Between 1667–68, Louis invaded the Spanish Netherlands and annexed parts of Flanders, Arras, Lille and the area around and including Duynkerke (Dunkerque) — all largely Flemish-speaking areas — as the place names still indicate. In 1672–78, Louis launched another invasion of the region, chewing up and swallowing more of western Flanders including Cambrai and Maubeuge. Then in 1681, he occupied the entirely German-speaking city of Straßburg, with no other justification than the fact that it served his strategic interests.
In 1688, Louis XIV started his longest war to date, which sought to realise the cherished objective of tearing the entire area west of the Rhine from the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland and annexing these territories to France. Had he been successful this would have made German the de facto second language of the kingdom with over 5 million German speakers (to put this into context, England’s population was only 8 million as late as 1800). Commonly known as the Nine Years War (1688–97) or the Pfalzkrieg (Palatinate War), French troops left a trail of misery and destruction in their wake. Heidelberg, Speyer, Mannheim, Worms, Oppenheim and a string of smaller towns and villages were raised to the ground during the invasion, some of which, such as the palace in Heidelberg, still bear the scars to this day. The Holy Roman Empire was fortunate that Louis’s ambitions to annex the entire Rhineland Palatinate were met with opposition from England, and that the subsequent balance of forces then swung against Louis, eventually resulting in France’s defeat. At the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697, France actually had to cede territory for the first time.xxxvi (21–2) Yet Louis, who enjoyed an exceptionally long reign of some seventy-two years, had a lust for conquest that showed no sign of abating following this setback. His next war, the War of the Spanish Succession, lasted even longer than the Palatinate War, concluding only shortly before his death in 1715. His successors showed no less desire to achieve Cardinal Richelieu’s ambitions and the expansionist policies of the Sun King, the Drang nach Osten (push eastwards) continued. In 1766, more of Lothringen (Lorraine) fell to France and the tide was determinedly shifting against the Holy Roman Empire. Whichever of the two powers historically controlled the middle kingdoms had then always gone on to become the more powerful state.
Revolutionary France then (from 1792 onwards) embroiled the European Continent in one war after another, securing conquests of land from Spain to Egypt and from Naples to Moscow. Napoleon defeated all comers with his new meritocratically-led citizen army whose highly motivated soldiers avowedly marched to bring ‘Equality, Liberty and Fraternity’ to the world, or so they believed. Within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire a minority of the liberal cultural elite — including the great German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, and the writer and poet Heinrich Heine — enthusiastically believed in Napoleon’s modernising promises to ‘liberate the German nation from mediaeval feudalism’. Beethoven had even intended to dedicate his Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, to Napoleon, but upon seeing the reality of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions, and how he had begun to crown his relatives as the kings of conquered lands, he rescinded. Beethoven wrote; ‘He (Napoleon) is no different from ordinary mortals! Now he will also trample human rights under foot, succumbing to his own ambitions; he will place himself above all others and become a tyrant!’(23)
Once these great men saw the realities of Napoleon’s supposed ‘liberty and fraternity’, their initial enthusiasm soon waned. Attempts by the French to create a German satellite known as the Mainzer Republic wiped out whatever revolutionary sympathies remained, while their promises of liberation from feudalism turned out, in practice, to mean requisitioning, the expense and indignation of large-scale troop quartering in the territories of the Reich, and then the collection of ‘war contributions’, forced conscription, widespread rape and pillage, then finally outright annexation.(24) In 1803, Napoleon invaded and acquired the entire territory west of the Rhine, including the Netherlands, which was then formally integrated into France in 1810. For the first time in history the Rhine border became a short-lived reality.xxxvii At a stroke, Napoleon disposed of the nobilities of the territories he had annexed, secularised their administration and imposed the ‘Code Napoleon’. Of the fifty-one Reichsstädte (cities with an imperial charter), which France had annexed, only six were allowed to continue existing with their rights and privileges intact. Napoleon also went on to destroy the greatest support base of the Emperor and the empire by dividing up and ascribing the territories of the smaller states either to France or to other German states.(25)
By 1804, Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor at Notre Dame in Paris and proclaimed a new French empire while Emperor Franz II, the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, had himself crowned emperor of his personal Austrian dominions, to forestall the demise of his dynasty in case Napoleon decided to sweep away the ancient edifice of the Holy Roman Empire altogether. Just two years later, Napoleon was itching to extend his cartographical experiments even further across the old Reich. So he created a new Rhinebund (Confederation of the Rhine), ostensibly as a French satellite and contrary to the interests of Austria. The league consisted of sixteen co-opted states carved out of the Holy Roman Empire. With France penetrating ever deeper into the heartlands of German Europe, and the Napoleonic threat inching ever closer to her own borders, Prussia’s careful strategy of guarded neutrality began to unravel. The remaining German states, that were yet to be annexed, began to ally themselves with Austria and Prussia for the inevitable battle.
The 1,000-year existence of the Holy Roman Empire, this fragmented and imperfect edifice, had weathered all manner of storms, but the new French empire was not about to tolerate a buffer zone to its ambitions in central Europe. Having absorbed and restructured a considerable portion of the Reich, it was not long before Napoleon made a clean sweep. On 6th August 1806, Napoleon issued an ultimatum to the Austrian Emperor Franz II to lay down the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire. According to Napoleon there could be only one emperor in Europe.xxxviii
France heaped one humiliation after the other on the old Reich and its princes: annexing everything west of the Rhine, and in the north territories as far east as the Elbe. Napoleon forced much of the rest of Germany to the east of the Rhine into his new Rhinebund satellite. Napoleon subsequently demeaned the Holy Roman Emperor by calling for his abdication, later confiscating his crown and the symbols of his ancient empire. Napoleon was doing more to forge a sense of German national unity and bridge the old particularisms than any of its previous emperors had done. Pan-German nationalists at the royal court in Prussia, such as Freiherr vom und zum Stein, convinced the king to end Prussia’s humiliating neutrality and join the alliance against Napoleon. However, Prussia’s would-be British and Russian allies were far away and slow to move. Far slower than the Grande Armée, which swept into Prussia and wrong-footed its once famed military, swiftly inflicting two crushing military defeats on her at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt. With Austria and Prussia, the two most powerful kingdoms within the old empire casually crushed, Napoleon now had carte blanche to do as he wished with the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire. The fate of German Europe now appeared to lie between outright annexation or satellite status within the expanding French empire.
Napoleon extended his Rhinebund satellite in 1808 to include thirty-nine German states (the territory totalled 325,800 square kilometres with a population of 14.6 million). He also began handing out royal crowns like sweets, encouraging the particularistic interests of the old Kurfürsten (Elector’s) states. Bavaria became a kingdom in its own right, to the chagrin of Austria, as did Hanover, to the fury of the English, Saxony as a rival to Prussia and even little Württemberg was given a crown to boot.(26) Between 1807–09, Poland was reconstituted out of the ether, largely at Prussia’s expense. Napoleon’s aim was to create a strategic ally in the east but more cynical commentators at the time stressed that his motivations for this came not only from the head, but also from the heart, as he was having an amorous affair with a
Polish countess, Marie Walewska, who bore him a son; also arguably giving life to a long-lasting love affair between France and Poland.
Napoleon did everything in his power to see that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation could never be reconstituted, and to ensure that the strongest states within the empire, namely Austria and Prussia, were permanently weakened. As far as Napoleon was concerned, multicultural empires were anathema in the age of the nation state. He wanted France to be the only great nation state in Europe, and for her greatness to endure the central kingdoms had to be annexed, their populations assimilated and what remained beyond them cut down to size. The only obstacles to France’s Continental hegemony were the power and reach of maritime Britain and the vastness of Russia.
In the end, Napoleon’s ambitions sank before the Nile, at Trafalgar, and froze or starved to death on the long march back from Moscow. After more than twenty-three years of non-stop war and devastation, which had cost the lives of over 6 million civilians and military combatants, the leniency with which Napoleon himself and France in particular were treated by the Royal Courts of Europe was truly remarkable.(27)
With the demise of the Holy Roman Empire at the hands of France, King Gustav IV of Sweden announced, ‘Although the most sacred bonds… have now been dissolved, the German nation can never be destroyed, and through the grace of Almighty God, Germany will one day be united once more, and restored to power and repute.’(28) Gustav was overstating what unity there had been, but giving voice to the thought that the European powers would now consider a stronger centre to act as a buffer to the expansionist desires of France. That role eventually fell to Prussia in a reconstituted ‘German Confederation’ — a secularised and rationalised loose German Federation of thirty-nine states within the borders of what had been the Holy Roman Empire.
xii His son Ludwig the Pious (who reigned from 814–840) was no less religious and no less amorous than his father (Charlemagne had nine wives and seventeen children), running off in his teens to the Benedictine Monastery south of Frankfurt with a young nun he had befriended. His fellow brother monks however did not wish to incur the wrath of his father, the Emperor, and gave him away. The beautiful monastic town was blessed and renamed by Charlemagne as Seligenstadt (‘blessed town’), which retains its beautiful medieval charm to this day. The restaurant opposite the main entrance to the monastery also hosted Napoleon for a night on his way to the Battle of Austerlitz.
xiii The Salian (Franconian) dynasty’s power base was centred on central-southern and southwestern Germany. During the eleventh century the Salian dynasty built one of Germany’s most enduring architectural monuments, the cathedral at Speyer, the largest Romanesque Cathedral north of the Alps, which contains the remains of four Holy Roman Emperors. This dynasty also built palaces in Aachen, Goslar, Magdeburg and Regensburg.
xiv By means of contrasting early German and English history, Barbarossa is now a largely negelected figure in Germany, whereas Richard the Lionheart is still revered. This is somewhat ironic as Richard Coeur de Lion, son of the French Plantagenet King of England Henry II, did not speak English and spent most of his years, when he was not crusading, focused upon his French domains leaving England to be exploited under the stewardship of his brother King John.
xv Maximillian also furthered the expansion of his dynasty in a very significant way by marrying his son Philip to the daughter of the King of Castille and Aragon, establishing the Spanish branch of the Habsburg family, who would come to rule over the largest empire of the modern age, both in the old world and the new.(17)
xvi Those beautiful imperial cities that escaped the firestorms of the Second World War and which can instantly transport you back to the Middle Ages include: the ancient Saxon capital of Quidlingenburg and the Salian dynasties’ fortified palace or Pfalz in Goslar (both towns are now UNESCO World Heritage listed sites); Forcheim, first mentioned in 805 in the Diedenhofener Kapitular document where Charlemagne forbade the towns of Magdeburg and Forcheim to trade weapons with the Slavs, and where in 911, Konrad 1 was crowned King of the Germans; Regensburg, which was the starting point for many of the crusades against the Slavs and became the long-term home of the Reichstag (Parliament); Rottenburg on the Tauber river (also known as ‘Christmas every day’ for its rich Christmas traditions and its museum of Christmas toys); Dinkelsbühl, famous for its Pied Piper-style summer children’s festival and Nordlingen, site of historical battles and a beautifully preserved medieval town; Speyer, with its eleventh-century cathedral, the largest in Europe north of the Alps; Wetzlar the home of the Reichskammergericht or Imperial Court of Justice and Fritzlar, where the Anglo-Saxon monk, St Boniface, began his Christianising mission to the Germans and where Heinrich I was crowned King of the Germans in 919, among others. (For a full list of the imperial towns see the appendix.)
xvii Taxes for wars against the approaching Turks were raised at Reichstags at regular intervals during the 1520–40s, again in 1594 and 1603, 1663 and on numerous occasions in the 1660s and 1670s to fight both the Turks and the French.
xviii Frankfurt — Holy Roman Emperors (Kaisers) were elected in the great Roman Hall (Römersaal) from 1356 and were also crowned in the city from 1562–1792 at Saint Bartholomew’s Cathedral.
xix The term ‘First Reich’ used to describe the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and the subsequent Second Reich used to describe the Prusso-German nation forged by Bismarck in 1871 did not come into common usage until the early twentieth century.(25)
xx Charles V primarily borrowed the money to gain his election from the German banking giants the Fugger family who were based in Augsburg, and who had been bankers to kings since the fourteenth century. They themselves were elected to the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire in 1511. Their most lasting achievement is the ‘Fuggerei’. In 1514, they bought part of Augsburg and in 1523 built fifty-two almshouses for the poor. Their most famous resident from 1681–94 was Mozart’s father. Augsburg and the Fuggerei would largely be destroyed in the Second World War, but the Fuggerei was rebuilt after the war and fully restored in 2007. To this day it remains open to the needy.
xxi Charles V is remembered by the Anglo-Saxons as the Spanish king, Charles I, who at the time of his alliance with England against Valois France had been betrothed to Henry VIII’s oldest daughter (Bloody) Mary, when she was only six. Charles V was Catherine of Aragon’s (Henry VIII first wife’s) nephew. As Holy Roman Emperor he put pressure on the Pope not to annul the marriage. After Henry VIII’s death, Mary, who had remained loyal to the Catholic faith, earned her epithet of ‘Bloody’ Mary by immediately burning 300 Protestant dissenters at the stake upon becoming queen. On the suggestion of Charles V, she married his son Prince Philip of Spain. Philip would succeed his father as King Philip II of Spain (but not as Holy Roman Emperor — as the German princes did not want a Catholic Spaniard on the throne and voted instead for Charles V’s Austrian Habsburg brother Ferdinand I). The marriage between Mary and Philip was unpopular, as the Protestant establishment in England rightly feared the threat this posed to their hard-won liberties. Philip II as King of Spain remains infamous in Anglo-Saxon history as being the king who launched the Spanish Armada against England in 1588.
xxii The Edict of Worms in 1521 pronounced a Reichsacht (imperial act of law) against Luther and his followers, following which he was excommunicated, his theses were banned from publication, reading, or being used in lectures and all subjects of the empire were charged with delivering the heretic to the Emperor.
xxiii To accommodate the electors’ growing concerns over his power as emperor, Charles allowed the Habsburg dynasty to essentially be divided in 1521 between the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs. The Austrian side, under his brother Ferdinand, received the title of Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, King of Bohemia and Hungary. (The male line of this ‘Austrian’ side of the Habsburgs died out in 1740 and this led to the wars of the Austrian succession, which ultimately put Maria Theresa, a female descendent, on th
e throne. Maria Theresa married Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine and their descendants continued the dynasty in the name of Habsburg-Lorraine).
xxiv In 1520, Cortes had just captured the vast and rich Aztec Empire in modern day Mexico. The conquests seemed limitless when Pizzaro also conquered the Inca Empire in 1532. Thus Charles focused his attentions and his son Philip’s on the more promising Spanish Habsburg line, its possessions included Spain and her newly acquired colonies in the New World, as well as the Netherlands and the Habsburg’s Italian dominions. In 1580, Philip II inherited Portugal and all its colonies including Brazil. The Spanish Habsburg line died out in 1700 leading to the Spanish War of Succession.
xxv In 1525, with the death of the King of Hungary at the Battle of Mohacs, Charles’s brother Ferdinand became King of Hungary as well as Austria, and took the battle to the Turks both on land and sea, venturing through the Balkans, the Mediterranean and in North Africa, gradually alleviating the pressure on the empire.
xxvi In 1529, the Turks reached the gates of Vienna, and again in 1566, before being turned back. There was another 117-year tug of war over the Balkans before the Turks were at the gates of Vienna again in 1683. As their star ultimately faded, the Balkans became a sphere of influence that was fought over both by Austria and Russia. It became the flashpoint for the outbreak of many regional conflicts until 1914 when it became the match that set the world ablaze.
xxvii In 1530, true to his convictions, Charles was the last Holy Roman Emperor to receive his formal coronation at the hands of a Pope — Pope Clement VII who crowned him emperor in Bologna.
xxviii The Inquisition was one of the most evil institutions in the history of mankind. As many as 5 million souls are said to have been tortured to death, burned or drowned at the hands of the Catholic Church from the 1480s through to the end of the Counter-Reformation. It also led to the total ethnic cleansing of the Jews and Moorish descendants (the Moriscos) from Spain, from 1492 to the early 1600s. This genocide was unparalleled in Europe, but one that would later pale into insignificance in terms of the barbarity that was employed in the Caribbean and the Americas.(7)
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