- Germany from 1250 to 1493
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Charles IV’s power was based primarily upon the territorial possessions of the house of Luxembourg, which he greatly extended by the purchase of the electorate of Brandenburg (1373). The German monarchy was a source of dignity and influence, but in terms of land and revenue it was outweighed by Charles’s hereditary domains in the east and northeast. The Golden Bull, replete with privileges to the electors, attacked none of the fundamental problems of the monarchy: dwindling crown lands, slender revenues, and the lack of an army and of an expert bureaucracy.
The financial problem was acute and long-standing. The succession of disputed elections between 1198 and 1257 had compelled the various claimants to purchase support by grants of royal land and revenues; the attempt by Rudolf of Habsburg to recover possession of crown lands alienated since 1245 had been opposed by his electors, who were unwilling to set an example by surrendering their own considerable acquisitions. At every election the votes of the princes had been secured by the grant or pledge of royal rights and property; thus, every king began his reign with a financial millstone round his neck and could attain freedom of action only by the possession or acquisition of extensive dynastic territories. The system of pledging crown lands led to the permanent loss of this land and its revenues and to the enrichment of the princes at the expense of the emperor. The imperial cities (Reichsstädte) had been heavily taxed by Rudolf, and, before his acquisition of Austria, they had furnished the bulk of his revenue. His less provident successors had pledged them in a few cases to the local territorial princes and had thus lost the right of taxation. Charles IV carefully cultivated his dynastic revenues from Bohemia, but he lavishly expended crown assets in Germany to expand his family possessions. His financial exploitation of the cities for purely dynastic purposes naturally stiffened their resistance to taxation. By 1400 the annual revenues from all the German crown possessions averaged only 30,000 florins.
The enforcement of the public peace, a taproot of royal power in other countries, had long since slipped from the hands of the German monarchs. The German monarchy possessed no executive officials comparable to the English sheriff or justice of the peace, and it was diverted from its guardianship of law and order by recurrent conflicts with the papacy and by its absorption in purely dynastic matters. Consequently, the proclamation and enforcement of the peace fell into the hands of regional associations of cities and of the individual territorial princes. Thus the monarchy was prevented from using its function as defender of the public peace as an entering wedge to invade the jurisdiction of the municipalities and the territorial lords.
In sum, the German rulers were being gradually deprived of their triple role as feudal suzerain, defender of the church, and keeper of the peace. The sweeping privileges granted to the princes in 1220 and 1231 had undermined the monarch’s position as feudal suzerain. The rulers’ bitter struggles with the papacy cast doubt on their credibility as protectors of the church. They allowed their powers as guardians of the public peace to slip into the hands of others.
The continued ascendancy of the princes
By Charles IV’s death in 1378, the division of Germany into numerous loosely defined territorial principalities had reached an advanced stage.
Southern Germany
In southern Germany the dissolution of the Hohenstaufen duchy of Swabia gave territorial predominance to the Habsburgs, whose original possessions were scattered across Alsace, Breisgau, the Vorarlberg, and Tirol. Rudolf’s acquisition of the provinces of Austria and Styria in 1282 had more than doubled the Habsburg patrimony and established its center of gravity in southeastern Germany. The Habsburg’s rivals and neighbors to the north, the counts of Württemberg, had combined with the Swabian nobles to foil the attempt of Rudolf to revive the defunct duchy of Swabia for one of his sons. (The counts, insatiably acquisitive and the inveterate enemies of the cities of the region, were finally raised to ducal status in 1495.) The margraves of Baden were chiefly preoccupied with the southward expansion of their territory on the upper Rhine at the expense of the independent small nobles and cities of Swabia.
These three large entities contained lesser lordships, which were in constant danger of absorption by marriage, purchase, or feud. Bavaria, granted to the house of Wittelsbach as a duchy in 1180, was strengthened by the acquisition of the Palatinate in 1214; but subsequent testamentary partition restricted this important gain to the Upper Palatinate.
Central Germany
In central Germany the margraves of Meissen of the Wettin dynasty thrust steadily eastward and received the electorate of Saxony in 1423, when the Ascanian line of electors died out; in the west they obtained Thuringia (1263) and clung to it tenaciously despite repeated royal attempts to oust them by claiming it as a vacant fief. The landgraves of Hesse, though surrounded by powerful neighbors, contrived to make modest territorial gains at the expense of the Wettin dynasty and the archbishops of Mainz. East and south of Hesse, the Rhine-Main region was a land of great ecclesiastical princes: the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; the bishops of Speyer, Worms, Würzburg, and Bamberg; and the wealthy abbots of Fulda and Lorsch. It abounded in counts of the second rank, dominated by a great secular prince, the count palatine of the Rhine. The area contained four electorates and was therefore of crucial political importance.
Northern Germany
In northern Germany the dukes of Brunswick dissipated their strength by frequent divisions of their territory among heirs. Farther east the powerful duchy of Saxony was also split by partition between the Wittenberg and Lauenburg branches; the Wittenberg line was formally granted an electoral vote by the Golden Bull of 1356. The strength of the duchy lay in the military and commercial qualities of its predominantly free population. But the vigour of its eastward expansion into the Slav lands beyond the Elbe tended to diminish its involvement in the internal politics of the Reich. As in central Germany, large areas of northern Germany were held by ecclesiastical princes, including the archbishops of Bremen and Magdeburg and the bishops of Utrecht, Münster, and Osnabrück. During the 13th and 14th centuries the major trading cities of the north, including Münster, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, joined together to form the powerful Hanseatic League, which was a powerful economic and political force not only in northern Germany but in most of the lands surrounding the North and Baltic seas.
Eastern Germany
In eastern Germany the duchy of Mecklenburg, Germanized by a steady stream of immigrants, was drawn deeply into Scandinavian affairs and in 1363 provided Sweden with a new royal dynasty in the person of Albert of Mecklenburg. The electorate of Brandenburg, purchased by Charles IV and bequeathed to his second son, Sigismund, was dominated by a disorderly and rapacious nobility. Sigismund granted this dubious asset in 1415 to his faithful ally Frederick, burgrave of Nürnberg. The kingdom of Bohemia remained the durable territorial core of the Luxembourg dominions, and its silver mines at Kuttenberg (now Kutná Hora, in the Czech Republic), under German supervision, vastly increased crown revenues. The Czech population increasingly resented the economic and cultural influence of the German minority, and this created antagonisms profoundly disturbing to the monarchy.
Continued dispersement of territory
Inside the various territories the consolidation of princely authority was far from complete. The principalities were often ragged in outline and territorially dispersed because of the accidents of inheritance, grant, partition, and conquest. Everywhere lesser nobles disputed the power of the prince and formed associations in defense of their rights and fiefs. In the ecclesiastical princedoms the ascendancy of an archbishop or a bishop was contested by the cathedral chapter, which had become a preserve of the nobility. The self-governing cities fought to protect their chartered liberties and drew together in formidable leagues to resist princely encroachment. Thus the princes, in trying to enforce their authority, tended to consolidate the opposition and to excite potential or open hostility.
In this crucial struggle the great secular potentates undermined their own strength by persisting in the Germanic custom of dividing their territory among their sons instead of transmitting it intact to the eldest. By 1378 the Bavarian lands of the house of Wittelsbach were shared between three grandsons of Louis IV. In 1379 the wide possessions of the Habsburgs were partitioned by family agreement between Albert III and his younger brother Leopold.
The ecclesiastical princes, vowed to celibacy and elected by their cathedral chapters, could not hand on their lands to descendants. Still, their policies and aspirations were not much different from those of the secular princes, and most of them managed to install their relatives in rich canonries and prebends.
