Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (97 page)

Unlike monastic orders that operated internationally, the Empire’s lay organizations remained local. The craftsmen’s and journeymen’s associations did not seek to federate between towns or across territories on the basis of common trades. Very few of the intellectual societies recruited members beyond their home region, though the relatively free flow of information allowed them to communicate with each other. Social life in the new universities established in Germany during the late fifteenth century was initially organized around their academic structure of four faculties: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. However, by 1600, student societies had formed around young men on the basis of their home region rather than subject of study. For instance, Rostock University, which only admitted around 200 students annually in the 1640s, had separate societies for Pomeranians, Westphalians, Brandenburgers, Silesians, Thuringians, Brunswickers, Prussians, Frisians, Holsteiners and Scandinavians, in addition to local boys from Mecklenburg.
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NOBLES AND PRINCES

The Electors’ League

Associations between nobles and princes lacked the basis in physical proximity underpinning organizations like guilds within individual communities, but otherwise they shared many common features. They claimed to be free associations of legally empowered individuals, like
those joining groups within communities, but unlike civic leagues, where communities combined as collective actors. Despite their more elevated socio-political status, combinations of nobles and princes were likewise often regarded as subversive by their superiors, notably during Henry IV’s reign. Princes initially had little interest in alliances, operating instead as kinship groups rather than as dynastic families needing allies. By contrast, collegiality developed much earlier among the electors, who shared an interest (like guildsmen) in excluding others from their organization.

The seven electors held 18 meetings independent of royal elections between 1273 and 1409, demonstrating a sense of corporate identity and responsibility for the Empire.
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The process of excluding papal interference encouraged the formation of the Electors’ League (
Kurverein
) in 1338, which became their main vehicle to assert collective pre-eminence over other princes through an exclusive, direct relationship to the emperor.
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Their identity was enshrined in the Golden Bull of 1356, which confirmed their right of free assembly. The four Rhenish electors of Mainz, Cologne, Trier and the Palatinate remained more influential than those in Bohemia, Saxony or Brandenburg throughout the later Middle Ages, partly because the latter three were held by the ruling Luxembourg family or its close allies. It was this Rhenish group that deposed Wenzel in 1400 and planned to do the same with Sigismund in 1424. However, the Hussite emergency encouraged Brandenburg and Saxony to cooperate more closely with their Rhenish colleagues, while the parallel decline of the three ecclesiastical electors relative to neighbouring secular princes prompted them to welcome greater collaboration. The Luxembourgs’ demise in 1437 ended the direct possession of an electorate by the monarch until the Habsburgs acquired Bohemia in 1526, further encouraging collegiality.

However, tensions continually resurfaced, especially between Mainz and the Palatinate, and prevented the electors dominating the Reichstag as it emerged around 1495. The four Rhenish electors remained the active core, leading the process of electing Charles V and holding at least 15 meetings separate from their other three colleagues during his reign. Their attempt to assert exclusive leadership had failed by 1567, ensuring the electors remained a single college, despite new tensions following the conversion of the elector Palatine (1560) and his Brandenburg colleague (1613) to Calvinism. The Electors’ League was confirmed
in 1558 and 1635, but the development of the permanent Reichstag after 1663 removed the need for separate meetings.
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This brief survey already reveals a pattern that will reappear throughout this chapter. Collaboration developed along corporate-status lines in the late Middle Ages, assumed more institutional form around 1500, and was ultimately rendered superfluous by the Reichstag’s permanence after 1663, leading to a decline in most forms of political associations.

Aristocratic Associations

Aristocratic associations developed in response to the adverse circumstances affecting many nobles from the mid-thirteenth century, including the growth of more coherent principalities and more potent towns, as well as economic fluctuations. While many lesser lords thrived by exploiting the new opportunities, there were always large numbers who found themselves squeezed between assertive peasants and aggressive princes. Princes and other titled aristocrats like counts were emerging as clearly superior to knights and other untitled lords, who were simultaneously losing their immediate relationship to the emperor (see
pp. 375–7
). Charles IV’s wholesale dissipation of the crown lands accelerated this trend from the 1370s and princes replaced the emperor as lord over many of the Empire’s lesser fiefs.

The knights and other lesser nobles were not doomed feudal reactionaries, nor is there evidence of any general ‘crisis of the aristocracy’.
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Götz von Berlichingen was the most famous of the ‘robber barons’, immortalized in Goethe’s play of 1773, which presents his predicament as exemplifying a clash between old and new orders. As the fifth and youngest son of a family of Swabian knights, Götz’s options indeed appeared limited and he pursued 15 separate feuds that eventually made his name as both a troublemaker and a skilled commander. In fact, he adapted well to the changing circumstances, amassing considerable wealth and writing his autobiography, which eventually served as Goethe’s source material. Götz’s knightly contemporary, Ulrich von Hutten, was one of the Empire’s leading intellectuals. Franz von Sickingen, who died leading the Knights Revolt in 1523, exemplified the many former ministeriales who rose in princely service. Sickingen’s own family secured the status of immediacy in 1488, while he acquired land, castles and considerable wealth through controlling the Palatinate’s
mercury mines. Like other knights, he both fought princes and served them as a mercenary commander and moneylender.

Thus, we should see the associations of the lesser lords and knights both as means to defend their autonomy amidst often threatening circumstances and as vehicles for individuals to profit from those same circumstances. Knights were not averse to serving princes, but they generally wished to preserve or acquire immediacy. The counts of the Harz region in north Germany attempted this by forming a sworn association based on kinship to manage their possessions collectively as a condominium. Like townsfolk and guildsmen, they hoped to minimize internal discord, because this threatened to expose them to potentially dangerous neighbours. To this end, they forswore feuding and agreed to submit disputes to common arbitration, as well as to cooperate in exploiting their mines and to ransom any member captured in disputes with outsiders.
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The Harz region failed to develop as a coherent territory when the individual counties were acquired by neighbouring princes. However, princely families also found similar arrangements useful to preserve collective weight if dynastic partition had created several branches sharing relatively small areas, as was the case among the Welfs, the Askanier in Anhalt and the Ernestine Saxons into the seventeenth century. The spread of primogeniture and the development of a clearer status hierarchy discouraged this practice by identifying princely rank and constitutional rights more precisely with individual imperial fiefs by the 1580s.

Lesser lords also collaborated by pooling resources to build and maintain ‘co-heirship castles’ (
Ganerbenburgen
) like Burg Friedberg on the Middle Rhine founded in 1337 by 12 families who elected a common castellan. Such groups were quite common in Hessen, Baden, Württemberg, Alsace, Lower Saxony and the Palatinate, where the knights were more common than in eastern Germany. Like the Harz counts’ condominium, this form of co-proprietorship was binding on heirs and linked to internal discipline and self-sacrifice. For example, members who engaged in unsanctioned feuds were to be expelled for endangering the collective. The Friedberg group demonstrated considerable potential, acquiring the mortgage to the imperial city of the same name in 1455, and buying the county of Kaichen 20 years later. This enabled the Friedberg group to play an influential role in both the Wetterau counts’ group after 1492 and the Rhenish imperial
knights’ canton, securing survival as a miniature aristocratic republic until annexed by Hessen-Darmstadt at the Empire’s dissolution in 1806.
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While such groups based on kinship and co-ownership were tolerated, associations between unrelated noblemen were viewed with suspicion after the formation of the first such league in 1331. The Golden Bull condemned such organizations as conspiratorial, but the prevailing circumstances continued to compel lesser lords to band together and so new leagues emerged after 1360. Faced with the Hussite insurrection and lacking his own territory within the Empire, Sigismund saw advantages in cooperating with the nobles and granted privileges to all knights, including those lacking immediacy, endorsing the formation of knights’ unions in 1422.

While their social character was broadly uniform, the political direction of knights’ unions diverged according to local circumstances. Those formed in less-populated areas were generally obliged to define themselves relative to only one locally dominant prince and so had less room to manoeuvre than organizations that could bargain with several powerful lords. Violence could erupt if the local princely family split internally, as occurred amongst the Habsburgs in the fourteenth century, or if the prince accumulated large debts or pursued dangerous external policies. Frederick III did both in the 1450s, prompting 39 Austrian nobles to establish the Mailberg League in October 1451. This soon expanded to 500 members, including Bohemians and Hungarians, and ultimately the League besieged him in Wiener Neustadt. Frederick clashed again with his nobles in 1461–3 and 1469–71, and while he prevented them from emancipating themselves as free knights, he had to allow them a greater say in managing Austria through the provincial Estates.
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A broadly similar pattern emerged in Bavaria, where the duke slowly persuaded his knights after 1311 that their status and privileges derived from him, rather than from some ancient right. Although this undercut claims to be immediate, it offered the Bavarian knights improved protection against other nobles during feuds, as well as opening employment opportunities in the duchy’s expanding administration. The Württemberg counts employed similar methods to encourage dependency and secure a ready pool of armed retainers. However, the Bavarian knights saw disputes within the ducal family after 1489 as an opportunity to
escape its jurisdiction and established a league known as the
Löwlerbund
. Within five years they were obliged to accept submission in return for improved local corporate rights, which expanded in 1557 to representation in the Bavarian Estates. As in Austria, Estates representation enabled the nobles to oblige their prince to negotiate how much their tenants should pay in territorial taxes. Their position was consolidated through their employment as tax collectors and district officials.
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The chances to preserve autonomy were better in regions with more people and resources, like Swabia, Franconia and the Rhineland. The greater proximity of nobles encouraged cooperation, while princely jurisdictions were split, opening niches for more autonomy. Additionally, these regions were heartlands of the imperial church, which provided nobles with alternative employment, income and influence, lessening their dependency on secular masters. For example, princely power was split in Franconia by the fifteenth century between the margraves of Ansbach and Bayreuth and the bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg, together with a number of counts and other more modest lords. Württemberg’s influence in Swabia was balanced by the Habsburgs, whose possessions in nearby Alsace and the Breisgau allowed them to intervene as local princes as well as in their capacity after 1438 as the imperial family. This already proved significant during the events in Bavaria between 1489 and 1494 when the emperor initially backed the Löwler League to force Bavaria’s duke to relinquish his grip on the heavily indebted imperial city of Regensburg.

Swabia saw the formation in 1408 of the most important knights’ organization, the League of St George’s Shield (
St Georgenschild
). This soon encompassed all Swabian free nobles and many of those in Franconia who joined to defend their autonomy against powerful princes. Although the League declined after 1468, it revived two decades later when it was given greater coherence through regional subdivision into four ‘quarters’ and the creation of a court to regulate internal disputes. By that point, 29 prelates and 26 counts and barons were members along with 531 knights. The decision to back the Habsburgs in the Swiss War of 1499 overstretched the League. Many found membership too costly and numbers plummeted to 27 prelates, 10 counts and barons and just 60 knights. Attempts to revive it in 1512 foundered on growing status tensions, especially as the counts and prelates were
better placed to participate in the new institutions created by imperial reform and no longer wanted such close ties to people they regarded as socially inferior.
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The Knights Revolt, 1522–3

As we have seen (
pp. 408–9
), the introduction of imperial taxes forced those claiming ‘free’ status to decide whether to pay to retain this, or risk losing immediacy by avoiding the new burdens. The knights had already resisted attempts by princes to include them in the new territorial taxes developed after the mid-fourteenth century (see
pp. 531–4
). Many opted out of the territorial Estates that emerged at this point by claiming they were ‘free’ and thus exempt from such burdens. Although the knights were usually personally exempt, they realized that the new taxes would take a significant proportion of their tenants’ rents, thereby reducing their own incomes just as it was becoming more expensive to fund an aristocratic lifestyle. When the Franconian princes convened in 1495 to discuss collecting the new Common Penny agreed by the Reichstag, the local knights responded with the classic argument that they were exempt because they already paid a ‘blood tax’ as society’s warriors.
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