Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (11 page)

The Frankish ideas imparted important characteristics to the Empire, giving it a strong ideological continuity, but ultimately contributing to its inability to match new political ideas emerging in Europe by the eighteenth century. Although different in many ways, one aspect of ancient Rome is strikingly modern. Romans believed their empire was
a unitary state inhabited by a common people who had submerged any previous identities through the acceptance of common citizenship. By contrast, the Franks and their imperial successors were more like other pre-modern emperors in Persia, India, China and Ethiopia who saw themselves as ‘kings of kings’, ruling empires composed of discrete kingdoms inhabited by different peoples.

This was a source of great strength to the Franks and their successors. It meant that the imperial title retained prestige, remaining a much more realistic goal than trying to establish direct hegemony over the subjects of other rulers. Peoples and lands were mostly only indirectly subject to the emperor, whose authority was mediated by a variety of other, lesser lords. This hierarchy would lengthen, especially under the Staufers, eventually becoming more elaborate and rigid as it began to be fixed in copious written and printed documents from the fifteenth century. Although ultimately hindering adaptation to change, this aspect provided coherence since status and rights depended on each lord or community’s continued membership of the Empire. It also rendered the creation of a national monarchy undesirable, because the Empire was defined as many kingdoms, rather than just one kingdom.

Peace

As in other empires, the emperor was expected to preserve peace. Charlemagne blended Merovingian and late Roman ideals by presenting peace as the fruit of justice. The Salians and Staufers asserted a more active style of kingship, reversing the church’s argument that good governance was a precondition of faith and justice.
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This shift should not be misunderstood as deliberate state-building. It was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans embraced the modern idea of progress, which envisaged the future as an improved version of the present, encouraging both the elaboration of new utopias and the expectation that politics should deliver these.
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Previously, people generally viewed the future in terms of salvation and secular ideals of fame and posthumous reputation. They might bemoan current problems like disorder, disease and misrule, but saw these as deviations from an essentially static, idealized order. The discrepancy between ideal and reality was not too troubling, since it was considered an expression of the imperfection of human, earthly existence. The ruler was expected to
embody idealized harmony (
Concordia
) and to manifest it through symbolic-laden actions.

The emphasis on consensus remained fundamental to imperial politics until 1806, but it would be wrong to replace the earlier narrative of emperors as failed state-builders with a new one of them as honest peace-brokers.
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Virtually all the men ruling the Empire before the sixteenth century were successful warriors, with many of them owing their position to victory over domestic rivals.

Freedom

Likewise, we should not confuse the Empire’s much cherished freedoms with the modern, democratic ideal of Liberty. The latter derives inspiration from republican Rome and the ancient Greek city states, neither of which feature significantly in the classical legacy embraced by the Empire. Instead, Frankish warrior culture imparted a distinctly pre-modern idea of local and particular liberties, which started to shape the Empire as a status hierarchy, distributing political and social capital unevenly across society. The emperor’s coronation and mission elevated him above other lords, but these lords still played a role in his accession as king. The Franks’ success as conquerors bred a culture of entitlement amongst the aristocracy that Carolingian rulers never escaped. No king could afford to ignore his leading lords for long. However, these rarely sought to displace the king, or to establish fully independent kingdoms of their own. As we shall see in
Chapter 7
, the Carolingian and Ottonian aristocracy repeatedly declined opportunities to break up the Empire during periods of weak royal rule. Rebellions were about individual influence, not alternative forms of governance.

The most important liberty was the right of lords to participate in the greater affairs of the Empire by having a voice in forming the political consensus. Rather than a constant battle between centralism and princely independence, the Empire’s political history is better understood as a long process of delineating these rights and fixing them with greater precision. As will become clearer in
Chapter 8
, the graduations became sharper with the fundamental distinction from the later twelfth century between those with ‘imperial immediacy’ and those whose relationship to the emperor was mediated by one or more intervening
levels of lordship. Over the next five centuries, immediacy became more firmly associated with the rule of increasingly distinct territories and their mediate subjects. Meanwhile, those possessing immediacy shared common political rights that came to be exercised through more formal institutions from the later fifteenth century.

Freedoms and status were corporate in the sense of being shared communally by members of a legally recognized social group, such as the clergy. They were also local and specific, varying across different parts of the Empire, and even between those of nominally the same social rank. Fundamentally, however, their freedoms and status related all inhabitants in some way to the Empire as the ultimate source of individual or communal liberties. The Empire’s hierarchy was not a chain of command, but a multilayered structure allowing individuals and groups to disobey one authority whilst still professing loyalty to another. This was exemplified by the refusal of Counts Frederick and Anselm to join their immediate lord, Duke Ernst II of Swabia, in rebelling against Conrad II in 1026: ‘If we were slaves of our king and emperor, subjected by him to your jurisdiction, it would not be permissible for us to separate ourselves from you. But now, since we are free, and hold our king and emperor the supreme defender of our liberty on earth, as soon as we desert him, we lose our liberty, which no good man, as someone says, loses save with his life.’
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Power

Imperial rule was not hegemonic, despite periodic moves towards a more command-style monarchy, notably under the Salians, but was characterized more by brokerage and negotiation. It worked because the main participants usually had more to gain from preserving the imperial order than by overturning or fragmenting it. The Carolingians extended a broadly standard system of general governance across their entire realm, entrenching it by adapting the specifics of rule to local circumstances (see
pp. 334–52
). The Empire was divided into duchies as military districts, subdivided into counties for the maintenance of public order. The duchies largely mapped onto the diocesan structure west of the Rhine, and onto the fewer, but larger tribal areas east of that river. Land was endowed as fiefs or benefices to enable the dukes and counts to sustain themselves and carry out their functions,
as well as to support bishops and abbots in developing a more extensive and dense church infrastructure (see
pp. 79–89
and
326–30
).

Later chapters will explore how far these institutions provided political continuity, but for now it is important to note that the Carolingians already distinguished between the kingdom (
regnum
) and the king (
rex
), with the former persisting even if it was ruled by several kings.
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The transition from the Carolingians to the Ottonians as German kings in 919 was regarded by contemporaries as a significant event. Like Otto I’s assumption of the imperial title in 962, they disagreed how far this represented a break with the past, but by the twelfth century most emphasized continuity even if they did not all fully accept the wider claims of imperial translation.
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Continuity persisted despite subsequent changes of ruling family and the long periods without a crowned emperor. History records the Empire’s kings as members of different dynasties, and this is certainly a useful shorthand. However, true dynasticism only emerged in the fourteenth century, and in fact simply reinforced existing ideas that each ruler could claim descent from his illustrious predecessors. Wipo of Burgundy expressed this as ‘Charlemagne’s stirrups hang from Conrad [II]’s saddle’.
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Most medieval kings tried at least once in their reign to sit on Charlemagne’s stone throne, which was carefully preserved in Aachen. Frederick I renovated the Carolingian palaces at Ingelheim and Nimwegen. As time progressed, Charlemagne became an idealized role model. Even the Ottonians, who, as Saxons, came from a people once defeated by Charlemagne, could still celebrate him as the bringer of Christianity.
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Continuity suggested that power was transpersonal, transcending the lives of individual monarchs. This idea developed in France, England and Bohemia around 1150 where it was expressed through the idea of the crown symbolizing the kingdom as a combination of inalienable royal rights and property. The loyalty that all subjects owed to the crown transferred automatically from one king to the next. This idea did not take firm hold in the Empire, despite its having Europe’s oldest crown in continuous use.
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While royal rule remained continuous in the Empire, imperial coronations depended on papal cooperation before 1530. Consequently, it was the Empire itself that was abstracted as transpersonal. This was most famously demonstrated in 1024 by Conrad II’s furious response to a delegation from Pavia that defended
their demolition of the imperial palace there on the grounds that his predecessor Henry II had died: ‘Even if the king had died, the kingdom remained, just as the ship whose steersman falls remains. They were state, not private buildings; they were under another law, not yours.’
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Abstracting the Empire helped divorce political continuity from specific territory, unlike western European monarchies, where power was increasingly associated with ruling a distinct people and place.
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The sacrality of the imperial mission reinforced this. Continuity was only seriously challenged with changes in historical perception emerging from Renaissance Humanism, which was more likely to contest claims that lacked foundation in verifiable written sources. The Protestant Reformation proved a second challenge, since continuity with ancient Rome was automatically suspect to those busy renouncing papal supremacy over their church. Finally, political changes became more obvious as imperial governance shifted under the Habsburgs to possession of lands controlled directly by the emperor, including parts of the New World during the reign of Charles V in the sixteenth century. However, it was not until 1641 that anyone published a serious critique of the ideology of imperial translation, while imperial political culture continued to celebrate aspects of the Holy Roman imperial past right up to 1806, such as the belief in unbroken imperial rule since Charlemagne.
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POPE AND EMPEROR TO 1250

The Papacy and the Carolingians

The relationship between spiritual and secular authority broadly followed the common European trend for power to become less personal and more institutional. As institutionalized politics has long been associated with progress, individual popes and emperors have been criticized for putting what are perceived as private interests before their public roles. Medieval emperors, in particular, have been accused of pursuing the ‘chimera’ of imperial power in Italy, rather than building a strong German national monarchy.
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Individuals were certainly important in shaping events, notably through the deaths of key figures at critical moments. Yet, Italy was an integral part of the Empire, and defence of the church was central to the imperial mission.

Popes and emperors were not necessarily predestined to clash. Indeed, their relationship in the ninth century was more about assistance than assertiveness. The church remained underdeveloped and decentralized. Clergy were relatively few and scattered, especially north of the Alps, where they faced many challenges (see
pp. 77–83
). While the pope enjoyed prestige and a measure of spiritual authority, he was not yet the commanding international figure he would become by 1200 and was often at the mercy of the feuding Roman clans. Over two-thirds of the 61 popes between 752 and 1054 were Romans and another 11 came from other parts of Italy.
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Lothar I confirmed the free election of popes by the clergy and congregation of Rome in 824, but required successful candidates to seek confirmation from the emperor. This assertion of imperial authority did not unduly trouble most popes at this point, since they wanted an emperor who was strong enough to protect them, yet not so close by as to be an oppressor. The Carolingian civil wars after 829 exposed Rome to the Arabs, who sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter’s in 846.

The Empire’s partition in 843 following the Treaty of Verdun widened papal autonomy, since the pope could choose between three, still relatively powerful Carolingian kings – of West Francia, East Francia (Germany) and Lotharingia – who each saw the imperial title as a way of asserting leadership over the others. This gave the pope a vested interest in perpetuating the idea of a singular, enduring Empire to sustain his role as emperor-maker. Lothar I already held the title co-emperor alongside his father Louis I since 817. Lothar retained this title in the partition of 843 and, as the eldest Carolingian, was allowed to choose his share of empire, selecting Aachen and the middle strip of territory running up the Rhine and over the Alps to Italy, which became known as Lotharingia. This arrangement suited the pope, since it kept the emperor interested in defending Rome. The incidence of papal-imperial meetings indicates the generally good cooperation. Lothar’s successor as emperor, Louis II, met the pope nine times during his reign (855–75), thrice more than any of his immediate successors.
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However, the balance clearly shifted in the pope’s favour, as symbolized by Louis’ performance of Strator service for Pope Nicholas I in 858 – the first time for over a century, and possibly the first ever occasion if we believe Frankish accounts that Pippin had not acted as papal groom in 752. Some contemporary observers criticized Louis as only ‘emperor of
Italy’, a charge levelled against his successors, whose lands shrank still further after the 880s.
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