Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire
Historical-conceptual difference a) Holy Roman Empire and b) Britain, France, Spain
Joachim Whaley wrote:
Introduction:
… The subject of this work is the evolution of German-speaking Central Europe within the framework of the Holy Roman Empire from the late fifteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Around 1500, the reforms attempted by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I resulted in the emergence of a new kind of polity in the Reich. The emperor failed in his financial and military demands. Yet the agreement that was secured on a general peace and on the creation of a higher court of law to protect it, and the continuing negotiations with the Reichstag that ensued, marked a decisive turning point. The polity was set on a new course of development that continued through to the end of the eighteenth century.
The constitutional balance that prevailed in Germany was quite unlike that which characterized the British, French, or Spanish monarchies, though it was similar to the constitutional system of the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom or to the decentralized commonwealths developed around the same time by the Swiss or somewhat later by the Dutch. In the Holy Roman Empire, the formula Kaiser und Reich (Emperor and Reich or Imperial Estates) described a dual system which functioned at two levels, distinct though linked in complex ways. At one level, the Reich developed from a medieval feudal system based on the personal relationship between the king and his noble vassals into something increasingly like a federal system. The essential infrastructure of the king and his fiefs remained in place until the Reich was dissolved in 1806. More than in most other parts of Europe, the authority of the monarch was limited and it was subject to fairly strict and explicit constraints.
It is true that historians of other European countries now see the development of the dynastic state in less absolute terms and emphasize its limitations and weaknesses. The ‘composite monarchies’ of Britain, France, and Spain were collections of provinces, principalities, or kingdoms which retained, because they clung to them, traditional rights and institutions in defiance of centralizing monarchs and their officials.
The German case is, however, rather different again. For here, at the second level, princes and other subordinate corporations and individuals retained a far greater degree of autonomy from the monarch. It was at this level that many of the essential functions of the state developed: taxation, the regulation of society, the raising of armed forces, and the like.
In some of the larger territories, from the late fifteenth century this led to the emergence of structures that have been called states by some German historians. The term may seem appropriate as far as internal function is concerned. Yet the rulers of these territories remained vassals of the emperor. They were overlords of their people, but never sovereigns. Their powers were subject to the laws of the Reich and to the authority of the emperor, to whom their people could appeal as a higher authority.
The nature of this dual system and its effects on the development of the German lands has been understood in different ways by successive generations of historians. In the national tradition of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, the early modern period was viewed as an era of decline and decay. On the one hand, romantic notions of a medieval German Christian Reich appeared to reveal a contrast with the divisions of the Holy Roman Empire and its manifest lack of universal influence after the Reformation. For many Catholic scholars of the nineteenth century, the Reformation represented the end of medieval universalism. On the other hand, nationalist historians bemoaned the decline of a supposedly strong medieval German empire or kingdom into a period of anarchic division and disunity after about 1500. Protestant historians in Prussia and elsewhere in Germany could regard the Reformation as a heroic German achievement. For the rest, however, these historians concurred in the view that the decades around 1500 saw the final degeneration of the Reich. The supposed triumph of the princes over the emperor, and the assertion of particularism, led first to a century of bitter divisions and protracted conflicts over religion.
In the early seventeenth century, those conflicts gained an international dimension, and for thirty years the German lands became a battlefield. The end of the war, according to nationalist tradition, marked the nadir of German unity. The German lands were ravaged and exhausted; German society was shattered and German culture all but extinguished. Amidst the ruins, the German princes allegedly established absolutist states untrammelled by any moderating authority. The Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the hostilities in 1648, was viewed as the Magna Carta of particularism. It enshrined the absolute rights of the princes and codified the impotence of both the emperor and the German people. For the next one-and-a-half centuries, in the traditional view, the Reich survived only as a decrepit shell: corrupt and moribund, a hollow mockery of the once strong medieval empire with its universal mission.
The Source:
Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Volume 1, Oxford University Press 2012
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.