- Germany from 1250 to 1493
Germany and the Hohenstaufen, 1125–1250
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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 once again 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 into 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, townsmen, 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 labor 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 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.
