Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (6 page)

Part III
charts the evolution of this hierarchy, with each of the three
chapters 7–9
covering one of the fundamental shifts in the basis of imperial governance. Carolingian rule established a basic political and legal framework for the Empire, but this did not develop further and even partially disappeared around 900. The absence of formal institutions should not, however, be taken as the lack of effective governance. This book follows the lead of those who have drawn attention to the informal aspects of a political culture based on personal presence rather than written, formalized rules.
²¹
Symbols and rituals were as much a part of politics as formal institutions; indeed formal institutions cannot function without the former, even though their role is
often no longer acknowledged openly in the modern era. Any organization is partly ‘fictive’ in that it depends on the conviction amongst those who engage with it that it really exists. The organization is sustained because each individual acts in the expectation that others will behave similarly. Symbols and rituals provide markers for participants, helping to sustain the belief in the organization’s continued existence. The organization is threatened if its symbols lose their meaning, or are challenged, such as during the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. Likewise, an organization risks being exposed as fictive if it no longer meets common expectations, for example if the anticipated repression fails to materialize or is exposed as feeble when a government is confronted with open defiance.

Imperial governance entailed fostering a consensus amongst the Empire’s political elite to ensure at least minimum compliance with agreed policy, enabling the emperor to dispense with the burden of both forcing cooperation and of ruling the bulk of the population directly.
²²
Consensus did not necessarily mean harmony or stability, but it did achieve the ‘crude simplicity’ of imperial rule, allowing the emperor and elites to pursue policies without requiring a radical transformation of the societies they governed.
²³
This imposed limits on what emperors could do. They needed to uphold the legitimacy of imperial rule through demonstrative acts, such as punishing obvious wrongdoers; yet emperors also had to avoid personal failures that would undermine their aura of power and could be interpreted as the loss of divine favour.

A key characteristic of imperial governance was that institutional development was primarily driven by the need to foster and sustain consensus, rather than by attempts by the centre to reach directly into the peripheries and localities. The Ottonian line of kings during the tenth century ruled through a relatively flat hierarchy of senior lay and spiritual lords. The Salians, their successors after 1024, shifted to more of a command style without breaching the established pattern. Broader socio-economic changes meanwhile supported a longer and more complex lordly hierarchy, both reducing the average size of each jurisdiction while multiplying their numbers. The Staufer family ruling after 1138 responded by formalizing the lordly hierarchy, creating a more distinct princely elite internally stratified by ranks denoted by different titles, but united through a common immediacy under the emperor. Lesser lords and subjects were now more clearly ‘mediate’, meaning that
their relationship to the emperor and Empire ran through at least one intervening level of authority. This hierarchy crystallized around 1200, consolidating the complementary division of responsibilities within the Empire. The emperor got on with the business of the imperial mission, assisted by the immediate princely elite who meanwhile assumed more functions within their own jurisdictions, including peace-keeping, conflict resolution and resource mobilization. These jurisdictions became ‘territorialized’ through the need to demarcate areas of responsibility. The Staufers’ demise around 1250 was a personal, not structural failure, since the basic pattern of imperial governance continued to evolve along the same lines into the fourteenth century.

The next shift came during the line of Luxembourg kings (1347–1437), who changed the emphasis from imperial prerogatives to hereditary dynastic possessions to provide the material basis sustaining imperial governance. The new methods were perfected after 1438 by the Habsburgs, who amassed not only the largest hereditary lands in the Empire, but acquired a separate dynastic empire outside it, initially including Spain and the New World. The transition to Habsburg rule occurred amidst new internal and external challenges, prompting the period of imperial reform that intensified around 1480–1520. The reforms channelled established patterns of consensus-seeking through new, formalized institutions, and entrenched the complementary distribution of responsibilities between imperial structures and princely and civic territories.

The development of imperial governance through a long lordly hierarchy appears to detach the Empire from its subjects. Certainly this is how most general accounts have treated its history: as high politics, far removed from daily life. This has had the unfortunate consequence of contributing to the widespread sense of the Empire’s irrelevance, especially as social and economic historians have largely followed their political counterparts and traced developments like population size or economic output using anachronistic national frontiers.
Part IV
addresses this, arguing that both the governance and patterns of identity within the Empire were closely entwined with socio-economic developments, notably the emergence of a corporate social structure combining both hierarchical-authoritarian and horizontal-associative elements. This structure was replicated – with variations – at all levels of the Empire’s socio-political order.

A full social history of the Empire is beyond the scope of this book. Rather,
Chapter 10
traces the emergence of the corporate social order, showing how it embraced both lords and commons, and how it became anchored in rural and urban communities with varying but generally wide degrees of self-governance. These associative aspects are explored further in
Chapter 11
, which demonstrates the importance of corporate status in all forms of leagues and communual organizations from the high Middle Ages onwards, from the smallest guild to groupings that resulted in major challenges to imperial rule, such as the Lombard League or the Swiss Confederation. Like jurisdictions, corporate identities and rights were local, specific and related to status. They reflected the belief in an idealized socio-political order, which placed a premium on preserving peace through consensus rather than through any absolute, abstract concept of justice. The consequences of this are explored in
Chapter 12
, which shows how conflict resolution remained open-ended, like the Empire’s political processes generally. Imperial institutions could judge, punish and coerce, but they mainly brokered settlements intended as workable compromises rather than as definitive judgements based on absolute concepts of right and wrong.

The Empire thus fostered a deep-rooted, conservative ideal of freedom as local and particular, shared by members of corporate groups and incorporated communities. These were local and particular
liberties
, not abstract
Liberty
shared equally by all inhabitants. Here, this book offers an alternative explanation for the hotly contested ‘genesis of German conservatism’, without, however, claiming any continuity beyond the mid-nineteenth century. Usually, the authoritarianism of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany is attributed to the supposedly dualist political development prior to the Empire’s demise in 1806.
²⁴
Attempts at genuine egalitarian liberty are ascribed solely to ‘the people’ who are crushed by ‘the princes’, notably during the bloody Peasants War of 1524–6. Meanwhile, the princes usurped the ideal of freedom for themselves to legitimate their privileged position as autonomous rulers. ‘German liberty’ thus supposedly narrowed to the defence of princely autonomy against potential imperial ‘tyranny’. Simultaneously, as the ‘real’ governments in the Empire, the princes allegedly introduced the rule of law, protecting their subjects’ right to property, whilst denying any meaningful political representation. Liberty thus became associated with the bureaucratic state and transposed to
national government when this was created in the later nineteenth century.

This argument has never explained why central Europeans remained so unreceptive to nineteenth-century liberalism. Either they were too cowed by a repressive police state to embrace it, or they were duped by a naive faith in princely benevolence and their own ingrained sense of subordination.
²⁵
Yet liberals discovered that ordinary people often did not want their version of liberty, because uniform equality conflicted with treasured corporate rights which appeared to offer superior safeguards against capitalist market exploitation.
²⁶
Later problems stem at least partly from how those corporate rights were stripped away amidst rapid industrialization and urbanization after the 1840s. These matters lie beyond the scope of this book.

The attachment to corporate identities and rights helps explain why the Empire endured despite internal tensions and stark inequalities in life chances. However, it was neither a bucolic, harmonious old-worldly utopia, nor a direct blueprint for the European Union.
²⁷
The question of the Empire’s long-term viability by the late eighteenth century is tackled at the end of
Chapter 12
. For now we need to note, as an important factor in changing the Empire across time, the long-term shift from a culture of personal presence and oral communication to one based on written communication. This transition was common throughout Europe and is one of the general markers of the shift to modernity. However, it had particular consequences in the Empire since this relied so heavily on consensus-seeking and on delineating power, rights and responsibilities along a status hierarchy.

Oral communication and written culture co-existed throughout the Empire’s lifespan, so the transition is one of degrees, not absolutes. Christianity is a religion of the book, while both ecclesiastical and secular authorities used written rules and communication (see
Chapter 7
,
pp. 320–25
, and
Chapter 12
,
pp. 603–10
). Yet messages generally only acquired full meaning when delivered in person by someone of appropriate rank. Early medieval theology believed God’s intentions to be transparent, with individual actions merely demonstrating divine will. Face-to-face contact was generally necessary for binding decisions to be reached. However, writing was a good way to fix such decisions and to avoid potential ambiguities and misunderstandings. Like the more recent and certainly more rapid media revolution, participants
found the new forms of written communication unsettling, but appreciated their benefits. Ancillary techniques, like the use of seals and particular forms of address and styles of writing, were developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to convince recipients of letters that such techniques represented the authentic voice of the writer by imparting a permanent authority to the text.
²⁸
The use of paper rather than parchment facilitated a significant growth of written culture from the mid-fourteenth century, while the invention of printing a century later changed both its volume and its use.

Unfortunately, writing also makes discrepancies more obvious, as the papacy already discovered during the twelfth century when it began to be criticized for issuing patently contradictory pronouncements. A paper trail could also demonstrate how knowledge was conveyed, making it harder for authorities to claim ignorance of wrongdoing. Theologians and political theorists responded by elaborating a hierarchy of communication. The idea that divine intentions were directly manifest in human action already threatened to make God the servant of His own creation. From this it was logical to develop the idea of a mysterious God whose actions were beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. To elevate themselves above their subjects, secular authorities were credited with an exclusive ability to understand the ‘mysteries of state’ that would otherwise only baffle common folk. Those in power tailored their choice of words and images to suit specific target audiences. Communication became as much – if not more – about signalling the authorities’ superiority over their subjects as about conveying messages.
²⁹

The elevated language of the mysteries of state used to promote centralization elsewhere in Europe was ill-suited to an imperial governance based more on consensus than command and where high politics continued to rely primarily on face-to-face communication. Although the princes did adopt a more exalted style of rule during the sixteenth century, they remained bound within a common framework, which exposed their actions and pronouncements to audiences they could not control. The imperial chancellery was usually at the forefront of employing written culture, but used this to record and fix the status and privileges of those entitled to participate in the political process. Broadly similar developments took place within the Empire’s constituent territories, where communal and corporate rights were enshrined in
charters and other legal documents. Increasingly, imperial institutions were called upon to broker disputes arising from the interpretation of these rights. While the system retained some flexibility, contemporaries were increasingly aware of the discrepancies as settlements relied on compromise and fudge, almost inevitably contravening some formal rules. In the late eighteenth century, the gap between formal status and material power became glaring at the highest political level with the growth of Austria and Prussia as European powers in their own right. While the refusal to abandon hallowed practices gave the Empire some coherence, this also made it impossible for its inhabitants to conceive of any alternative structure. Reform narrowed down to mere tinkering with existing arrangements and ultimately proved unable to cope with the overwhelming impact of the French Revolutionary Wars, forcing Francis II’s decision in 1806 to dissolve the Empire.