Exhibit: Identity in the West’s 2nd empire
Book post: Peter Wilson on Europe’s Middle Ages
Social Science Files research series:
Type 7 society (status over status) (stratified) (Medieval) (complex differentiation)
The Source: Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, Harvard University Press 2016
Our two previous SSF exhibits from the same [large] book:
Note on Form
… The term ‘Empire’ is used throughout for the Holy Roman Empire, distinguishing this from references to other empires, such as those of the Byzantines and Ottomans. Likewise, ‘Estates’ refers to corporate social groups, like the nobility and clergy, and to the assemblies of such groups, whereas ‘estates’ identifies land and property. The Empire endured throughout the periods when it was ruled by a king who had not been crowned emperor. Use of the terms ‘king’ and ‘emperor’ reflects the status of the Empire’s monarch at any given period. …
Chapter 3 Sovereignty
[only one section]
The Empire as International Actor
Europe’s shift from a medieval to a modern sovereign state order coincided with the Empire’s own reforms, consolidating it as a mixed monarchy where the emperor shared power with a complex hierarchy of imperial Estates. Sovereignty remained fragmented and shared, rather than becoming concentrated in a single, ‘national’ government. To many later commentators, this merely appears further evidence of the Empire’s ‘decline’. However, medieval emperors had never monopolised powers of war and peace. Rather, imperial reform constructed new, collectively shared powers in response to the changing international circumstances and new methods of warfare. Crucially for the Empire’s subsequent history, these constitutional changes were made while the shape of the wider European order remained open and Charles V’s accession in 1519 lent new substance to traditional claims of imperial pre-eminence.
Measures adopted between 1495 and 1519 distinguished between wars against non-Christians and those against other Christians. The former were still understood in established terms as repelling the Otto- man menace, rather than the colonial conflicts waged by conquistadors and others in the New World. As we have seen [earlier], peace with Muslims was considered impossible, so no formal declaration of war was necessary. The imperial Estates were only allowed from the 1520s to debate the level of ‘Turkish assistance’ (Türkenhilfe), not the emperor’s right to demand it. By contrast, conflicts with Christians were handled as judicial rather than military issues, because the emperor was expected to remain at peace with his fellow monarchs. The emperor could not demand assistance, though his obligation to consult the Reichstag since 1495 before making war in the Empire’s name was lightened in 1519 to discussing this only with the electors. Moreover, like his medieval counterparts he was still free to wage war using his own resources.
As a collective actor, the Empire approached war with Christian neighbours on a similar basis to breaches of its own internal ‘public peace’ declared in 1495. Rather than escalating conflict through an imperative to mobilise, imperial law sought to minimise violence by forbidding imperial Estates to assist those disturbing the peace. Acting through the Empire’s new supreme courts, the emperor could issue ‘advocates’ mandates, identifying lawbreakers as ‘enemies of the Empire’ (Reichsfeinde). Although imperial Estates were required to assist in restoring peace, this system effectively ruled out mobilisation for offensive war. Moreover, it drew on established medieval practices by requiring incremental action proceeding first with public warnings to desist, before force could be used. …
Chapter 4 Lands
THE EMPIRE AND ITS LANDS
Core and Periphery
The Empire was never a unitary state with a homogeneous population, but instead a patchwork of lands and peoples under an uneven and changing imperial jurisdiction. This chapter outlines how and when different parts of Europe were associated with the Empire, arguing that its political core was not necessarily its geographical one.
Empires and imperial expansion are usually explained through the core–periphery model. The Roman, Ottoman, Russian and British empires are presented as expanding outwards through the conquest or control of other lands. An empire is thus defined by the dominance of a core over more peripheral territory that is only loosely integrated or kept entirely separate. The core is usually considered more highly organised, economically developed and militarily superior to the often less densely populated periphery. This relationship also appears to explain collapse through the law of diminishing returns, with further conquests bringing additional administrative and security costs that outweigh gains in resources.
The Empire only loosely fits this model, contributing to the speculation already noted in the introduction of whether it was really imperial.
The Franks were not, in fact, unusual in appearing more ‘backward’ than the late Roman societies they conquered in Gaul and parts of Italy. The same has been said of the Mongols during the thirteenth century or the Manchus in China after 1644.
However, the Carolingians and their successors (with the partial exception of the Ottonians) generally disdained the more urbanized, densely populated Italy in favour of remaining north of the Alps. Aachen and Rome were only two of several important sites in a realm that remained characterised by multiple centres rather than a single core. The original Frankish heartland had stretched from the Loire valley eastwards to Frankfurt, and from Aachen in the north southwards into Provence and (later) Lombardy. This region was fragmented three ways by the ninth-century partitions, while the imperial title migrated among the Frankish successor kingdoms before finally coming to rest in Germany under Otto I. Ottonian rule shifted political geography northwards into Saxony without entirely displacing the significance of earlier centres. The focus moved south-west to the Middle Rhine under the Salians and then also to Italy with the Staufers, before shifting back to the Rhineland in the later thirteenth century. Luxembourg rule moved the imperial title to Bohemia, before it came to reside in Austria under the Habsburgs, though again without completely overshadowing established centres like Aachen, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Regensburg.
This movement suggests we should re-imagine the interrelationship of the Empire’s territories according to their degree of openness to the emperor’s authority, rather than as a fixed pattern of control.
We can label ‘king’s country’ the areas which elsewhere correspond to a core, provided we recognize that their identity changed during the Empire’s history. The Franks merged relatively quickly with other elites and thereafter the Empire never had a single ‘imperial people’ akin to the position of the Manchus in China or Anglo-Saxons in the British empire. Instead, king’s country was defined legally through prerogatives allowing the emperor to exploit particular resources to sustain his rule. While these properties were concentrated in certain regions, there were always some scattered elsewhere to enable him to roam more widely. Personal royal possessions assumed greater importance, becoming what can be called more properly ‘dynastic territories’ from the fourteenth century. These ultimately replaced properties associated with imperial prerogatives and constituted the king’s country of late medieval and early modern emperors. Throughout, king’s country was never contiguous, as a glance at a map of Habsburg possessions will readily show.
A second category of land ‘close to the king’ was also defined politically rather than geographically or ethnically and comprised areas on which the monarch could normally rely, but which were controlled indirectly through vassals. Initially, these lands were usually held by men who were related by blood or marriage to the royal family, but their support was contingent on how far they could persuade their own dependants to cooperate. These hierarchical ties of kinship and dependency become more formal, especially after the twelfth century, and were codified through the imperial reforms around 1500. Dynastic ties retained significance even into the eighteenth century, including the role of Habsburg archdukes as prince-bishops in the imperial church.
Areas ‘open to the king’ formed a third category, also mediated by vassalage and other jurisdictions, but held by people who would not necessarily fully honour formal obligations. The success of individual monarchs was often determined by their ability to maximize support from these areas. The constitutional changes around 1500 essentially involved the Habsburgs’ acceptance of more formal power-sharing in return for binding the ‘open’ and ‘close’ areas within a system of more enforceable obligations.
‘Distant’ regions formed a fourth category and were the more peripheral politically, sharing some of the characteristics with the classic core–periphery model. The frontier zones of northern and eastern Germany remained peripheral for most of the Middle Ages. This relationship could change, however. Austria, established as a border zone in the tenth century, became the imperial core from the mid-fifteenth century. …
Hierarchy
The four categories just discussed varied in their political proximity to the emperor, but did not necessarily relate hierarchically to each other. For example, distant regions were rarely subordinate to any of the other categories, but instead enjoyed the same immediacy under the emperor as much of the king’s country.
Hierarchy was a central feature of the Empire throughout its existence, and some important aspects require discussion here.
The Empire was neither a single command chain nor a neat pyramid with the emperor at the pinnacle. Instead, the Empire was an idealized overarching framework encompassing multiple elements that were both internally hierarchical and that interrelated in complex patterns characterised by inequality. The most significant of these components were already identified as kingdoms (regna) in the ninth century. However, what actually constituted a kingdom was not constant. …
The Empire’s principal kingdoms were not clearly delineated before the eleventh century. Their inhabitants lacked maps and regarded geography differently from later generations. For example, rivers like the Rhine were medieval expressways rather than potential frontiers. Politics involved networks and chains of obligations and responsibilities, not uniform control of clearly bounded territories. Internal subdivisions within the three kingdoms of West Francia, East Francia and Lotharingia also remained in flux, in contrast to the wider European pattern of gradual integration of regions within a recognisable ‘national’ whole. Italian and German history has generally been written as if it ran in the opposite direction: as stories of national disintegration only redressed violently through nineteenth-century unification. Meanwhile, Burgundy largely disappears, because it is no longer a single country, instead being absorbed into France, Germany, Italy and the smaller ‘nations’ of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
The picture becomes clearer when we accept that ‘integration’ and ‘demarcation’ are not necessarily opposites. The integration of autonomous or conquered regions into more obviously centralized monarchies like France also required fixing boundaries and defining jurisdictions, especially where distinct legal arrangements were allowed to persist. The situation in the Empire had unique features, but was not wholly dissimilar. Demarcation here has been labelled ‘territorialisation’ and entailed clearer spatial divisions, around 35 of which ultimately emerged as sovereign states after 1806.
However, this process was neither one of progressive fragmentation into ever-smaller territories, nor the steady evolution of existing subdivisions towards sovereign statehood. Rather, the components changed their size and character throughout the Empire’s existence. Some territories indeed fragmented, or became more distinct. Others appeared at some point, only to be subsumed later within neighbouring territories.
Moreover, this process was not an expression of declining central power. Rather, spatial demarcation co-evolved with how the Empire was governed. In particular, demographic and economic expansion around 1000 opened new possibilities to expand the lordly elite through subdividing existing jurisdictions.
In short, integration proceeded through demarcating more jurisdictions, rather than trying to bind those already established under tighter central supervision. …
[Detailed sections on each of the ‘territories’ omitted here..]
[‘England’, part of the first paragraph included for clarification..]
England
Many German and English writers were fond of expressing a common Anglo-Saxon-Germanic heritage prior to 1914, but in fact this largely disappeared after the Saxon migrations of late antiquity. Important contacts remained, especially with the renewed missionary activity promoted by the Carolingians, who often relied on qualified monks from the British Isles, like St Boniface, but otherwise England and the Empire evolved separately. While a sense of Saxon heritage may have played a part, both countries were sufficiently distant not to be immediate competitors. Ironically, this opened possibilities for royal marriages which, like Byzantine-imperial matches, were intended mainly to impress a domestic audience and avoid antagonizing a king’s nobles by tying him to one local family. …
Chapter 5 Identities
IDENTITY AND BELONGING
Nations and Nationalism
The Empire disappeared at the point in European history generally considered to be the birth of modern nationalism. This coincidence is often related in older accounts arguing that the Empire’s demise was barely registered by its inhabitants, who had long since transferred their loyalties to national states. … German historians were convinced of the continuous existence of Deutschtum since antiquity, but usually believed the Empire had failed to provide the necessary framework for this to flourish.
Later twentieth-century historians were more aware how previous generations had, with terrible results, manipulated evidence to convey false continuities and to claim parts of Europe as ‘historic’ homelands. … Evidence advanced previously for continuity was now dismissed as marginal or exceptional. The most that was conceded was that a tiny military and clerical elite articulated a narrow view of themselves as a ‘people’ to bind warlord and followers through a common myth of origins.
Regnal Identities and the Empire
Such insights have been developed to argue that pre-modern identity was ‘regnal’, focused on a monarchy, rather than defined by the essentialist ‘blood and soil’ criteria advanced by nineteenth-century nationalists. It is certainly easier to research the process of identification through the symbols and arguments employed to foster identity than to reconstruct individuals’ subjective self-definition.
The medieval French monarchy made considerable efforts to foster loyalty, already projecting the family’s own patron saint as a model for all subjects in the eleventh century – a strategy also employed in Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and Kievan Rus. Central holy places were endowed to assist this, like Westminster Abbey in England, or St Denis in France. Royal institutions, like the court, justice, taxes and war-making, also all focused attention on a common political centre.
The argument that pre-modern identities were regnal shares much with older arguments that Europe’s states were products of centralising processes largely driven by kings. As we have seen, such interpretations have distorted the Empire’s history, because later generations have looked for centres and institutions that did not exist.
The Empire’s inhabitants did not lack elements that could encourage a shared identity. While the actual Roman legacy was confined to the south and south-west, it was spread in its revised Holy Roman form by Charlemagne and his successors. For much of the early Middle Ages the Empire was simply the regnum, whereas all other kingdoms required some qualification limiting them to a specific people, as in the kingdom of the Lombards.
… Latin served as a single elite language transcending vernacular dialects. Roman Christianity provided a common belief system, as well as much of the conceptual language required to discuss morality, politics and justice. Migration, especially after the eleventh century, spread people and ideas across the Empire. The political elite often travelled great distances to attend assemblies or participate in coronations and military campaigns. Distance was no barrier to the spread of other common institutions like monastic orders or the imperial church. There was great variety in socio-economic forms, but this was scarcely unique in medieval Europe, while there were no fundamental divisions between ethnic groups, such as those between steppe nomads and settled populations found in Russia or China.
These factors suggest there was nothing inevitable about the Empire’s peoples eventually building multiple, distinct ‘national’ identities … most of which were indeed constructed precisely for this purpose only much later. The real difference between the Empire and more centralized monarchies was certainly political, but not how ‘political’ is customarily understood.
Centralized monarchies fostered ‘national’ identities by selecting elements that made their regnal identity plausible and desirable. This always entailed excluding aspects hindering this, hence the use of language … and (after the Reformation) religion to distinguish ‘loyal subjects’ from ‘suspect foreigners’.
The Empire never attempted this, because it was always superior to any one kingdom and hence always contained more than one ‘people’. The story of identification within the Empire was never one of failed efforts to forge a single (German) national identity. Rather, it was always a process through which communities and groups formed their own particular identities through securing a legally recognized autonomous position within the wider imperial framework.
PEOPLES
Tribes
… German ethnographers and archaeologists … used the terms ‘tribe’ (Stamm) and ‘people’ (Volk). Tribes were usually regarded as subdivisions of a common people, with the Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Frisians and Alemanni all being considered ‘Germanic’. The writers generally romanticized their subjects as repositories of ‘authentic’ national culture, regarding history as a constant struggle to preserve cultural ‘purity’ in the face of foreign intrusions, as well as expansion through the merger of tribes on the basis of alleged common characteristics. Most argued that this process culminated in a national ‘awakening’ around 1800 as people became more self-aware of their commonalities. …
The German word Volk was in fact rarely used before the eighteenth century, and then only to denote a specific group, particularly soldiers … Early writers … used Latin terms. Populus meant ‘people’ in the general sense of humans or inhabitants, especially the politically active section. Gens were people related by common descent, while natio usually denoted common origins more narrowly defined by birth. Nonetheless, medieval commentators – like their present-day counterparts – were often imprecise and ambiguous in their employment of such terms. Identity was usually multilayered and frequently expressed differently according to the situation, despite most writers’ conviction that geography and climate imparted ‘fixed’ characteristics.
The term natio could be employed to identify a group that later writers called a ‘tribe’. ‘Nations’ were originally ‘barbarians’, those who lay beyond Roman civilization, and it was not until the thirteenth century that the term acquired more positive attributes with the growing acceptance that Christendom was split into different sovereign peoples.
Initially it was foreign students studying in Paris or Bologna who were identified as ‘nations’ according to common origins. … Even in the eighteenth century, ‘nation’ continued to be used flexibly, with the Viennese and Prussian soldiers variously constituting ‘nations’ according to some authors. However, from the sixteenth century, ‘nation’ assumed many of the characteristics once associated with populus, especially in the mouths of those claiming to represent the nation politically, whereas populus became more debased as the ‘common’ sort.
Identity Markers
… Language (lingua) was already widely touted in the ninth century as an important distinguishing mark, but in practice the huge variance amongst vernaculars hindered actual understanding. Customs (mores) were also cited and often expanded into generalized characteristics. … cunning Swabians, greedy Bavarians who lived in poverty, quarrelsome Lorrainers prone to rebellion, and loyal Saxons who allowed their ruler to abuse their trust … Common descent (genus) proved equally vague in practice, as it was applied variously to kinship groups and entire populations.
Myths of origins often proved more attractive because they combined various elements within a story that could serve many, especially political, agendas. Most myths identified one or more founding figures usually associated with victory or conquest, especially of the area their people currently inhabited. … Myths were portable; indeed many contained stories of a shared migration, or that the current people emerged from the mingling of earlier groups including conquered and conquerors. …
… However, even in their core homeland, the Franks formed only 15– 25 per cent of the population and were too few to establish themselves exclusively as a ruling class throughout the Carolingian realm. They generally merged with other elites through marriage or expropriation of land, with assimilation working in both directions depending on circumstances: some conquered elites considered themselves Franks, while elsewhere Frankish conquerors identified themselves at least partly with the areas they now controlled. The Franks sought to preserve their distinctiveness by continuing the late Roman practice of expressing separated identities through law codes. This aspect should not be over-exaggerated as most laws remained unwritten, while the distinction between law and custom was far from clear. Nonetheless, law assumed significance as a defining marker of identity when combined with other factors encouraging a sense of community; hence the significance of the use of expulsion as punishment for major transgressions, since this cast the wrongdoer from the tribe or people.
The Franks wrote laws for each subject people incorporated within their realm from the late eighth century, often fabricating tradition by claiming these derived from earlier ones. The Alemanni, Bavarians, Frisians, Lombards, Saxons and Thuringians all had (or acquired) their own Lex distinct from the Lex Francorum reserved for the Franks.
Paradoxically, this eroded the Franks’ own self-belief as an imperial people, since they became just one group among many, even if their elite remained primarily the group in charge. In turn, this imparted the lasting sense of the Empire as inhabited by a variety of peoples, rather than as an exclusive, superior people standing apart and above those they ruled, as in the case of the British and Ottoman empires.
Other Frankish policies further eroded any sense of their being the Empire’s exclusive rulers. Rapid Christianization of the elites between 780 and 820 removed religion as a potential marker of difference — another contrast with British and Ottoman experience. Old power structures broke up, at least outside Saxony, southern Italy and, to an extent, also Bavaria. Continued redistribution of land and offices by later monarchs further reduced the differences amongst the elites — differences that were now socially and politically far less significant than those between the free and unfree populations. Population growth from the eleventh century, together with migration after about 1100, eroded old identities whilst adding new ones.
Belief in tribal identities nonetheless persisted, because their original lack of clarity allowed later generations to shape them to suit their own purposes. … Identities were still sufficiently sharp in the early tenth century for some to criticize the Saxon Ottonians as being the ‘wrong’ people to replace the Frankish Carolingians as German kings in 919.
… The sense of distinct peoples increasingly mattered less than other, more focused identities.
ESTATES, CLASSES AND FAMILIES
Estates Society
Tribes were never regarded as composed of equals. There was already a sense of the individual during the early Middle Ages. Each person had specific duties and was responsible for their own actions and salvation. However, prior to the eighteenth century, most commentators were more concerned with how horizontal and vertical divisions stratified society internally. Personal aspects, like interests, abilities or appearance, were all considered less important in identifying an individual than their membership of one or more of society’s subgroups. The Empire was not unique in how social stratification reinforced political hierarchies, but the specific form of this interaction nonetheless contributed to its governance becoming increasingly multilayered and territorialized. A key factor in this development was that social distinctions were never fully transportable, at least partly rooting an individual’s identity to place as well as person.
… [A] complex, three-way functional division was … recognised, especially by 1000.
… New forms of agricultural production resulted in around 85 per cent of the population living as laboratores in some form of servitude as the ‘commons’ or third social Estate whose function was to provide for the material needs of others.
Whereas previously all free male laity had been considered warriors … the second Estate … was evolving as hereditary nobility more concerned with controlling and exploiting land than fighting. Nonetheless, their programmatic function as society’s defenders was used to legitimate their special privileges.
The clergy (oratores) formed the senior Estate, placed first thanks to their function of praying for everyone’s salvation. …
[MGH: I find the ‘estate’ and ‘Estate’ concepts are not sufficiently clear. One of my priorities will be to clarify and make them compatible with my categories. As Wilson also observes (below) the problem lies at origin: “Theorists and rulers never resolved the contradictions inherent in their descriptions of Estates society”.]
… All commentators were convinced that social structure was hierarchical as a necessary and fundamental feature of human existence. How hierarchy was rationalised changed over time … Those in authority developed lengthy justifications for their elevated status, emphasising some form of asymmetrical reciprocity whereby duties and obligations were distributed unevenly throughout society. However, hierarchy was neither absolute nor fully clear. The sharp dividing line between free and unfree had been replaced by more complex graduations. All, including those in servitude, possessed rights relating to their Estate’s function. The ideal was an interlocking system in which all should accept their allotted place, because all derived benefits from the functions performed by others on their behalf.
The reality was necessarily messier and less consensual. Status was neither exclusively self-determined nor simply imposed from above according to a rational blueprint, but instead depended heavily on how far individuals and groups could secure recognition from others. Although the ideal was presented as stable, status remained a process of constant negotiation. It was accepted that each Estate was internally stratified into various subgroups, but their precise interrelationship was often unclear. For example, the Latin term milites (soldiers) had associations with personal freedom during the early Middle Ages, but by the eleventh century it applied to a new group of unfree knights also known as ministeriales. A century later it had become inconceivable for a knight not to be both free and on the lower rung of hereditary nobility. … Later, the nobility’s continued and growing internal stratification raised questions whether its senior ranks could still be considered knights. …
Theorists and rulers never resolved the contradictions inherent in their descriptions of Estates society, but their continued efforts embedded these categories deeply within social consciousness and legal practice.
A further factor was that the three Estates [i.e. clergy, nobles, commoners] were largely self-recruiting. … Vertical social mobility was generally much more restricted than geographical mobility through migration. …
Status and Place
Around 5–10 per cent of the population fell outside the boundaries of Estates society by early modernity, because they lacked a fixed abode. The linkage of status to domicile … was most pronounced in Germany thanks to the greater integration of territorialized authority within the overarching legal framework. …
Estates were not national, in the sense that there was no single ‘imperial’ clergy, nobility or commons. … In each case … identity came to be expressed through shared rights incorporated in law and anchored in turn through their recognition in other charters or privileges associated with their community’s relationship to the Empire.
This relationship was mutually reinforcing thanks to the difficulties each group experienced in defining and defending its identity. For example, late fifteenth-century German nobles tried to define their own status more clearly by emphasising their ancestry, marriage and record of participation in tournaments, rather than be defined by privileges granted by their prince, such as tax exemptions, tithes and hunting rights.
Self-determination was employed because nobles could not prevent their prince granting similar privileges to other groups. However, princes could also prove long and illustrious pedigrees, possessed superior resources, and were able to transform tournaments into lavish baroque spectacles that by 1600 were focused on their own courts and carefully choreographed to emphasise their own superior status and political agendas.
The Empire’s multilayered political structure offered alternative security for distinct privileges, since groups and communities could obtain recognition of their status from those superior to their own immediate lords. For example, the inhabitants of numerous towns during the high Middle Ages obtained charters from the emperor granting them corporate privileges that their own lords were unable to revoke. The diffuse distribution of authority through the Empire thus reflected and reinforced decentralised, multilayered social distinctions. The social hierarchy was complex and fragmented, like the political structure that offered multiple sources to legitimate corporate rights.
The emergence of burghers as legally distinct, privileged inhabitants of towns was the most important change in the third Estate across the Middle Ages. This process also underscores the significance of place in the wider elaboration of social distinctions, because burgher status was encouraged by aspects of communal living unrelated to the socio-economic functions of commoners, as well as being an expression of political self-assertion and people’s desire for greater control of their own destinies. Although burghers were collectively recognised as a distinct Estate by early modernity, they shared the late medieval characteristic of the other Estates in being fragmented by place, with each community having its own local and specific rights. These were not portable; therefore if someone moved to another town, they had to apply (and usually pay) for recognition as a burgher there.
While burghers were generally considered socially superior to peasants, their exact relationship to both the commons and to the other two traditional Estates remained unclear. The politicised slogan of the ‘common man’ (gemeiner Mann) emerged around 1500, embracing peasants and burghers without removing all distinctions between them. Throughout the later Middle Ages and early modernity, individuals sought special marks of distinction through forms of address or the right to wear particular clothes, often usurping the privileges of more prestigious groups that in turn would then invent new ways of elevating themselves. The spread of writing encouraged greater efforts to fix distinctions through elaborate laws, tables of ranks regulating hierarchies of titles, and sumptuary legislation defining what each corporate group should wear. Gender differences added complexity. A burgher’s wife was socially superior to a man from a status group below burgher’s rank, like a day labourer. If she was his employer, she might also exercise authority over him. Yet, as a woman, she was decidedly inferior in other respects, notably her ability to represent herself in a law court – something denied Saxon women until 1838 for instance. Even perceptive commentators chose to ignore these contradictions.
As late as 1795, the lawyer Johann Pütter wrote ‘people of the same Estate can differ in rank and status without the Estate thereby losing its unity’. …
[Classes]
… Medieval clerics … attacked noble privileges and their basis in violence as immoral, while the twelfth to early sixteenth centuries saw repeated bursts of popular anticlericalism fuelled by resentment at the often stark contrast between the lifestyle of clergy and their Christian ideals. However, the popular basis of such criticism broadened during the sixteenth century and focused more sharply on the obstacles to upward social mobility. For example, burghers tried to claim nobility on the basis of education and other achievements.The criticism gradually shifted from this or that group being unworthy of its privileges to a more fundamental critique of Estates society. The growing emphasis on human reason in philosophical arguments from the late seventeenth century undermined faith in a divinely ordained human order. …
Family
Much of the late medieval and early modern legislation in the Empire focused on delineating rights associated with marriage, parenthood, legitimacy, property-ownership and inheritance. Changes in these aspects of social structure were also to have profound implications for the Empire’s political order. The predominant form amongst the free population in 800 was the kindred or clan comprising a fairly large group of relations cooperating for mutual support and protection. Clan ties overrode those of marriage and nuclear families. For example, a wife could seek support from her kindred if her husband abused her or wanted a divorce.
These kindreds have entered history by the names of their ‘founder’, whose first name was applied by later genealogists as a family name for an age when such things were unknown. Thus, the Carolingians are Charlemagne’s descendants … Kindreds were indeed distinguished by common naming patterns — all the males in the Salian family were called Conrad or Henry. Nonetheless, kindreds operated through consanguinity and not patrilinear descent. Property could be bequeathed to any legitimate son or brother or even to more distant relations. Individual prestige, reputation and influence were all more important than immediate descent, though the latter was certainly important amongst royalty. There was little sense of an ancestral home, as royal service required the elite to move throughout the Frankish realm, while conquests and royal gifts gave them land scattered across wide areas.
The word ‘family’ (familia) was not determined primarily by blood or marriage ties before the twelfth century. Instead, it was most frequently used to denote the unfree workers and others economically dependent on a manor for whom the lord was legally responsible. Monogamous marriage was already a church ideal by the ninth century and praised as an indissoluble union of two consenting adults. Changes in the twelfth century made it a sacrament requiring clerical involvement to be legally binding and therefore easier for the authorities to regulate. The proportion of the population married officially in church remained small prior to a renewed emphasis on marriage as the basis for a godly household following the Reformation. It was at this point that the German word Familie gained common currency to denote the nucleated family of parents and children as the social ideal.
The changing attitudes towards marriage reflected its growing social and political importance. More distinct patrilineal families emerged around 1000, as tracing a single line of descent through fathers and sons assumed greater significance than consanguinity. This process took at least two more centuries to complete. Matrilineal descent remained significant into the twelfth century. For example, the chronicler Wipo regarded Henry III’s connections through his mother to Charlemagne as more significant than his more immediate relationship to his father, Conrad II.
Likewise, it was politically important for Conrad III to be able to demonstrate ties to the former Salian line of kings through his mother Agnes, daughter of Henry IV. Consanguinity also served aristocratic political interests into the late twelfth century. Brothers and sisters could be pulled from church careers and redeployed in the wider interests of the kindred to breed sufficient heirs when required. In an age of deficient medicine and the frequent violent premature death of males, this made perfect evolutionary sense. The larger group had better overall survival chances than narrower strategies based on nucleated families.
Frederick II used the expression ‘House of Staufer’ (domus Stoffensis) only once (1247) in over two thousand surviving documents. However, things were already beginning to shift by then and cooperation between siblings declined noticeably from the 1230s. While kindreds had the advantage of numbers, they often suffered from indiscipline as each member pursued his own ambitions. Internal rivalries could be destructive, as the Carolingians’ civil wars demonstrated from the 840s. Discipline could be imposed through subordinating individual interests to an ideal of the family as dynasty transcending the generations. This entailed acceptance of a stricter hierarchy of loyalties through a culture of self-restraint and deference to a paterfamilias. Patrilinealism and the seniority of the firstborn son provided a way to regulate subordination and determine the options each family member would be allowed to pursue. This explains the continued importance of the imperial church in providing suitable accommodation for the aristocracy’s unmarried children. Paternalism was supposed to compensate for individuals’ self-sacrifice as the senior head of the family employed his influence and connections to safeguard the material well-being and status of junior family members.
One sign of the spread of dynasticism was how twelfth- and thirteenth- century chroniclers began tracing royal genealogies to structure their accounts. …
Association of family and place was partly a reflection of much wider trends. The growth in population since the eleventh century encouraged the use of more stable ‘family’ names to help identify people more easily. Another factor was a significant reduction in the diversity of first names after about 1100 as parents chose from a fairly restricted repertoire of those of well-known saints and monarchs. The transition from one to two names was completed between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries amongst the urban population and adopted by the early fifteenth century in the countryside. Initially, individuals took either their father’s or mother’s first name as their surname, but increasingly geographic origins or occupation were used instead. Aristocrats and nobles were always associated with place. …
The cause of ‘church liberty’ weakened some of these associations during the later eleventh century, while the practice of replacing earth and timber castles with more durable and expensive stone constructions provided alternative, secular sites. … Over time, these locations assumed almost mystical status as ancestral homes, though by the end of the Empire few nobles could actually trace such long lineages directly.
PLACE
Boundaries
The assumption of a castle or town name to identify a family linked its members with a specific location. However, people also identified with larger geographical areas. These were always human constructs, as there is nothing ‘natural’ about frontiers. The choice of markers like rivers or mountain ranges always involved the demarcation of power and the desire to control resources, as well as emotional attachment and feelings that can affect someone who has left a place or perhaps never even been there. Place can assume significance beyond material considerations, notably through identification as a holy site. Size is not predetermined as it depends on how far the balance between population and space is socially and politically viable. Exactly how much space a community feels is justified depends on not only what they actually require, but how much they feel entitled to and can maintain without too much cost.
As indicated [earlier], the Empire’s external and internal boundaries changed considerably across its history. The internal changes were probably more significant than the external expansion and contraction, since they reflected how power and identity became increasingly concentrated in more numerous hierarchically ordered and territorially bounded units. Whereas medieval travellers encountered the Empire as they moved between the fixed points of human settlement, those during the eighteenth century experienced it as they crossed clear internal boundaries marked by customs posts and sentry boxes.
To an extent this simply reflected broader European trends. Frontiers remained open transitional zones into the thirteenth century, which allowed inhabitants to identify with powers either side according to circumstances. Given the absence of mutually recognised sovereignty, central authorities viewed frontiers as one-sided limits where their own power finished without paying too much attention to arrangements beyond.
Hierarchy mattered more politically than geographical boundaries. Authority was defined as chains of vassalage primarily linking people rather than places. This reflects the higher value placed on controlling people rather than land, which remained relatively plentiful into the eleventh century. Without machinery, command over people represented the only way to exploit land. Huge areas of forest, marsh and infertile upland remained largely uninhabited into the eleventh century and often beyond.
Nonetheless, people were already associated with specific places by the ninth century …all the major German regions derive their names from association with a tribal identity around 800: Bavaria, Franconia, Frisia, Swabia, Saxony, Swabia and Thuringia. Their inhabitants distinguished both ethnic and political (jurisdictional) boundaries by the tenth century, with the latter being more important in marking identity.
Community
Identification with these larger units remained relatively weak into the late Middle Ages, at least outside the elites, whereas attachment to smaller communities was already strong much earlier. Pre-modern Europe contained many communities, both real and imagined, and varying in size from Christendom through kingdoms, towns, villages to monasteries, manors and castles. Some communities were itinerant, but most were defined through the permanent concentration of people in a specific place.
Even isolated communities were connected somehow to others, so that all should be considered porous rather than fully closed. Nonetheless, common needs and activities focused collective identity. Many communities had an economic function, such as the manors of the early Middle Ages, or the towns of Italy and those founded in Germany from the eleventh century as market centres. Most forms of production required people to work together. Communal living brought numerous practical problems requiring people to collaborate; for example, fire safety or maintenance of drainage ditches. Christian worship was a communal activity. Already in the eighth century the church fostered the belief that individual sins endangered the wider community. … The development of more robust parish structures by the twelfth century provided a framework to engage the community in the maintenance of their church and participation in its activities. The pace accelerated considerably with the Reformation, which sharpened the distinctiveness of local religious practices, particularly in Germany, where different confessional groups often lived in relative proximity. The form of rituals, use of prayer, internal decoration of churches and the timing and sound of their bells all became important markers of community.
Identity was expressed through symbols, flags, coats of arms and civic colours, adopted with increasing elaboration from the high Middle Ages. Early chronicles are largely by clerics recounting the deeds of kings with varying levels of approval. However, it was common by the eleventh century for monks to compile lists of abbots or bishops to demonstrate the continuity and purity of local religious practice. They were joined by secular chroniclers during the later Middle Ages who traced the origins of their home town, often in considerable detail. Most were commoners, but they proclaimed the ‘nobility’ of their own town, boasting a lineage equal to that of any aristocrat. …
The growing size and density of settlements also helped sharpen their identities, as did the way they became embedded in wider political jurisdictions. Most of the Empire’s settlements had acquired some form of self-government by the high Middle Ages. Pressure on resources contributed to sharper internal and external demarcation.
Fences and walls served practical defensive purposes, but also marked each community’s outer extent and the internal subdivision of its assets. These changes were accompanied by new conceptions of property, distinguishing that owned collectively from that belonging to individuals.
Individuals’ identity followed the generally hierarchical structure of all social, political and religious organization in the Empire. Each person had multiple identities. Exactly what these meant cannot be determined except in the rare cases where we have personal testimony, but their general shape can be discerned. There were the familial and social identities already discussed. Larger towns had craft guilds, lay spiritual fraternities and neighbourhoods all providing more local foci for identity within the wider sense of community. Horizontal solidarity was more prominent in some circumstances, such as within guilds engaged in friendly competition in civic sports, or during periods of political or economic tension. However, many communal activities were also designed to stress internal hierarchies, such as the social distinctions displayed in seating arrangements in churches, or through the processional order employed during religious festivals.
Community might be celebrated as a special homely place (Heimat) offering warmth, security, familiarity and rootedness, but it was not open to everyone on equal terms. Merely being born in a specific place did not automatically guarantee full membership, since this often rested on the kind of privileges associated with the social Estates. Possession of such privileges was no guarantee of their continued enjoyment, since membership of a community also depended on observing its rules.
Multilayered Identities
Higher authorities viewed communal identity with ambivalence. Internal solidarity could prompt a community to combine against its lord, such as the German episcopal towns of Bremen and Cologne, which threw off their bishops’ jurisdiction during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, it also enhanced cohesion and enabled communities to discharge their obligations, such as providing taxes or soldiers. Communal identity coalesced during the twelfth century as other spatial distinctions sharpened in the Empire through the gradual territorialisation of lordly jurisdictions.
This process will be explored at greater length later [the chapters on “Governance” will be exhibited soon on Social Science Files], but for now it is important to note that only one side of it usually receives attention in histories of the Empire. The demarcation of clearer territorial jurisdictions indeed fragmented power, yet this was never solely a centrifugal process inevitably replacing the Empire with smaller, sovereign principalities … Rather, the demarcation of clearer jurisdictions within the Empire was accompanied by their greater integration within a common legal and political framework.
The Empire’s significance is demonstrated by how its internal political hierarchy enabled people to relate themselves and their community to their wider environment. … The monks who compiled lists of local bishops and abbots often combined these with parallel sequences of emperors, increasingly using both to write histories of their diocese as part of the Empire. The growing clarity of secular jurisdictions and their increasing significance for daily life provided another focus that displaced attachment to the larger, less clear, old ‘tribal’ areas as a secondary, more distant regional identity.
Secular jurisdictions were increasingly territorialised in the sense that specific powers and prerogatives came to rest in hereditary rule over an area and its inhabitants. The Franks already had a sense of patria as their Christian kingdom providing a common homeland for distinct groups of inhabitants. This persisted in a general sense throughout the Middle Ages, but assumed a new form during the sixteenth century as territorial identities sharpened rapidly. The growing use of patria for territory helped transform the idea of terra (territory) from a bundle of sometimes disparate possessions held by a common ruler into a distinct and geographically bounded entity. All levels of society engaged in this, because all used a similar language of the ‘common good’ to claim the moral high ground when expressing their objectives.
… Humanist scholars recovered or invented tribal identities to buttress what were in fact often spatially much smaller territorial identities. … Territorial coats of arms and army uniforms provided further markers during the eighteenth century.
The rapid development of cartography from the fifteenth century made a profound impact by providing a ready image of territorially defined political power. Maps now showed political boundaries as well as natural features and towns. The members of the House of Savoy celebrated its elevation to ducal rank in 1416 with a huge cake in the shape of their territory. Maps became increasingly detailed as cartographers struggled to meet their governments’ desire to survey and quantify. … [Maps] showed the Empire with clear outer boundaries divided into … regional subdivisions. Territories were often named and sometimes also marked, but did not dominate. Written descriptions followed these conventions. The Empire remained a common fatherland composed of numerous, lesser homelands. [END]
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