- Germany from 1250 to 1493
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Greater prestige still and a claim to imperial hegemony fell to the Saxon rulers when they broke the impetus of the Hungarian (Magyar) invasions, against which the military resources and methods of western European society had almost wholly failed for several decades. In 933, after long preparations, Henry routed a Hungarian attack on Saxony and Thuringia. In 955 Otto I (Otto the Great; reigned 936–973), at the head of a force to which nearly all the duchies had sent mounted contingents, annihilated a great Hungarian army on the Lech River near Augsburg. The battle again vindicated the efficiency of the heavily armed man skilled in fighting on horseback.
With a Saxon dynasty on the throne, Saxon nobles gained office and power, with opportunities for conquest along the eastern river frontiers and marches of their homeland. Otto I implemented an eastern policy that aimed at getting more than slaves, loot, and tribute. Between 955 and 972 he founded and richly endowed an archbishopric at Magdeburg, which he intended to be the metropolis of a large missionary province among the Slavic Wends beyond the Elbe, who remained faithful to their traditional polytheistic religion. This would have brought their tribes under German control and exploitation in the long run, but the ruthless methods of the Saxon lay lords led to a rebellion that forced Otto to scale back his plans.
In the 10th century there was little or no German agricultural settlement beyond the Elbe. Far too much forested land remained available for clearing and colonization in western and southern Germany. The Saxons attempted to secure their tenuous military victories in the region between the Elbe and Oder rivers by building and garrisoning forts. Beyond the Wends of Brandenburg and Lusatia, meanwhile, new Slavic powers rose; the Poles under Mieszko I and, to the south, the Czechs under the Přemyslids received missionaries from Magdeburg and Passau without falling permanently under the political and ecclesiastical domination of Saxons and Bavarians. The Wends, who had been subjugated by the Saxon margraves, resisted conversion to Christianity. They rebelled in 983 against the German military occupation, which collapsed along with the missionary bishoprics that had been founded at Oldenburg, Brandenburg, and Havelberg. Farther south the defenses of the Thuringian marches between the Saale and the middle Elbe remained in German hands, but only after a long and fierce struggle against Polish invaders early in the 11th century. The northern part of the frontier reverted to its position before Otto’s trustees, Hermann Billung and Gero, had begun their wars. Missionary enterprises directed into Wendish territory from Bremen and Magdeburg achieved little before the 12th century.
The Saxon ruling class and margraves must bear the responsibility for the fiasco of eastward expansion in the 10th century. The prelates, too, saw their missions as means to found ecclesiastical empires of subject dioceses that would exact tribute from the conquered Wends. The Slavic tribes across the Elbe remained unconverted and implacable foes, a standing menace to the nearby churches. The wars also left a legacy of savagery on both sides, so that from about 1140 onward the colonization of conquered Slavic lands by German settlers became the common policy of both the church and the princes.
Dukes, counts, and advocates
Conrad I’s and Henry I’s kingships rested on the election by the tribal duchies’ leaders and higher aristocracy. It was in the first place an arrangement between the Franks and the Saxons that the Bavarian and Swabian dukes recognized at a price by acts of personal homage, but the German kings, of whatever dynasty, had to live under Frankish law. After the death of Conrad I’s brother Eberhard in 939, Otto I kept the Franconian dukedom vacant, and the Franconian counts henceforth stood under the immediate authority of the crown. In Saxony, too, Otto kept in his hands the dukedom of his ancestors, even though the beginning of the Billung line of dukes is traditionally dated to 936. The march-duchy of the Billungs, a bulwark raised against the Danes and the northern Slav tribes, gave the Billung family military command but did not give it authority over all the other Saxon princes.
In the south the Ottonians sought to turn the tribal duchies into royal lands and to supplant native dynasties with aliens and members of their own clan. When even that policy did not stop rebellions under the banner of tribal self-interest, the Ottonians began to break up the ancient Bavarian tribal land by carving out a new duchy in Carinthia where the Bavarian expansion southward had opened up new lands and sources of revenue. The first two members of the Rhine-Frankish Salian dynasty, Conrad II (reigned 1024–39) and Henry III (reigned alone 1039–56), also bestowed vacant duchies quite freely on their own kin and on men from outside the duchies. They competed against ducal power but could neither abolish nor replace it. In the 11th century, as before, the dukes held assemblies of their freemen and nobility, led the tribal army in war, and enforced peace.
The counts, who were the ordinary officers of justice in serious criminal cases, obeyed the ducal summons; but, for the most part, they received their “ban,” the power to do blood justice, from the king himself. The lands and the customary rights attached to their office, and indeed the office itself, not only became hereditary but also came to be treated more and more as a patrimony to which they had an inherent right against all men, king and duke included. Even so, however, a good many lines died out, and their counties fell back into the king’s hands. From Otto III’s reign (983–1002) onward, kings often bestowed these counties on bishoprics and great abbeys rather than granting them again to lay magnates. The bishops, however, could not perform all the functions of the counts; in particular, their holy orders forbade them to pass judgments of blood. They often subinfeudated their countships, and they needed officials called advocates (Vögte; singular Vogt) to take charge of the higher jurisdiction in the territories that their churches possessed by royal grant. In the 10th and 11th centuries these advocates had to be recruited from the aristocracy, the very class whose greed for hereditary office was to be checked, because ordinary freemen could not enforce severe sentences or defend the privileges of the church against armed intrusion. Ostensibly advocates and protectors of ecclesiastical possessions, the nobles were in fact anything but reliable servants of their ecclesiastical overlords and instead posed great danger for the bishoprics and abbeys.
Thus there arose in nearly all German lands, whether the ducal office survived or not, powerful lines of margraves, counts, and hereditary advocates who enriched themselves at the expense of the church (which meant also the crown) and in competition with one another. From the abler, more fortunate, and long-lived of these dynasties sprang the territorial princes of the later 12th and 13th centuries, absorbing and finally inheriting most of the rights of government.
The king was the personal overlord of all the great. His court was the seat of government, and it went with him on his long journeys. The German kings, even more than other medieval rulers, could make their authority respected in the far-flung regions of their kingdom only by traveling ceaselessly from duchy to duchy, from frontier to frontier. Wherever they stayed, their jurisdiction superseded the standing power of dukes, counts, and advocates, and they could collect the profits of local justice and wield some control over it. As they came into each region, they summoned its leaders to attend their solemn crown wearings, deliberated with them on the affairs of the kingdom and the locality, presided over pleas, granted privileges, and made war against peacemakers at home and enemies abroad.
