Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (5 page)

Longevity is a second factor, with empires being judged of ‘world historical importance’ if they pass the ‘Augustan threshold’ – a term derived from Emperor Augustus’s transformation of the Roman republic into a stable imperium.
⁹
This approach has the merit of drawing attention to identifying why some empires outlived their founders, but it should be recognized that many which did not nonetheless left important legacies, such as those of Alexander and Napoleon.

Hegemony is the third element and perhaps the most ideologically charged. Some influential discussions of empire reduce it to the dominance of a single people over others.
¹⁰
Depending on perspective, the history of empire becomes a story of conquest or resistance. Empires bring oppression and exploitation, while resistance is usually equated with national self-determination and democracy. This approach certainly makes sense in some contexts.
¹¹
However, it often fails to explain how empires expand and endure, especially when these processes are at least partly peaceful. It also tends to conceive of empires as composed of a fairly stable ‘core’ people or territory, dominating a number of peripheral regions. Here – to use another common metaphor – imperial rule becomes a ‘rimless wheel’, with the peripheries connected to the hub but not to each other. This allows the imperial core to govern through ‘divide and rule’, keeping each peripheral population separate, and preventing them combining against the numerically inferior core. Such a system relies heavily on brokerage provided by local elites acting as the spokes between the hub and each periphery. Rule does not have
to be overtly oppressive, since the brokers can be coopted and can transmit some benefits of imperial rule to the peripheral population. However, imperial rule is tied to numerous local bargains which can make it difficult to mobilize substantial resources for common purposes, because the core has to negotiate separately with each set of brokers.
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The core–periphery model is helpful in explaining how relatively small groups of people can govern large areas, but brokerage has been a part of most states as they have expanded and consolidated and is, in itself, not necessarily ‘imperial’.

A major reason for the Empire’s relative scholarly neglect is that its history is so difficult to tell. The Empire lacked the things giving shape to conventional national history: a stable heartland, a capital city, centralized political institutions and, perhaps most fundamentally, a single ‘nation’. It was also very large and lasted a long time. A conventional chronological approach would become unfeasibly long, or risk conveying a false sense of linear development and reduce the Empire’s history to a high political narrative. I would like to stress instead the multiple paths, detours and dead ends of the Empire’s development, and to give the reader a clear sense of what it was, how it worked, why it mattered, and its legacy for today. An extended chronology is included after the appendices for general orientation. The rest of the book is divided into 12 chapters, grouped equally in four parts that examine the Empire through the themes of ideal, belonging, governance and society. The themes have been grouped for natural progression so the reader approaches the material like an eagle flying over the Empire. The basic outline will be visible in
Part I
, with the other details becoming clearer as the reader nears ground level by the time he or she reaches
Part IV
.

It makes sense to examine how the Empire legitimated its existence and how it defined itself relative to outsiders. This is the task of
Part I
, which opens with a discussion of the Holy Roman Empire’s basis as the secular arm of western Christianity. Historically, European development has been characterized by three levels of organization: the universal level of transcendental ideals that provide a sense of unity and common bonds (e.g. Christianity, Roman law); the particular and local level of everyday action (resource extraction, law enforcement, etc.); and the intermediary level of the sovereign state.
¹³
The Empire was characterized for most of its existence only by the first two of these. The emergence of the third from the thirteenth century was a
major contributory factor in its eventual demise. However, the evolutionary progression once imagined by historians, culminating in a Europe of competing nation states, no longer appears the terminus of political development, contributing to the recent renewed interest in the Empire and to comparisons between it and the European Union.

Chapter 1
opens with the circumstances of the Empire’s foundation through an agreement between Charlemagne and the papacy, which expressed the belief that Christendom constituted a singular order under the twin management of emperor and pope. This imparted a lasting imperial mission, anchored on the premise that the emperor was the pre-eminent Christian monarch within a common order containing lesser rulers. Moral leadership and guardianship of the church were the emperor’s tasks, not hegemonic, direct rule over the continent. As with other empires, this imperial mission imparted a ‘quasi-religious sense of purpose’ transcending immediate self-interest.
¹⁴
The belief that the Empire was far bigger than its ruler and transcended whoever was currently emperor took root very early on, and explains why so many emperors struggled to fulfil that mission rather than settle for what, with hindsight, seems the more realistic option of a national monarchy. The rest of the chapter examines the holy, Roman and imperial elements of this mission, and explains the often difficult relationship between Empire and papacy into early modernity.
¹⁵

The specifically religious dimension is explored in
Chapter 2
, which shows how the Empire embraced the typically ‘imperial’ distinction between itself as a single civilization in contrast to all outsiders, who were ‘barbarians’.
¹⁶
Civilization was defined as Christianity and the ancient imperial Roman legacy as embodied by the Empire after 800. However, the Empire’s dealings with outsiders were not always violent, while its continued expansion into northern and eastern Europe in the high Middle Ages was partly through assimilation.
Chapter 3
shows how the concept of a singular civilization prevented the Empire dealing with other states on equal terms. This became increasingly problematic as Latin Christian Europe divided into more clearly distinct sovereign states, each with monarchs claiming to be ‘emperors in their own kingdoms’.

Part II
aims to transcend the traditional dismemberment of the Empire by nationalist and regionalist historians in discussing how its many different lands and peoples related to it. The Empire lacked a stable core, unlike those provided by the Thames valley and the Île de
France for the English and French national states respectively. It never had a permanent capital or a single patron saint, common language or culture. Identity was always multiple and multilayered, reflecting its imperial extent over many peoples and places. The number of layers grew over time as part of the evolution of a more complex and nuanced political hierarchy sustaining imperial governance. The general core came to rest in the German kingdom in the mid-tenth century, though imperial monarchy remained itinerant into the fourteenth century. A stable hierarchy emerged by the 1030s, establishing that whoever was German king also ruled the Empire’s other two primary kingdoms of Italy and Burgundy and was the only candidate worthy of the imperial title.
Chapter 4
explores the actual shape of these kingdoms and their component lands, as well as how the Empire related to other European peoples. The relative significance of ethnicity, social organization and place to identities is discussed in
Chapter 5
.
Chapter 6
examines how concepts of the nation, emerging from the thirteenth century, reinforced rather than undermined the identification of many inhabitants with the Empire. Germans already saw themselves as a political nation well before unification in 1871, identifying the Empire as their natural home. The Empire never demanded the absolute, exclusive loyalty expected by later nationalists. This reduced its capacity to mobilize resources and command active support, but it also allowed heterogeneous communities to coexist, each identifying its own distinctiveness as safeguarded by belonging to a common home.

Part III
explains how the Empire was governed without creating a large, centralized infrastructure. Historians long expected and wanted kings to be ‘state builders’, or at least to have consistent, long-term plans. States are judged by a singular model, expressed most succinctly by the sociologist Max Weber as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.
¹⁷
National history thus becomes the story of creating an infrastructure to centralize and exercise exclusive sovereign authority, and the articulation of arguments to legitimate these processes. Equally, the arguments delegitimate rival claims both from insiders, like would-be autonomous nobles or regions, and from outsiders seeking hegemony over the ‘national’ territory. Measured against this yardstick, it is scarcely surprising that the Empire’s history is reduced to a repetitive and chaotic cycle lasting at least into the fifteenth century. Each ruler assumed the throne as king recognized by his peers amongst
the senior nobles. He then toured the German kingdom seeking homage, thereby providing opportunities for his rivals to deny this and rebel. Most kings at least asserted their authority, though there were lengthy periods involving rival kings and even civil war, notably 1077–1106, 1198–1214 and 1314–25. Many kings faced external raids and invasions by the Vikings, Slavs or Magyars until the tenth century. Once secure, these kings generally made a Roman expedition (
Romzug
) to seek coronation as emperor by the pope. Those that dallied too long were apt to face renewed rebellion north of the Alps, often precipitating an early return. Others found repeated expeditions necessary to assert even a modicum of authority in Italy. They either died prematurely of malaria whilst on campaign, or, worn out, hastened to some appropriate spot in Germany for a ‘good death’. Then the whole wearisome cycle seems to begin again, continuing until the Habsburgs finally established their own dynastic territorial dominions in the early sixteenth century that partially overlapped those of the Empire.

This narrative rests on Ranke’s influential conception of the Empire’s history as the story of failed nation building. Most observers have followed his lead in arguing that the ‘decline’ of central authority was inversely proportionate to the growth of the princes as semi-independent rulers. This argument has been underpinned by a century and a half of national and regional histories, charting the separate stories of modern countries like Belgium or the Czech Republic, as well as those of the regions of modern Germany and Italy, such as Bavaria or Tuscany. Each of these stories is so persuasive, because it is constructed around the development of centralized political authority and associated identity focused exclusively on its given territory. The overall conclusion is often that the Empire was some kind of federal system, which it became either immediately after Charlemagne’s death in 814 or by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 at the latest.
¹⁸
The enormous difference between these dates is an indicator of the problems with confidently pinning down these structures. Nonetheless, this is an attractive idea not only because, as we shall see, some of the Empire’s inhabitants claimed it was a confederation, but also because this definition at least allows it to be fitted into the accepted taxonomy of political systems. It was this aspect that drew Madison’s attention and his conclusion that it was ‘a feeble and precarious union’, a conclusion intended to encourage his fellow Americans to agree to a stronger federal government.
¹⁹

Federal systems are not unitary, in that they have two or more levels of government rather than a single, central authority. Additionally, they combine elements of shared rule through common institutions with regional self-rule in constituent territorial segments.
²⁰
These elements were certainly present in the Empire after the ‘imperial reform’ of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries gave the imperial constitution its definitive, early modern form. However, the concept of federalism requires careful handling, because it easily confuses more than it clarifies. Defining the Empire as federal perpetuates the narrow, dualist view of its development as solely defined by emperor-princely tensions, with the latter winning out by establishing fully sovereign kingdoms and principalities in 1806. Worse, it is very difficult to disassociate the term from its modern political usage, particularly in the German and Austrian federal republics, as well as Switzerland and other contemporary states, including the USA. In all these cases the component elements interact as equals, sharing a common status as parts of a political union. The differences are genuinely dualist: their dynamics provided by how far key powers are shared through common central institutions, and how far they are devolved as ‘states rights’ to the component units. Finally, modern federal states act directly on all their citizens equally. Each citizen is meant to have an equal participation in his or her own state, and in the union as a whole. All are bound directly by the same federal laws, even if some aspects of life are covered by arrangements specific to each component state. These forms of equality were completely and fundamentally alien to the Empire, which always had a dominant, if shifting, political core, and always ruled its population through a complex hierarchy defined by socio-legal status.