Germany from 911 to 1250

Conrad I

When in 911 Louis the Child, last of the East Frankish Carolingians, died without leaving a male heir, it seemed quite possible that his kingdom would break into pieces. In at least three of the duchies—Bavaria, Saxony, and Franconia—the ducal families were established in the leadership of their regions; in Swabia (Alemannia) two houses were still fighting for hegemony. Only the church, fearing for its endowments, had an obvious interest in the survival of the monarchy, its ancient protector. Against the growing authority of the dukes and the deep differences in dialect, customs, and social structure among the tribal duchies there stood only the Carolingian tradition of kingship. But with Charles III (Charles the Simple) as ruler of the West Frankish kingdom, its future was uncertain and not very hopeful. Only the Lotharingians put their faith in the ancient line and did homage to Charles, its sole reigning representative. The other component parts of the East Frankish kingdom did not follow suit.

On November 10, 911, Saxon and Frankish leaders ended Carolingian rule in Germany when they met at Forchheim in Franconia to elect Conrad, duke of the Franks, as their king. The rejection of the Carolingian dynasty was motivated by the dynasty’s inability to protect the kingdom from invaders and by related internal political matters. In the early 10th century the Germanic peoples in the lands east of the Rhine and west of the Elbe and Saale rivers and the Bohemian Forest—as rudimentary and as thinly spread as their settlements were—had to face even more primitive and pagan races pressing in from farther east, especially the Magyars. The Saxons, headed by the Liudolfing duke Otto—who refused to be considered a candidate for the royal crown—were threatened by more enemies on their frontiers than any other tribe; Danes, Slavs, and Magyars simultaneously harassed their homeland. A king who commanded resources farther west, in Franconia, might therefore prove to be of help to Saxony. The Rhenish Franks, on the other hand, did not wish to abdicate their position as the leading and kingmaking people, which gave them many material advantages.

Conrad of Franconia, elected by Franks and Saxons, was soon recognized also by Arnulf, duke of Bavaria, and by the Swabian clans. In descent, honours, and wealth, however, Conrad was no more than the equal of the dukes who had accepted him as king. To surmount them, to found a new royal house, and to acquire those wonder-working attributes that the Germans venerated in their rulers long after they had been converted to Christianity, he had yet to prove himself able, lucky, and successful.

In this period, political affairs became the monopoly of the German kings and a few score families of great magnates. The reason for this concentration of power was that, at the very foundation of the German kingdom, circumstances had long favoured those men whom birth, wealth, and military success had raised well above the ranks of the ordinary free members of their tribe. Their estates were cultivated in the main by half-free peasants—enslaved people who had risen or freemen who had sunk. The holdings of these dependents fell under the power of the lord to whom they owed service and obedience. Already they were tied to the lands on which they laboured and were dependent on their protectors for justice. For many reasons, ordinary freemen tended generally to lose their independence and had to seek aid from their more fortunate and powerful neighbours; thus, they lost their standing in the assemblies of their tribe. Everywhere, except in Friesland and parts of Saxony, the nobles wedged themselves between king or duke and the rank and file. They alone could become prelates of the church, and they alone could compete for the possession and enjoyment of political power. At the level below the dukes, the bulk of administrative authority, jurisdiction, and command in war lay with the margraves and counts, whose hold on their charges developed gradually into a hereditary right. The commended men and the half-free disappeared from the important functions of public life. In the local assemblies they came only to pay dues and to receive orders, justice, and penalties. Their political role was passive. Those lords whose protection was most worth having also had the largest throng of dependents and thus became more formidable to their enemies and to the remaining freemen. Lordship and vassalage were hereditary, and thus the horizon of the dependent classes narrowed until eventually the lord and his officials held all secular authority and power over their lives. Military strength, the possession of arms and horses, and tactical training in their use were decisive. Most dependent men were disarmed, and this became part of their degradation.

The accession of the Saxons

Conrad I was quite unequal to the situation in Germany. According to the beliefs of contemporaries, his failure meant that his house was luckless and lacked the prosperity-bringing virtues that belonged to true kingship. He also had no heir. On his deathbed in 918, he therefore proposed that the crown, which in 911 had remained with the Franks, should now pass to the leading man in Saxony, the Liudolfing Henry (later called the Fowler). Henry I was elected by the Saxons and Franks at Fritzlar, their ancient meeting place, in 919. With a monarch of their own ethnicity, the Saxons now took over the burden and the rewards of being the kingmaking people. The centre of gravity shifted to eastern Saxony, where the Liudolfing lands lay.

The transition of the crown from the Franks to the Saxons for a time enhanced the self-sufficiency of the southern German tribes. The Swabians had kept away from the Fritzlar election. The Bavarians believed that they had a better right to the Carolingian inheritance than the Saxons (who had been remote outsiders in the 9th century) and in 919 elected their own duke, Arnulf, as king. They too wanted to be the royal and kingmaking people. Henry I’s regime rested in the main on his own position and family demesne in Saxony and on certain ancient royal seats in Franconia. His kingship was purely military. He hoped to win authority by waging successful frontier wars and to gain recognition through concessions rather than to insist on the sacred and priestlike status of the royal office that the church had built up in the 9th century. At his election he refused to be anointed and consecrated by the archbishop of Mainz. In settling with the Bavarians, he abandoned the policy of supporting the internal opposition that the clergy offered to Duke Arnulf, a plank to which Conrad had clung. To end Arnulf’s rival kingship, Henry formally surrendered to him the most characteristic privilege and honour of the crown: the right to dispose of the region’s bishoprics and abbeys. Arnulf’s homage and friendship entailed no obligations to Henry, and the Bavarian duke pursued his own regional interests—peace with the Hungarians and expansion across the Alps—as long as he lived.

From these unpromising beginnings the Saxon dynasty not only found its way back to Carolingian traditions of government but soon got far better terms in its relations with the autonomous powers of the duchies, which had gained such a start on it. Nonetheless, the governing structures that it bequeathed to its Salian successors were self-contradictory: while seeking to overcome the princely aristocracies of the duchies by leaving them to themselves, the Saxon kings came to rely more and more, both for the inspiration and for the practice of government, on the prelates of the church, who were themselves recruited from the ranks of the same great families. They loaded bishoprics and abbeys with endowments and privileges and thus gradually turned the bishops and abbots into princes with interests not unlike those of their lay kinsmen. These weaknesses, however, lay concealed behind the personal ascendancy of an exceptionally tough and commanding set of rulers up to the middle of the 11th century. Thereafter the ambiguous system could not take the strain of the changes fermenting within German society and even less the attack on its values that came from without—from the reformed papacy.

The Liudolfing kings won military success, and with it they gained the respect for their personal authority that counted for so much at a time when the great followed only those whose star they trusted and who could reward services with the spoils of victory. In 925 Henry I brought Lotharingia (the region between the upper Meuse and Schelde rivers in the west and the Rhine River in the east that contained Charlemagne’s capital Aachen) back to the East Frankish realm. Whoever had authority in that region could treat the neighbouring kingdom of the West Franks as a dependent. The young Saxon dynasty thus won for itself and its successors a hegemony over the west and the southwest that lasted at least until the mid-11th century. The Carolingian kings of France, as well as the great feudatories who sought to dominate, if not to ruin, them, became in turn petitioners to the German court during the reign of the Ottos. The kings of Burgundy—whose suzerainty lay over the valleys of the Saône and the Rhône, the western Alps, and Provence—fell under the virtual tutelage of the masters of Lotharingia. Rich in ancient towns, this region, once the homeland of the Carolingians, was more thickly populated and wealthier than the lands east of the Rhine. Lotharingian merchants controlled the slave trade from the Saxon marches to Córdoba.

The eastern policy of the Saxons

Greater prestige still and a claim to imperial hegemony fell to the Saxon rulers when they broke the impetus of the Hungarian (Magyar) invasions, against which the military resources and methods of western European society had almost wholly failed for several decades. In 933, after long preparations, Henry routed a Hungarian attack on Saxony and Thuringia. In 955 Otto I (Otto the Great; reigned 936–973), at the head of a force to which nearly all the duchies had sent mounted contingents, annihilated a great Hungarian army on the Lech River near Augsburg. The battle again vindicated the efficiency of the heavily armed man skilled in fighting on horseback.

With a Saxon dynasty on the throne, Saxon nobles gained office and power, with opportunities for conquest along the eastern river frontiers and marches of their homeland. Otto I implemented an eastern policy that aimed at getting more than enslaved people, loot, and tribute. Between 955 and 972 he founded and richly endowed an archbishopric at Magdeburg, which he intended to be the metropolis of a large missionary province among the Slavic Wends beyond the Elbe, who remained faithful to their traditional polytheistic religion. This would have brought their tribes under German control and exploitation in the long run, but the ruthless methods of the Saxon lay lords led to a rebellion that forced Otto to scale back his plans.

In the 10th century there was little or no German agricultural settlement beyond the Elbe. Far too much forested land remained available for clearing and colonization in western and southern Germany. The Saxons attempted to secure their tenuous military victories in the region between the Elbe and Oder rivers by building and garrisoning forts. Beyond the Wends of Brandenburg and Lusatia, meanwhile, new Slavic powers rose; the Poles under Mieszko I and, to the south, the Czechs under the Přemyslids received missionaries from Magdeburg and Passau without falling permanently under the political and ecclesiastical domination of Saxons and Bavarians. The Wends, who had been subjugated by the Saxon margraves, resisted conversion to Christianity. They rebelled in 983 against the German military occupation, which collapsed along with the missionary bishoprics that had been founded at Oldenburg, Brandenburg, and Havelberg. Farther south the defenses of the Thuringian marches between the Saale and the middle Elbe remained in German hands, but only after a long and fierce struggle against Polish invaders early in the 11th century. The northern part of the frontier reverted to its position before Otto’s trustees, Hermann Billung and Gero, had begun their wars. Missionary enterprises directed into Wendish territory from Bremen and Magdeburg achieved little before the 12th century.

The Saxon ruling class and margraves must bear the responsibility for the fiasco of eastward expansion in the 10th century. The prelates too saw their missions as means to found ecclesiastical empires of subject dioceses that would exact tribute from the conquered Wends. The Slavic tribes across the Elbe remained unconverted and implacable foes, a standing menace to the nearby churches. The wars also left a legacy of savagery on both sides, so that from about 1140 onward the colonization of conquered Slavic lands by German settlers became the common policy of both the church and the princes.

Dukes, counts, and advocates

Conrad I’s and Henry I’s kingships rested on the election by the tribal duchies’ leaders and higher aristocracy. It was in the first place an arrangement between the Franks and the Saxons that the Bavarian and Swabian dukes recognized at a price by acts of personal homage, but the German kings, of whatever dynasty, had to live under Frankish law. After the death of Conrad I’s brother Eberhard in 939, Otto I kept the Franconian dukedom vacant, and the Franconian counts henceforth stood under the immediate authority of the crown. In Saxony too Otto kept in his hands the dukedom of his ancestors, even though the beginning of the Billung line of dukes is traditionally dated to 936. The march-duchy of the Billungs, a bulwark raised against the Danes and the northern Slav tribes, gave the Billung family military command but did not give it authority over all the other Saxon princes.

In the south the Ottonians sought to turn the tribal duchies into royal lands and to supplant native dynasties with aliens and members of their own clan. When even that policy did not stop rebellions under the banner of tribal self-interest, the Ottonians began to break up the ancient Bavarian tribal land by carving out a new duchy in Carinthia where the Bavarian expansion southward had opened up new lands and sources of revenue. The first two members of the Rhine-Frankish Salian dynasty, Conrad II (reigned 1024–39) and Henry III (reigned alone 1039–56), also bestowed vacant duchies quite freely on their own kin and on men from outside the duchies. They competed against ducal power but could neither abolish nor replace it. In the 11th century, as before, the dukes held assemblies of their freemen and nobility, led the tribal army in war, and enforced peace.

The counts, who were the ordinary officers of justice in serious criminal cases, obeyed the ducal summons; but, for the most part, they received their “ban,” the power to do blood justice, from the king himself. The lands and the customary rights attached to their office, and indeed the office itself, not only became hereditary but also came to be treated more and more as a patrimony to which they had an inherent right against all other men, king and duke included. Even so, however, a good many lines died out, and their counties fell back into the king’s hands. From Otto III’s reign (983–1002) onward, kings often bestowed these counties on bishoprics and great abbeys rather than granting them again to lay magnates. The bishops, however, could not perform all the functions of the counts; in particular, their holy orders forbade them to pass judgments of blood. They often subinfeudated their countships, and they needed officials called advocates (Vögte; singular Vogt) to take charge of the higher jurisdiction in the territories that their churches possessed by royal grant. In the 10th and 11th centuries these advocates had to be recruited from the aristocracy, the very class whose greed for hereditary office was to be checked, because ordinary freemen could not enforce severe sentences or defend the privileges of the church against armed intrusion. Ostensibly advocates and protectors of ecclesiastical possessions, the nobles were in fact anything but reliable servants of their ecclesiastical overlords and instead posed great danger for the bishoprics and abbeys.

Thus there arose in nearly all German lands, whether the ducal office survived or not, powerful lines of margraves, counts, and hereditary advocates who enriched themselves at the expense of the church (which meant also the crown) and in competition with one another. From the abler, more fortunate, and long-lived of these dynasties sprang the territorial princes of the later 12th and 13th centuries, absorbing and finally inheriting most of the rights of government.

The king was the personal overlord of all the great. His court was the seat of government, and it went with him on his long journeys. The German kings, even more than other medieval rulers, could make their authority respected in the far-flung regions of their kingdom only by traveling ceaselessly from duchy to duchy, from frontier to frontier. Wherever they stayed, their jurisdiction superseded the standing power of dukes, counts, and advocates, and they could collect the profits of local justice and wield some control over it. As they came into each region, they summoned its leaders to attend their solemn crown wearings, deliberated with them on the affairs of the kingdom and the locality, presided over pleas, granted privileges, and made war against peacemakers at home and enemies abroad.

The promotion of the German church

The royal revenues came from the king’s demesne and from his share of the tributes that Poles, Czechs, Wends, and Danes paid whenever he could enforce his claims of overlordship. There were also profits from tolls and mints that had not yet been granted away. The king’s demesne was his working capital. He and his household lived on its produce during their wanderings through the Reich, and he used its revenue to provide for his family, to found churches, and to reward faithful services done to him, especially in war. To swell his army, the king needed to add new vassals, and he inevitably had to grant land to some of them from his own demesne. Although the Salians inherited the remains of Ottonian wealth as an imperial demesne, they brought little of their own to make up for its diminution. The last Ottonian, Henry II (1002–24), and after him Conrad II, accordingly took to enfeoffing vassals with lands taken from the monasteries. Since the beneficiaries were often already powerful and wealthy men in their own right, no class of freeborn mounted warriors linked permanently with the crown resulted from the loyalties established and rewards granted during but one or two reigns. In any case, the lion’s share of grants went to the German church.

From the Carolingians the German kings inherited their one institution of central government: the royal chapel, with the chancery, which does not seem to have been distinct from it. Service there became a recognized avenue of promotion to the episcopate for highborn clerics. In the 11th century, bishops and abbots conducted the affairs of the Reich much more than the lay lords, even in war. They were its habitual diplomats and ambassadors. Unlike Henry I, Otto I and his successors sought to free the prelates from all forms of subjection to the dukes. The king appointed most of them, and to him alone, as to one sent by God, they owed obedience.

Thus there arose beside the loose association of tribal duchies in the German kingdom a more compact and uniform body with a far greater vested interest in the Reich: the German church. By ancient Germanic custom, moreover, the founder of a church did not lose his estate in the endowment that he had made; he remained its proprietor and protecting lord. Still, the bishoprics and certain ancient abbeys, such as Sankt Gallen, Reichenau, Fulda, and Hersfeld, did not belong to the king; they were members of the kingdom, but he served only as their guardian. The greater churches therefore had to provide the rulers with mounted men, money, and free quarters. Gifts of royal demesne to found or to enrich bishoprics and convents were not really losses of land but pious reinvestments, as long as the crown controlled the appointments of bishops and abbots. The church did not merely receive grants of land, often uncultivated, to settle, develop, and make profitable; it was also given jurisdiction over its dependents. Nor did the kings stint the prelates in other regalian rights, such as mints, markets, and tolls. These grants broke up counties and to some extent even duchies, and that was their purpose: to disrupt the secular lords’ jurisdictions that had escaped royal control.

This policy of fastening the church, a universal institution, into the Reich, with its well-defined frontiers, is usually associated with Otto I, but it gathered momentum only in the reigns of his successors. The policy reached a climax under Henry II, the founder of the see of Bamberg in the upper Main valley; nonetheless, Conrad II, though less generous with his grants, and his son Henry III continued it. Bishops and abbots became the competitors of lay princes in the formation of territories, a rivalry that more than any other was the fuel and substance of the ceaseless feuds—the smoldering internal wars in all the regions of Germany for many centuries. The welter and the confused mosaic of the political map of Germany until 1803 is the not-so-remote outcome of these 10th- and 11th-century grants and of the incompatible ambitions that they aroused.

The Ottonian conquest of Italy and the imperial crown

Otto first entered Italy in 951 and, according to some accounts, was already interested in securing the imperial crown. He campaigned in Italy at the request of Adelaide (Adelheid), the daughter of Rudolph II of Burgundy and widow of the king of Italy, who had been jailed by Berengar II, the king of Italy. Otto defeated Berengar, secured Adelaide’s release, and then married her. His first Italian campaign was also motivated by political developments in Germany, including the competing ambitions in Italy of his son Liudolf, duke of Swabia, and Otto’s brother Henry I, duke of Bavaria. Although he would be called back to Germany by a revolt in 953, Otto accomplished his primary goals during his first trip to Italy. He gained legitimate rights to govern in Italy as a result of his marriage, and securing his southern flanks guaranteed access to the pope. Moreover, after 951, expeditions into Italy were a matter for the whole Reich under the leadership of its ruler and no longer just expansion efforts by the southern German tribes. For the Saxon military class, too, the south was more tempting than the forests and swamps beyond the Elbe. With superior forces at their back, the German kings gained possession of the Lombard kingdom in Italy. There too their overlordship in the 10th and the 11th centuries came to rest on the bishoprics and a handful of great abbeys.

After Otto I’s victory over the Magyars in 955, his hegemony in the West was indisputable. Indeed, he was hailed in traditional fashion as emperor (imperator) by his troops after the victory, which was seen as divine sanction for Otto’s ascendant position by his contemporaries. Furthermore, according to one chronicler, the Saxon Widukind, he had already become emperor because he had subjected other peoples and enjoyed authority in more than one kingdom. But the right to confer the imperial crown, to raise a king to the higher rank of emperor, belonged to the papacy, which had crowned Charlemagne and most of his successors. The Carolingian order was still the model and something like a political ideal for all Western ruling families in the 10th century. Otto had measured himself against the political tasks that had faced his East Frankish predecessors and more or less mastered them. To be like Charlemagne, therefore, and to clothe his newly won position in a traditional and time-honoured dignity, he accepted the imperial crown and anointment from Pope John XII in Rome in 962. The substance of his empire was military power and success in war, but Christian and Roman ideas were woven round the Saxon’s throne by the writers of his own and the next generation. Although the German kings as emperors did not legislate matters of doctrine and ritual, they became the political masters of the Roman church for nearly a century. The imperial crown enhanced their standing even among the nobles and knights who followed them to Italy and could hardly have understood or wanted all its outlandish associations. Not only the king but also the German bishops and lay lords thus entered into a permanent connection with an empire won on the way to Rome and bestowed by the papacy.

Otto I successfully revived the empire in the West on Carolingian precedents and secured Ottonian rule in Germany, but his greatest triumph may have come near the end of his reign when he secured both recognition from the Byzantine emperor and a marriage arrangement between his son, Otto II, and the Byzantine princess Theophano. In 973 Otto II succeeded his father as emperor. His attention, perhaps under his wife’s influence, was drawn to Italy and the Mediterranean, and he campaigned in southern Italy with disastrous results, suffering a terrible defeat at the hands of Muslim armies. When Otto II died in 983, his heir, Otto III, was only three years old, and a period of regency preceded a reign of great promise unfulfilled. Inheriting the traditions of both the Western and Eastern empires, the third Otto sought to revive the Christian Roman empire of Charlemagne and Constantine and planned a great capital in Rome. Otto’s grand ambition is reflected in the appointment of Gerbert of Aurillac as pope, who took the name Sylvester II in imitation of Constantine’s pope; in Otto’s efforts to expand the empire and Christendom to the east; and in his discovery, with its apocalyptic overtones, of the tomb of Charlemagne in the year 1000. His premature death two years later, followed by that of Sylvester in 1003, ended this promising chapter of German history. His successor, Henry II, returned the imperial focus to Germany and contented himself with three brief Italian expeditions.

The Salians, the papacy, and the princes, 1024–1125

During the reign of Conrad II (1024–39), the first Salian emperor, the kingdom of Burgundy fell finally under the overlordship of the German crown, and this tough and formidable emperor also renewed German authority in Italy. His son and successor, Henry III (1039–56), treated the empire as a mission that imposed on him the tasks of reforming the papacy and of preaching peace to his lay vassals. Without possessing any very significant new resources of power, he nevertheless lent his authority an exalted and strained theocratic complexion. Yet, under Henry, the last German ruler to maintain his hegemony in western Europe, the popes themselves seemed to become mere imperial bishops. He deposed three of them, and four Germans held the Holy See at his command, but lay opposition to the emperor in Germany and criticism of his control over the church were on the increase during the last years of his reign.

Papal reform and the German church

More than any other society in early medieval Europe, Germany was divided and torn by the revolutionary ideas and measures of the so-called Gregorian Reform movement. Beginning with the pontificate of Leo IX (1048–54)—one of Henry III’s nominees—the most determined and inspired spokesmen of ecclesiastical reform placed themselves at the service of the Holy See. Only a few years after Henry’s death (1056), they agitated against lay authority in the church and issued a papal election decree that virtually eliminated imperial involvement. The ecclesiastical reformers sought to restore what they thought was the rightful order of the world and denied the notion of theocratic kingship. Priests, including bishops and abbots, who accepted their dignities from lay lords and emperors at a price, according to the reformers, committed the sin of simony (the buying and selling of church office). The reformers argued that earthly powers could not rightly confer the gifts of the Holy Spirit and thus rejected the tradition of lay investiture. They believed, moreover, that true reforms could be brought about only by the exaltation of the papacy so that it commanded the obedience of all provincial metropolitans and was out of the reach of the emperor and the local aristocracy.

The endless repetition of the reformers’ message in brilliant pamphlets and at clerical synods spread agitation in Italy, Burgundy, and Lotharingia—all parts of the empire. Their new program committed the leaders of the movement to a struggle for power because it struck at the very roots of the regime to which the German church had grown accustomed and on which the German kings relied. The vast wealth that Henry IV’s predecessors had showered on the bishoprics and abbeys would, if the new teaching prevailed, escape his control and remain at the disposal of prelates whom he no longer appointed. Under Roman authority the churches were to be freed from most of the burdens of royal protection without losing any of its benefits. The most fiery spirits in Rome did not flinch from the consequences of their convictions. Their leader Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), was ready to risk a collision with the empire.

Henry IV was not yet six years old when his father died in 1056. The full impact of the Gregorian demands—coming shortly after a royal minority, a Saxon rising, and a conspiracy of the southern German princes—has often been regarded as the most disastrous moment in Germany’s history during the Middle Ages. In fact, the German church had proved thoroughly unreliable as an inner bastion of the empire even before Rome struck. One of its leaders, Archbishop Anno of Cologne, kidnapped Henry in 1062 to gain control of both the young king and the regency, and another, Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen, exploited his influence over the young king by enriching his ecclesiastical possessions at imperial expense. In 1074 and 1075 Gregory proceeded against simony in Germany and humiliated the aristocratic episcopate by issuing summonses to Rome and sentences of suspension. These papal actions demoralized and shook the German hierarchy. The prelates’ return to their customary support of the crown was neither disinterested nor wholehearted nor unanimous.

The civil war against Henry IV

Although he intended to cooperate with Henry IV at the outset of his papacy, Gregory VII was drawn into a terrible conflict with the king because of Henry’s refusal to obey papal commands. Emboldened by his success in 1075 against the Saxons, Henry took a firm stand against Gregory in disputes over the appointment of the archbishop of Milan and the pope’s excommunication of a number of Henry’s advisers. At the synod of Worms in January 1076, Henry took the dramatic step of demanding that Gregory abdicate, and the German bishops renounced their allegiance to the pope. At his Lenten synod the following month, Gregory absolved all men from their oaths to Henry and solemnly excommunicated and deposed the king. The situation quickly became desperate for Henry, who both lost much support and faced a reinvigorated revolt. In October, Gregory’s legates and leaders of the German opposition assembled at Tribur (now Trebur, Germany) to decide the future of the king, who by this point had been abandoned by his last adherents. Gregory was then invited to attend a meeting at Augsburg the following February to mediate the situation. Henry hastened to meet Gregory at Canossa before the pope reached Augsburg, however, and appealed to him as a penitent sinner. Gregory had little choice but to forgive his rival and lifted the excommunication in January 1077. Despite Gregory’s reconciliation with Henry, the princes elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden king at a gathering in Forchheim in March.

The civil war that now broke out lasted almost 20 years. A majority of the bishops, most of Rhenish Franconia (the Salian homeland), and some important Bavarian and Swabian vassals sided with Henry. He thus held a geographically central position that separated his southern German enemies from his Saxon ones, who could not unite long enough to destroy him. With the death in battle of Rudolf of Rheinfelden in 1080 and the demise of another anti-king, Hermann of Salm, in 1088, the war in Germany degenerated into a number of local conflicts over the possession of bishoprics and abbeys. Henry was also successful in the larger struggle with Gregory, invading Italy and forcing the pope from Rome in 1084. At that time, Henry elevated Wibert of Ravenna to the papal throne as the antipope Clement III, who then crowned Henry emperor.

The situation remained in flux throughout the rest of Henry’s reign. In 1093 Henry was nearly toppled by a revolt led by his son Conrad, and a revived papacy under Urban II challenged the legitimacy of Clement. In 1098 the tide turned again when Henry appointed his other son, Henry, as his heir and relations with the bishops and papacy improved. Ultimately, however, Henry’s reign was doomed to failure by one final revolt. Even his apparent triumph at Canossa was tempered by his loss of status as a divinely appointed ruler.

Throughout these years, the crown, the churches, and the lay lords had to enfeoff more and more ministeriales in order to raise mounted warriors for their forces. Though this recruitment and frequent devastations strained the fortunes of many nobles, they recouped their losses by extorting fiefs from neighbouring bishoprics and abbeys. The divided German church thus bore the brunt of the costs of civil war, and it needed peace at almost any price.

Henry V

The Salian dynasty and the rights for which it fought were saved because Henry IV’s son and heir himself seized the leadership of a last rising against his father (1105). This maneuver enabled Henry V (1106–25) to continue the struggle for the crown’s prerogative over the empire’s churches against the demands of the papacy. As the struggle continued, the princes became the arbiters and held the balance between their overlord and the pope. In 1122, acting as intermediaries and on behalf of the Reich, they reached the agreement known as the Concordat of Worms with the Holy See and its German spokesman, Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz, the bitter personal enemy of Henry V. By then, however, the princes had for the most part defeated efforts to restore royal rights in Saxony and to stem the swollen jurisdictions and territorial powers of the aristocracy elsewhere.

When Henry V, the last Salian, died childless in 1125, Germany was no longer the most effective political force in Europe. The brilliant conquest states of the Normans in England and Sicily and the patient, step-by-step labours of the French kings were achieving forms of government and concentrations of military and economic strength that the older and larger empire lacked. The papacy had dimmed the empire’s prestige and decreased the emperor’s power, and Rome became the true home of universalistic causes. When Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095, Henry IV, cut off and surrounded by enemies, was living obscurely in a corner of northern Italy. The Holy See, by its great appeal to the militant lay nobility of western Europe, thus won the initiative over the empire. At this critical moment the Reich also lost control in the Italian bishoprics and towns just when their population, trade, and industrial production were expanding quickly. Germany did not even benefit indirectly from the Crusaders’ triumphs, although some of their leaders (e.g., Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert II of Flanders) were vassals of the emperor. The civil wars renewed for a time the relative isolation of the central German regions.

Internally, the crown had saved something of the indispensable means of government in the control over the church, but it was a bare minimum, and its future was problematic. The ecclesiastical princes henceforth held only their temporal lands as imperial fiefs, for which they owed personal and material services. As feudatories of the empire, they came to represent the same interests toward it as did the lay princes; at least, their sense of a special obligation tended to weaken. The king’s jurisdiction continued to exist alongside and in competition with that of the local powers. The great tribal duchies survived as areas of separate customary law. Each developed differently, and the crown could not impose its rights on all alike or change the existing social order. The most tenacious defenders of this legal autonomy had been the Saxons, but it also prevailed in Swabia, where distinct territorial lordships grew fast.

The Gregorian reform movement therefore aggravated the age-old contradictions in Germany’s early medieval constitution, but its monastic culture and its intellectual interests were anything but barren. Both sides fought with new literary weapons over public opinion in cathedrals and cloisters and perhaps also in the castles of the lay aristocracy. In their hard-hitting polemical writings they attempted to expound the fundamental theological, historical, and legal truths of their cause. The agitation did something to disturb the cultural self-sufficiency of the German laity. It drove many of the southern German nobles to maintain direct connections with the Holy See, and, whether they wanted to or not, they had to fall in with the aspirations of the religious leaders. The reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries, it might almost be said, very nearly completed the conversion of Germany that had begun five centuries before.

Dynastic competition, 1125–52

The nearest kinsmen of Henry V were his Hohenstaufen nephews—Frederick, duke of Swabia, and his younger brother Conrad—the sons of Henry’s sister Agnes and Frederick, the first Hohenstaufen duke of Swabia. Some form of election had always been necessary to succeed to the crown, but, before the great civil war, nearness to the royal blood had been honoured whenever a dynasty failed in the direct line. By 1125, however, the princes, guided by Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz, no longer respected blood right. Affinity with Henry V was no recommendation to them, and hereditary succession seemed to lower the authority they vested in the government of the Reich. Instead of Frederick, they chose the duke of Saxony, Lothar of Supplinburg (reigned as King Lothar III in 1125–37 and as Emperor Lothar II in 1133–37). Like the Hohenstaufen, he had risen through a lucky marriage and continuous combat into the first rank of dynasts, but, unlike them, he had served the cause of the Saxon opposition to the Salians.

With the enormous Northeim and Brunonian inheritances behind him, Lothar II could humble the Hohenstaufen brothers after marrying his only daughter and heiress to a Welf, Henry the Proud, in 1134. Even without this dazzling alliance, the Welfs—already dukes of Bavaria and possessors of vast demesnes, countships, and ecclesiastical advocacies there, in Saxony, and in Swabia—were somewhat better off than their Hohenstaufen rivals. On the death of Lothar in 1137, however, the fears of the church and a few princes turned against the Welfs. Instead of Henry the Proud, who now held the duchies of Saxony and Bavaria and the Mathildine lands in Italy, they chose as their ruler Conrad (reigned 1138–52), who had been Lothar’s unsuccessful Hohenstaufen opponent.

The battle against the Welfs, which Conrad III put foremost on his political program, was abandoned with his death in 1152, when an election decided the succession and the political situation in Germany for the next 30 years. This time the princes chose Frederick I (reigned as king in 1152–90 and emperor in 1155–90), the son of Conrad’s elder brother Frederick and the Welf princess Judith. Selected in part because of his connections with important families in Germany, Frederick (known as Frederick Barbarossa, “Redbeard”) was careful to maintain good relations with them and made concessions to his powerful Welf cousin Henry the Lion. In 1156 the duchy of Bavaria, which Conrad had tried to wrest from the Welfs, was restored to Henry the Lion, already undisputed duke of Saxony. Henry II Jasomirgott, the Babenberg margrave of Austria who was Henry the Lion’s rival for Bavaria, had to be compensated with a charter that raised his margravate to a duchy and gave him judicial suzerainty over an even wider area. Taken out of the Lion’s duchy, it was to be held as an imperial fief that might descend both to sons and daughters. A perpetual principality, it served as a model for the aspirations of many other lay princes.

Colonization of the east

The history of Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries is one of ceaseless expansion. A conquering and colonizing movement burst across the river frontiers into the swamps and forests from Holstein to Silesia and overwhelmed the Slavic Wendish tribes between the Elbe and the Oder. Every force in German society took part: the princes, the prelates, new religious orders, knights, townspeople, and peasant settlers. Agrarian conditions in the older German lands seem to have favoured large-scale emigration. With a rising population, there was much experience in drainage and wood clearing but a diminishing fund of spare land to be developed in the west. Excessive subdivision of holdings impoverished tenants and did not suit the interests of their lords. Sometimes also, seignorial oppression is said to have driven peasants to desert their masters’ estates. They certainly found a better return for their labour in the colonial east: personal freedom, secure and hereditary leasehold tenures at moderate rents, and, in many places, quittance from services and the jurisdiction of the seignorial advocate.

The colonists brought with them a disciplined routine of husbandry, an efficient plow, and orderly methods in siting and laying out their villages. Very soon, even the Slavic rulers of Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic) and Silesia (now mostly in Poland) were competing for immigrants. First and foremost, however, the princes of the Saxon and Thuringian marches sought to attract settlers for the lands that they had conquered and the towns that they had founded to open up communications and trade routes. The older regions of the Reich, moreover, had not only peasants but also men of the knightly class to spare—soldiers who needed fiefs and lordships to uphold their rank. Both could be gained beyond the Elbe under the leadership of successful princes. The Germanized east thus became the home of fair-sized principalities in the 13th century, while all along the Rhine River valley the rights of government were scattered over smaller and less compact territories. The Ascanian dynasty, for instance, which under Albert I (Albert the Bear) began to advance into Brandenburg, by 1250 not only ruled over a broad belt of land up to the Oder River but, having already established its control on the Oder’s eastern banks, was ready for further advances. Farther south the Wettin margraves of Meissen busied themselves with settlements and town foundations in Lusatia.

For a time, Henry the Lion, as duke of Saxony (1142–80), overshadowed all these rising powers, and the Welf profited as much by the ruthless use of his resources against weaker competitors as by his own efforts in Mecklenburg. As his was the only protection worth having in northeastern Germany, the newly established Baltic bishoprics were at his mercy, and he alone could attract the traders of Gotland to frequent the young port town of Lübeck, which he extorted from one of his vassals in 1158.

The Reich too possessed demesnes in the east, notably the Egerland, Vogtland, and Pleissnerland in the Thuringian march. The Hohenstaufen kings therefore took some part in opening up these regions. They too founded towns and monasteries on their thickly wooded lands and established their ministeriales as burgraves and advocates over them. But in this, as in many other things, they only competed with the princes. They did not and could not control the eastward movement as a whole.

Hohenstaufen policy in Italy

In the other great field of German expansion in the 12th century—Lombardy and central Italy—the emperors and their military following alone counted. Indeed, from the very start of his reign, Frederick Barbarossa sought to recover and exploit regalian and imperial rights over the growing Lombard city communes and the rest of Italy. The connection between the German crown, the empire, and dominion over Italy has sometimes been regarded as a disaster for Germany and the ever-increasing concern of the Hohenstaufen dynasty with the south as its most tragic phase. Although Frederick’s policy was opportunistic, it was motivated by political necessity and personal inclination. Having bought off the Welfs, reconciled other great families with yet more concessions, and lastly endowed his own cousin, Conrad III’s son Frederick, with Hohenstaufen demesnes in Swabia, he had to try to mobilize their goodwill toward the empire while it lasted. He now aimed to set up a regime of imperial officials and captains who were to exact dues and to control jurisdiction that the communes had usurped from the failing grasp of their bishops. In 1158, as part of this plan, Frederick made his second Italian expedition and conquered Milan, the preeminent city in Lombardy. This was followed by an assembly and the publication of the Roncaglia decrees, which defined royal rights and attempted to establish Frederick’s authority in Italy.

For the Hohenstaufen ministeriales the rule of their masters in northern and central Italy provided a career. Because they could be deployed continuously, they became the backbone of the imperial occupation. A handful of minor dynasts also served Frederick for many years in the powerful and profitable commands that he established. The German bishops and certain abbots still had to supply men and money, and some of them threw themselves wholeheartedly into the war: for instance, Rainald of Dassel and Philip of Heinsberg, archbishops of Cologne from 1159 to 1167 and from 1167 to 1191, respectively, as archchancellors for Italy, had a vested interest in it. The support of the lay princes, conversely, was fitful and sporadic. Even at critical moments, they could not be counted on, unless they individually agreed to serve or to send their much-needed contingents for a season. The refusal of the greatest of them, Henry the Lion, in 1176 brought about the emperor’s defeat at the Battle of Legnano and spoiled many years’ efforts in Lombardy.

The fall of Henry the Lion

Forced to retreat before the papacy and the Lombard League after the Battle of Legnano, Frederick cooled toward his Welf cousin, whom he could justly blame for some of his setbacks. Hitherto, the enemies of Henry—the princes, bishops, and magnates of Saxony—had been unable to gain a hearing against him at the emperor’s court days. By 1178, however, the emperor was ready to help them. Outlawed (1180), beaten in the field, and deserted by his vassals, Henry had to surrender and go into exile in 1182. His duchies and fiefs were forfeited to the empire.

His fall left a throng of middling princes face to face with an emperor whose prestige, despite reverses, stood high and whose resources had greatly increased since the beginning of his reign. The princes were nonetheless the chief and ultimate beneficiaries of the events of 1180. The final judgment by which Henry the Lion lost his honours was not founded on tribal law but on feudal law. The princes who condemned him regarded themselves as the first feudatories of the empire, and they decided on the redistribution of his possessions among themselves. During the 12th century the tribal duchies of the Ottonian period finally disintegrated. Within their ancient boundaries not only bishops but also lay lords succeeded in eluding the authority of the dukes. In their large immunities, bishops and nonducal nobles themselves wielded ducal powers. To enforce the imperial peace laws became both their ambition and their justification. Everywhere the greater lay dynasties and even some bishops tried to acquire a ducal or an equivalent title that would enable them to consolidate their scattered jurisdictions and, if possible, to force lesser free lords to attend their pleas.

These highest magnates had interests in common, and they closed their ranks not only against threats from above but also against fellow nobles who had been less successful in amassing wealth, counties, and advocacies and who did not possess the superior jurisdiction of a duke, a margrave, a count palatine, or a landgrave. They and they alone were now called princes of the empire. To lend a certain cohesion to their varied rights, they were willing to surrender their house lands to the empire and receive them back again as a princely fief. For the emperor it was theoretically an advantage that men so powerful in their own right should owe their chief dignity and most valued privileges to his grant. It opened the possibility of escheats (reversions to the property of the emperor), for, in feudal law, the rules of inheritance were stricter than in folk right. In Germany, however, the political misfortunes of rulers succeeded, by and large, in ensuring that ancient caste feeling and notions of inalienable right conquered the principles of feudal law. By 1216 it had been established that the emperor could neither abolish principalities nor create princes at random.

The “heirs” of Henry the Lion had to fight a ceaseless battle to establish and maintain themselves. In Bavaria the Wittelsbachs had received the vacant duchy, but they were not recognized as superiors by the dukes of Styria or by the dukes of Andechs-Meran. In Saxony the archbishop of Cologne was enfeoffed with Henry the Lion’s ducal office and with all his rights in Westphalia, while an Ascanian prince, Bernard of Anhalt, received the eastern half of Henry’s duchy. Neither Bernard nor the archbishop, however, could make much out of their dukedoms, except in the regions where they already had lands and local jurisdictions. All over the empire these and regalian rights, such as mints, fairs, tolls, and the right of granting safe-conducts, were the substance of princely power. To possess them as widely as possible became the first goal of the abler bishops and lay lords.

Hohenstaufen cooperation and conflict with the papacy, 1152–1215

Frederick’s interest in Italy stemmed not only from his difficulties in Germany but also from his desire to obtain imperial coronation at the hands of the pope, who alone could bestow this dignity. Frederick enjoyed good relations with the papacy early in his reign, and in 1153 he and Pope Eugenius III signed a treaty acknowledging each other’s rights, though the pontiff died before he could crown Frederick emperor. That task fell to Adrian IV in 1155, whom Frederick had restored to the papal throne after suppressing the revolt of Arnold of Brescia and the people of Rome. Good relations would not last between the two, however. Neither side upheld the terms of the treaty of 1153, and in 1157 open conflict erupted in the so-called incident at Besançon, wherein Adrian declared that Frederick had received the empire as a beneficium, or fief, from the pope—an expression that provoked the emperor and his advisers. Adrian apologized for the use of the term, explaining that it meant “favour,” but only after relations between the emperor and pope had become embittered. The incident at Besançon was the first of a series of controversies between the papacy and Frederick and the Hohenstaufen line.

The attempt to establish a direct imperial regime in Italy in 1159 antagonized the papacy once again and led to a new struggle with Rome, the ally of the Lombard communes. Political and territorial rather than ecclesiastical interests were at stake, but the popes could only fight as heads of the universal church, defending its liberty against a race of persecutors, and they had to employ their characteristic weapons—excommunication, propaganda, and intrigue. Nonetheless, the German bishops stood by Frederick and, for the most part, followed him in maintaining a prolonged schism against Pope Alexander III. Unsuccessful in Lombardy, the Hohenstaufen shifted the centre of their ambitions after 1177 to Tuscany, Spoleto, and the Romagna. This redoubled the fears and the resentment of the popes, particularly after Frederick’s death while crusading in 1189, when his son and chosen successor, Henry VI (reigned 1190–97), became the legitimate claimant to the Sicilian kingdom through his wife, Constance, the sole surviving heiress.

With their backs to the wall, the popes had to make what use they could out of any opposition to the Hohenstaufen. Their chance came in 1197 when Henry VI died prematurely, leaving a three-year-old son, Frederick, to succeed him. To escape the chaos of a minority regime, the bulk of the German princes and bishops in 1198 elected the boy’s uncle Philip of Swabia. But an opposition faction in the lower Rhenish region, led by the archbishop of Cologne and financed by Richard I of England, raised an anti-king in Otto IV, a younger son of Henry the Lion. Concerned with preserving traditional papal rights regarding the imperial succession and territorial holdings in Italy as well as with the interests of his ward, Frederick, Pope Innocent III involved himself in the electoral dispute. Territorial interests in the Romagna tempted the papacy to exploit the weaknesses of the empire’s constitution, the uncertainties of electoral custom, and the lack of strict legal norms in Germany. During the war for the crown, much hard-won demesne and useful rights over the church had to be sacrificed by the rivals to bribe their supporters.

Frederick II and the princes

Henry’s son Frederick II entered Germany in 1212 to advance his claim to Otto IV’s throne and secured the crown in 1215. Despite promises to divide his inheritance, he kept the kingdom of Sicily and the empire together, and thus he also became locked in the inevitable life-and-death struggle with the papacy. The Hohenstaufen demesne in Swabia, Franconia, and Alsace and on the middle Rhine was still very considerable, and Frederick even recovered certain fiefs and advocacies that had been lost during the earlier civil wars. Their administration was improved, and they provided valuable forces for his Italian wars. The great peace legislation of 1235, moreover, showed that the emperor had not become a mere competitor in the race for territorial gain. But, except for brief intervals, the princes and bishops were left free to fight for the future of their lands against one another and against the intractable lesser lords who refused to accept their domination. The charters that Frederick had to grant to the ecclesiastical princes (the so-called Confoederatio cum Principibus Ecclesiasticis, 1220) and later to all territorial lords (Constitutio, or Statutum in Favorem Principum, 1232) gave them written guarantees against the activities of royal demesne officials and limited the development of imperial towns at the expense of episcopal territories. But the charters were not always observed, and until 1250 the crown remained formidable in southern Germany, despite the anti-kings Henry Raspe and William of Holland, whose election by the Rhenish archbishops in Germany in 1246 and 1247, respectively, was engineered by the papacy.

The empire after the Hohenstaufen catastrophe

Frederick II died in 1250, in the midst of his struggle against Pope Innocent IV. His son Conrad IV left the north the next year to fight for his father’s Italian possessions. William of Holland, anti-king from 1247 to 1256, was thus without a rival in an indifferent Germany that had lost interest in its rulers. The bishops’ cities and the towns, many of them founded on royal demesne, could not be subjugated. Their economic power challenged the age-old aristocratic order in German society, and, deprived of royal protection, they banded together to defend their autonomy. Within the nobility each rank tended to acquire some of the personal rights of its betters. The Hohenstaufen breakdown after 1250 left a gap in Swabia that no rising territorial power was able to fill. Countless petty lords and imperial ministeriales of the southwest succeeded in holding their seigniories as immediate vassals of the empire. Their independent territories often survived for centuries.

The ministeriales elsewhere too ceased to be the dependable servants that they once had been. Many free nobles voluntarily joined their ranks, and the knights thus assimilated the rights of the free aristocracy. They became the governing class of the territorial principalities, the standing councillors of their masters, whose household offices and local justice they monopolized and held in fee for many generations. Without the consent of this territorial nobility, the princes could neither tax nor legislate. Even the less important ministeriales, who only administered manors for their lords, became entrenched as hereditary bailiffs, keeping surplus produce for themselves and usurping seignorial dues, so that it paid the owners to commute the labour services of their villeins into money rents and to lease out those portions of the demesne that the unfree peasants had cultivated for them. Even then, however, the hereditary officials could not be easily dislodged. Finally, the ambitions of the princes themselves did not aim above the patrimonial policies of the past. They were acquisitive and attempted to build up their territories by usurpation, inheritance, marriage treaties, and escheats. They also tried, where possible, to administer their lands with officials whom they could depose at will. Yet they did so not to found sovereign states but chiefly to provide for their families. Again and again, they divided their dominions among sons, who in turn founded cadet lines and set them up on a fraction of the principality.

By 1250 there was thus no really effective central authority left in Germany. The prince-bishoprics had become fiercely contested prizes between neighbouring dynasties, themselves often vassals of the bishopric. But constant feuds, disorder, and insecurity did not, by any means, frustrate the immense energies of the Germans in the 13th century. Eastward expansion continued under the leadership of the princes and, above all, of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Their advance into Prussia went hand in hand with the opening up of the Baltic by the merchants of Lübeck. It is possible that three centuries of complete security from foreign invasion made it unnecessary for the German aristocracy to learn the virtues of political self-discipline and subordination. Still, it would be a great mistake to judge Hohenstaufen Germany solely by its failure to achieve political and administrative unity.