Peter H. Wilson, History of The Holy Roman Empire
Legitimation & governance by long lordly hierarchy, corporate social order, and more...
Peter H. Wilson wrote:
Introduction
… The term ‘empire’ requires some clarification before proceeding further. The [Holy Roman] Empire lacked a fixed title but was always referred to as imperial, even during the long periods when it was governed by a king rather than an emperor. The Latin term imperium was gradually displaced by the German Reich from the thirteenth century. As an adjective, the word reich means ‘rich’, while as a noun it means both ‘empire’ and ‘realm’, appearing in the terms Kaiserreich (empire) and Königreich (kingdom). There is no universally accepted definition of an empire, though three elements are common to most interpretations. The least useful is a stress on size. … Emperors and their subjects have generally lacked the obsession of social scientists with quantification; on the contrary, a more meaningful defining characteristic of empire would be its absolute refusal to define limits to either its physical extent or its power pretentions [footnote Turchin].
Longevity is a second factor, with empires being judged of ‘world historical importance’ if they pass the ‘Augustan threshold’ – a term derived from Emperor Augustus’s transformation of the Roman republic into a stable imperium. This approach has the merit of drawing attention to identifying why some empires outlived their founders, but it should be recognized that many which did not nonetheless left important legacies, such as those of Alexander and Napoleon.
Hegemony is the third element and perhaps the most ideologically charged. Some influential discussions of empire reduce it to the dominance of a single people over others [footnote Ferguson]. Depending on perspective, the history of empire becomes a story of conquest or resistance. Empires bring oppression and exploitation, while resistance is usually equated with national self-determination and democracy. This approach certainly makes sense in some contexts. … However, it often fails to explain how empires expand and endure, especially when these processes are at least partly peaceful. It also tends to conceive of empires as composed of a fairly stable ‘core’ people or territory, dominating a number of peripheral regions. Here – to use another common metaphor – imperial rule becomes a ‘rimless wheel’, with the peripheries connected to the hub but not to each other. This allows the imperial core to govern through ‘divide and rule’, keeping each peripheral population separate, and preventing them combining against the numerically inferior core. Such a system relies heavily on brokerage provided by local elites acting as the spokes between the hub and each periphery. Rule does not have to be overtly oppressive, since the brokers can be coopted and can transmit some benefits of imperial rule to the peripheral population. However, imperial rule is tied to numerous local bargains which can make it difficult to mobilize substantial resources for common purposes, because the core has to negotiate separately with each set of brokers. The core–periphery model is helpful in explaining how relatively small groups of people can govern large areas, but brokerage has been a part of most states as they have expanded and consolidated and is, in itself, not necessarily ‘imperial’.
A major reason for the Empire’s relative scholarly neglect is that its history is so difficult to tell. The Empire lacked the things giving shape to conventional national history: a stable heartland, a capital city, centralized political institutions and, perhaps most fundamentally, a single ‘nation’. It was also very large and lasted a long time. …
… It makes sense to examine how the Empire legitimated its existence and how it defined itself relative to outsiders. This … opens with a discussion of the Holy Roman Empire’s basis as the secular arm of western Christianity. Historically, European development has been characterized by three levels of organization: the universal level of transcendental ideals that provide a sense of unity and common bonds (e.g. Christianity, Roman law); the particular and local level of everyday action (resource extraction, law enforcement, etc.); and the intermediary level of the sovereign state. The Empire was characterized for most of its existence only by the first two of these. The emergence of the third from the thirteenth century was a major contributory factor in its eventual demise. …
… Christendom constituted a singular order under the twin management of emperor and pope. This imparted a lasting imperial mission, anchored on the premise that the emperor was the pre-eminent Christian monarch within a common order containing lesser rulers. Moral leadership and guardianship of the church were the emperor’s tasks, not hegemonic, direct rule over the continent. As with other empires, this imperial mission imparted a ‘quasi-religious sense of purpose’ transcending immediate self-interest. The belief that the Empire was far bigger than its ruler and transcended whoever was currently emperor took root very early on, and explains why so many emperors struggled to fulfil that mission rather than settle for what, with hindsight, seems the more realistic option of a national monarchy. The rest of the chapter examines the holy, Roman and imperial elements of this mission, and explains the often difficult relationship between Empire and papacy into early modernity. …
… The Empire embraced the typically ‘imperial’ distinction between itself as a single civilization in contrast to all outsiders, who were ‘barbarians’. Civilization was defined as Christianity and the ancient imperial Roman legacy as embodied by the Empire after 800. However, the Empire’s dealings with outsiders were not always violent, while its continued expansion into northern and eastern Europe in the high Middle Ages was partly through assimilation … [The] concept of a singular civilization prevented the Empire dealing with other states on equal terms. This became increasingly problematic as Latin Christian Europe divided into more clearly distinct sovereign states, each with monarchs claiming to be ‘emperors in their own kingdoms’. …
… The Empire lacked a stable core, unlike those provided by the Thames valley and the Île de France for the English and French national states respectively. It never had a permanent capital or a single patron saint, common language or culture. Identity was always multiple and multilayered, reflecting its imperial extent over many peoples and places. The number of layers grew over time as part of the evolution of a more complex and nuanced political hierarchy sustaining imperial governance. The general core came to rest in the German kingdom in the mid-tenth century, though imperial monarchy remained itinerant into the fourteenth century. A stable hierarchy emerged by the 1030s, establishing that whoever was German king also ruled the Empire’s other two primary kingdoms of Italy and Burgundy and was the only candidate worthy of the imperial title. … Germans already saw themselves as a political nation well before unification in 1871, identifying the Empire as their natural home. The Empire never demanded the absolute, exclusive loyalty expected by later nationalists. This reduced its capacity to mobilize resources and command active support, but it also allowed heterogeneous communities to coexist, each identifying its own distinctiveness as safeguarded by belonging to a common home.
[This book] explains how the Empire was governed without creating a large, centralized infrastructure. Historians long expected and wanted kings to be ‘state builders’, or at least to have consistent, long-term plans. States are judged by a singular model, expressed most succinctly by the sociologist Max Weber as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. National history thus becomes the story of creating an infrastructure to centralize and exercise exclusive sovereign authority, and the articulation of arguments to legitimate these processes. Equally, the arguments delegitimate rival claims both from insiders, like would-be autonomous nobles or regions, and from outsiders seeking hegemony over the ‘national’ territory. Measured against this yardstick, it is scarcely surprising that the Empire’s history is reduced to a repetitive and chaotic cycle lasting at least into the fifteenth century. …
… This narrative rests on Ranke’s influential conception of the Empire’s history as the story of failed nation building. Most observers have followed his lead in arguing that the ‘decline’ of central authority was inversely proportionate to the growth of the princes as semi-independent rulers. This argument has been underpinned by a century and a half of national and regional histories, charting the separate stories of modern countries like Belgium or the Czech Republic, as well as those of the regions of modern Germany and Italy, such as Bavaria or Tuscany. Each of these stories is so persuasive, because it is constructed around the development of centralized political authority and associated identity focused exclusively on its given territory.
The overall conclusion is often that the Empire was some kind of federal system, which it became either immediately after Charlemagne’s death in 814 or by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at the latest [footnote includes Whaley’s Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 1493–1806, Oxford, 2012]. The enormous difference between these dates is an indicator of the problems with confidently pinning down these structures. Nonetheless, this is an attractive idea not only because, as we shall see, some of the Empire’s inhabitants claimed it was a confederation, but also because this definition allows it to be fitted into the accepted taxonomy of political systems. It was this aspect that drew Madison’s attention and his conclusion that it was ‘a feeble and precarious union’, a conclusion intended to encourage his fellow Americans to agree to a stronger federal government. …
… Defining the Empire as federal perpetuates the narrow, dualist view of its development as solely defined by emperor-princely tensions, with the latter winning out by establishing fully sovereign kingdoms and principalities in 1806. Worse, it is very difficult to disassociate the term from its modern political usage, particularly in the German and Austrian federal republics, as well as Switzerland and other contemporary states, including the USA. In all these cases the component elements interact as equals, sharing a common status as parts of a political union. The differences are genuinely dualist: their dynamics provided by how far key powers are shared through common central institutions, and how far they are devolved as ‘states rights’ to the component units. Finally, modern federal states act directly on all their citizens equally. Each citizen is meant to have an equal participation in his or her own state, and in the union as a whole. All are bound directly by the same federal laws, even if some aspects of life are covered by arrangements specific to each component state. These forms of equality were completely and fundamentally alien to the Empire, which always had a dominant, if shifting, political core, and always ruled its population through a complex hierarchy defined by socio-legal status.
[This book] charts the evolution of this hierarchy … covering [each] of the fundamental shifts in the basis of imperial governance. Carolingian rule established a basic political and legal framework for the Empire, but this did not develop further and even partially disappeared around 900. The absence of formal institutions should not, however, be taken as the lack of effective governance. This book follows the lead of those who have drawn attention to the informal aspects of a political culture based on personal presence rather than written, formalized rules. Symbols and rituals were as much a part of politics as formal institutions … {An] organization risks being exposed as fictive if it no longer meets common expectations, for example if the anticipated repression fails to materialize or is exposed as feeble when a government is confronted with open defiance.
Imperial governance entailed fostering a consensus amongst the Empire’s political elite to ensure at least minimum compliance with agreed policy, enabling the emperor to dispense with the burden of both forcing cooperation and of ruling the bulk of the population directly. Consensus did not necessarily mean harmony or stability, but it did achieve the ‘crude simplicity’ of imperial rule, allowing the emperor and elites to pursue policies without requiring a radical transformation of the societies they governed. This imposed limits on what emperors could do. They needed to uphold the legitimacy of imperial rule through demonstrative acts, such as punishing obvious wrongdoers; yet emperors also had to avoid personal failures that would undermine their aura of power and could be interpreted as the loss of divine favour.
A key characteristic of imperial governance was that institutional development was primarily driven by the need to foster and sustain consensus, rather than by attempts by the centre to reach directly into the peripheries and localities. … Broader socio-economic changes meanwhile supported a longer and more complex lordly hierarchy, both reducing the average size of each jurisdiction while multiplying their numbers. … Lesser lords and subjects were now more clearly ‘mediate’, meaning that their relationship to the emperor and Empire ran through at least one intervening level of authority. This hierarchy crystallized around 1200, consolidating the complementary division of responsibilities within the Empire. The emperor got on with the business of the imperial mission, assisted by the immediate princely elite who meanwhile assumed more functions within their own jurisdictions, including peace-keeping, conflict resolution and resource mobilization. These jurisdictions became ‘territorialized’ through the need to demarcate areas of responsibility. ….
The development of imperial governance through a long lordly hierarchy appears to detach the Empire from its subjects. Certainly this is how most general accounts have treated its history: as high politics, far removed from daily life. This has had the unfortunate consequence of contributing to the widespread sense of the Empire’s irrelevance, especially as social and economic historians have largely followed their political counterparts and traced developments like population size or economic output using anachronistic national frontiers. [The final part of the book] addresses this, arguing that both the governance and patterns of identity within the Empire were closely entwined with socio-economic developments, notably the emergence of a corporate social structure combining both hierarchical-authoritarian and horizontal-associative elements. This structure was replicated – with variations – at all levels of the Empire’s socio-political order.
[The book] traces the emergence of the corporate social order, showing how it embraced both lords and commons, and how it became anchored in rural and urban communities with varying but generally wide degrees of self-governance. These associative aspects … demonstrate the importance of corporate status in all forms of leagues and communual organizations from the high Middle Ages onwards, from the smallest guild to groupings that resulted in major challenges to imperial rule … Like jurisdictions, corporate identities and rights were local, specific and related to status. They reflected the belief in an idealized socio-political order, which placed a premium on preserving peace through consensus rather than through any absolute, abstract concept of justice. The consequences of this are explored [showing] how conflict resolution remained open-ended, like the Empire’s political processes generally. Imperial institutions could judge, punish and coerce, but they mainly brokered settlements intended as workable compromises rather than as definitive judgements based on absolute concepts of right and wrong.
The Empire thus fostered a deep-rooted, conservative ideal of freedom as local and particular, shared by members of corporate groups and incorporated communities. These were local and particular liberties, not abstract Liberty shared equally by all inhabitants. …
… The attachment to corporate identities and rights helps explain why the Empire endured despite internal tensions and stark inequalities in life chances. However, it was neither a bucolic, harmonious old-worldly utopia, nor a direct blueprint for the European Union. … [We also need to note in this introduction] an important factor in changing the Empire across time, the long-term shift from a culture of personal presence and oral communication to one based on written communication. This transition was common throughout Europe and is one of the general markers of the shift to modernity. However, it had particular consequences in the Empire since this relied so heavily on consensus-seeking and on delineating power, rights and responsibilities along a status hierarchy.
Oral communication and written culture co-existed throughout the Empire’s lifespan, so the transition is one of degrees, not absolutes. Christianity is a religion of the book, while both ecclesiastical and secular authorities used written rules and communication. Yet messages generally only acquired full meaning when delivered in person by someone of appropriate rank. Early medieval theology believed God’s intentions to be transparent, with individual actions merely demonstrating divine will. Face-to-face contact was generally necessary for binding decisions to be reached. However, writing was a good way to fix such decisions and to avoid potential ambiguities and misunderstandings. … Ancillary techniques, like the use of seals and particular forms of address and styles of writing, were developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to convince recipients of letters that such techniques represented the authentic voice of the writer by imparting a permanent authority to the text. The use of paper rather than parchment facilitated a significant growth of written culture from the mid-fourteenth century, while the invention of printing a century later changed both its volume and its use.
Unfortunately, writing also makes discrepancies more obvious, as the papacy already discovered during the twelfth century when it began to be criticized for issuing patently contradictory pronouncements. A paper trail could also demonstrate how knowledge was conveyed, making it harder for authorities to claim ignorance of wrongdoing. Theologians and political theorists responded by elaborating a hierarchy of communication. The idea that divine intentions were directly manifest in human action already threatened to make God the servant of His own creation. From this it was logical to develop the idea of a mysterious God whose actions were beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. To elevate themselves above their subjects, secular authorities were credited with an exclusive ability to understand the ‘mysteries of state’ that would otherwise only baffle common folk. Those in power tailored their choice of words and images to suit specific target audiences. Communication became as much – if not more – about signalling the authorities’ superiority over their subjects as about conveying messages.
The elevated language of the mysteries of state used to promote centralization elsewhere in Europe was ill-suited to an imperial governance based more on consensus than command and where high politics continued to rely primarily on face-to-face communication. Although the princes did adopt a more exalted style of rule during the sixteenth century, they remained bound within a common framework, which exposed their actions and pronouncements to audiences they could not control. The imperial chancellery was usually at the forefront of employing written culture, but used this to record and fix the status and privileges of those entitled to participate in the political process. Broadly similar developments took place within the Empire’s constituent territories, where communal and corporate rights were enshrined in charters and other legal documents. Increasingly, imperial institutions were called upon to broker disputes arising from the interpretation of these rights. While the system retained some flexibility, contemporaries were increasingly aware of the discrepancies as settlements relied on compromise and fudge, almost inevitably contravening some formal rules. In the late eighteenth century, the gap between formal status and material power became glaring at the highest political level with the growth of Austria and Prussia as European powers in their own right. While the refusal to abandon hallowed practices gave the Empire some coherence, this also made it impossible for its inhabitants to conceive of any alternative structure. Reform narrowed down to mere tinkering with existing arrangements and ultimately proved unable to cope with the overwhelming impact of the French Revolutionary Wars, forcing Francis II’s decision in 1806 to dissolve the Empire.
The Source:
Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of The Holy Roman Empire, Penguin Random House 2016
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