Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  For the next three hundred years – a huge span of time – the imperial kingdom continued to operate as best it could. With the sole exception of Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1152–90), the distant emperors rarely took a close interest from their various residences in Germany. The essence of the kingdom’s politics lay with the localities – in the ongoing feuds of the counts and the cities, on the fate of obscure battles, on the plotting of dynasts. Even so, few would have predicted that France’s modest duchy might one day grow more powerful than the Empire’s enormous kingdom.

  The linguistic patterns which developed within the imperial kingdom are instructive. Despite German overlordship, the German language made few inroads. The main vernacular remained a Franco-Provençal idiom, the ancestor of modern Arpitan, which one can hear to this day in the streets of Lyon and in parts of western Switzerland and Savoy. To anyone with a historical ear, Arpitan carries the echoes of bygone Burgundy.66

  The mechanism whereby imperial counts were promoted to dukedoms by the emperor seems to have been entirely haphazard. Everything depended on the power, prestige and good fortune of particular vassals at particular moments. Yet one new duchy, closely entwined with the noble German House of Zähringen, holds a special place in the story. The castle of Zähringen now lies in ruins on a hillside overlooking the town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was the seat of an ambitious clan of local counts, who had already won and lost two duchies, and who were now heading for the ducal ranks for a third time. The Zähringer had proved themselves efficient managers of their estates; they had exploited their legal rights over Church lands in the Black Forest, and, after founding the municipality of Freiburg, pioneered a system of consolidated local administration. They were demonstrating in miniature what the emperor longed to introduce on a larger scale. Too many Burgundian nobles had forgotten their oaths of fealty. In 1127, therefore, the emperor appointed Conrad von Zähringen Rector or ‘governor’ of the Kingdom of Burgundy, rewarding him further with the lands of a newly invented Duchy of Burgundia Minor or ‘Lesser Burgundy’. The Zähringen rectors were effectively brought in to restore discipline.67

  The Duchy of Burgundia Minor, known in German as Klein Burgund, covered a sizeable area to the east of the Jura, coinciding quite closely with the limits of modern Francophone Switzerland. It is No. VI on Bryce’s list. It contained a smaller unit within it classed as a Landgrafschaft or ‘Landgravate’, which also received the appellation of ‘Burgundy’ and which is No. VIII on Bryce’s list. This unit consisted of the district on either side of the River Aar between Thun and Solothurn. It may or may not have reached as far as the Habichtsburg or Habsburg, the ‘Hawk’s Castle’, which overlooks the River Aar below Solothurn, and which was to be the original seat of Central Europe’s most powerful dynasty. Habsburg tradition insists that the protoplast of the family was called Guntram.68

  As rectors and dukes, the Zähringer exercised overlordship over a large variety of nobles, counts and bishops, and over an archipelago of islands of loyal towns in the midst of a wayward countryside. They showed great energy establishing a network of incorporated towns, including Fribourg, Burgdorf, Murten (Morat), Rheinfelden and Thun. Their most active representative, Count Berthold V (fl. 1180–1218), built the castle of Thun, and in 1191, reportedly after killing a bear, founded the city of Berne. When he died heirless, the duchy lapsed. The experiment was not repeated.69

  Already in the mid-twelfth century Frederick Barbarossa was well aware of the need to shore up imperial power. He was crowned king of Germany at Aachen in 1152, king of Italy at Pavia in 1154, Holy Roman Emperor in 1155 and, after considerable delay, king of Burgundy at Arles in 1173. Each of these steps was preceded by years of politicking and campaigning. In the process he made common cause with the Roman papacy, thereby giving new life to the doctrine of ‘the Two Swords’, whereby emperor and pope were supposed to be the dual agents, secular and ecclesiastical, of divine rule. Barbarossa’s keen interest in Burgundy was kindled by his second marriage, to Beatrice, heiress of the count-palatine. Thanks to this union, he took the county under his direct rule, embroiled himself in the kingdom’s quarrels, and here at least achieved nothing decisive. He died on his way to the Second Crusade without ever seeing the Holy Land.70

  By pitting emperors against popes, the long-running ‘Investiture Contest’ inevitably weakened each of the supreme authorities of the medieval world. It began in the tenth century, when the Ottonian emperors first promoted their claim to control the election of popes, and it continued in fits and starts before fizzling out in the thirteenth. It centred in general round an inconclusive dispute as to whether pope or emperor was entitled to exercise jurisdiction over the other, and in particular round their rights and procedures for making appointments. It added an extra dimension to a bitter civil war in Germany, that came to an end in theory at the Concordat of Worms of 1122. But it rumbled on elsewhere, not least in England under King John. Its significance may have been exaggerated by historians, who neglect other sources of tension;71 but in all parts of the Empire, it helped create an impasse where neither the emperor nor the pope would cede to the other’s claims of supremacy, and it accelerated the fragmentation of power:

  The period of the Investiture Contest saw the establishment… of new territorial units, and these units were the nuclei from which were created the principalities of late mediaeval Germany… Many generations were to pass before… the princes established full territorial control, but already at the beginning of the twelfth century the great aristocratic families were mounting the path which led to territorial sovereignty; and it was the Investiture Contest with its revolutionary social changes which gave them the opportunity to assert and consolidate these powers.72

  The imperial Kingdom of Burgundy was especially susceptible to this weakening of authority. One must ask why, after the interlude of the Zähringen duchy, the emperors were so reluctant to intervene and stop the rot. The best answers are geographical, political and strategic. First, thanks to imperial Burgundy’s mountainous terrain, all military operations there were fraught with uncertainty. Secondly, automatic priority was given to the Kingdom of Germany. The death of every emperor was invariably followed by a campaign in which the leading candidates competed to succeed him and be crowned as king of the Germans, before proceeding towards coronation as emperor. Thirdly, having secured Germany, every monarch had to choose between attending to Italy or to Burgundy. Almost without exception, they gave precedence to Italy. Rome, the seat of the papacy, exercised a magic attraction. Papal approval carried enormous weight, and every would-be German emperor dreamed of walking in the steps of Charlemagne. So the Kingdom of Burgundy was routinely neglected. One German emperor even left Germany as well as Burgundy to fend for itself. Frederick II (r. 1220–50), half-Italian, preferred to set up his court in his mother’s base in Sicily.73

  Inexorably, therefore, the Kingdom of Burgundy was subject to a long series of secessions. Chips flew off the block at regular intervals. The original collection of territories steadily shrank. Provence went first, then the Comtat Venaissin, Lyon and the Dauphiné. The Empire frequently retained moribund claims or residual rights, but the overall effect was unmistakeable. The kingdom crumbled in slow motion. The earliest moves towards separation were taken by prelates, who in several instances assumed the status of ‘prince-bishops’. Their courage was born of the emperors’ need for ecclesiastical support. The bishops of Sion (in the Valais) and of Geneva broke free at a very early stage, and others simply followed.

  The strongest statement of the Church’s position on investiture was made in Burgundy in 1157. At the Diet of Besanz (Besançon), the papal legate ventured the opinion that the Empire was nothing more than a papal beneficium: that is, a voluntary gift remaining at the pope’s dis-posal. As one historian remarked, he took the risk that one of the imperial dukes might put a battleaxe through his skull, for he was throwing doubt on to the unquestioned acceptance of the
emperor’s authority. He certainly put ideas into the heads of both the archbishop of Besanz and the local count.

  The County-Palatine of Burgundy – so called because of its location on the kingdom’s northern border – was a crucial territory. Count Rainald or Renaud III (d. 1148) had already tried and failed to build his own small empire. Having inherited the County of Mâcon within the adjoining French Duchy of Burgundy, he declared himself to be a Freigraf or franc comte within the Empire. The imperial authorities showed no sympathy, confiscating most of Rainald’s lands as punishment. Yet it was Rainald’s daughter whom the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa married, and the memory of Rainald’s ‘Free County’ remained.74 In 1178, the archbishop of Besanz, a grandson of Rainald III, negotiated his way to turning his episcopal see into a Reichsstadt or ‘imperial city’, free from the feudal dues of the County-Palatine. It was a telling precedent. A couple of decades later, the bishop of Basle went one step further by creating a ‘prince-bishopric’, and ruling not only over his episcopal see, but also over nearby lands once confiscated from Rainald III.75

  Large parts of the future Switzerland were also carved out of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy. Sometime early in the thirteenth century, a peasant migration occurred from the lands of the bishop of Sion in the Valais eastward to the Grisons. The migrants took bridge-building techniques with them, opened up the Schollenen Gorge to travellers and provided access to the valuable trade route over the St Gotthard pass into Italy. In August 1291 the men of Uri, Schweiz and Unterwalden, who operated tolls on the pass, swore an oath to resist outside interference. They had performed the founding act of the Swiss Confederation.76

  Provence, by contrast, drifted apart from Burgundy through a succession of marriages. In 1127, in stage one, the last Bosonid heiress had ceded her rights to a husband from Barcelona, thereby putting practical control of the territory beyond the Empire’s reach. In 1246, the last Catalan heiress of Provence brought the same dowry to an Angevin husband, thereby launching a line of counts who were vassals of the king of France (see p. 174).77

  And so the erosion continued. In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, the French conquered Languedoc in the course of the Albigensian Crusade, bringing them up to the right bank of the Rhône. Under St Louis, king of France (r. 1226–70), they long planned an outpost on the Mediterranean coast at Aigues-Mortes, aiming to build a crusading port and to consolidate their hold on the lower Rhône valley.78 In 1229 agents of the king of France succeeded in ousting the bishop of Vivarium (Viviers) to create a French foothold in the Vivarais at the foot of the Cévennes.79 The Comtat Venaissin on the opposite bank, which took its name from the small town of Venasque, was bequeathed by an heirless owner as a gift to the papacy in 1274. The enclave of Avignon, within the comtat, was sold to an exiled pope in 1348.80 The nearby county of Aurausion (Orange) enjoyed the status of an autonomous principality under the counts of Baux, notorious for their feuding with the counts of Provence during the ‘Baussenque Wars’. The legacy of the counts eventually passed to the French House of Chalon.81

  Lugdunum – Lyon – the chief city of the Rhône valley, was growing all the time into a commercial city of the first rank. Its annual fairs, thronged by Italian merchants, provided a point of exchange between the commerce of northern and southern Europe. Yet increasingly it became an object of great strategic interest to France. Thirteenth-century Lyon was, above all, an archiepiscopal city of unusual importance. Church councils were held there. One, in 1245, excommunicated the Emperor Frederick II. Another in 1274 was attended by 500 bishops. Popes presided in person; and in 1305 Pope Clement V was crowned there. It was probably no accident that the archbishop of Lyon, Bernard de Got, was the new pope’s brother.

  The papal bull deposing and excommunicating Frederick II did not mince words:

  Innocent, bishop, servant of the servants of God… The secular prince who has been the special cause of so much discord… has committed four sins of the greatest gravity… [including] perjury… the arrest of our legates… [holding] sees, abbeys and other churches vacant… [and] sacrilege. Furthermore he has deservedly become suspect of heresy… We therefore denounce the said prince, and mark him out as an outcast who has made himself unworthy of the empire… Let those whose task it is… freely choose a successor… Given at Lyons on 17 July in the 3rd year of our pontificate.82

  Such a document could never have been produced if the emperor had exercised even limited influence over what was still, in theory, an imperial city.

  The Second Council of Lyon (1274) was convened to end the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. It only succeeded in confirming and defining a key item of Catholic theology, the filioque,* which has barred the way to reconciliation ever since. (Lyon was also the place where a long-running heretical movement was thought to have begun. Peter Valdo had preached dangerously irregular, proto-Protestant views, and was banished. But his movement persisted. Valdensian communities took to the mountains of Savoy, and would defy the authorities in the best Burgundian manner for centuries (see p. 408).83

  Lyon, however, was riven with internal power struggles, and therefore fell easy prey to French intrigues. The archbishop was permanently at odds both with the counts of the Lyonnais-Forez, and with the city’s rich patricians. When the French won over first the count and then the patricians, the archbishop was defenceless. French troops marched in without resistance in 1311. The archbishop retained his title of ‘primate of the Gauls’, but power passed to a city-commune run by elected consuls subject to French approval.84

  The Dauphiné, equally coveted by France, controlled the road to Italy over the Mont Cenis. But the counts of Albon/Vienne, who held Grenoble and the approaches to the pass, hung on until 1349, when they sold out to the king of France in a private cash deal. Henceforth, the territory would serve as a dignity for the French king’s son and heir, the ‘dauphin’ (whether or not it still technically formed part of the Holy Roman Empire is an open question).85

  By this stage, the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy was looking distinctly ragged. The parts that abutted Germany, like Basle and Berne, were still under the emperor’s eye. But all those abutting France were being sucked beyond his reach. The emperors admitted as much. Though none of them formally renounced their claims to the kingdom, none after Conrad IV in 1264 bothered to publicize their royal Burgundian title.

  Political fragmentation was obviously gaining pace, yet such a simple term hardly describes the complicated processes at work. For as the traditional units crumbled new agglomerations were growing up, often in disregard for existing state boundaries. Marriages, dowries, conquests and bequests resulted in a constant stream of mergers, de-mergers and new upstart fortunes. The typical Burgundian count was no longer the ruler of one straightforward fief dependent on one overlord. More often he was head of a complex clutch of lands, titles and claims, assembled over the generations by the combined efforts of his family’s knights, wives, children and lawyers.

  Examining the counts-palatine of Burgundy, for example, one sees that the original inheritance had repeatedly passed from one political sphere to another, and by marriage from one family to another: in 1156 to the German family of Hohenstaufen; in 1208 to the Bavarian House of Andechs; and in 1315 to the royal House of France. At each stage the beneficiary added his wife’s titles and possessions to his own, sometimes acknowledging the former overlord, sometimes not. For the expert courtly genealogists and their clients, a significant moment loomed in 1330 when Jeanne III de France, consort of the duke of royal French Burgundy, inherited a claim to the imperial County-Palatine of Burgundy from her mother. The royal duchy and the imperial county were tantalizingly close to a permanent union. In the midst of the labyrinth of Burgundian successions (see below), Margaret, countess-palatine of Burgundy (1310–82), daughter of the French king, sought to accelerate the prospective merger. In 1366, with no particular justification, she started to promote the term of ‘France-Comté’ (sic), dropping the tradi
tional name of ‘County of Burgundy’ from her charters. (She was undoubtedly playing on the precedent of Rainald III, the self-styled franc comte.) The established formula of ‘Franche-Comté’ only emerged definitively after Margaret’s death. It is kingdom No. VII on Bryce’s list.86

  The mid-fourteenth century was a time of maximum distress across Europe. The Black Death struck in 1348, though it was by no means the last irruption of the bubonic plague. France was about to descend into the bear pit of the Hundred Years War with England, and the Holy Roman Empire was in uproar over the Golden Bull of 1356 and the introduction of a consolidated imperial constitution and electoral procedures. Thanks to the papal schism, there was one pope in Rome, and another in Avignon. Those few parts of the Kingdom of Burgundy which had not been lost were often disputed among neighbours. To cap it all, mind-boggling crises of succession erupted simultaneously in the Kingdom of France, in the Duchy of Burgundy and in the County-Palatine. At this point, faint-hearted readers are advised to take a break.

  Studying the Burgundian succession of the 1360s, one can easily develop ‘Palis-Rondon’ – as the Japanese call a squint. Three of the main players were Jean II de Valois, king of France, and two of his sons: Charles de Navarre and Philippe le Hardi. One explanation runs as follows: