emperor could now enfeoff someone else with his lands. But that right had almost completely diminished. Already under Henry VI, the princes received the right to pass their lands by inheritance to distant family members and even to their son-in-laws. The recall of a fief was almost defunct, though we will see that Frederick and later emperors will still try.

Furthermore, Otto was now obliged to offer Frederick military support as an imperial vassal. But in return he was also entitled to imperial protection and support.

But the most important benefit however was the elevation to rank of imperial prince. That allows him to participate in imperial decision making and opens up all sorts of opportunities for consolidation and expansion of power, something that ends up for the house of Welf in a royal title.

So what about young Isabella, the one who made all this reconciliation possible? She was by all accounts an exceptionally beautiful woman, so beautiful indeed that people along her route into Germany constantly demanded to see her famous face. She received the most splendid welcome in Cologne, the city that was most keen on close relationships with England. Matthew Paris the English chronicler wrote that “Tens of thousands flocked to welcome her with flowers and palm branches and music. Riders on Spanish horses had performed with their lances the nuptial breaking of the staves, whilst ships which appeared to sail on dry land, but were drawn by horses concealed under silken coverings whilst the clerks of Colone played new airs on their instruments. The matrons seated on their balconies sang the praises of the empress’ beauty, when Isabella at their request laid aside hat and veil and showed her face”

Six weeks later the wedding was celebrated with all possible pomp and in the presence of a sea of bishops and a banner of knights. Frederick did not however stay with his bride on the wedding night. His astrologer had suggested the morning as more auspicious. Business over, he declared that Isabella was now with child and was sent to live behind closed doors in the royal palace of Palermo catered for by eunuchs and having an estimated five children. She was barely again seen in public and even her brother had to insist to be allowed to meet her.

The wedding took place in July 1235. A mere month later an even bigger gathering took place in Mainz. Frederick had called all the imperial princes to join him in one great assembly to confirm and swear upon a new constitution of the empire.

And they all came. The Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, Besancon and Magdeburg. And amongst the bishops came those of Regensburg, Bamberg, Konstanz, Augsburg, Strassburg, Speyer, Basel, Hildesheim Osnabrück, Lüttich, Utrecht, Cambrai, Metz, Verdun, Naumburg, Merseburg, Passau, Eichstaedt and Freising. Then we had the great abbots of Murbach, Reichenau and Ellwangen, the dukes of Bavaria, Brabant, Saxony, Lothringia, Carinthia, the Landgrave of Thuringia, the Margraves of Baden, Meissen and Brandenburg and many, many more even I cannot be bothered to mention.  Everybody was there. It was almost a rerun of the great Pentecost assembly Barbarossa had held 50 years earlier.

But this time it was less about chivalric play and display, but about negotiations over the future shape of the empire and the upcoming campaign in Lombardy. The aforementioned reconciliation with the house of Welf took place here. The other great outcome of the event was the Mainzer Landfrieden, another public peace or more likely public truce that we have heard about since the reign of Henry III.

Gone are the days an emperor can simply order peace to be maintained, threatening anyone who were to pursue his demands by force of arms.

Feud is by now endemic in Germany. The logic is the same we talked about when we looked at the constitutions of Melfi. In the absence of a functioning judicial system of redress, society recognised feud as a viable way to resolve conflict. In the kingdom of Sicily, Frederick addressed the issue by establishing a complete system of appellate courts backed by central powers, a set of provisions intended to prevent and de-escalate conflict and a ban on privately held castles.

The idea to introduce the same in the empire was simply inconceivable. In the two great privileges, the one in favour of the bishops from 1220 and the more recent one in favour of the temporal princes, jurisdiction in princely territories had moved permanently from the imperial hands into princely hands. The process of passing laws in the Empire also involved the princes. Formally their role was purely advisory, but in practice any imperial Ukase issued without the bishops, dukes and margraves consent was not worth the parchment it was written on. And surely the princes would never consent to take down their castles. They would love to pass a law that ordered all their own vassals to take own their castles, but that is not something an emperor would be prepared to sign. So, the castles stay, all 20,000 of them. Even passing laws preventing the carrying of weapons or the provision that nobody can get out by saying that “the other guy started it” were seemingly not possible to get through.

But there were still 29 articles all sides could agree on. Some of those repeated the privileges granted in the documents from 1220 and 1232.

The new things were, that any feud had to be formally declared and that there would be a three-day cooling-off period before hostilities could begin. Further that certain acts of violence were prohibited upon sanction of instant imperial ban. These included setting things alight, in particular houses and castles.

And finally that before a feud could be formally declared, the parties have to go before a judge. 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 no 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 judge acts more as an arbitrator, 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 better than nothing.

In fact the establishment of a permanent imperial judge, even if he was just an arbitrator became the seed of what would later become the imperial courts that operated from 1495 to 1806 helping to maintain peace and order in the empire.

That does not sound very impressive for such an enormous gathering, the creation of a new duchy and a common peace with marginal improvements to the plague of feuds. But the most important purpose of this gathering was not to produce some formal agreement. Its significance lies more in the fact that it was the first opportunity for the princes and the emperor to operate the new constitution of the empire as it had been created by the privilege to the bishops in 1220 and the privilege to the princes in 1232.

We have discussed both before, but just as a recap. In these imperial charters, Frederick had passed most of the imperial rights first to the bishops and then to the other imperial princes. These included things like jurisdiction, the minting of coins, the building of castles, the establishment of tariff borders and posts etc. Any imperial prince would now have the right to exercise royal power within his territory.

The charters of 1220 and 1232 did in the eyes of many historians not really grant rights to these princes they did not have before. In all these endless wranglings with the royal authority at least since Henry IV’s forced trip to Canossa, the princes have continuously squeezed more and more concessions from the emperors. The civil wars after the death of Henry VI may have accelerated the process, but the direction had been set long before.

But importantly until 1220 and 1232, all the transfers of rights had been bilateral. I.e., every single right had been granted to an individual prince in an individual negotiation. Each prince would hence see his rights and privileges as the result of his own cunning or the dexterity of his ancestors.

The privileges of 1220 and 1232 were granted not to each individual prince, but to the bishops and to the temporal princes as a group. It formally created a distinction between imperial princes and mediated vassals. All imperial princes, irrespective whether they were bishops, abbots, dukes, landgraves, margraves or counts, all shared the same rank. They now exercised these rights not on the basis of some bilateral agreement, but because they were imperial princes. If you are an imperial prince you can for instance mint coins, if you are not, you cannot, unless the emperor or an imperial prince grants you the right. For instance the just created duke of Brunswick had exactly the same rights in his territory as the duke of Bavaria whose family had patiently gather them for over 200 years.

The definition of an imperial prince was that an individual had received a princely fief immediately from the emperor. That distinguishes them from the mediated nobles, i.e,. aristocrats who had received their fief from a territorial lord or even sometimes had no fief at all, just their own allodial, i.e., private lands.

This clarification of the rank of imperial prince had an immediate positive effect on the coherence of the empire. The princes feel reassured that their rights would not be taken away by a more assertive emperor. Because they are based on rank, the rights can only be removed by removing them from everyone of princely rank. Hence in any imperial attempt to roll back time, the princes would stand together.

It also meant that the princes were now integrated into the imperial project. The concept of the Honour of the Empire, that each prince was called upon to uphold, dates back to Barbarossa. Now it gains even more traction. The princes are the pillars of the empire, they have an obligation to support the emperor and provide the Reichsdienst, the service to the empire..

I have often wondered why in periods of almost completely diminished royal authority, say in the late 13th century none of the larger territories, say Bavaria, Austria, Saxony or Bohemia decided to throw off the yoke of imperial oversight. I doubt it was purely for reasons of language or cultural affinity. That for example did not stop the Swiss.

The princes, even the biggest ones, had seen some compelling benefits in this coordination mechanism where they were integrated in the decision-making process at the top level whilst free to act as they wished within their territory. 19th century historians often criticised Frederick’s charters of 1220 and 1232 as the nail in the coffin of any hope of early statehood for Germany. I would agree that these decisions cemented a development already under way that may, just may have been reversed. And I am convinced the territorialisation of Germany resulted in a significant slowing down of economic development. But we should not overlook the fact that the empire held together for another 571 years using broadly this framework.

Peter Wilson, Olaf B. Rader and others draw a parallel to Magna Carta which was granted around the same time. Like in Frederick’s privileges, the king of England is passing some fundamental royal rights to his nobles. The difference is though that in England the rights go to parliament, an institution the membership of which can change. That has allowed for a gradual development where through a change in the composition of the membership of parliament and the transfer of more rights to this institution, you could ultimately arrive at democracy.

In Germany the royal rights transferred not to an institution, but to individuals based on rank. These individuals change over time, in case of bishops through the regular election of new holders of the post and in case of the temporal princes through inheritance, elevation and division. But that is not the same as passing them on to an institution.

At least not yet. By 1495 the participation of princes and other holders of I,perils immediacy became instutiinalised in the Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire. But the Reichstag despite over 300 years of existence did not become the nucleus of a democratic Germany. I have my views about why and how that happened, but if I have learned one thing over the last 82 episodes, it is to keep my mouth shut until I have properly researched the topic.

And as we are talking about mouth shut, these last episodes were a bit too long for what I promised. And I do not want to put out another 35 minute one. Hence, I will skip the bit about the reburial of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary or as the Germans call her Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia. It would have shone a light on one of the very, very few saints I do have genuine regard for, but ultimately, she did not have a major impact on history, as gentle, caring people rarely do. I will produce a Patreon episode about her, so if you still want to hear more, about Elisabeth and the much less caring and much less gentle Konrad von Marburg, just go over to Patreon, support the show and take a listen.

Otherwise, next week we will take a look at some of the most fascinating aspects of Frederick II, outside his political life. We will talk architecture, poetry, science and his true passion, the arte de venandi con avibus, the art of hunting with birds. I hope it will be a nice breather before the sound of clashing horses and ring of swords on armour dominate the rest of this season of the History of the Germans Podcast.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

by on

A journey upriver from Worms to Heidelberg

This week it is back to the political landscape of the empire. We will travel upriver from Mainz via Worms and the not yet existent cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen to Heidelberg, my old  hometown. And there we will meet the man who held one of the empire’s most confusing titles, the count Palatine of the Rhine, Elector and High Steward of the Empire. His name is Friedrich, Friedrich der Siegreiche, Frederick the Victorious, and being victorious is barely half of what is interesting about him.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 189 – The Count Palatine on the Rhine, which is also episode 5 of Season 11: The Empire in the 15th Century.

This week it is back to the political landscape of the empire. We will travel upriver from Mainz via Worms and the not yet existent cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen to Heidelberg, my old hometown. And there we will meet the man who held one of the empire’s most confusing titles, the count Palatine of the Rhine, Elector and High Steward of the Empire. His name is Friedrich, Friedrich der Siegreiche, Frederick the Victorious, and being victorious is barely half of what is interesting about him.

I would normally at this point place another appeal to support the podcast, but quite frankly, looking at my Bloomberg screen we are all best served holding on tight and see where things are going. Which is why we should be even more grateful to Arnar Thor Petursson, Bruce Gudmundsson, Arthur S., Christian M., aryeh Y., Sam from Rhode Island and CJ who have not only signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support but have stayed the course all the way to now.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show

Last week we discussed how printing had changed the world, and if you have missed it, listen. Even if I say so myself, I think that was a pretty good one. But this week we will leave Mr. Gutenberg in his workshop, busy printing bibles and set off again on our tour of the empire.

Our journey takes us south, which in the 15th century meant we travel by boat, on the Rhine, upriver. Right – but how do you get a boat upriver without steam or diesel power? All you had was rowing or sailing. That works ok on the parts of the river where it is wide enough and where there is enough wind. Where we are, halfway between the Netherlands and Basel, the river is no longer wide enough nor is there enough wind to sail. Therefore, all this way, the boats have to be pulled along with ropes, either by men or by animals. That required tow paths along the shores of the river. The towpath on the left bank was the ancient Roman road from Augusta Raurica, near modern day Basel to Lugdunum Batavorum, modern day Katwijk in Holland. And by the 15th century there was another towpath on the right bank, also going all the way.

We are in 1454, long before the Rhine had been regulated by Johann Gottfried Tulla in the 19th century. That means for most of the journey the Rhine is a 2 or 3km wide mix of river arms, loops, small islands and floodplains, making the distance considerably longer than it is today. The settlements we pass were all built on the high banks created when the river had dug its bed during the ice age.

Then and now, the river is busy. Today, almost 50% of the total volume of goods transported on inland waterways in europe, travel on the Rhine between Basel and the Netherlands. And that was likely the same in the 15th century, only that a much larger proportion of goods were carried on rivers rather than over land.

This trade is what had turned Mainz into “the golden city”. Mainz, like Cologne had the right of the Stapel, meaning every transport of goods going up or down the Rhine had to stop in Mainz, unload and offer their wares at a “reasonable” price for sale to the local merchants. The Staple was a real pain. In particular for traders who had rare merchandise that had a ready market either up or downriver. Say you had a few barrels of the finest Alsace Riesling, say some Clos St.Hune from Hunawihr and what you, or more precisely your principal wants, is to get that exact barrel over to London. But if you have to offer it at the Mainz Staple, you run the risk that someone else buys it and ships it to London. And what will you tell the earl of Burlington about what happened to the wine he had ordered. So, Messrs. Justerine and Brooks ordered their shipper to offload the precious Riesling upriver from Mainz, load it on carts and transport it overland.

There are various routes, some shorter, passing just below where Frankfurt airport is today, some longer giving rise to new trading cities in Darmstadt and Wiesbaden.

The bypassing of the staple was not the only issue the city of Mainz had been struggling with. By 1454 the city could look back on almost 200 years of financial mismanagement. Its ruling elite, the patricians had gradually stepped away from trade and had become rentiers, living of the income of their estates, and most importantly their annuities. Annuities were financial instruments issued by cities or princes which offered an income more or less to eternity. Mainz sold lots of these and since there was no end date to the interest payments, their debt kept growing and growing. The Patricians, who had bought these annuities controlled many of the levers of power, forcing the city to pay these annuities. And where did that money come from? The rich oligarchy, the Patricians were exempt from paying tax, so the city put the burden on local artisans and foreign traders. When that was not enough, they borrowed even more from the patricians, issuing even more annuities. On several occasion the city either tried to tax the patricians or haircut the annuity payments, resulting in often bloody clashes between the guilds of artisans and the patricians. Meanwhile more and more trade tried to avoid the egregious charges levied by Mainz.

So to avoid any more taxation and levies, we need to get back to our boat. As the set of strong horses move on, and the ropes tighten, we watch Mainz, its famous cathedral and church towers and just beyond it the city of Wiesbaden fading away in the distance.

As we go upriver, we get into the heartland of the high medieval emperors. This is the ancient stem duchy of Franconia, the lands where emperor Konrad II came from and where he built his massive cathedral of Speyer. It is the land that Friedrich of Hohenstaufen took over from Henry V and where he bult his powerbase that brought his family to the imperial throne.

Our first stop is Worms, 60km upriver. Whilst Mainz had gradually been falling behind and had seen its population drop to a mere 6,000 by 1454, Worms was doing exceedingly well. Its population of over 10,000 had rapidly recovered from the plague, its trade was humming, and its finances were in a somewhat better shape than Mainz.

Worms, like Mainz had been the seat of a bishop, but Worms had been much more effective at throwing off the burden of ecclesiastical rule. In 1074 the emperor Henry IV granted the citizens relief from royal customs on the Rhine. This as the very first imperial charter ever granted directly to citizens, giving Worms a claim to be the oldest free city in the empire.

Subsequently the influence of the bishops inside the city diminished rapidly and by around 1400 they moved out to the small city of Ladenburg. From then on, their territories kept shrinking until by 1792 only 18 villages were left to sustain the episcopal coffers. Another case of the decline of the prince bishops during the late Middle Ages.

But who cares about some bishop. The city itself was doing great. Its ancient cathedral, finished as far back as 1181 had hosted the marriage of emperor Frederick II to Isabella of England in 1235 and in 1521 a Saxon Augustine monk will say the famous words “Here I stand, and I can do no other”, a scene I still hope we will cover before the year is out.

For us, Worms is only a brief stop. Soon we are back on board and the sturdy horses drag our little ship further upriver closer to our final destination for this episode.

Where Rhine and Neckar come together, the river widens, and the floodplain stretches well beyond the 2-3 km it normally extends to. At the confluence, on one of the few hills stood the Burg  Eichelsheim, a customs post of the Count Palatinate on the Rhine which had once been the prison for pope John XXII after he had been deposed at the Council of Constance – episode 173 if you want to refresh your memory.

If you go there today, nothing is left of Burg Eichelsheim. Instead, you find yourself in the center of one of Germany’s most significant conurbations, Mannheim-Ludwigshafen. Mannheim is the creation of Counts Palatinate Karl Philipp and Karl Thedore. The city is centered on one of the largest baroque palaces in Europe. The structure stretches 450 meters in length and covers 6 hectares. And it has exactly one more window than the palace of Versailles. The only problem is that it is a bit boxy and bland. And since nobody needs 6 hectares of rooms, it now houses Mannheim university, one of Germany’s leading schools of business and economics.

Schloss Mannheim, Ehrenhof

The city surrounding the Palace was built from scratch and laid out in a chessboard pattern. This is standard procedure in the US, but in europe you will struggle to find entire cities built on a grid pattern. There are a few in Italy like Sabbioneta and Palmanova and Edinburgh’s New Town extension is also on a grid plan, but Mannheim is arguably the largest grid-based city in Europe.

But in 1454 when we leave the Rhine and turn left to make our way up the Neckar, there was nothing but marchland where Mannheim now stands. Nor was there even the remotest sign of the other major agglomeration on the opposite bank, Ludwigshafen. If Mannheim was swampy, the site of Ludwigshafen was deep under water, so deep that when the city was constructed in the 19th century, they put the houses up on stilts to protect against floods.

It is probably time to let you know where we are heading, we are traveling to the seat of the most august of imperial princes and electors, to Germany’s oldest continuously operating university, and to the most visited castle ruin in the world, I talk of course of Heidelberg

Set in the Neckar valley where it is narrowing down on both sides, the town, built on the left bank of the river is long and narrow, barely three blocks wide squeezed between the river and the mountain.

As you enter the old town, look on the left and you can see the KFG, the Kurfürst Friedrich Gymnasium, founded in 1546. I know this has nothing to do with the empire in the 15th century, but it happens to be the school where I passed my Abitur, and this is my podcast, and I boast when I want to.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

Moving down the Hauptstrasse, the nearly 2km long straight main road that has been the central artery of the city since 1392, we pass the university square, a place we will talk about lots more next week. Moving on we get to the Heiliggeistkirche which housed the Bibliotheca Palatina, one of the worlds most admired libraries, until it was carried off to the Vatican during the 30-years war, where it still remains.

But finally, we find ourselves face to face with the enormity of the Heidelberger Schloss. This is not an architecture podcast, nor is this medium suitable to convey the impression of this structure, even in its ruined state leaves.

fot. Radoslaw Drozdzewski /Wikipedia

Such a mighty castle was clearly the home of an important territorial ruler, a duke of somewhere, margrave of X, maybe even a king.

But no, it was the home of a count and a count of somewhere that is not really a place, or at least wasn’t a place until the place was named after the count’s title. Heidelberg was the seat of the Counts Palatinate on the Rhine which is one of the most peculiar in the long list of rather peculiar German titles.

The first to use the title was Konrad of Hohenstaufen, the half-brother of Frederick Barbarossa, though it goes back much further. The original title was that of the count Palatinate of Lothringia, held in the11th century by a certain Ezzo (episode 17 if you are interested). Count Palatinate means Count of the palace or Administrator of the royal palace. Each of the stem duchies had one of these counts palatinate whose role was exactly that, keeping an eye on the houses, castles and manors on behalf of the king. They liked what they saw and over time kept the houses, castles and manors of the king for themselves.

When Ezzo’s family died out title and lands were then passed through a number of different noble families, until in 1156 the aforementioned Konrad von Hohenstaufen, half-brother of Frederick Barbarossa takes over. By now the title and the holdings of their bearers had detached from its original geography. Much of the property in the duchy of Lower Lothringia had been lost and Konrad made his seat on Burg Stahleck, above Bacharach on the edge of Upper Lothringia. Being a Hohenstaufen, he had also inherited some of his family holdings on the upper Rhine, the area we had just traveled through on our little boat.

You may remember vaguely that Barbarossa changed tack after his defeat in Northern Italy in the 1170s. Instead of acting as the honest broker between the imperial princes, he decided to build out the royal territories in the German speaking lands as a way to exert power. In the process he amassed a sort of inverted L-shaped territory that stretched from base in the south along the Rhine to North of Frankfurt ad from there east, all the way to Bohemia.

Not only were these rich lands on important trade routes, but they also locked in the Southern princes. These princes found themselves surrounded by the Hohenstaufen on their Northern and Western side and by the Alps in the south and Bohemia in the east. Anyone stuck inside this cauldron better did what the emperor asked.

Barbarossa’s half-brother Konrad, the Count Palatinate, played a significant role in that plan. His job was to gain control of the area we have just crossed.

In 1184 an opportunity emerged to acquire the advocacy over the monastery of Lorsch, the richest and most august abbey on the upper Rhine, on the opposite bank from Worms. Lorsch had important possessions between the Neckar in the south and Frankfurt in the North.

Being the advocate was supposed to mean to look after the monk’s lands and make sure nobody came and took it away. Well, he was successful in as much as nobody came to take it away, he did that all by himself. Though it remained nominally property of the monks, he took all their vast territory for himself leaving the holy men in unheated halls and bare clothes. Lorsch is today a modest establishment, even though its Carolingian gatehouse is one of the most venerable remains from the days of Charlemagne.

The next churchmen he robbed was the bishop of Worms. In the 11th century the bishopric had still been rich and powerful, but once Konrad had fulfilled the obligations of his “advocacy”, the venerable institutions was down to a handful of villages. Konrad meanwhile had acquired the Neckar valley and the site of what would become the mighty castle of Heidelberg.

Konrad died in 1195, but for as long as the Hohenstaufen ruled, the Counts Palatinate supported the emperor, even though they weren’t members of the imperial family.

In 1214 emperor Frederick II gave the Palatinate to Ludwig von Wittelsbach, duke of Bavaria. Ludwig was the son of Otto von Wittelsbach, Barbarossa’s loyal paladin who had already been rewarded with the duchy of Bavaria. Though Ludwig was by no means as steadfast a supporter as his father had been, by and large the Palatinate continued its function as a link in the imperial chain of control.

This period of being a faithful vassal ended with the end of the Hohenstaufen. The kings of the interregnum had no control of the royal lands, and a mad feeding frenzy set in. The entirety of that inverted L that stretched from Basel to the Main River and then from there all the way to the Bohemian border came up for grabs. We have already heard how the Habsburgs snatched vast tracts of the Swiss and Alsatian positions (episode 140).

The Counts Palatinate on the Rhine were another one of these princes who profited from the demise of imperial power. Arguably they walked away with the biggest price. The next time a king of the Romans worth the name was elected, in 1273, only 7 princes were seen worthy to perform the sacred act of election. Who chose them and on what grounds is a mystery we explored in episode 139. But what had never been in doubt was that the count Palatinate on the Rhine was one of the 7 electors. The Palatinate wasn’t the largest and certainly not the richest of the principalities of the empire, but centuries of being close to imperial power, regularly acting as regent or guardians of the younger sons of emperors had elevated them to the count palatinate not just of a stem duchy, but the Count Palatinate of the whole empire, Reichstruchsess or High Stewart of the empire. As such the Counts Palatinate were part not just of the election process, but as the Golden Bull set out, part of the collective government of the empire.

Palatiate in 1329

By 1329 they had amassed a nicely contiguous territory around Heidelberg and Mannheim as well as various lands and territories to the west of Mainz. By some weird internal Wittelsbach machinations they also held the Oberpfalz, the Upper Palatinate, a sizeable territory between Nurnberg and the Bohemian border a solid 300km east of Heidelberg. And then they held a number of customs posts along the Middle Rhine. These latter positions were the most valuable bit. There are no statistics about the trade volume that went up and down the Rhine in the pre-modern period, but if we start off with 50% of current inland waterway trade going over the Rhine and then take into account that the majority of transportation in the Middle ages was on water, then it would not be excessive to assume 10%, maybe 20% of all European land-based trade passed the various customs houses of the Counts Palatinate. I think you would be hard pressed to find another way to explain the splendor of Heidelberg Castle and the scale of Mannheim Palace. Whilst this activity added to trade frictions and the economy of the German lands gradually falling behind France and England, at least they had the decency to build one of the most photographed castles in Germany, the Pfalzgrafenstein near Kaub, that castle that sits on a river island with its curtain walls shaped like a ship’s prow.

The next big expansion push came when Ruprecht displaced Wenceslaus the Lazy as king of the Romans in 1400. Ruprecht holds the record for King of the Romans with the shortest appearance in the History of the Germans Podcast. I gave the guy less than 3 minutes at the end of episode 165.

So whilst his impact on imperial politics, despite a solid 10 years on the throne was negligible, his impact on the Palatinate and Heidelberg in particular was considerable. He was also one of, if not the first territorial ruler to set up a bureaucracy that was worthy of the name. He established a registry of rights, lands and privileges of his state, introduced a system of taxation and recruited civil servants tasked with collecting these rights. This produced the revenues that allowed him to establish the university of Heidelberg in 1386 and might have given him the confidence to reach out for the imperial title in 1400. That latter move turned out to be a double-edged sword. For one, he used his role as king of the Romans to bring in various royal territories or positions, like the landgraviate of Alsace which expanded the Palatinate’s zone of influence all the way to the gates of Strasburg. On the other hand, the expenditure associated with the royal title bankrupted him.

His son learned from his father’s mistake and made no attempt at succeeding to the royal or imperial title. Instead, he held on to his father’s gains, improved the bureaucracy and hey presto –  the Count Palatinate on the Rhine swiftly became one of the richest territorial princes again.

This gentleman, Ludwig, the third of the Counts Palatinate of this name had four sons. The Wittelsbachs had always been fecund, which is great when it comes to continuing the dynasty but causes all sorts of mayhem when it comes to inheritance.

Ludwig III died in 1436. By then his eldest son was already dead, leaving three younger ones, aged 12, 11 and 9. The youngest, Ruprecht was designated for an ecclesiastical career, whilst the eldest was going to inherit lands and title. Which leaves the cursed middle child, Friedrich.

As the younger son of a father reluctant to divide his territory, his outlook was to either be an idle squire, become a bishop or pursue a military career. When he turned 18, he accepted his fate and formally gave up his right to a share of the Palatinate in exchange for a regular income. And that could have been the end of the story. Friedrich might have ended up as a competent general fighting wars for his brother, the emperor or as a mercenary in the service of Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

But things changed suddenly, when his elder brother Ludwig IV unexpectedly died in 1449. Ludwig IV left behind a young boy, Philipp from his marriage to the daughter of the antipope Felix V. I thought I just drop that pope thing in because it is so weird – check it out if you are interested, Felix V previously duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy.

More significant than the boy’s parentage was the fact that he was merely a year old. He needed a guardian, who would be a better candidate for that than his good old uncle Fritz. Friedrich had proven his allegiance to the territory by forsaking his inheritance, he was a well-educated young man as well as a good soldier.

The estates and the people of the Palatinate liked and supported him, expecting a long and fruitful regency. And in any other period of history, that is likely what would have happened. But these weren’t normal times. The empire was effectively rudderless. Sigismund had just died, his successors, Albrecht II and Friedrich III were largely absent focusing on Hungary and their own territories, the dukes of Burgundy were breathing down the necks of the principalities in the west and the Hussites were still around.  

For a territory like the Palatinate that stretched all along the Rhine, from Colmar to Koblenz but was utterly fragmented with huge gaps between the different exclaves, it was vital to be able to project stability and strength. And even a solid guardianship was not enough to achieve that.

That meant the politically expedient solution would be to let little Philipp experience some tragic mishap. Child mortality was high in the 15th century, and nobody would bat an eyelid. But that was not Friedrich’s style.  Instead, he sat down with his cabinet of highly trained lawyers and drilled deep into roman law, until they came across a legal instrument not used since the days of the ancient roman emperors, the concept of arrogation or adrogation.

Here is how that worked. In a first step, Friedrich adopted his nephew Philip as his own son. But that did not yet get us very far. If it had been a normal adoption, then Philipp would still take over the rule of the Palatinate once he reached majority, all the adoption would achieve is that Philipp would now inherit Friedrich’s personal fortune.

In an Adrogation the adoptee submits his or her own rights and fortune to the adoptimg parent. In other words, once Adrogation had happened, Philip would not become elector Palatinate until Friedrich had died. It made Friedrich Elector for life, just without the right to pass on his title and territory to anyone other than Philipp. To make this agreement watertight, Friedrich promised not get married and never to have legitimate children.

As I said, nobody had done this since the roman empire. But in the Roman Empire, it had worked extremely well. The succession from Hadrian to Antoninus Pius and then to Marcus Aurelius was executed via Adrogation, i.e., Marcus Aurelius as the legitimate heir was adrogated to Antoninus Pius.

The five good emperors were not a bad precedent, Friedrich was competent, and Philipp was allowed to see his 16th birthday. Hence the nobles and cities of the palatinate supported this move. Even Philipp’s mother signed up for the deal. Friedrich then went to the pope and the other Electors, and they all agreed. Only one person refused, and that was the most important one, the emperor Friedrich III. He objected to the concept of adrogation on the back of the specific rules about guardianship in the Golden Bull. For the next 25 years Friedrich I will call himself Elector Palatinate but will never be formally recognized by the imperial court. Towards the end of his reign, he will be placed in the imperial ban as a usurper, in part for the adrogation. But given the state of imperial power and the strength of the state he built and the reputation he had acquired, nobody came out to enforce that verdict.   

Friedrich is known as Frederick the Victorious, and he is called the victorious because, well because he was victorious. There is not enough time left in this episode to discuss the wars he fought and battles he won, but what we can do is look at the reasons why he was victorious.

As we have seen these last 50-odd episodes, the world of the late Middle Ages saw two ways of being successful in war. Either you had a hugely motivated and ingenious military force, like the Hussites and the Swiss, or you had money.

Friedrich I had money. Not just because he had inherited one of the richer principalities in the empire, but because he transitioned it from a bundle of rights into a more coherent and more productive entity.

He could build on his grandfather’s institutional changes and expanded from there.

He reorganized the university in 1454, expanding the teaching of roman law. Graduates of this course were snapped up and deployed in the elector’s bureaucracy. Given the territories were heavily fragmented, the elector established a number of Aemter, effectively regional offices charged with administrating these lands. It is in these offices that his law graduates are put to work.

When we talk about administration, much of it simply meant collecting dues and taxes. But it could also involve managing road infrastructure, building city walls and strongholds, organizing flood defenses and so forth. During time of famine, a good lord would procure foodstuff from abroad and distribute it through the Aemter.

Alongside the modern bureaucracy stood the old feudal organization. One of the weaknesses of the feudal organization was the lack of documentation. Throughout the High Middle Ages lords and nobles would show up with ancient charters claiming this or that exemption or privilege, and nobody could refute them. Friedrich I created a Lehnsbuch, a book of feudal rights that documented all the rights and privileges that applied in the relationship with his vassals, of which there are dozens from the dukes of Julich in the North to the towns and abbeys of Alsace. By writing them all down in a compendium, they are fixed and can be enforced and false claims refuted.

Finally, he tried to consolidate his lands into a contiguous territory, filling in the gaps. In part that was achieved by simple conquest, occasionally by purchase or by acquiring a mortgage.

But in the main it was done through agreements of mutual support signed with the small counts, knights and abbots whose territories interspersed within the palatinate lands. These agreements may sound all chivalric and honorable but appear to me a bit more like protection money. I guess if someone called Frederick the Victorious, unbeaten general in dozens of battles, shows up in front of my modest castle with 300 of his closest friends offering me protection against some unexpected raid by person or persons unknown, I am well advised to take such generous offer. This kind of treatment extended not just to counts and abbots but was also applied to the prince bishops of Worms and Speyer, themselves imperial princes, but in many ways bound to the Count Palatinate.

And finally, he operated through flattery and bribery. He would appoint counts and knights to his council, which came with the privilege of a life at the splendid court of Heidelberg as well as a regular salary.

In this manner Friedrich helped the Palatinate to achieve its largest territorial extent. At its height it comprised the lands around Heidelberg and Mannheim, the Upper Palatinate around Amberg, but also a near contiguous territory covering the modern state of Rheinland Pfalz.

But the most significant job a prince had, be it a territorial prince, a king or an emperor, was to maintain peace and justice, which was more or less the same thing. In 1462 he established the Pfaelzer Hofgericht, the Palatinate High Court. This court, again staffed with graduates from Heidelberg university, gained a reputation for its just and equitable judgements. Which meant that in the same way modern contracts often specify the London courts as the place to settle disputes, parties from all over southwest Germany brought their squabbles to the court in Heidelberg.

And Friedrich was able to enforce these judgements. On the one hand he had this elaborate system of regional offices, feudal oaths, agreements of mutual support and courtiers who were bound to follow his orders. But he also had a small but very loyal and efficient military force. It was a lot larger than a bodyguard, but not quite a standing army. The important thing was, that they were his own subjects or vassals, were generously paid, well trained and available in war as well as peacetime. Again, you would not want to mess with them.

And, surprise, if there is stability and the rule of law, trade flourishes. Subjects who find value in the way their territory are managed, find payment of taxes, levies, court fees and so forth just that little easier to bear.

What also helped was Friedrich’s comparative frugality. He ploughed most of the income back into the expansion of the principality. His court was and had to be splendid in order to attract the local nobles, but not excessively so. His main interest beyond work lay in the emerging Renaissance ideas. He himself had a thorough education and was fluent in Latin. He brought scholars to his court like Peter Luder, an early humanist who tried to introduce ancient Roman and Greek ideas to the university, Matthias Kemnat a historian, Michel Behaim a poet and many more.

Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Humanist

Which gets us to the next thing we will discuss on the podcast, the emergence of the German universities. Every nation revers their universities, be it Oxford and Cambridge for the English, Harvard and Yale for the US, Bolognia, Parma and Pavia for the Italians, or Coimbra for the Portuguese. But for the Germans, the universities, be they Wittenberg or Göttingen, Heidelberg or Marburg, Tübingen and Leipzig matter in a very specific way. How, that is what we will explore next week. I hope you will join us again.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

by on

The Invention of printing

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 187 – Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters, which is also episode 3 of Season 10 – the Empire in the 15th century.

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

But before we start just another reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free and for good reason. It does not take a genius to notice that the way we communicate as a society has changed. We do spend a lot of time on electronic media of all kinds, not just social media, but podcasts, streaming, youtube etc. Most of this content is paid for by advertising. Advertisers, in the absence of better metrics, pay the platforms and creators on the basis of eyeballs or ear canals. And since our crocodile brains are still dominating the cerebellum, our eyeballs and ear canals  always turn to the loudest and most eye catching. But that is not aways the information our frontal cortex wants and should feed on.  We need stuff that may be less exciting, but more thoughtful. And that is not what advertisers can pay for. So we need at least a part of our information world that is funded by its users. That is why I have subscriptions to newspapers and libraries, am happy to pay for the BBC and for Netflix. And for some podcasts and Substacks too. And if you want to do the same and for some reason feel the History of the Germans is deserving your support, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron.  And thanks a lot to Marko P., James Zapf, Kenneth H., MarkV, Mark Young, Swin Purple and Jeff N. who have already done that.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that, back to the show

Johannes Gutenberg was born sometime between 1393 and 1400 in Mainz. His family was comparatively well off, part of the 100 ancient families of the city, what we call today a patrician. The family lived mainly off annuities, financial instruments issued by the city that generated a solid and predictable income. We also know that his father was a companion of the mint, meaning he was on some sort of supervisory board of the archepiscopal mint  that struck the Rhenisch Gulden, the most common currency in the Holy Roman Empire.

His name, Gutenberg, derived -as was customary – from his family home, the Hof zum Gutenberg in the city centre, next to St. Christopherus church.  Gutenberg translates as “hill of the good people” but that was not its origin. Where it stood had once been the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in europe. That community had been subjected to pogroms ever since 1096, as we discussed in episode 38, but the great expulsion had come in 1349 when the Black Death struck. Allegedly 6,000 men, women and children chose to commit suicide by setting light to their synagogue rather than convert. Where they once lived, the Judenberg, was given to the city council and a patrician family built a house on the site. As memory of the atrocities faded, that house turned from Judenberg to Gutenberg, which in 1419 the family adopted as their family name.

Hof zum Gutenberg in 1835 (a baroque palais built after the original house was burned down in the 17th cnetury)

And that is all we know about his first 30 plus years. He may have gone to university, he may have trained as a goldsmith, or he may have just hung out in in bars and nightclubs for all we know.

In 1434 he moved to Strasbourg, a city that at that time was much larger and much richer than Mainz. Mainz had been going downhill due to mismanagement by the city council, internal conflicts, the endless fighting between the archbishops and their neighbours and the regular schisms between two contenders for the archepiscopal throne. It had not recovered its population from before the Black Death. Strasbourg on the other hand was thriving, reaching 25,000 inhabitants, a major hub in the wine trade that stretched all the way to Norway and Scotland. Its cathedral, one of the greatest achievements of gothic art was still rising up and the streets were lined with impressive stone houses of prosperous merchants and artisans.

What Gutenberg did in Strasbourg for the following 10 years is shrouded in mystery. Some argue he did already begin printing there in 1440, but no proof of such activity can be found. All we do know about this time is from court records, according to which he was engaged in the production of mirrors and some “adventure and art” that was kept secret.

He left Strasbourg in 1444, then disappears from the records before he returned to Mainz in 1448. Seemingly flush with cash he buys out his siblings and moves in the old family home. And that is where he starts his printing business for real. In 1454 he published his masterpiece, the Gutenberg bible.

That is it. He never wrote down what inspired him, how he developed the technology or what he wanted to achieve with it. All these books that have been written about Gutenberg’s life, and there are at least three available in English, are all conjecture. Well-argued and meticulously researched, but in the end more suitable for a true crime than for a history podcast.

But what we have is his magnificent innovation, according to Luther, “Gods ultimate and greatest gift”.

Johannes Gutenberg stands in a line with the world’s great inventors, the James Watts, the Thomas Alva Edisons, the Carl Benz and Louis Pasteurs. But as much as we would all love to read the story of the lone genius  who had that one brilliant idea that propelled the world forward, we have to acknowledge that boring academic research has proven again and again, that there are very few if any instances where innovation happened that way. All these great advances were usually the culmination of multiple strands of developments that came together at a particular time and a particular place to be picked up by some determined individual who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Let’s see whether printing with moveable letter was the same..

First up, Gutenberg did not invent printing. People have been printing things for hundreds if not thousands of years using wooden stamps. And since the late 14th century the art of the woodcut was spreading cross europe, a technique that allowed to print images or a page of text multiple times.

Madonna del Fuoco (Madonna of the Fire,woodcut  c. 1425), Cathedral of Forlì, in Italy

Gutenberg’s technology deviated from this technique first by using metal rather than wood. Metal is much more durable, allowing the production of a much larger number of copies before the stamps wear out.

The second downside of the woodcut was that to create a whole book would require to carve every single page first in wood, as a mirror image and then making an imprint. That was not only time consuming, but also left no room for error. If say only one letter was wrong, the whole woodcut had to be made from scratch again. Which is why nobody did that.

Gutenberg’s press used moveable type. So there would be a stamp for each letter and they would be assembled to form the respective words and sentences. If there was an error, all you need to do, was replace the letter and restart the printing.

That’s it. Genius! That is the invention. Let’s just go and start printing.

But hold on. Let’s think about that. If you want to print a book, you will need a lot of these individual letter stamps, called punches. And I mean a lot. For example in my scripts I use about 3,500 characters per page. The Gutenberg bible was a bit more generous with space and used only 2,400. But then he printed at least two pages on the same sheet of paper. That is 4,800  punches minimum per print run.

So, let’s take a look at how these punches could be made. Punches were originally created in coin making. Up until the modern days coins were made by creating a metal disk usually containing some gold, silver or copper. This disk is then struck with a punch to imprint the desired image, say heads or tails on to the disk. The punch consists of a handle like that of a chisel, a steel shank of a few centimetres’ length into which the punch maker had engraved an image. The coin maker would then carefully place this punch over the metal disk and strike it with a hammer. In a sophisticated mint, such as the mint in Mainz, there would be another die underneath the disk, called an anvil, so that both sides of the coin would be struck at the same time.

Now here is the rub. The anvil lasted about 36,000 strikes and the punch only about 20,000 strikes, A very large mint like Venice would produce about 20,000 coins a day, meaning the punch needed to be replaced every day. Mainz was certainly smaller, but still, the punches only functioned for a limited period of time.

So every day or every couple of days a punch maker needed to engrave a new punch. And this punch had to look exactly the same as the previous punch to make sure the coins looked identical. Then the coins were quite small the images however quite intricate. These minute images had to be engraved into a steel punch that had to be heated and cooled several times to harden it, but without becoming brittle. Then the engraving had to be done into the steel, with steel. There was no way you could get hold of a diamond cutter. So steel was used on steel to scrape off some minuscule curls of steel. I have no way of checking this, but according to John Man’s book The Gutenberg Revolution, a good punch maker could create letter on a scale of 0.01 millimetres, which is 6 times the resolution of a modern laser printer.

And a punch maker needs about a day to make one punch. So to make our 4,800 punches needed to print two pages would take, well 4,800 days, which given feast days and holidays meant it would take one punch maker 20 years to make all the punches  needed for these 2 pages, or 20 punch makers a year. And Gutenberg did neither have 20 years nor the funds to employ 20 punch makers. Plus each letter would end up being just that tiny bit different.

So he needed a more efficient solution to make metal punches. And that solution was the hand mould. Now I have been warned to try to describe the hand mould. Someone called Joseph Moxton tried 200 years ago and when his 13 page description was reprinted, the editors wrote in the comments that “nobody should try to understand the hand mould by reference to this description”.

Type Foundry – Druckkunst-Museum Leipzig

Printing Like Gutenberg and Hand Casting Type

But the idea is the following. You create one punch for each letter. Then you use the punch to create an imprint, called the matrix. The matrix is then inserted and fixed at the bottom of the hand mould. And then you pour metal into the mould which then creates a little rectangular stick with the letter at the top. Repeat again and again and hey presto one punch is turned into lots and lots of cloned punches. But there is still a problem, if you were to make these from say steel, it would take a few hours to cool naturally or you could cool it down rapidly using water or oil, which would add another step in the process.

Which gets us to the next bit of alchemy, the metal he used for these cloned punches. It was an amalgam of lead, tin and antimony. This alloy is not only liquid but has a habit of cooling extremely quickly. So, you can pour in the molten metal that was heated to 327 degrees Celsius and take out the new punch almost immediately, already cool enough to be handled. And bang, you take out the letter punch and you can use the hand mould again to make the next, and the next and the next.

Ok, great. Now you can make lots and lots of the 24 or 26 letters of the alphabet. But there is another problem. Gutenberg wanted to create a print that looked like a handwritten manuscript, just better. And that meant he needed a lot more than 26 types. There were various special signs that were used as abbreviations in the handwritten manuscripts around at the time. He needed these. And he wanted the flow from one letter to the next – again – like in a handwritten manuscript, which meant having to create multiple versions of each letter with different attachment points. In the end, his typefaces had between 220 and 290 different characters. All of which had to be cut into a punch and then moulded dozens, if not hundreds of times.

Great, now you have a pile of letters, but how do you turn this into a page of text? You need to fix them into something. Gutenberg’s solution was to create a frame into which the type setter would place the individual letters. To stop them from wiggling about they were placed into a frame. Sounds straightforward, but let’s think again. First up, not all sentences are the same length, whilst the frame is rectangular. Well, you can fill in the gaps with punch that have no letter, effectively creating a void. Or, you could create various versions of the same letters with just marginally larger or smaller width to end up with a perfectly justified edge to the text. And finally you could play around with little fillers to widen the gap between different letters. And all that has to be done in a way that does not make the text jerky, but flowing naturally, easy to read.

Then you have to make sure that all the letters are absolutely, 100% the same height. If not, you end up with one letter being bold and the next one faint. And we are talking of precision levels in the sub millimetre level.

So now you got your frame with all the letters firmly held in place, something called a “Forme”.  The next question is what material you want to print on. The traditional material to write on in the Middle ages was vellum, made from calf skin. One calf skin produced about 3 pages of the highest quality or 6 pages if stretched out. Hugely expensive. It was a fairly easy to print on material, but if printing was to become as wide spread as it did, it needed another, a cheaper material.

Willkommen | Gutenberg-Museum

Paper had been around in Western Europe since the 11th century as it spread from China via the Islamic world. But in europe large scale production only began in the 14th century. One reason was that Chinese paper was fairly soft and absorbent, perfectly suited for Chinese calligraphy, but not ideal for illuminated manuscripts. The Europeans added animal glue to the mix, which hardened it, so it could take ink and paint. The first German papermill opened in 1390 in Nurnberg, but the most desirable paper came from Italy.

The next question was what ink to use. Handwritten manuscripts were written using Iron-gall ink, a black or brown mixture made from iron sulphate, tannic acid and gum arabicum. This ink was too watery, it ran off the types and smeared all over the pages. It was also acidic, so often faded through the paper to the opposite side.

Gutenberg therefore had to develop a new kind of ink, that, since he wanted his books to look like manuscripts, had to have a similar colour to Iron-Gall ink but was more viscous and sticky. Printer’s ink was based on oil paint a material only recently made popular by the early Netherlandish painters, the Jan van Eycks, Rogier van the Weyden and Robert Campin. During the 1440 and 1450s this technique was gradually coming up the Rhine river, finding an important centre in Alsace. In all likelihood it was there, in the workshops of one of these pioneers of oil painting in the Rhineland that Gutenberg first encountered oil-based paint, without which printing with moveable type was simply impossible.

Then we get to the last major technological component, the actual printing press. Woodcuts and other prints had been made by rubbing the paper onto the carved piece. That did work to a  degree, but often left smudges of paint on the page. And Gutenberg needed to print both sides of the page, which meant he needed to fix the paper in exactly the same place twice. Which means we needed a way to fix both the frame with the letter and the paper into place and then apply the exactly accurate level of force on to it.

The solution for that was – the wine press. Mainz is in the midst of a wine growing region. The Gutenberg family owned a farm near Eltville, right in the centre of the Rheingau, source of some of Germany’s finest white wines. Wine presses work with screws and are calibrated to exert exactly the right amount of pressure to squeeze the liquid out of the grapes, but not smash them into pulp. Ideal for printing, where again precision was key.

That is the hardware, the letter types moulded in the hand mould, the frame they are fixed in, called the forme, the ink and the printing press. But that still does not make a book. We also need a process.

The first step is to carve the type, a job usually done by a gold or silversmith, ideally one with experience working in making coin punches. Then we have someone making the types by punching the matrix, fixing it inside the hand mould, first creating the special alloy and then pouring it into the mould.

Once we have the typefaces, they go to the setter who puts together the actual text by placing the respective letters inside the frame. He or she would usually have arranged the punches in two cases, one for the larger and one for the smaller letters, where we got our terms upper case and lower case from. This is a truly sophisticated job. For one, all the letters the setter sees are mirror image. And then he or she has to work out all the gaps and widths to fit the text on to the frame.

The frame is then taken to make a first simple imprint which is given to the corrector. That person will read through the first imprint and check for errors. This is again hugely important because the advantage of printing over handwritten manuscripts was not only cost, but even more, accuracy. Copyists made mistakes and these mistakes then compounded through the line of distribution, from one writer to the next. A printed copy was exactly the same as the next one, making sure only the accurate information is transmitted. But for that the information had to be accurate to start with.

Once approved, the forme then goes to the actual printer. Each printing press is operated by two people. One handles the formes and applies the ink. Application was done with two large leather balls which are covered with a film of oil paint and then banged vertically on to the forme. You do not want to rub it side to side because it would seep in between the letters and smear across the page. Doing that meant the banger often got the sticky oil paint on his fingers that was difficult to wash off. Hence you needed another person to handle the clean sheets of paper. The paper needed to be a bit moist to better absorb the paint, which was one part of the job. Then he had to fix it in place on the paper holder, then lower it over the forme. And finally he slid the forme and paper under the press, turned the screw, released it and slid everything back out. I put a link in the show notes for a video where you can see how that worked.

How a Gutenberg Printing Press Works

Then the paper and paint needed to dry, which meant it was brought up to the loft where it was hung up like washing.

Then the whole process was repeated, to print the back of the page. To make sure that the back and front aligned perfectly, the paper frame had two little pins that pricked the paper. When it came back down having dried in the loft, you put the paper through the same pricks when fixing it, and hey presto, perfection.

I hope you get what I am telling you here. The invention of printing was not some eureka moment where Gutenberg jumped up in his bathtub and went – that is how it works.

This was likely a decades long process of trial and error, developing each one of these specific instruments, the hand mould, the forme, the ink, the paper, the printing press and then going through hundreds or thousands of iterations to figure out which combination of materials and pressure worked best. Since Gutenberg left no records of his life apart from legal documents, we do not know how many iterations he went through. But to give you an idea, James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he finally released DC01, the product that would make him a billionaire. Elon Musk, not my favourite person, took 6 years before his rockets first reached orbit, after several exploded, and that was based on a technology that had already existed since the 1940s. The first reusable rocket, his true innovation, took another 7 years to develop. In other words, innovation is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, that was the case in the 15th century and it still is the case today.

And it is also most unlikely Gutenberg did develop each of these tools and processes all by himself. Even if he had some goldsmith skills, for which there is no evidence, it is unlikely he could operate at the level of precision required to make the punches. We know he hired a goldsmith, Hans Dunne in Strasburg and kept him on when he moved to Mainz. As for all the other tools, let’s remember that from his days in Strasburg onwards, he had a team of 6 to 8 people working with him, many great artisans in their own right and staying with him throughout.

And then we have the time and place. Mainz and Strasburg in the first half of the 15th century. Both cities lay on the Rhine river, at the time the trading super highway connecting north and south. There was a mint in Mainz and with it the specialists skills to make high precision punches. And Gutenberg knew about those given his father had been one of the board members of the Mint. It was right around that time that oil painting spread southwards along the rhine from Flanders to Alsace and then Italy.  Paper had gained popularity and was making the same journey in the opposite direction. And Mainz lay in a wine making region with wine presses galore.

It is unlikely that Mainz in 1450 was the only place in the world where printing with moveable type could be invented, in large part because it was invented a few decades earlier in Korea and other forms of printing had been used in China for centuries.

But what moveable type printing did in the 1450s in Mainz was to catch on, which is something it did not do in Korea. And that had to do with two crucial elements every innovation needs, funding and willing customers.

If you look back at the history of Silicon Valley, it is quite obvious that this outburst of innovation and creativity did not come out of nothing. It was a combination of pentagon, mainly navy funded research in Northern California, Stanford university, and then starting in 1972, venture capital firms providing the funding for all that makes up our modern world, including the pinnacle of technological and creative achievement, podcasts.

Gutenberg too was dependent upon financial backers.

He found a first group of them when he moved to Strasbourg in 1434. He himself had about 350 gulden, enough to buy a substantial house, but not enough to create a business on the scale we are talking about here. So he invited three partners to join him.

And at that point he did not invite them to join them in a decades long chase to develop the printing press. The idea he brought them was to make mirrors. 

Not posh glass mirrors, but small handheld mirrors. How do you get rich with mirrors? Well, that is something that could only have worked in the madness of the 15th century. The black death and the recurring outbreaks of the Plague, the huge uncertainty caused by endless feuds, the absence of a central authority, the split of the church during the schism, the Hussite revolt, the threat of a Turkish invasion, all that left people utterly unsettled. They sought refuge in their faith, and in particular in the support they hoped saintly interventions could bring. This is a century of enormous pilgrimages, and one of the most significant ones was the pilgrimage to Aachen. Aachen cathedral does not only hold the bones of Charlemagne, a saint at least in the eyes of many, but some of the most revered of relics, relics that had touched Jesus himself and members of his family. These include the robe of the Virgin Mary, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the cloth in which the head of John the Baptist was wrapped, and the loincloth worn by Christ on the cross. Touching these sacred relics would transfer so much holiness, any illness, sadness or affliction would instantly dissolve.

Every 7 years these saintly objects would be taken outside the cathedral and shown to the people. Each of these 10 days would see 10,000 pilgrims descending on Aachen trying to catch a glimpse of Jesus’ loincloth. No way the canons would allow anyone to touch the precious objects, but they were so imbued with sanctity, they radiated goodness. So simply being in the presence and catching some of these rays would bring salvation from troubles.

But even though Aachen may see a 100,000 visitors over the 10 days of the festival, this was not enough to satisfy the demand. All those who stayed home, be it due to lack of funds or illness, were in dire need of deliverance. And there was a way to collect these rays of holiness and bring them back home to your loved ones. All you needed was a hand mirror that would capture the  rays emanating from the sacred relics and contain them.

That is what these mirrors may have looked like

And these were the kinds of mirrors that Johannes Gutenberg intended to produce. And now take a breath, guess how many mirrors he intended to make? 500? A 1000? 10,000? No, 32,000 was the intended production run. Selling those at half a guilder each that would bring in revenues of 16,000 guilders. Production cost were – hold on – 600 guilders. A gross profit margin of 96% or a profit of 26x. That is more than say Facebook or Google Search, albeit not by much. Just to put all this into perspective. Gutenberg’s income was about 30 guilders and his net worth was about 300 guilders.

We do not know how Gutenberg intended to make these magic mirrors, in particular we do not know how he would produce them in such quantities. What he did find though was investors who were willing to support this venture with what turned out to be a lot more than 600 guilders.

At which point we hit on one of the greatest Gutenberg mysteries. What was it he did during his years in Strasburg. Sure, there were the mirrors, but his partners and he himself poured a lot more than the initially intended 600 guilders into this venture. And then there is the court case. Because, surprise, surprise, the scheme did not work out as planned. There was a court case at the end of it where the son of one of the partners demanded his father’s money back.

And what is weird about this court case is that no one, not the claimant, not the witnesses and certainly not the defendant Gutenberg was prepared to explain what exactly the venture was. They talk about an “aventur und kunst”, best translated as a venture and an art. And then they go on about presses and formes and secret arts. Something else beyond the making of mirrors had been going on.

 Given all we heard about the complexity of printing and all the different technologies and processes that had to be developed, it is fair to assume that much of the money intended to make mirrors went into the R&D of printing. And then there is the fact that when he arrives in Mainz in 1348, he immediately sets out to print things using his printing press.

Having left Strasburg and his old business partners behind what he now needed was financing to scale up his business. And he found this financing from a man called Johann Fust. Fust was an important citizen of Mainz and a very wealthy man. He lent Gutenberg 800 gulden in 1449 to set up a printing workshop and would provide funding over the next five years to the tune of 4,500 gulden, the same as 12 substantial houses in the city.

Everything is now in place. Gutenberg has a technology and a process. He had brought along some members of his old team from Strasbourg and hired more. And he had financing.

All he now needed was customers. Who would want to own a printed book, or any printed material?

What he had going for him was a veritable explosion in literacy during the previous hundred years. Knowledge was no longer confined to within the walls of monasteries. By 1440 the German lands boasted 9 universities, up from none in 1370. Running a trading business had become more and more reliant on writing, on the exchange of letters and the drafting of contracts, hence the sons and sometimes the daughters of the city merchants went to newly opened schools. And even artisans and labourers keen to expand their horizons learned to read.

And what did they read, manuscripts. Along with the growth in literacy a whole industry of scribes had developed. Paper had been the killer application. Costing a10th of vellum and parchment, the material itself had become accessible. Entrepreneurs set up writing businesses where scribes would copy books, pamphlets, missals and breviers by the dozen.

In other words, books were more and more accessible.

But these handwritten books and documents had a serious weakness. They were written in haste and hence prone to errors. And for some books, errors were unacceptable.

A copy of a major theological treatise must not carry mistakes – imagine what happened if you misinterpret St. Augustine. Same goes even more for missals, the books that lay down in detail how each mass throughout the year is supposed to be celebrated. Any error there and the whole of the congregation may find itself falsely instructed.

But even more practical things needed to be accurate, like schoolbooks. The most widely used schoolbook of the 15th century was the so-called Donatus, a 4th century Latin grammar, a concise book aimed at young students. Again, it is self-evident that a student buying this book would be very badly served did he pick up a version with lots of errors.

 So, this is how the history of printing begins, with a school book. The Donatus by Gutenberg probably came out in 1450 and remained a mainstay of his workshop throughout.

Another line of business came out of the political situation. The Ottomans kept progressing up the Balkans whilst at the same time threatening Cyprus and Constantinople. Pope Nikolaus V called for a crusade and to fund the endeavour offered full indulgences against pay.

Indulgences were not only spiritual offers, but they were also physical objects. About one page of dense text recording the exact wording of the papal bull granting the indulgence, its conditions and application. It also featured, of course, the name of the sinner, the name of the priest granting the indulgence and his signature on the receipt.

These pieces of paper could be presented at the next confession and led to automatic absolution of sins and reduction of time in purgatory. Again, this was not a document where  spelling mistakes or – worse – the omission of whole lines of text was acceptable.

Coming to the rescue, Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. Hence the second key output of the printing press were forms for indulgences, faithfully recording the papal bull, leaving space to add the names of sinner and priest and the signature.

Other products were more for daily use. One was the so-called Turk calendar, a calendar for the year with woodcuts and statements encouraging the reader to take up arms against the Turks, or even better, give money to those who wanted to fight. I will not go into another product, the so called sibylline prophecies that he may or may not have printed and what they meant. That is the kind of rabbit whole that has swallowed many a Gutenberg scholar.

An Admonition to Christendom against the Turks. | Library of Congress

So far , so seriously underwhelming. School books, calendars, indulgences – clearly not the kind of output that propels one to the European Pantheon of greats.

What Gutenberg needed was a best seller, a book that would display the absolute superiority of his innovative production process and that would hopefully make him rich.

Talking about rich, the print runs were going well, but cash flow was still a bit tight. The problem was the same that had felled so many innovative companies – payment terms.

By the time the first little scholar handed over his 2 shillings for the Donatus, Gutenberg had already paid all his suppliers of paper, metal and ink, his employees, his rent and the interest on his loans. And as demand for his print runs went up, so did his upfront expenditure, meaning he had a thriving business but every money that came in went straight out the door to pay from materials for the next print run. And that meant he did not have the money to make that one killer app, the kind of book that would divide world history into before and after.

So he went back to Johann Fust and asked for another loan, a loan needed to set up another, a second print workshop where he would produce that killer app.

And what was this killer app. Initially he had wanted to piggy back on an initiative to issue a new, revised missal for the whole of the enormous archdiocese of Mainz and all its suffragan bishoprics. If that had gone through, it would have been a gold mine. Gutenberg’s printing press was the only device that could guarantee that every single copy of the missal was identical. And every one of the thousands of parishes in the diocese would have needed to buy one.

But it did not come off. Both the archbishop and the Roman curia had sponsored the development of missals and neither could force the other to sanction their product. So no missal was agreed and betting on one winning out in the end would have been utter madness.

Exhausted with waiting for the missal, in 1452, Gutenberg decided to go for the big one, the whole bible. 

To get an idea of the scale of the undertaking, the Gutenberg bible comprised 1,275 pages of text mostly in 42 lines. It was produced in an edition of 180 copies, some of them on vellum, but most on paper. Not any odd paper, but special, expensive Italian paper.

It was not just an accurate copy of the at the time most accurate copy of the vulgate, the Latin bible, it was also and still remains, one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Each letter is printed as sharp and as accurate as humanly possible. The entire text, in two columns is justified on the end, requiring an incredibly fiddly adjustment of individual letters until they all match.

In 1455 probably Fust, not Gutenberg, brought the bible to the Frankfurt fair, then and now the greatest trade fair in the German lands. And already at the time it had a section dedicated to books. And who would come to poke around the latest issues, than our friend, legendary composer of bestselling erotica and future pope Pius II, Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini.

And he got very excited, so excited he wrote back to his then boss, the Spanish cardinal de Caravjal: quote: “I did not see complete bibles, but quinternions [those five sheet, twenty page sections] of different books, written in extremely elegant and correct letter, without error, which your eminence could read with no difficulty and without glasses” end quote.

Piccolomini tried to buy a copy but was told that all copies had been pre-ordered.

Gutenberg had his best seller. He had produced a book that was not cheaper than a manuscript, but infinitely better, its letters sharper, its layout more beautiful and most importantly – error free.

Gutenberg stood on the verge of becoming immensely rich and celebrated as the man who invented the world’s most important new technology for a 1000 years. But as he stood there, Johann Fust pulled the rug from under his feet.

Gutenberg had never paid any of the interest he owed on all the various loans he had taken out. And right now, in 1455, with the bibles almost completed, but not sold for cash, he had no money, just debt. Sure, he knew that as soon as he dispatched the books, the funds, maybe as much as 9,000 gulden would be flooding in, but right now, he did not have a penny. And Johann Fust knew that too.  He sued Gutenberg, Gutenberg was forced to hand over both his workshops with all the presses, the nearly finished bibles, the materials and everything else he had worked on for nearly two decades.

Johann Fust and his son-in-law, Gutenberg’s former assistant, Peter Schoeffer sold the bibles, made a Fortune, continued the workshop, and rapidly became the largest printing business in the Rhineland and publishing books almost as magnificent as the Gutenberg bible. Gutenberg himself kept going on a smaller scale, but would never have the resources to ever produce anything on the scale of the Gutenberg bible.

And that is where we will stop for today. Next week I will try to assess the impact of Gutenberg’s invention, a task that has defeated many a better man, but – like Gutenberg – I have embarked on this path and cannot stop.

And as usual my closing plea to support the show at historyofthegermans.com/support. All your help is very much appreciated.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

by on

Mainz and Hessen

This week we are setting off on our tour of the empire for real. And where better to start than with the most senior, most august of the seven prince Electors, the archbishop of Mainz, archchancellor of the empire, and holder of the decisive vote in imperial elections.

We have already encountered a number of archbishops of Mainz in this podcast, from the treacherous Frederick who tried to overthrow Otto the Great, to Willigis, the eminence grise of the empire under Otto II, III and Henry II, Adalbert, first advisor and then adversary of Henry V, Peter von Aspelt, the man who put the Luxemburgs on the Bohemian throne and lots more.

But this series is not about grand imperial politics, but about the grimy territorial skullduggery inside the empire. And for Mainz this is a story that is deeply entangled with the history of Hessen.

Where Mainz is ancient, tracing its’ eminence back to a saint who had come across the water, Hessen was a new kid on the block amongst the imperial princes. But a very successful one. And at its beginning stood the 24-year-old daughter of a saint holding up her baby son to be acclaimed lord by the people, or some such thing.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcast

Listen on YouTube

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans; Episode 186 – Origin Stories, which is also episode 1 of our new series, the empire in the 15th century.

This week we are setting off on our tour of the empire for real. And where better to start than with the most senior, most august of the seven prince Electors, the archbishop of Mainz, archchancellor of the empire, and holder of the decisive vote in imperial elections.

We have already encountered a number of archbishops of Mainz in this podcast, from the treacherous Frederick who tried to overthrow Otto the Great, to Willigis, the eminence grise of the empire under Otto II, III and Henry II, Adalbert, first advisor and then adversary of Henry V, Peter von Aspelt, the man who put the Luxemburgs on the Bohemian throne and lots more.

But this series is not about grand imperial politics, but about the grimy territorial skullduggery inside the empire. And for Mainz this is a story that is deeply entangled with the history of Hessen.

Where Mainz is ancient, tracing its’ eminence back to a saint who had come across the water, Hessen was a new kid on the block amongst the imperial princes. But a very successful one. And at its beginning stood the 24-year-old daughter of a saint holding up her baby son to be acclaimed lord by the people, or some such thing.

But before we start just a quick reminder that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week our special thanks go to Tom B., Christopher P., Jocelyn, Cristy Z, Jakub P., Sean Ryder and Jeff B.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

Last thing, I have given an interview on the History Flakes Podcast that came out yesterday. History Flakes is a great show presented by Pip and Jonny, two comedians, historians and tour guides from Berlin. I have been listening to their show for a while and really enjoy it. So, tune in, either to hear me hurtling through the history of Brandenburg from the fall of the roman empire to Frederick of Hohenzollern in just about 60 minutes or to one of their other episodes, on the Karl Marx Allee, on Christmas in Berlin or Josephine Baker. The show is called History Flakes, a Berlin History Podcast.

Welcome to History Flakes – The Berlin History Podcast — Whitlam’s Berlin Tours

And with that, back to the show.

Let’s start at the beginning. The city of Mainz was founded by the Roman general Drusus, stepson of Augustus, father of emperor Claudius as well as the grandfather of the emperor Caligula. A most ancient and most august provenance at least by German standards. In the 1st century CE, Mainz became the military and administrative center of the Province of Upper Germany.

Mainz, like the other important roman cities of Cologne and Trier probably had bishops since the second century, though records and names were lost due to the persecutions and the simple passage of time. Once Christianity became first recognized by the emperor Constantine in 313 and was then made the state religion by Theodosius in 380 AD the bishops of Mainz became more tangible.

These bishops of the 4th to the 8th century were occupied with acquiring martyr’s bones, building churches and dabbling in the violent politics of the Merovingian and Carolingian courts. We know very little about their background but is likely that as in other parts of the former Roman Empire the bishops were recruited from the ancient imperial elite, who spoke and wrote in Latin as opposed to the political elite who were descendants of Germanic tribesmen. Gregory of Tours, patron saint of this podcasts, kept going on about the senatorial rank of his family and sneered at the uncouth habits of his political overlords. But sneering from the sidelines gets you only so far.

The turning point for the bishopric of Mainz came with the arrival of a man called Wynfreth. Wynfreth was born around the year 675 somewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. He had received his education in benedictine monasteries, potentially in Exeter and Winchester. This is the time when England and even more so, Ireland were the great repositories of knowledge in western Europe.

In 716 he joined a number of Anglo-Saxon and Irish missionaries going into the wilds of Frisia. And that is the time he took on the name he became best known by, Boniface, or Saint Boniface to you and me.

That Friesian project collapsed when Karl Martell wielded his hammer to close to the intended converts, but Boniface had found his calling. Other than his colleagues, Boniface realized that to be successful on a truly continental scale, he needed the endorsement of both spiritual and temporal authorities. His genius was in forging an alliance between the papacy and the mayors of the palace, the de facto rulers of the Merovingian empire. These mayors of the palace were looking for a way to remove the Merovingian kings, who had turned into purely ceremonial figures, whilst the popes needed both military protection against the Lombards in Italy and a way to get a better handle on the church organization in the Frankish empire.

Boniface became the go-between for the two sides and in the process acquired more and more influence. Part of this political capital was invested in reforming the church, making it less dependent on the Frankish aristocracy and more oriented towards Rome. But his other great task he set himself was to convert “the Germans”.  Though we know that such a term did not really exist in the 8th century, apart from the name of the now defunct Roman provinces, what was meant was all of the territory east of the Rhine River. For this task Boniface was given the title of Archbishop which came with the right to create dioceses and appoint bishops.

And creating dioceses and appointing bishops was what he did. Some, like Büraburg, Erfurt, Eichstätt und Würzburg, he created from scratch, others, like Regensburg, Passau, Salzburg and Freising he reorganised. He also founded monasteries, the most significant of them was Fulda, where he was also buried.

But he did not get everything the way he wanted. His original plan was to have one unified German missionary church structure, led by an archbishop based in Cologne. But that ran into opposition from the political forces so that he had to settle for Mainz as the seat of his archbishopric. Boniface never really warmed to the place, which is why he spent more time in Fulda, deeper in the pagan heartlands. He died in 754, murdered whilst again attempting to convert the Frisians.

Though Mainz harped on about St. Boniface for centuries after this, the true founder of the Archbishopric of Mainz was his successor, Lullus the Great. Silly name, impressive politician. He wrangled the notion that Mainz was the primate of Germany, though there never was a shred of paper that awarded this title. And he did expand the number of suffragan bishoprics, that is bishops who were under the supervision of the archbishop of Mainz. It did not all happen in one go, but over time the archbishopric of Mainz acquired 14 dependent bishoprics from Chur in modern day Switzerland to Hildesheim in Niedersachsen and from Mainz in the West to Prague in the east. It included such important seats as Speyer, Worms, Constance, Strasbourg, Augsburg and Paderborn. During the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical province of Mainz was the largest administrative entity in the catholic church after the papal states.

But this role as church administrator was only one of the three pillars of the power of the archbishops.

The second pillar was his political position in imperial politics. St. Boniface was widely and erroneously believed to have crowned Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian king, so that the archbishops of Mainz demanded the right to crown the king of East Francia. And that right was broadly recognised until Archbishop Aribo refused to crown the empress Gisela in 1024 on the grounds of her being too closely related to her husband the emperor Konrad II. The archbishop of Cologne was less tied up with canonical red tape, crowned Gisela, and from that point forward the archbishop of Cologne became the sole legitimate coronator of kings.

What Mainz retained however, was the role as imperial arch chancellor. Though the chancellery travelled with the emperor and the emperor would appoint whoever he wanted as chancellor, the ceremonial responsibility for the Chancellery resided with the archbishop of Mainz. That unfortunately did not include the obligation to maintain complete and accurate archives, which would have done a whole lot of good to the organisational effectiveness of the empire and the accuracy of the historical record. But what it meant was that Mainz was crucial in all imperial elections and imperial diets. When the elections had been unanimous as they were until the 13th century, Mainz was the first to vote, which made this vote the deciding one. How impactful that can be, check out episode 43, All Change, All Change where the archbishop dramatically tilts the wheel of history. When elections became contestable Mainz voted last of the seven electors, giving it again the deciding vote. Mainz did not only take the lead in deciding who should be next in line for the throne, but also when it came to removing kings deemed unsuitable, like Adolf of Nassau, episode 142 and Wenceslaus the Lazy episode 165. The attempt to depose Sigismund after his blunders in Bohemia we discussed in episode 179 were also led by the archbishop of Mainz.

And then we have a third pillar of the power of the archbishop of Mainz the bit we focus on today. If you remember way back when we discussed the Ottonian and Salian emperors, we talked about the Reichskirchensystem, the organisational structure unique to the empire. The early medieval emperors had granted the bishops and sometimes the abbots temporal lordships. The idea was that the bishop, who was appointed by the emperor would administer these lordships on the emperor’s behalf and would send money, food or soldiers as required to support the ruler. This system, though never working in exactly this neat way, was pursued for roughly a hundred years, from Otto the Great to Henry IV, and even after the emperors were no longer free to appoint bishops at will, emperors would still prefer to grant a vacant county or lordship to a bishop rather than to a great aristocratic rival.

As a consequence, bishops in the empire became prince bishops who not only administered their diocese or ecclesiastical province but also lands and rights they had received as vassals of the emperor. These lands could be and often were rich and extensive. Just take a look at the baroque palaces of Würzburg, Brühl, Bruchsal, Münster and Aschaffenburg and compare these to say the Palais du Tau, home of the archbishop of Reims, the primate of the French church.

Normally the bishoprics had received lands and rights fairly close to their seats. The emperor had no reason to give a county in say Thuringia to a bishop in Bavaria. There was always a bishop nearby who would be much better at administrating this entity than one hundreds of miles away.

But Mainz was different. And that goes back to good old Boniface. As I mentioned, Boniface had founded a number of bishoprics when he set out on his mission. Two of these, Erfurt and Büraburg were not given a new bishop after 755 and instead fully integrated into Mainz. And with them came all their territory.

The next important gain came with the Veronese Donation in 983. This came about after emperor Otto II was defeated at the battle of Capo Colonna in 982. Episode 10 if you want to check back. Otto II needed support from his bishops and so he granted Willigis, the most powerful archbishop at the time, a huge amount of territory south of Frankfurt as well as the Rheingau up to Bingen.

Another territory they acquired much later, in 1230 was the former imperial monastery of Lorsch, between Heidelberg and Darmstadt.

At which point we come to the limitations of audio podcasts. What we now need is a map. I will link one in the show notes, so if you are in a position to do so, click the link and take a look. But the basic problem was that the easternmost possession, the city of Erfurt, is about 300km from Mainz. And hence to create a contiguous territory, the archbishops of Mainz needed to build a land bridge from the western shore of the Rhine all the way to Erfurt in Thuringia.

That was an enormously ambitious undertaking, but not entirely impossible. The territorial entities that dominated the land between Mainz and Erfurt were the counts of Nassau, the Landgraves of Thuringia and the abbey of Fulda as well as dozens and dozens of counts, knights, free cities and the like.

The initial idea was to incorporate Fulda into Mainz. The 8th century archbishop Lullus had already tried this on the back of Fulda’s link to St. Boniface but was ultimately rebuffed. In the centuries that followed the emperors kept supporting Fulda against the incursions of Mainz, largely because Fulda kept sending money and soldiers to the emperor. And whilst many other royal monasteries found themselves incorporated into bishoprics or territorial principalities, Fulda kept going and in 1220 the abbot of Fulda was made an imperial prince.  

A great opportunity to turn this around came in 1247. To explain, we need a bit of context.

We are back in the final years of the last Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, episode 89 to 91. Pope and emperor have entered their final battle and the pope was winning.

The archbishop of Mainz was Siegfried III of Eppstein. He was the most significant of the four members of the Eppstein family who occupied the archepiscopal seat of Mainz for 77 years in the period from 1200 to 1305. He had taken over from his uncle in 1230. Though the Eppsteins had risen to power in Mainz with the support of the Welf Otto IV, they had quickly switched sides when Frederick II appeared on the scene and had been supporters of the Hohenstaufen for almost 3 decades. But when Frederick II was excommunicated in 1241, they switched sides again and joined the pope against the emperor.

The pope was grateful and declared the abbot of Fulda incapacitated and made Siegried III the administrator of the Abbey and its huge territory. So, step one in gaining the land-bridge to Erfurt was achieved.

The next step was to crown Heinrich Raspe, the landgrave of Thuringia as king and future emperor. In part this was on Pope Innocent IV’s behalf, but there might have been a territorial calculus at play. If Heinrich Raspe succeeded and Frederick II and his sons were defeated, the new king might give his benefactor in Mainz some of the land he controlled between Mainz and Erfurt.

All seemed to be going swimmingly for our ambitious archbishop, until Heinrich Raspe died from wounds received in a battle against the Hohenstaufen in 1247, just a year after his coronation.

Heinrich Raspe was the last of the Ludowigers, the landgraves of Thuringia. The landgraves controlled a large territory stretching from Naumburg to Wetzlar, effectively a large part of modern-day Thuringia and the northern part of the Bundesland Hessen.

Now that the landgrave was dead, all this territory was up for grabs.

Even though we are in the allegedly lawless Middle Ages, the idea that someone could just go and take some land without any justification, be it a contract or inheritance or imperial charter, was simply not possible. Some of the claims were flimsy, but everyone had the decency of at least making something up.

As for Siegfried of Mainz, his claim was that much of the lands in Northern Hesse and Thuringia had been in the ownership of his archbishopric since the day of saintly Boniface. The only reason the landgraves controlled it was down to the Vogt or advocacy rights granted to the landgraves in the past. But now that the landgraves had died out, the advocacy rights should revert back to the archbishopric.

Then there were other contenders for the inheritance of the great landgraves., first amongst them Heinrich der Erlauchte, Henry the Venerable, margrave of Meissen, member of the house of Wettin (episode 107 if you are interested). Heinrich der Erlauchte had an awful lot going for him. First up, his mother was the daughter of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia and the sister of the last landgrave, Heinrich Raspe. He was also the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and a faithful supporter of the Hohenstaufen. Hence the emperor Frederick II had already enfeoffed him with the landgraviate of Thuringia should Heinrich Raspe die without heir.

But Frederick II was excommunicated, so what does it matter that he had already made a decision. Enter stage left the third set of contenders, Sophie of Brabant and her son Heinrich.

Sophie of Brabant had been born Sophie of Thuringia. And not only was her father the older brother of Heinrich Raspe and his predecessor as landgrave, her mother was even more significant, her mother was a saint, and not any odd saint, but Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia or Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, one of the most revered saints of the 13th century. And whatever you think about saints, in the 13th century that can go a long way.

xr:d:DAEsaN3QT1s:131,j:4979083993,t:23051816

I produced an entire bonus episode on Elisabeth you can listen to if you have signed up on Patreon or on my website.

But in broad brushes. Elizabeth was the daughter of king Andreas of Hungary and at the age of 4 was betrothed to Ludwig, the future landgrave of Thuringia. As was customary, she grew up in her future husband’s household, which was one of the greatest chivalric courts in the empire, full of tournaments, dances and Minnesänger. Wagner created a whole opera about that court. When Elisabeth was seven, her mother, who had organised her marriage, was brutally murdered. That made her politically worthless as a bride.

Still living on the Wartburg, she was subjected to all sorts of abuse and bullying by courtiers and members of her intended husband’s family who were trying to get rid of her. At which point all that chivalry rang a bit hollow to her. She avoided going to the grand festivities and instead focused on charitable work. This made her even less suitable as a bride for one of the great princes of the realm, but Ludwig did the decent thing and married her anyway.

DCIM\100MEDIA\DJI_0001.JPG

They had three children, a boy and two daughters. Sophie was the middle child. As time progressed, Elisabeth’s focus on helping the poor became her preoccupation. She admired Saint Francis of Assisi and his commitment to poverty and charity. When her husband set out for a crusade and died at Brindisi (episode 77), she fell under the spell of a new spiritual rector, who turned out to be a religious sadist, Konrad of Marburg. He made her swear off the world and give away her entire property to the building of hospitals and to feed the hungry. Stripped of their income, Elizabeth and her children lived more and more like beggars, suffering hunger and depravation. The great countess of Thuringia worked as a mere nurse in the great hospital she had built in Marburg, going around in the simplest of clothes, doing good works. And she underwent extreme religious exercises and possibly beatings by Konrad of Marburg.

Having not only the dowager countess living like a peasant but also her children, including the heir to the landgraviate living in a pigsty was a political impossibility. That is why the aforementioned Heinrich Raspe, Elisabeth’s brother-in-law, had her children, including the heir to the landgraviate, removed from her care. Heinrich Raspe sidelined Sophie’s brother, the true heir to the landgraviate, and officially succeeded him when the young man died in 1241.

Elisabeth died aged just 24 when Sophie was 7. Already during her lifetime, the fame of Elisabeth as a holy woman was spreading far and wide. She died in 1231 and already by 1235 she was declared a saint. In 1236, in one of the great displays of medieval faith, her body was laid to rest in a specifically built chapel in Marburg. Her pallbearers were the greatest princes of the realm, led by the emperor Frederick II himself.

As for Sophie, she was shipped off to marry Duke Henry of Brabant when she was 17 years of age, the same year her brother had died. That was not an advantageous marriage as the duke of Brabant already had six children and an heir.

What I want to say is that Sophie’s upbringing had been tough, more than tough. Suffering hunger and poverty, watching your mother living in a deeply toxic relationship with a religious fanatic, being taken away by an evil uncle and shunted out of the way after her brother had suddenly died was a lot to take in. And on top of that seeing all this extreme adoration for her mother who probably had little time for Sophie and was by all accounts the reason for her difficult life. God knows what that does to a person. And nobody at the time wrote it down.

What the chroniclers did mention however was her toughness and determination, and specifically her key determination was to provide for her only son, Henry. The death of her uncle Heinrich Raspe in 1247, when little Henry was just 3 years old, was the one great chance she had to secure him a principality.

Did she have a legal claim to the landgraviate of Thuringia? Well, sort of. She was the daughter of one of the pervious landgraves, which was on par with Henry the Venerable’s claim that derived from Heinrich Raspe’s sister.

Under the Mainzer Landfrieden, this conflict should have been brought before the imperial court to decide or arbitrate. But in 1247 there were two imperial courts, one of an excommunicated emperor and another by an anti-king only some of the princes recognised. So, there may as well have been none.

We have three claimants to the landgraviate, the archbishop of Mainz, Heinrich der Erlauchte, the margrave of Meissen, and Sophie of Brabant on behalf of her son also Heinrich. And with no court to file for probate, it was “first come, first served”.

Heinrich Raspe had died on February 16th, 1247. Three weeks later the archbishop Siegfried Eppstein of Mainz is up in Fritzlar and appoints episcopal administrators for various bits of the landgravial territories.

In May 1247 Sophie of Brabant shows up in Marburg together with her husband and takes control of the lands between Kassel and Wetzlar, an area that at this point was already called the county of Hesse.  She might have progressed up to the Wartburg, the main residence of the Landgraves and tried to take possession of the whole of the landgraviate, though this is unclear.

There are two stories about how she took control. One is that she simply appeared in Marburg with her little boy, went to the market square, held him up and declared that he, the grandson of Saint Elisabeth and the benign landgrave Ludwig, should be acclaimed as the new landgrave and count of Hesse. Everybody clapped and then the estates of Hesse, the nobles and cities of the land approved the young man in his title. In 1989 the city of Marburg set up a statue that depicted exactly this event.

That story is likely a fabrication, since there were no estates of Hesse at the time. However, there is an element of truth to it in as much as the local powers approved the takeover by the Brabanters.

Let’s consider what these territorial lordships actually were. At this stage they consisted in a bundle of rights. There were manors and estates the lord owned outright. Then there were fiefs he held from the emperor as well as advocacies from bishoprics and monasteries. Cities that recognised an overlord on the basis that one of his predecessors had founded them. And then there were the regalia, the imperial rights to mint coins, collect tolls and taxes, build castles and so forth that had gradually transferred to a territorial lord. All these rights were interwoven, shared and dispersed between various other holders of power, local nobles, monasteries, neighbouring princes etc… So, when we look at these neat maps that delineate one princely territory from the next, they are pretty much all inaccurate before the 18th century. Every piece of land was subject to particular rights and privileges of this guy or that guy. All these colour shading means is that prince x held more rights in this place than anyone else.  

One can imagine what happens when the princely family dies out. All these various partial rights holders will at a minimum demand confirmation of their existing rights or scramble to extend them. They will produce all sorts of documents confirming this or that, some true, others false or superseded. For the incoming claimant to the inheritance the question is then whether to accept or challenge these claims. If you accept you end up with a thinner bundle of rights than your predecessors, if you challenge, you end up with a feud, or worst case, nothing at all because another contender is happy to sign the papers and beats you.

Which means that to gain control of a territory depends very much on finding an equitable settlement with the powers that be, the nobles, cities, monasteries and other power brokers.

Sophie seemed to have been very successful at this kind of diplomacy. Because her takeover of Hesse was exceptionally smooth. She did grant a wide range of privileges to the various counts and knights in the territory, guaranteed the city of Kassel its privileges and so forth.

And she had another ace up her sleeve, her mother. It would simply be anachronistic to brush over the fact that she was the daughter of a saint and the proposed heir the grandson of the great benefactor of the poor.  And that descendance from Saint Elisabeth resonated particularly well with a very special group of people inside the city of Marburg, the Teutonic Knights.

The Teutonic Knights were deeply interwoven with Elisabeth of Hungary and her family. Elisabeth was made a patron saint of the order alongside the Virgin and St. George. The church of Saint Elizabeth in Marburg, where the saint is buried was built and run by the Teutonic Order. Elisbeth’s brother-in-law, Conrad had joined the Teutonic Knights and had given them land in Marburg where they built their headquarters, which remained the overall headquarters until they transferred to the Marienburg in Prussia almost 100 years later.

As far as the Teutonic Knights were concerned it was clear that no one, but the grandson of their patron saint should be master of the city of Marburg and lord of Hessen.

Meanwhile Sophie’s cousin, Heinrich der Erlauchte of Meissen had a more difficult time to assert his position in the heartlands of Thuringia around Eisenach, Gotha and Naumburg. He went down the route of challenging the claims of his new vassals rather than accept them.  Hence, he had to fight for about three years before he could take control of the eastern part of the landgraviate. But in the end, he did.

So, by 1250 it looked as if things were settled. The archbishop had picked up a bunch of territories between Fritzlar and Hersfeld. Sophie of Brabant on behalf of little Heinrich had taken the western part, the county of Hesse between Marburg and Kassel. And Heinrich der Erlauchte had taken the eastern half, the Thuringian bit.

But it only looks like that. All three parties still maintained their claims on the whole. It is another three body problem.

Sophie has now two options. Her position was very stable. She could go after the whole of the landgraviate, try to remove Heinrich der Erlauchte first from the Wartburg and then the rest of the lands, or she could go after the lands the archbishop of Mainz had occupied. But she could not do both. And if she wanted to achieve either, she was best served to team up with one of the others.

Sophie chose to team up with her cousin Heinrich der Erlauchte against Mainz. The two parties made an agreement whereby the margrave of Meissen recognised the little boy Heinrich as count of Hesse and in return Sophie made Heinrich der Erlauchte the little boy’s guardian and regent. Together they then decided to push back against Mainz which had taken lands and territories not only in Hesse, but in Thuringia as well.

Part of this effort was military. Heinrich der Erlauchte forced the Mainz administrators out and devastated the lands of the archbishop around Erfurt and Fritzlar. These destructive raids were a classic element of aristocratic feuds. The purpose was to reduce the opponent’s resources and force him to the negotiation table.

The other leg was political.

These prince bishoprics had a fundamental vulnerability in particular during the 13th, 14th and 15th century. The procedure to appoint a new archbishop was not settled. Traditionally bishops, including the bishop of Rome were chosen by the whole congregation. During the early Middle Ages that right transitioned to the cathedral chapters and the college of cardinals. And finally, during the imperial and the Avignon papacy, the pope claimed the exclusive right to appoint bishops and archbishops. Plus, the pope demanded huge payments upon election, usually the first full year income of the bishopric.

We talked about the opposition in the German church against the papacy and its impact on imperial policy when we discussed the reign of Ludwig the Bavarian. But it also had a major impact on the way the ecclesiastical territories developed.

Given there were two legitimate ways to become archbishop, either election by the cathedral chapter or papal appointment, interested parties could intervene on either side to place a candidate of their liking on to a vacant seat. What we find throughout this period is that strong bishops and archbishops are followed by either weak ones or a schism between two competing contenders. And these periods of weakness are when the territorial princes pounce.

That is what happened here. When the aggressive and competent Siegfried II of Eppstein died in 1249, his successor as archbishop, Christian of Weisenau was a weak man. And he lasted barely two years before he was made to resign. His successor, Gerhard, Wildgraf von Daun got into big trouble right from the start and was excommunicated twice, once for blackmail and then for being disobedient. Then he was captured by some other enemies, twice, spending much of his reign in various prison cells.

Heinrich der Erlauchte ruthlessly exploited the situation and forced Mainz to return all the advocacies and right in Thuringia. But what he did not do was force Mainz to return these rights in Hesse as well.

This was very much a breach of the alliance between Sophie and Heinrich der Erlauchte. And what made things worse for the budding land of Hesse was that there was now a new archbishop, Werner of Eppstein, nephew of Siegfried and a much more forceful character than his predecessors.

Sophie now stood alone against Mainz and Heinrich der Erlauchte. So, she sought a new ally, a neighbour to the north, the duke of Brunswick, who also happened to be her son-in-law. Sophie and the duke decided to go after her cousin’s lands in Thuringia. They occupied the Wartburg and Eisenach. But the two sons of Heinrich der Erlauchte, Albrecht and Dietrich hit back hard. They took the Wartburg back and entered Eisenach where they massacred Sophie’s garrison and supporters.

Sophie returned back to Marburg tail between legs. At which point the archbishop Werner of Eppstein though it was his time to have a go. He excommunicated the daughter of Saint Elisabeth and put the whole county under interdict. And then hostilities began that lasted 2 years.

Sophie had built various fortifications for exactly this eventuality. One of them, the Frauenberg or women’s mountain near Marburg became the key to the war. Sophie and her now adult son held the castle throughout that time, whilst the land of Hesse went up in flames.  In the end, neither side could win militarily.

The war concluded thanks to the diplomatic skills the young count Heinrich von Hessen had inherited some of his mother. He brought more and more allies of the archbishop over to his side.

In 1264 the three parties were exhausted and settled their differences. Everybody recognised young Heinrich as Lord of Hesse, the archbishop gave up his rights in both Hesse and Thuringia and Heinrich der Erlauchte handed over a couple of cities to the newly created state of Hesse.

Heinrich von Hessen continued with his combination of military force and diplomacy, expanding his territory more and more. In 1292 king Adolf of Nassau did the deed and elevated the Landgraves of Hesse to imperial princes.

Over the next 200 years these two entities, the archbishop of Mainz and the Landgrave of Hesse would clash again and again. Mainz kept acquiring castles and villages across Hesse in their attempts to build a land bridge to Erfurt and the Landgraves of Hessen expanded their territory westwards. Ultimately the landgraves were more successful, coming as far southwest as Darmstadt.

And this is a story that repeated itself again and again across the empire. The bishops and abbots lost more and more rights and lands to the territorial rulers, and many were mediated, meaning they lost their independence and were subsumed into the princely territories.

And that happened even before the Reformation when many of the prince bishoprics became temporal principalities, like famously the land of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia.

As we have seen in the case of Mainz versus Hessen, there are a number of reasons for that.

One was that the bishops and the archbishop of Mainz were tied into wide ranging political conflicts across the empire and within the church, which, to use a modern term, led to management overstretch.

But the biggest problem was the competition between cathedral chapter and papacy over the right to choose the bishops. The cathedral chapter was staffed with the sons of the local powerful families who were trying to put candidates up who would help their relatives. The papacy was trying to preserve the power of the archbishops but did not know enough about the candidates and local politics. That resulted in either the selection of the lowest common denominator or the selection of two rival candidates. For almost the entire period 1328 and 1419, there were two contenders for the see of the primate of Germany fighting it out. And these conflicts were a perfect time for the greedy neighbours, the landgraves of Hessen, the counts of Nassau and the counts Palatinate on the Rhine to expand their territory at the expense of the archbishops.

All this culminates in the Mainzer Stiftsfehde of 1461/62 which we will discuss towards the end of this series.

But next week we will move to more uplifting topics. And since we were in Mainz, we will talk about the greatest gift the city had made to the world, the printing press. We will talk about who Gutenberg was, how he developed his great invention, how it spread, and how it changed the world. I hope you will join us again.

by on

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.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

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.

Support the Show – Become a Patron