During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was an outpouring of ‘national voices’ across many parts of Europe, not least in the British Isles from oppressed Celts struggling to retain their identity from the ceaseless onslaughts of the English. In the case of Scotland’s 2014 referendum on Independence, these voices were revived to try and express the idea that Scots had been oppressed by the English since at least the Declaration of Arbroath made in 1320 by the Chancellor of Scotland and sent (in Latin) to Pope John XXII, which in translation reads: ‘For as long as a hundred remain alive, we will never in any degree be subject to the dominion of the English. Since it is not for glory or honour that we fight but for liberty alone which no good man loses but with his life.’ An echo of the cry for ‘Freedom’ made a generation earlier by William Wallace. Similar outpourings emerged in Wales during Owain Glyndwr’s revolt against English rule childing ‘The Libel of English Policy’ and warning ‘Beware of Walys’.
During the same period French nationalists can look back and point to the Hundred Years War with England and the symbolic role Joan of Arc played in stiffening and galvinising French resistance. Czech nationalists look to the Hussite rebellions to paint a similar picture of Czech resistance against German encroachments. But it’s never as simple as all that. In many of these outpourings, confessional, dynastic and regional struggles took precedence over what were as yet proto-national identities. Conflicting identities and loyalties meant Scottish barons were divided amongst themselves, as was the Bohemian nobility and the French in their struggles with more powerful neighbouring dynasties.
All great European nations like to paint a picture of a 1,000 or even 2,000-year unbroken rise to nationhood. However, most historians would argue that the nation state did not become a political reality until the late eighteenth century. Before this time, European states were a collection of multinational kingdoms ruled more often than not by foreigners. Being of the same ‘nationality’ as the majority of the subjects you ruled over was not a prerequisite as demonstrated by the fact that from 1466–1657, the Polish crown controlled Prussia as a fiefdom, and in 1697 the Saxon Wettin dynasty bought the Polish crown. For most of the seventeenth century, England was ruled by the Scottish Stuart dynasty and during the eighteenth by the Welfen (Guelph) Hanoverians, better known to us today as ‘the Georgians’.
The idea of striving for ethnically and linguistically homogenous nation states, as opposed to expanding one’s own dynastic holdings, irrespective of what kind of people they contained, was anathema to the ruling houses of Europe, right up to the time of the French Revolution and beyond. France is a case in point, a nation that is often held up to be the epitome of the nation state, yet it was far from homogenous at the end of the eighteenth century with an incredible diversity of languages: people spoke Basque in the southwest, Italian in the south-east, Occitan in the central-south, in the north-west Breton and Flemish in the north-east, whereas along the central-eastern border the majority spoke German. The unification of France did not occur until the outset of the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic era, when the centralising desires, emanating from Paris, began a process of radical Francophonisation of the entire country including the establishment of one legal code.
Great Britain was no exception. The legacy of the Norman Conquest meant that the royal family and the nobility continued to speak French until 1362. Ancient enmities between Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Normans continued to play themselves out for centuries. Britain did not begin its path towards nationhood until after the War of the Roses and the accession of Henry VII in the late fifteenth century. Even then, it was not without numerous violent ‘interruptions’ as pointed out by Norman Davies, in his neutrally entitled book, The Isles, which explains how ceaseless dynastic disputes, the ‘Celtic fringe’, and countless wars delayed the centralisation of power, and how even the terms of reference for the nation were, and to some extent remain, confused. Davies lists sixteen definitions describing Britain from the Roman era to the present, including: the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms (fifth century to the tenth century), the Commonwealth and Free State of England, Wales and Ireland (1649–54) and the contemporary United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.(6)
Across Europe as a whole, the loyalties of local peasant communities often remained stronger towards their local feudal ruler, on whom they directly depended, rather than believing in what would have been some abstract notion of nationhood at the time. If a sense of identity predominated it tended to be regional. This would have been even more acute in the larger states where there had been a degree of centralisation around a royal court, which could take weeks to reach via dirt roads on horseback. Naturally, events such as wars, invasions and territories being overrun by foreign armies could briefly conjure a sense of wider allegiances, but these then diminished as the threat receded. This was no less true in the Holy Roman Empire, where the German historian, Ernst Kantorowicz concluded, ‘On some auspicious occasion, in solemn moments of enthusiasm, when they (the Germans) assembled for a crusade or pilgrimage, they felt a thrill of pride that they — Saxons and Franks, Swabians and Bavarians — were one. But they did not even then feel “German”. At most, they felt that they stood together as heirs of the Empire of the Caesars.’(7)
It took centuries for the ‘new’ Roman Empire to become ‘holy’, and even longer for it to become ‘German’. And while the empire included the overwhelming majority of German-speaking Europe, it did not include all of it; settlements such as the Teutonic Order’s possessions along the Baltic, including Prussia, or German communities in Hungary and Romania, were excluded. At the same time, the empire included significant non-German-speaking communities: Italians in the south, French in parts of Lorraine and Brabant, and Czechs in rural Bohemia; and from 1130 to the 1330s, during the time of the eastward ‘colonisations’, pockets of other Slavic communities became part of the empire. Slavic populations between the Elbe and Oder rivers were assimilated, adopting the German language, with the exception of small pockets of Slavic language speakers in the Lausitz, and Carinthia and regions further east. Germans in the regions east of the Elbe therefore often have Slavic ancestry.(8)
Since Roman times, Jews had also settled in the territories of the empire in order to escape persecution elsewhere. With the rise in trade from the early Middle Ages there was an increase in the use of money. Jews, who for much of the empire’s history were banned from participating in other trades, played a leading role as money lenders since the religious prohibitions on usury did not apply to them. Centuries of settlement and trade in the German-speaking lands meant that most Jews spoke Yiddish, a dialect that is very close to late medieval German, which they continued to use as they moved east following an eruption of persecution directed against them after the outbreak of the Black Death in the mid fourteenth century. (The Black Death halted the empire’s significant population growth between 1200–1350. Half of the population was then wiped out by the plague. The empire’s population numbers did not fully recover again until the early 1500s.) This persecution was predicated on rumours, which spread rapidly after the French authorities had tortured a French Jew into ‘admitting’ he had poisoned a well to infect Christians. Pogroms subsequently took hold in cities across the empire based on these rumours but often had baser motivations, as Jewish communities were the prime money lenders in the empire at this time and killing them wiped out the murderers’ debts. King Casimir the Great of Poland and Charles IV of Bohemia were among the few monarchs in Europe to offer them sanctuary.
From the early thirteenth century onwards, the empire benefited from advances in agricultural technology and the intensification of farming. The introduction of three-course rotation, the diversification of crops, and the use of the horse-drawn four-wheeled cart brought great economic progress. At the same time, attendant population growth, which was estimated to have almost doubled from circa 8 million to circa 14 million, led to the extensive draining of marshes and the clearing of
forests, particularly in the newly acquired eastern territories.(9) Consequently, there was dramatic growth in the establishment of villages and towns and an increase in the number of travelling merchants and a proliferation of their crafts. Merchants increasingly organised themselves, forming guilds and corporations in the larger commercial centres within the Empire. One of the most significant trade associations for economic cooperation founded in the early thirteenth century was the Hanseatic League, formed by the north German seaports of Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar and Rostock in 1257. Over time, ‘the Hanse’ grew to encompass hundreds of river and seaport towns as well as cities, and by the late fourteenth century had become the most powerful trade network in Europe. But despite its economic expansion and population growth, political integration within the empire remained limited. The empire’s ability to wield its power depended on the strength of the emperor that ruled it and the regional power base he relied upon.
The Holy Roman Empire can also only be termed an empire by the standards of the early Middle Ages, a time before the great maritime empires of Spain, Portugal and England emerged.
Reasons for the ‘arrested development’ of the German nation and the weakness of the institution of German monarchy in the medieval era are varied. They range from the particularism of its noblity, to the energy expended by its rulers on a variety of religious adventures, to the sheer size of the empire (by medieval standards), where it could take weeks to transit a message from one province to another, vastly reducing the possibilities for effective central control.
When historians speak of the German nature of the empire, this denotes that the empire was, to all intents and purposes, the aristocracy of the mainly German princes who were the only estate able to take effective political action.(10) Of these German princes, the Saxon King, Otto the Great, was the most significant. Otto was a powerful ruler, and one of the great emperors of the early medieval era who could depend upon his own reliable Saxon regional powerbase from where he undertook a revival of the empire. He reinitiated the use of the term Imperator Augustus in the late tenth century, laying claim to the heritage of Charlemagne, establishing the coronation rights and duties of the German princes toward their king and emperor, which remained in place for centuries. He cemented the core tribes and territories that remained part of all future configurations of Germany. But he also bequeathed the empire the ‘Curse of the South’ by making the wearing of the imperial crown dependent on holding the crown of Lombardy (northern Italy), and by pledging to continue to protect the Roman Church. That meant constant military adventures in Italy on the part of Otto’s successors with emperors spending considerable periods of time, energy and resources battling the nobility south of the Alps in Italy, fighting to secure the crown of Lombardy and thereby retaining their right to an imperial coronation at the hands of the Pope in Rome.
The symbiotic relationship between the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Church and its emperors and popes began to break down with the advent of the Salian dynasty,xiii which replaced the Saxon dynasty in the eleventh century. The Salian rulers Heinrich III and Heinrich IV came to view the Roman Church as having grown too fat and greedy. They believed that the Church’s insatiable desire for power, more land and taxes within the territories of the empire would not only undermine the very institution of the emperor but leave him with little to rule over. The battle over investiture rights between the Salian emperors and the popes in Rome revolved around who had the right to appoint senior clergy. The Church attempted to wrest this prerogative from kings and emperors by asserting its ‘universal’ authority. This resulted in a costly battle, which weakened the empire, and absorbed the resources of a succession of ruling houses. The more time emperors spent fighting battles in Italy, the more the dukes and princes within the empire sought to assert their power within their own territories. This in turn stunted the progress towards stronger institutions and a powerful centralising ruling house both in Germany and Italy.
It took a new dynasty, the Hohenstaufens, under the iron rule of Friedrich I, perhaps the greatest emperor of the medieval period, to impose his will on the Church and reassert imperial authority. Friedrich I, better known as Friedrich Barbarossa (Barbarossa was the nickname the Italians gave him on account of the reddish colour of his beard), conquered Lombardy and occupied the Papal States, humbling the Church. He gained his papal coronation as emperor by ‘right’ and not as a courtesy in 1155. It was Barbarossa who termed the dominions of his empire ‘Holy’ leading to the common usage of the term the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. In 1158, he called an Imperial Assembly at Roncaglia (Piacenza) in northern Italy to establish a binding legal and constitutional framework over his vast medieval empire. Based on Roman law, and overseen by legal experts from the university of Bologna, this assembly also invoked the lasting notion of Landfrieden, essentially an end to regional and dynastic vendettas either against the emperor or by one prince or duke against another within the confines of the empire. This was a forlorn hope in the case of the empire’s Italian regions. The legacy of wasted southern battles in contrast to the more successful eastern expansion of the empire endured in German literature, culture and psyche until the destruction of the eastern territories after the Second World War.
Barbarossa’s reign witnessed renewed prosperity and population growth along with the establishment of great new cities such as Freiburg and Munich. Ever the adventurer, Barbarossa joined King Philip of France and Richard the Lionheart of Englandxiv (who left his infamous brother King John on the throne in the legendary time of Robin Hood), to ride off on the Third Crusade. The French and English kings sent their smaller armies of knights by ship to travel via the Mediterranean, whilst Barbarossa marched his 100,000-man army right through Hungary, Serbia, via Constantinople and on through Anatolia. Barbarossa’s army won two great battles against the Saracens at Philiomelium and Iconium. Saladin, the leader of the Muslim armies, on hearing of the approach of Barbarossa’s huge and successful force, responded by scrambling for troops from across the Arab world to combat this new threat to his recent conquest of Jerusalem. But fortune was to smile on Saladin, when on the verge of entering the Holy Land, the sixty-seven-year-old Barbarossa drowned whilst crossing the river Saleph. Myths soon emerged that Barbarossa had been carrying the sacred lance (the spear which had pierced Jesus’s side whilst he was still on the cross), claiming that he drowned as he lost his grip on the lance whilst crossing the river. Taking his death as a bad omen, tens of thousands abandoned the crusade and Saladin’s army made short work of those who remained. By 1190, three years after the fall of Jerusalem, only 5,000 of Barbarossa’s crusaders arrived in the city of Acre, where the German Hospitalers had their base and where some assume Barbarossa’s remains were initially interred.(11)
Barbarossa’s grandson, Friedrich II, married Yolande of Jerusalem, the last surviving heiress of the defunct Christian kingdom that was conquered by Saladin. During Friedrich II’s 1228 crusade, he won back Jerusalem for Christendom and the empire, more through bloodless diplomacy than battle, as he negotiated a truce with the Egyptian Sultan Al-Kamil, by which Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem were returned. Friedrich II was crowned King of Jerusalem on 18th March 1229 in the presence of the Grandmaster of the Order of the Teutonic Knights. Jerusalem fell to a new Muslim offensive in 1244 and Friedrich’s constant absences from his dominions north of the Alps (he only spent twelve years in Germany and spent the rest of his life in Sicily), led to the German princes again asserting greater control over their lands and the power of the emperor diminishing. Friedrich II however is remembered by many German historians as one of the great emperors of the early medieval period; an intellectual who spoke six languages, wrote on a variety of subjects (including his favourite pastime of falconry), advancing academia by founding the university of Palermo, which went on to become one of the leading universities of its age in the field of the sciences, theology and philosophy. His court patronised the music and song of the famous Minnesänger (courtly tro
ubadours) like Walter von der Vogelweide. His architectural legacy remains one of his most enduring, not only in Palermo but also the alluring Castel Del Monte in Apulia. And although he helped patronise the ideal of courtly love, fashionable at the time, in his private life he remained a great admirer of the female form, marrying three times, while entertaining eight noble mistresses and siring twelve bastards that we know of. Friedrich not only attempted to combine and unite the Roman and German worlds but uncommonly for his time he also held a deep affection and respect for Arabic culture. His interest in and tolerance of the Muslim world was not shared by the Pope, who excommunicated him, despite his recovery of the holy city of Jerusalem. After Friedrich II’s death, there followed the period of the interregnum, where from 1254–73 there was no emperor, leaving a variety of regional princes to fight it out for the honour of the title.
The adoption of the prefix ‘Holy’ in conjunction with the empire is particularly significant in the context of how successive German imperial dynasties continually revived Charlemagne’s role as protector of the ‘Holy’ Roman Catholic Church. It became even more so in terms of the energy, time and resources spent crusading south into the Holy Land, and east into the heartlands of the heathen Slavs. The use of the term the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, which became commonplace by the mid thirteenth century, was therefore far more than merely a symbolic title. In contrast, the term ‘of the German nation’, which was added to describe the Holy Roman Empire, had a more convoluted birth. The use of the term German or Teutonic during the early Middle Ages was often meant to be a derogatory throwback referencing the Roman era when these were synonymous with the word ‘barbarian’. During the height of the disputes over temporal and spiritual power between the popes and emperors of the late eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII used the terms Rex Teutonicorum and Regnum Teutonicum to describe the ‘German’ (barbarian) kingdom that was ruled by his arch-rival, the Emperor Heinrich IV.(12)
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