In theory he owed his
throne to election by the nobles, but in fact the hereditary principle was
dominant.
throne to election by the nobles, but in fact the hereditary principle was
dominant.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
”
CH. II.
## p. 108 (#154) ############################################
108
Effect of the Concordat
1
control over elections in Burgundy, and had been gradually losing
authority in Italy. Two factors had reduced the importance of the Italian
bishoprics: the growing power of the communes, often acquiesced in by
the bishops, had brought about a corresponding decline in episcopal
authority, and the bishops had in general acceded to the papal reform
decrees, so that they were far less amenable to imperial control. As far
as Germany was concerned, it remained of the highest importance to the
king to retain control over the elections, as the temporal authority of the
bishops continued unimpaired. And here, though the abolition of the
obnoxious use of spiritual symbols satisfied the papal scruples, the royal
control of elections remained effective. But it cannot be denied that the
Concordat was a real gain to the Papacy. The Emperor's privilege was
a surrender of an existing practice; the Pope's was only a statement of
how much of the existing procedure he was willing to countenance?
On 11 November a diet at Bamberg confirmed the Concordat, which
forthwith became part of the constitutional law of the Empire. In
December the Pope wrote a letter of congratulation to Henry and sent
him his blessing, and at the Lenten Synod of 11232 proceeded to ratify
the Concordat on the side of the Church as well. The imperial diploma
was welcomed with enthusiasm by the synod; against the papal concessions
there was some murmuring, but for the sake of peace they were tolerated
for the time. It was recognised that they were not irrevocable, and
their wording rendered possible the claim that, while Henry's privilege
was binding on his successors, the Pope's had been granted to Henry
alone for his lifetime. There were also wide discrepancies of opinion as
to the exact implication of the praesentia regis at elections and the
influence he could exercise at disputed elections. By Henry V, and later
by Frederick Barbarossa, these were interpreted in the sense most favour-
able to the king. Between Henry and Calixtus, however, no friction arose,
despite the efforts of Archbishop Adalbert to provoke the Pope to action
against the Emperor. Calixtus died in December 1124, Henry in the
following summer, without any violation of the peace. The subordination
of Lothar to ecclesiastical interests allowed the Papacy to improve its
position, which was still further enhanced during the weak reign of Conrad.
Frederick I restored royal authority in this direction as in others, and the
version of the Concordat given by Otto of Freising represents his point
of view; the difference between Italian and German bishoprics is ignored,
and the wording of the Concordat is slightly altered to admit of in-
terpretation in the imperial sense. It is clear that the Concordat
1 See A. Hofmeister, Das Wormser Konkordat (Festschrift Dietrich Schäfer zum
70 Geburtstag). Hofmeister, following Schäfer against Bernheim and others, insists
also that, though Henry's privilege was to the Papacy in perpetuity, the Pope's
was only to Henry for his lifetime. The Church party certainly adopted this view,
but that it was recognised by the imperialists seems to be disproved by subsequent
history.
2 The First Lateran Council.
## p. 109 (#155) ############################################
The enhanced position of the Papacy
109
contained within itself difficulties that prevented it from becoming a
permanent settlement; its great work was to put on a legal footing the
relations of the Emperor with the bishops and abbots of Germany. What
might have resulted in connexion with the Papacy we cannot tell. The
conflict between Frederick I and the Papacy was again a conflict for
mastery, in which lesser subjects of difference were obliterated. Finally
Frederick II made a grand renunciation of imperial rights at elections
on 12 July 1213, before the last great conflict began.
The first great contest between Empire and Papacy had virtually
come to an end with the death of Henry IV. Its results were indecisive.
The Concordat of Worms had provided a settlement of a minor issue,
but the great question, that of supremacy, remained unsettled. It was
tacitly ignored by both sides until it was raised again by the challenging
words of Hadrian IV. But the change that had taken place in the relations
between the two powers was in itself a great victory for the papal idea.
The Papacy, which Henry III had controlled as master from 1046 to 1056,
had claimed authority over his son, and had at any rate treated as an
equal with his grandson. In the ecclesiastical sphere the Pope had obtained
a position which he was never to lose. That he was the spiritual head of
the Church would hardly have been questioned before, but his authority
had been rather that of a suzerain, who was expected to leave the local
archbishops and bishops in independent control of their own districts.
In imitation of the policy of the temporal rulers, the Popes had striven,
with a large measure of success, to convert this suzerainty into a true
sovereignty. This was most fully recognised in France, though it was very
widely accepted also in Germany and North Italy. In England, papal
authority had made least headway, but even here we find in Anselm an
archbishop of Canterbury placing his profession of obedience to the Pope
above his duty to his temporal sovereign. The spiritual sovereignty of
the Papacy was bound to mean a limitation of the authority of the
temporal rulers.
Papal sovereignty found expression in the legislative, executive, and
iudicial supremacy of the Pope. At general synods, held usually at Rome
and during Lent, he promulgated decrees binding on the whole Church;
these decrees were repeated and made effective by local synods also, on
the holding of which the Popes insisted. The government was centralised
in the hands of the Pope, firstly, by means of legates, permanent or
temporary, who acted in his name with full powers: secondly, by the
frequent summons to Rome of bishops and especially of archbishops, who,
moreover, were rarely allowed to receive the pallium except from the
hand of the Pope himself. A more elaborate organisation was contemplated
in the creation of primacies, begun in France by Gregory VII and extended
by his successors; while certain archbishops were thus given authority
over others, they were themselves made more directly responsible to Rome.
CH. II.
## p. 110 (#156) ############################################
110
Ecclesiastical and political considerations
And as papal authority became more real, the authority of archbishops
and bishops tended to decrease. The encouragement of direct appeals to
Rome was a cause of this, as was the papal protection given to monasteries,
especially by Urban II, with exemption in several cases from episcopal
control. Calixtus II, as a former archbishop, was less in sympathy with
this policy and guarded episcopal rights over monasteries with some care.
But the close connexion of the Papacy with so many houses in all parts
tended to exalt its position and to lower the authority of the local bishop;
it had a further importance in the financial advantage it brought to the
Papacy.
Papal elections were now quite free. The rights that had been pre-
served to Henry IV in the Election Decree of Nicholas II had lapsed
during the schism. Imperial attempts to counteract this by the appoint-
ment of subservient anti-Popes had proved a complete failure. In episcopal
elections, too, progress had been made towards greater freedom. There
was a tendency towards the later system of election by the chapter, but at
present clergy outside the chapter and influential laymen had a consider-
able and a lawful share. In Germany and England the royal will was
still the decisive factor. It may be noticed here that the Popes did not
attempt to introduce their own control over elections in place of the lay
control which they deprecated. They did, however, frequently decide in
cases of dispute, or order a new election when they considered the previous
one to be uncanonical in form or invalid owing to the character of the
person elected; occasionally too, as Gregory VII in the case of Hugh and
the archbishopric of Lyons, they suggested to the electors the suitable
candidate. But the papal efforts were directed primarily to preserving
the purity of canonical election.
The Reform Movement had led to a devastating struggle, but in
many respects its results were for good. There was undoubtedly a greater
spirituality noticeable among the higher clergy, in Germany as well as in
France, at the end of the period. The leading figure among the moderates,
Bishop Otto of Bamberg, was to become famous as the apostle of Pome-
rania, and Archbishop Conrad of Salzburg was to be prominent not only in
politics but also for his zeal in removing the clergy from secular pursuits.
In the age that followed, St Bernard and St Norbert were able by their
personality and spiritual example to exercise a dominance over the rulers
of France and Germany denied to the Popes themselves.
There was indeed another side of papal activity which tended to lessen
their purely spiritual influence. The temporal power was to some extent
Ja necessity, for spiritual weapons were of only limited avail. Gregory VII
had apparently conceived the idea of a Europe owning papal suzerainty,
but his immediate successors limited themselves to the Papal States, ex-
tended by the whole of South Italy, where the Normans recognised papal
overlordship. The alliance with the Normans, so often useful, almost
necessary, was dangerous and demoralising. It had led to the fatal results
## p. 111 (#157) ############################################
Papal advance due to Gregory VII
111
of Gregory's last years and was for some time to give the Normans a
considerable influence over papal policy, while the claim of overlordship
of the South was to lead to the terrible struggle with the later Hohen-
staufen and its aftermath in the contest of Angevins and Aragonese. In
Rome itself papal authority, which had been unquestioned during
Gregory's archidiaconate and papacy up to 1083, received a severe check
from Norman brutality; it was long before it could be recovered in full
again.
The great advance of papal authority spiritual and temporal, its rise as
a power co-equal with the Empire, was not initiated indeed by Gregory VII,
but it was made possible by him and he was the creator of the new Papacy.
He had in imagination travelled much farther than his immediate suc-
cessors were willing to follow. But he made claims and set in motion
theories which were debated and championed by writers of greater learning
than his own, and though they lay dormant for a time they were not
forgotten. St Bernard shewed what spiritual authority could achieve.
Gregory VII had contemplated the Papacy exercising this authority,
and his claims were to be brought into the light again, foolishly and
impetuously at first by Hadrian IV, but with more insight and deter-
mination by Innocent III, with whom they were to enter into the region
of the practical and in some measure actually to be carried into effect.
Gregory VII owed much to Nicholas I and the author of the Forged
Decretals; Innocent III owed still more to Gregory VII.
CH. II.
## p. 112 (#158) ############################################
112
CHAPTER III.
GERMANY UNDER HENRY IV AND HENRY V.
The death of Henry III on 5 October 1056 was one of the greatest
disasters which the medieval Empire experienced. It is true that his
power had declined in the latter years of his reign, but the difficulties
before him were not so great that he himself, granted good health, could
not have successfully surmounted them. Imperial prestige had suffered,
especially from Hungary in the south-east; yet even the weak government
of the regency was soon able to restore, though it could not retain, its
overlordship. It was rather in the internal affairs of Germany and in the
Italian kingdom that the death of the great Emperor was fatal. The
German princes needed a master to keep them from usurping or claiming
independence of action. And in Italy the situation was critical, as
Henry III had recognised. Imperial authority was challenged in the
north and centre by Duke Godfrey of Lower Lorraine, the husband of
Beatrice of Tuscany, while in the south the rise of the Norman power
and the prospect of a secular sword on which the now regenerated Papacy
could rely put it in a position to shake off its subservience to its former
rescuer and protector, the Emperor. The more absolute Henry's authority
had been, the greater the loss of imperial prestige should the Papacy be-
come independent.
The heir to the throne was a boy not quite six years
of
had averted the gravest danger to which monarchy was liable—the
danger of a vacancy in the kingdom-as his son Henry had already been
recognised and anointed as king. But he could not avert the lesser,
though often hardly less grave, evil of a regency. Probably in accordance
with the Emperor's own wishes, and certainly following the usual
precedent, the Empress-mother Agnes was recognised as regent, a woman
distinguished only for her piety. Had she combined with this the firm
character of a Blanche of Castile, she might have made of her son a
Louis IX, but she failed alike to maintain imperial government and to
impress her piety on her son. For the few months that Pope Victor II
survived his master and friend, all indeed went well. His counsels brought
peace in Germany (especially in Lorraine and Bavaria), his influence it
was that caused the change in government to be effected with so little
disturbance, and during his lifetime Empire and Papacy were united in
the closest harmony. But with his death Agnes was left to depend on
the counsel of such of the bishops as enjoyed her favour: in particular
Henry of Augsburg, whose influence at court seriously weakened the
regency owing to the jealousy to which it gave rise.
age. Henry III
## p. 113 (#159) ############################################
Regency of Agnes
113
The effect of the five years and a half of Agnes' regency was to pro-
duce a steady decline in the prestige and power of the central authority.
At first, indeed, there was an improvement on the eastern frontiers. The
birth of a son, Salomo, to King Andrew of Hungary had disappointed
the king's brother Béla in his hopes of the succession. To counteract this
danger Andrew made peace with the Empire in 1058, and a marriage-
alliance was arranged between Salomo and Agnes' daughter Judith.
This alliance, however, only produced disaster. An imperial army sent
in 1060 to the assistance of Andrew was severely defeated. Andrew him-
self was killed in battle, Salomo had to take refuge in Germany, and Béla
and his son Géza established themselves as rulers of Hungary. The Duke
of Poland, who had given a refuge and assistance to Béla, seized the
opportunity to throw off the imperial overlordship, and by his continual
alliance with the anti-German party in both Hungary and Bohemia was
able to maintain himself in a practically independent position. The Duke
of Bohemia, therefore, was on the side of the Empire', and his loyalty was
to be of the greatest value, placed as he was in direct contact with the
duchies both of Saxony and Bavaria. During practically the whole of the
eighty years covered by the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V this
situation prevailed in the three countries. There was frequent civil war
in each of them, and the brothers of the ruler were constantly in revolt
against him, but, while the German party maintained itself in Bohemia,
the anti-German party was successful in both Hungary and Poland. To-
wards the end of the period Hungary became more concerned in Eastern
than in Western politics, though its contest with Venice for the coast of
Dalmatia introduced a further complication into the international
situation.
It was not surprising that the frontier-states refused obedience to a
government which could not enforce its authority within the kingdom.
The majesty of the imperial name was still sufficient to leave the
disposition of appointments, both lay and ecclesiastical, in the hands of
the Empress-regent. Agnes, too, was fortunate in the patronage that she
had to bestow, though singularly unfortunate in its disposal. The duchy
of Franconia, as before, remained in royal hands. When Swabia became
vacant by the death of Duke Otto in 1057, Agnes bestowed the duchy on
the Burgundian Count, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, and his marriage with the
king's sister Matilda in 1059 was designed to bind him to the interests of
the court; but Matilda died in 1060, and his subsequent marriage with
Adelaide, Henry IV's sister-in-law, tended perhaps rather to rivalry than
to union with the king. To the leading noble in Swabia, Count Berthold
of Zähringen, was given the duchy of Carinthia in 1061 ; Carinthia, how-
ever, remained quite independent of its duke, and the local family of
1 In 1085 Vratislav II as a reward for his loyalty received the title of king, and
was crowned by Archbishop Egilbert of Trèves at Prague. The title was for his life-
time only, and did not affect his duties to his overlord.
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. III.
8
## p. 114 (#160) ############################################
114
Weakness of the government
Eppenstein was predominant in the duchy. In Saxony, Agnes does not
seem to have attempted to interfere with the recognised claims of the
Saxons to independence within the duchy or with the hereditary right of
the Billung family, and on the death of Duke Bernard in 1059 his son
Ordulf succeeded without challenge. But it was probably with the aim of
obtaining valuable support in Saxony that in 1061 she handed over the
duchy of Bavaria, which had been entrusted to her own charge by
Henry III, to Count Otto of Nordheim. The dukes so appointed used
their new authority solely to further their own ambitious ends, and the
mother exalted her son's most determined opponents. The leading
ecclesiastics were no more disinterested in their aims than the secular
princes. Archbishop Anno of Cologne was entering into relations with
the leading nobles in Germany, and with the Papacy and Duke Godfrey
in Italy, and was using his influence already in episcopal elections; his
nephew Burchard, who became Bishop of Halberstadt, was one of the
principals in every Saxon revolt. The Archbishop of Mayence, Siegfried',
was a man of little resolution, whose weakness of character prevented him
from playing the part in German history to which his office entitled him.
The most serious rivalry to Anno came from the north, where Archbishop
Adalbert of Bremen was establishing a dominant position, partly by
taking the lead in missionary work in Scandinavia and among the Slavs,
partly by the extension of his secular authority so that even nobles were
willing to accept his overlordship in return for his powerful protection.
His ambition, however, aroused the hostility of the Billung family, and
was directly responsible for the first disturbances in Saxony.
It was in Italy that imperial authority was displayed at its weakest.
Here the death of Henry III had enabled Duke Godfrey of Lower
Lorraine to establish an influence which the German government was
unable to challenge. The election of his brother Frederick as Pope
Stephen IX in 1057 was serious in itself, besides the fact that it marked
the end of the imperial control of papal elections. The Empress-regent,
indeed, ratified this election, as well as that of Nicholas II in 1059, but
even her piety took alarm at the Papal Election Decree and the alliance
with the Normans. It shews how serious the situation was when Agnes
could feel herself bound to oppose the reform party and recognise
Cadalus as Pope in 1061, an action which only damaged imperial prestige
still further, since she was unable to give him any support. On the other
hand, Duke Godfrey intervened, probably in collaboration with Anno,
compelling the rival Popes to return to their dioceses to await the decision
of the German government.
But it was not the decision of Agnes that was to settle this question.
The regency had already been taken out of her hands. Dissatisfaction
1 He was appointed by Agnes in 1060; as he was of high birth, he may have
been designed to counter the ambitions of Anno.
## p. 115 (#161) ############################################
Anno's coup d'état at Kaiserswerth
115
with the weak government of a woman and a child had been for some
time openly expressed, especially by those princes whose selfish ambition
had contributed greatly to this weakness. Archbishop Anno had been
intriguing to get control of the government, and the plot that he contrived
was probably carried out with the connivance of Duke Godfrey. The
plot culminated at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine in April 1062, when Anno,
with the assistance of Duke Otto of Bavaria and Count Ekbert of
Brunswick, beguiled the young king on board a boat, took possession of
his person and of the royal insignia, hurried him by river to Cologne,
and there took charge of the government in his name. Agnes made
no attempt to recover her lost authority, and retired at once to the
life of religion to which indeed she had dedicated herself the previous
year.
For two years Anno retained control, and used his authority to
enrich his province and to advance his relatives'. He thought it politic,
indeed, when the court was in Saxony in 1063, to associate Archbishop
Adalbert in the government, and in a diploma of 27 June Adalbert is
described as patronus, Anno as magister of the young king. This was the
title under which he usually appears; the way in which he performed his
tutorship may be inferred from the charges, so constantly repeated after-
wards, of the vicious life of Henry's early years. Italian affairs in par-
ticular engrossed Anno's attention. In concert with Duke Godfrey he
had certainly decided for Alexander II and against Cadalus, but it was
important that the German government should formally have the decisive
voice. At the diet of Augsburg in 1062, and finally at the synod of
Mantua in 1064, Anno dictated a decision in favour of Alexander. But
in this he clearly over-reached himself, and the Papacy, which was
asserting its independence of imperial authority, did not accept the
position that a German archbishop could have the decisive voice in
a papal election. Both in 1068 and in 1070 Anno received a lesson at
Rome as to who was master and who servant. And his absence at Mantua
gave the opportunity to his rival in Germany. Anno returned to find
himself superseded by Adalbert.
For another two years the control rested with Adalbert, who had won
increased fame by a victory in Hungary which temporarily restored
Salomo. The regency, indeed, came to an end when in his fifteenth year
the young king came of age and girded on the sword at Worms on
29 March 1065. But the archbishop remained master, and made
imperial policy subservient to his own ambitions. He received lavish
grants from the royal domain in Saxony, and further impoverished the
1 On 14 July 1063 a royal charter granted one-ninth of the royal revenues to
the Archbishop of Cologne to be distributed among the monasteries of his province.
On 31 August 1063 Archbishop Engelhard of Magdeburg died, and Anno's brother
Werner (Wezil) was appointed to succeed him; he was only second to Anno's
nephew Burchard in instigating revolt in Saxony.
СВ. І.
8--2
## p. 116 (#162) ############################################
116
Short regency of Adalbert of Bremen
crown by a bountiful distribution of royal abbeys, mainly among bishops.
The coming-of-age of the king was to have been followed by his imperial
coronation at Rome, but this was prevented by Adalbert, who feared that
Godfrey and Anno would regain influence over the king in Italy. His
ambition brought about his sudden downfall. Anno was able to engineer
another coup d'état with his old associates, and to unite the leading
bishops and nobles on his side. At the diet of Tribur, in the beginning
of 1066, Henry was compelled to dismiss Adalbert. Though he had used
his authority for merely selfish aims, the principality he had erected
might have done great service to the cause of imperial unity in limiting
the independence of the Saxons, but it collapsed with his fall. The
Billungs, under Duke Ordulf's son Magnus, took advantage of his
humiliation to drive him from Bremen, and the collapse of the German
missions, which he had done so much to foster, among the Slavs and
Scandinavians both completed the ruin of his prestige and diminished the
sphere of imperial authority.
From the fall of Adalbert may be dated the commencement of
Henry IV's personal government. Anno made a bid for power once more,
but the murder of his nephew Conrad, whose appointment to the arch-
bishopric of Trèves he had just secured, combined with a serious illness
to force him into the background. Henceforward he devoted himself to
his province, using his remaining energies in the foundation of monasteries
and the reform of monastic discipline; rather more than a century later
his name was enrolled among the saints of the Church. There was no one
else ambitious or bold enough to succeed Adalbert. The lay princes could
only be roused to take an interest in imperial affairs when their indepen-
dence of action was threatened or when the actual safety of the kingdom
was at stake. A dangerous illness of the king caused alarm as to the
succession, and they united to bring about his marriage with Bertha of
Turin, to whom he had already been betrothed for ten years. The
imperial coronation was again contemplated, and indeed welcomed by the
Pope who was desiring imperial assistance against the Normans, but was
again prevented, this time by Duke Godfrey. Godfrey, alarmed at the
prospect of a revival of imperial authority in Italy, anticipated the
imperial expedition by himself marching against the Normans. His lack
of success compelled the Pope to come to terms with the Normans once
more. By Godfrey's action the German king lost all the advantage he
might have obtained from intervening as protector of the Papacy; the
attempt to interfere in the papal election had already been unsuccessful,
and imperial prestige in Italy was thus completely ruined when Henry
took over the reins of
power.
The regency of the kingdom, in the hands of a weak woman and of
ambitious metropolitans, had had disastrous results for the central
authority. Nor was there much change during the early years of Henry IV's
direct rule. The accounts of his enemies continually refer to the excesses
## p. 117 (#163) ############################################
The royal office
117
at any rate of his youth. The exaggeration of these accounts is evident,
but there is probably a substratum of truth, and the chief blame must fall
on Anno and Adalbert, if not on Agnes as well. The marriage with
Bertha, it was hoped, would prove a steadying influence. The king, how-
ever, was a reluctant, if not an unfaithful, husband, and visited his dislike
of the marriage upon his wife. In 1069 he even attempted to obtain a
divorce, but the Papacy intervened, and the papal legate, Peter Damian,
who never minced his words, compelled the king to receive back his wife.
This seems to have been the turning-point in the reign. From this time
he was a constant and an affectionate husband, and from this time he
clearly abandoned the path of pleasure and devoted himself assiduously
to the task of government.
The history of Germany under Henry IV and Henry V is in the main
a record of civil war, producing confusion and disorder throughout the
country and involving untold hardships and miseries for the lower classes.
The king was faced with formidable opposition even before the Papacy
joined the ranks of his foes. To realise this, as well as to note the changes
that resulted in Germany as a whole, it is necessary at the outset to survey
briefly the political and social structure of Germany. Difficult too as it is
to distinguish between the theoretical and the actual, some attempt must
be made to do so; particularly as the theoretical derives from the past,
and the past ideas, even in this period of change, still have their effect in
determining the relations of the various parts of the constitution to one
another. In the first place, the king held a unique position, obscured as
it often was by the actual weakness of the ruler.
In theory he owed his
throne to election by the nobles, but in fact the hereditary principle was
dominant. Henry IV always insisted on his ius hereditarium against the
claims of Pope and nobles, and it was not until the death of Henry V
that the elective idea, asserted already in 1077 and 1081 at the elections of
the anti-kings Rudolf and Herman, won a victory over the hereditary.
The king alone held office dei gratia, and this was marked by the religious
ceremony of unction and coronation. He was supreme liege lord, com-
mander-in-chief, the source of justice, the enforcer of peace; these
attributes were symbolised by the royal insignia-crown, lance, sceptre,
sword, etc. — the possession of which was so important, as was evidenced
in the contest of Henry V with his father in 1105–6 and again in the
events which occurred after Henry V's death. Further, there were vested
in him the sovereign rights! —lordship of towns, offices, jurisdictions, mints,
tolls, markets, and the like all of which were coveted for their financial
| All that came under the heading of regalia. These were defined by Frederick
Barbarossa's lawyers at Roncaglia. Cf. also the definition of them in Paschal Il's
privilege to Henry V of 12 February 1111 (MGH, Constitutiones, Vol. 1, No. 90,
pp. 141 sq. ).
CH. III.
## p. 118 (#164) ############################################
118
“Princes” of the kingdom
advantages, and these could only lawfully be exercised after the grant of
a charter from the king.
Such a position carried with it potentialities towards absolutism, and
in the case of a strong ruler like Henry III the trend was in that direction.
But to this theoretical supremacy were attached definite limitations as
well. The king was subject to law, not above it, and as supreme judge
it was his duty to do justice ; the breach of this obligation, his opponents
declared, justified rebellion against him. In great issues affecting the
kingdom, or the person and property of a prince of the kingdom, the
king had to act by consent, to summon a diet of the princes and in effect
to be guided by their decision. These “princes ”—dukes, margraves,
counts, bishops, abbots of royal abbeys—owed their status originally to
their official position. With the office went land, and as the lay nobles
ceased in fact to be royal officials their landed position becomes the more
important. The period of transition is a long one, but the change
is especially rapid during the second half of the eleventh century;
naturally public recognition of the change lags behind the fact. One
result of this change from an official to a landed status was the decline
in rank of those nobles who held their fiefs from duke or bishop and not
directly from the king.
Among these lay princes, the dukes held a place apart, differing from
the counts not only in priority of rank. They had owed their position
originally not to appointment by the king but to election by the people
of the tribe, and this origin was still perpetuated in the claim of the
nobles of Bavaria to be consulted in the appointment of their duke. At
the same time the king was especially concerned to insist on the depen-
dence of these offices upon himself; he did not even feel himself obliged
to fill a vacancy in one of them within the year and a day that was
customary with other offices. Franconia during this period remained in
his hands, except that the Bishops of Würzburg were given ducal rights
in the eastern portion ; Swabia after Rudolf's deposition for treason in
1077 remained vacant for two years. On the other hand, in Saxony,
where the duke indeed had only a limited authority, the hereditary right
of the Billung family was not contested.
Of the counts (grafen), the margraves (markgrafen), important
especially for the defence of the eastern frontiers, retained exceptional
judicial and military privileges, and in some cases maintained their inde-
pendence even of the dukes. The counts-palatine (pfalzgrafen) too
retained their old position. They were four in number, one for each
of the tribes that formed the original stem-duchies—Franks, Swabians,
Bavarians, Saxons-and they acted in theory as representatives of royal
justice within the duchies and as the administrators of the royal domains.
Of these the Count-Palatine of the Franks, who had his seat at Aix-la-
Chapelle and was known now usually as Count-Palatine of Lorraine, though
later as Count-Palatine of the Rhine, was the most important. There was
## p. 119 (#165) ############################################
The countryside and the towns
119
no duke in Franconia to usurp his authority; he was, beneath the king,
supreme judge, and commonly acted during the king's absence as his
representative. But there was, on the other hand, a great change in the
position of the ordinary counts. There were few whose authority extended
over the whole of a gau or pagus, as had formerly been usual; of these
few, some, whose control extended over more than one gau, came to be
distinguished in the twelfth century, for example the Count of Thuringia,
by the new title of landgrave (landgraf). In most cases the county had
been divided up, often by division among sons, into several districts each
of them under a count, often of quite small extent. The family residence,
soon converted into a castle, gave the count his name, and, whatever
other dignities the counts might acquire, they never lost their connexion
with the duchy of their origin'. Their political importance, therefore,
varied in proportion to the extent of their lands, and in fact there
was little distinction between those who had merely the title of count
and ordinary freemen with free holdings.
The increasing importance of landed-proprietorship in the status of
nobles had its effect in tending to depress the majority of ordinary free-
men to a half-free status. In the country districts there was little real
distinction between the half-freeman and the freeman who held from
a noble in return for services in work and kind, and who had lost the right
of bearing arms. On the other hand, the rise of the class of ministeriales,
especially when they held land by military tenure, forming as they did an
essential element in the domain of every lord, lay and ecclesiastical, gave
an opening to freemen by joining this class to increase their opportunities
at the expense of a lowering of status. It was a particular feature of the
period. Conrad II had especially encouraged the formation of this class
of royal servant, and on it his successors continued to rely.
As in the countryside, so in the towns there was a tendency to
1
obliterate the distinction between the free and half-free classes, though
in the towns this took the form of a levelling-up rather than a levelling-
down. The “ free air” of the towns, the encouragement to settlers, the
development of trade especially in the Rhine district, as well as the pro-
tection of the town walls, caused a considerable increase in their
population ; they acquired both constitutional and economic importance.
Some towns were royal towns, but all were under a lord, usually a bishop,
and it was to the bishops that the trading element in the town owed its
first privileges. It was to the bishop's interest to obtain for his town from
the king special rights such as the holding of a market and exemption
from tolls in royal towns, and all charters to towns till the latter part of
the eleventh century are granted through the bishops. The first sign of
a change is in the charter of Henry IV to Worins in 1074. The privileges
1 The original home of the Welfs was Altdorf in Swabia. So it was to a diet of
Swabian nobles that Henry the Lion, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was first sum-
moned to answer the charges against him.
CH. INI.
## p. 120 (#166) ############################################
120
Alliance of the towns with the king
granted are of the usual nature-exemption from toll in certain (in this
case, specified) royal towns. But for the first time the charter is given
not to the bishop but to the townsmen, and they are described, for the
first time, not as “negotiatores” or “mercatores” but as “ cives. ” The
circumstances attending the grant of this charter', including the welcome
to the king, the well-equipped military support given to him, the pay-
ment by the community of a financial aid, the reception and preservation
of the charter, all imply a town-organisation of a more advanced nature
than previous charters would have led us to expect. The Jews played an
important part in these early trading communities, and they are specially
mentioned in the charter to Worms; so too the Bishop of Spires in 1086
for the advantage of his town was careful, as he states, to plant a colony
of Jews and to give them special privileges, which were confirmed by the
king in 1090? If Worms was the first town which gives evidence of an
organisation independent of its bishop, it was soon followed by others
where the bishop as at Worms was hostile to the king. The rising of the
people at Cologne against Archbishop Anno in 1074, the expulsion of
Archbishop Siegfried and the anti-king Rudolf from Mayence in 1077,
the expulsion of Bishop Adalbert from Würzburg the same year and the
defence of the city against Rudolf, and, above all, the devotion of the
Rhine towns to Henry IV during his last years, shew clearly a wide
extension of this movements.
The townsmen, then, were coming into more direct relations with the
king. As far as the nobles were concerned, the change is rather in the
contrary direction. The duty of fidelity to the head of the State was still
a general conception; even ecclesiastics who scrupled to take an oath of
liege-fealty to the king did not disavow this obligation. The oath of
fealty was not taken by the people as a whole, but only by the princes of
the kingdom, whether to the king or to his representative, and they took
the oath in virtue of their official capacity and as representing the whole
community. It mattered not whether they held fiefs from the king
or from another noble; it was not the fief but the office, through which
the royal authority had been, and in theory still was, asserted, that
created the responsibility on behalf of the people within their spheres of
control. So the relation of the king with the nobles was not yet strictly
1 See H. Wibel, Die ältesten deutschen Stadtprivilegien (Archiv für Urkunden-
forschung, 1918, Vol. vi, pp. 234 sqq. ).
2 Altmann and Bernheim, Ausgewählte Urkunden zur Erläuterung der Verfass-
ungsgeschichte Deutschlands, pp. 158 sqq.
3 In Flanders, Cambrai set the example by founding a commune in 1077. Here
the movement was also directed against the bishop, but in this case it was, as at
Milan, allied with the Church reform movement. See Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique,
Vol. 1, pp. 192 sq. In Germany proper the movement was definitely royalist in
character.
4 Cf. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, Vol. vi (ed. Seeliger), pp. 487 sqq. ;
G. von Below, Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters, Vol. 1, pp. 232 sqq.
## p. 121 (#167) ############################################
The growth of feudalism
121
a feudal relation. It was not to become so until the end of the twelfth
century, when the status of prince was confined to those nobles who held
directly from the king. The feudum was not yet the all-important thing,
at any rate in theory and law. There were many fiefs without military
service, some without service at all; there were vassals too without fiefs.
But these became, more and more, exceptional cases, and rapidly the
change from the official to the feudal status was being accomplished
in practice. Always the grant of a fief had accompanied the bestowal of
an office; and, as the fiefs had become hereditary, so too had the offices.
In the majority of cases, offices and fiefs had become identified, and the
official origin was preserved in little more than the title'.
In fact, the great nobles were no longer royal officials but territorial
magnates with alods and fiefs to which their children (sons if possible,
but failing them daughters) succeeded, and their aim was to loosen the
tie which bound them to the sovereign and to create an independent
position for themselves. Two circumstances combined to assist them in
this ambition-the rise of the class of ministeriales and the continual
civil war. The military fief became the normal type, and every important
noble had his band of armed and mounted retainers. He soon had his
castle, or castles, as well, built in defiance of the king; for castle-building
was a sovereign right, which only the stress of civil war enabled the noble
to usurp. Medieval society was based especially on custom and precedent.
If the central authority was weak, the nobles began at once to encroach ;
usurpations were in a few years translated into rights, and it was difficult,
if not impossible, for the king to recover what had been lost. Moreover,
while the counts had ceased to be royal officers, the system of maintain-
ing the royal control by missi had long disappeared. This made a fixed
seat of government impossible. The king himself had to progress cease-
lessly throughout his dominions to enforce his will on the local magnates.
There was no system of itinerant justices, and, except in the royal
domains, no official class to relieve the direct burden of the central
government. So there was no permanent machinery which could function
normally ; everything depended on the personality of the ruler.
But from the point of view of the king there were compensations.
Each noble played for his own hand, and there was rarely any unity of
purpose among them. It was from the dukes that the king had most to
fear, and with regard to them he started with many advantages. They
had no claim to divine appointment, no royal majesty or insignia, no
sovereign rights but such as he had granted. The nobles in each duchy
held office in theory from the king, to whom, and not to the duke, they
1 This is true even of the counts-palatine, with the exception of the Count-
Palatine of the Rhine who still retained much of his old official position; for instance,
when Henry IV went to Italy in 1090, the Count-Palatine of the Rhine was appointed
co-regent of the German kingdom with Duke Frederick of Swabia. So too when
Henry V went to Italy in 1116.
CH. III.
## p. 122 (#168) ############################################
122
The royal domain
had sworn liege-fealty', and they were far more jealous of the assertion
of the ducal, than of the royal, authority over them. Moreover the duke
by virtue of his office acquired little, if any, domain in his duchy? Where
his family possessions lay, there alone, in most cases, was he really power-
ful. Agnes in her appointments had at any rate shewn herself wise
in this, that she had appointed as dukes nobles whose hereditary lands
lay outside the duchies to which they were appointed. Berthold of Zäh-
ringen, the most powerful noble in Swabia, was a nonentity as Duke in
Carinthia; Otto of Nordheim, one of the leading nobles in Saxony, could
not maintain himself in his duchy of Bavaria when he revolted in 1070.
In other words, the noble depended on his domain, and this is equally
true of the king. There was no direct taxation' as in England, and the
king had in a very real sense to live of his own. The royal domain* was
scattered throughout the kingdom ; in each duchy there were royal
estates and royal palaces, though the largest and richest portion lay in
eastern Saxony, stretching from Goslar to Merseburg, the inheritance of
the Saxon kings. In the first place, it supplied the needs of the royal
household, and this, as well as the maintenance of royal authority, made
necessary the continual journeyings of the king and his court. The
domain, too, provided a means whereby the king could make grants of
lands whether in reward for faithful service or, more usually, in donations
to bishoprics and abbeys. And, finally, in these manors, as also in the
manors of nobles and ecclesiastics, there emerged out of the mass of half-
free tenants a class of men who played an important and peculiar rôle in
Germany. These royal ministeriales were employed by the king in adminis-
trative posts, as well as in the management of his estates; they were
armed and mounted, and provided an important part of the king's army.
On them he began to rely, therefore, to counteract the growing indepen-
dence of the greater nobles, both in his Council and on military expeditions.
In return, they were granted fiefs, and rose often to knightly ranks,
1 A duke or other noble might obtain an oath of fealty from his vassals, but
there should, by right, be in it a saving clause, preserving the superior fealty due
to the king.
2 Cf. Waitz, op. cit. Vol. vii, pp. 133 sq.
3 Unless the bede comes under this category. But all nobiles were exempt from
this, and other exemptions had been granted by charter.
4 Cf. M. Stimming, Das deutsche Königsgut im 11 und 12 Jahrhundert; B. Heusinger,
Servitium regis in der deutschen Kaiserzeit (Archiv für Urkundenforschung, Vol. viii,
pp. 26–159). Between the royal and the private domain of the king as a rule little
distinction was made. But the issue sometimes arose, notably on the question of the
inheritance of the Hohenstaufen from Henry V; see infra, p. 336.
6 Eventually this had its result in the rise of a number of new noble families to
take the place in German history of older ones that had become extinct. One leading
cause for the disappearance of old noble families—the ecclesiastical career (with its
enforced celibacy) which in the abbeys especially had been almost a prerogative of the
nobility-is very clearly demonstrated by A. Schulte, Der Adel und die deutsche Kirche
im Mittelalter (Kirchenrechtliche Abhandlungen, ed. U. Stutz, LXIII, LXIV).
## p. 123 (#169) ############################################
Alliance with the episcopate
123
sometimes even to episcopal. The same process was occurring in the
domains of the nobles. The ecclesiastical nobles had probably set the
example? , which was followed by the secular nobility and by the king.
As it provided him with the possibility of making himself self-sufficient and
so independent of princely support, it provided them too with a means of
furthering their independence of him.
The royal domain, then, plays a central part in the policy of the
Salian kings, as it was to do with the Capetians in France. During the
regency it had been grievously depleted. But there were many ways
in which it could be increased and in which gaps could be made good-
by inheritance, by exchange, by conquest, by escheat. There were also
other sources of royal revenue, notably the sovereign rights, of justice
and the like, which were assumed by the king wherever he might happen
to be and which were frequently lucrative. From the towns too, as well
as from the domain, he could levy contributions? , and, as has been indicated
above, could look to them for valuable support especially in time of war.
The loyalty and devotion of the Rhine towns is most marked, particularly
when the episcopal lord of the town was disloyal. But only in a few cases
was the bishop himself among the king's enemies, and so a direct alliance
with the townsmen, which might have been as useful to the German
monarchy as it was to the French, occurred only in isolated cases. It was
not to the king's interest to make the bishops antagonistic.
For the alliance with the episcopate had, from the time of Otto I,
been a cardinal factor in the policy of the king of Germany. The political
importance of the ecclesiastical nobles was evident: on them, as well as on
ministeriales and lesser nobles, the king relied both for his Council and
government and for his military expeditions. They could never make
their offices and fiefs hereditary, and they could be depended upon as
a counterpoise to the dangerous power of the dukes; while in the con-
tinual civil wars of this period the summons to the host was not of much
avail, nor could it be made effective without the consent of the nobles.
But they were equally valuable to the king from the economic point of
view. In the first place, the royal abbeys made annual payments in kind,
which began to be converted into money payments or at any rate to
1 Compare with this the prominent part played by ecclesiastics in the drift
towards feudalism in Saxon England (supra, Vol. 11, pp. 375–7). The great differ-
ence is that in Germany it was an unfree class to whom these military fiefs were
granted.
? The tax known as “bede” (petitio, precaria)originally, as its name shews, a
voluntary contribution. On the nature of this tax see G. von Below, op. cit.
pp. 85 sqq. , and generally for the taxation of towns, K. Zeumer, Die deutsche
Städtesteuern (Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, ed. G. Schmoller,
Vol. 1, No. 2).
3 The lay nobles would take part only if they happened to be present, or if they
were summoned to diets on important issues of state or to judge one of their
number. The great offices of the household were held by dukes, but had become
merely titular and ceremonial.
CB. II.
## p. 124 (#170) ############################################
124
The complication of Italy
be reckoned on a monetary basis early in the twelfth century; from these
abbeys, too, when he visited them, he could claim hospitality. There
is no evidence that the episcopal services included fixed payments in kind,
but the obligation seems to have been imposed upon the bishops of main-
taining the king and his retinue during the king's stay in their towns,
whether or no these contained a royal palace. It is at any rate noticeable
how prominently they figure in the itineraries of the Salian kings! . And
on the death of a bishop the king exercised his rights of regalia and took
possession of the revenues of the see during the vacancy, and sometimes
of spolia as well, seizing the personal effects of the dead bishop. These
great ecclesiastical offices were regarded by the king as very distinctly
part of his personal possessions?
CH. II.
## p. 108 (#154) ############################################
108
Effect of the Concordat
1
control over elections in Burgundy, and had been gradually losing
authority in Italy. Two factors had reduced the importance of the Italian
bishoprics: the growing power of the communes, often acquiesced in by
the bishops, had brought about a corresponding decline in episcopal
authority, and the bishops had in general acceded to the papal reform
decrees, so that they were far less amenable to imperial control. As far
as Germany was concerned, it remained of the highest importance to the
king to retain control over the elections, as the temporal authority of the
bishops continued unimpaired. And here, though the abolition of the
obnoxious use of spiritual symbols satisfied the papal scruples, the royal
control of elections remained effective. But it cannot be denied that the
Concordat was a real gain to the Papacy. The Emperor's privilege was
a surrender of an existing practice; the Pope's was only a statement of
how much of the existing procedure he was willing to countenance?
On 11 November a diet at Bamberg confirmed the Concordat, which
forthwith became part of the constitutional law of the Empire. In
December the Pope wrote a letter of congratulation to Henry and sent
him his blessing, and at the Lenten Synod of 11232 proceeded to ratify
the Concordat on the side of the Church as well. The imperial diploma
was welcomed with enthusiasm by the synod; against the papal concessions
there was some murmuring, but for the sake of peace they were tolerated
for the time. It was recognised that they were not irrevocable, and
their wording rendered possible the claim that, while Henry's privilege
was binding on his successors, the Pope's had been granted to Henry
alone for his lifetime. There were also wide discrepancies of opinion as
to the exact implication of the praesentia regis at elections and the
influence he could exercise at disputed elections. By Henry V, and later
by Frederick Barbarossa, these were interpreted in the sense most favour-
able to the king. Between Henry and Calixtus, however, no friction arose,
despite the efforts of Archbishop Adalbert to provoke the Pope to action
against the Emperor. Calixtus died in December 1124, Henry in the
following summer, without any violation of the peace. The subordination
of Lothar to ecclesiastical interests allowed the Papacy to improve its
position, which was still further enhanced during the weak reign of Conrad.
Frederick I restored royal authority in this direction as in others, and the
version of the Concordat given by Otto of Freising represents his point
of view; the difference between Italian and German bishoprics is ignored,
and the wording of the Concordat is slightly altered to admit of in-
terpretation in the imperial sense. It is clear that the Concordat
1 See A. Hofmeister, Das Wormser Konkordat (Festschrift Dietrich Schäfer zum
70 Geburtstag). Hofmeister, following Schäfer against Bernheim and others, insists
also that, though Henry's privilege was to the Papacy in perpetuity, the Pope's
was only to Henry for his lifetime. The Church party certainly adopted this view,
but that it was recognised by the imperialists seems to be disproved by subsequent
history.
2 The First Lateran Council.
## p. 109 (#155) ############################################
The enhanced position of the Papacy
109
contained within itself difficulties that prevented it from becoming a
permanent settlement; its great work was to put on a legal footing the
relations of the Emperor with the bishops and abbots of Germany. What
might have resulted in connexion with the Papacy we cannot tell. The
conflict between Frederick I and the Papacy was again a conflict for
mastery, in which lesser subjects of difference were obliterated. Finally
Frederick II made a grand renunciation of imperial rights at elections
on 12 July 1213, before the last great conflict began.
The first great contest between Empire and Papacy had virtually
come to an end with the death of Henry IV. Its results were indecisive.
The Concordat of Worms had provided a settlement of a minor issue,
but the great question, that of supremacy, remained unsettled. It was
tacitly ignored by both sides until it was raised again by the challenging
words of Hadrian IV. But the change that had taken place in the relations
between the two powers was in itself a great victory for the papal idea.
The Papacy, which Henry III had controlled as master from 1046 to 1056,
had claimed authority over his son, and had at any rate treated as an
equal with his grandson. In the ecclesiastical sphere the Pope had obtained
a position which he was never to lose. That he was the spiritual head of
the Church would hardly have been questioned before, but his authority
had been rather that of a suzerain, who was expected to leave the local
archbishops and bishops in independent control of their own districts.
In imitation of the policy of the temporal rulers, the Popes had striven,
with a large measure of success, to convert this suzerainty into a true
sovereignty. This was most fully recognised in France, though it was very
widely accepted also in Germany and North Italy. In England, papal
authority had made least headway, but even here we find in Anselm an
archbishop of Canterbury placing his profession of obedience to the Pope
above his duty to his temporal sovereign. The spiritual sovereignty of
the Papacy was bound to mean a limitation of the authority of the
temporal rulers.
Papal sovereignty found expression in the legislative, executive, and
iudicial supremacy of the Pope. At general synods, held usually at Rome
and during Lent, he promulgated decrees binding on the whole Church;
these decrees were repeated and made effective by local synods also, on
the holding of which the Popes insisted. The government was centralised
in the hands of the Pope, firstly, by means of legates, permanent or
temporary, who acted in his name with full powers: secondly, by the
frequent summons to Rome of bishops and especially of archbishops, who,
moreover, were rarely allowed to receive the pallium except from the
hand of the Pope himself. A more elaborate organisation was contemplated
in the creation of primacies, begun in France by Gregory VII and extended
by his successors; while certain archbishops were thus given authority
over others, they were themselves made more directly responsible to Rome.
CH. II.
## p. 110 (#156) ############################################
110
Ecclesiastical and political considerations
And as papal authority became more real, the authority of archbishops
and bishops tended to decrease. The encouragement of direct appeals to
Rome was a cause of this, as was the papal protection given to monasteries,
especially by Urban II, with exemption in several cases from episcopal
control. Calixtus II, as a former archbishop, was less in sympathy with
this policy and guarded episcopal rights over monasteries with some care.
But the close connexion of the Papacy with so many houses in all parts
tended to exalt its position and to lower the authority of the local bishop;
it had a further importance in the financial advantage it brought to the
Papacy.
Papal elections were now quite free. The rights that had been pre-
served to Henry IV in the Election Decree of Nicholas II had lapsed
during the schism. Imperial attempts to counteract this by the appoint-
ment of subservient anti-Popes had proved a complete failure. In episcopal
elections, too, progress had been made towards greater freedom. There
was a tendency towards the later system of election by the chapter, but at
present clergy outside the chapter and influential laymen had a consider-
able and a lawful share. In Germany and England the royal will was
still the decisive factor. It may be noticed here that the Popes did not
attempt to introduce their own control over elections in place of the lay
control which they deprecated. They did, however, frequently decide in
cases of dispute, or order a new election when they considered the previous
one to be uncanonical in form or invalid owing to the character of the
person elected; occasionally too, as Gregory VII in the case of Hugh and
the archbishopric of Lyons, they suggested to the electors the suitable
candidate. But the papal efforts were directed primarily to preserving
the purity of canonical election.
The Reform Movement had led to a devastating struggle, but in
many respects its results were for good. There was undoubtedly a greater
spirituality noticeable among the higher clergy, in Germany as well as in
France, at the end of the period. The leading figure among the moderates,
Bishop Otto of Bamberg, was to become famous as the apostle of Pome-
rania, and Archbishop Conrad of Salzburg was to be prominent not only in
politics but also for his zeal in removing the clergy from secular pursuits.
In the age that followed, St Bernard and St Norbert were able by their
personality and spiritual example to exercise a dominance over the rulers
of France and Germany denied to the Popes themselves.
There was indeed another side of papal activity which tended to lessen
their purely spiritual influence. The temporal power was to some extent
Ja necessity, for spiritual weapons were of only limited avail. Gregory VII
had apparently conceived the idea of a Europe owning papal suzerainty,
but his immediate successors limited themselves to the Papal States, ex-
tended by the whole of South Italy, where the Normans recognised papal
overlordship. The alliance with the Normans, so often useful, almost
necessary, was dangerous and demoralising. It had led to the fatal results
## p. 111 (#157) ############################################
Papal advance due to Gregory VII
111
of Gregory's last years and was for some time to give the Normans a
considerable influence over papal policy, while the claim of overlordship
of the South was to lead to the terrible struggle with the later Hohen-
staufen and its aftermath in the contest of Angevins and Aragonese. In
Rome itself papal authority, which had been unquestioned during
Gregory's archidiaconate and papacy up to 1083, received a severe check
from Norman brutality; it was long before it could be recovered in full
again.
The great advance of papal authority spiritual and temporal, its rise as
a power co-equal with the Empire, was not initiated indeed by Gregory VII,
but it was made possible by him and he was the creator of the new Papacy.
He had in imagination travelled much farther than his immediate suc-
cessors were willing to follow. But he made claims and set in motion
theories which were debated and championed by writers of greater learning
than his own, and though they lay dormant for a time they were not
forgotten. St Bernard shewed what spiritual authority could achieve.
Gregory VII had contemplated the Papacy exercising this authority,
and his claims were to be brought into the light again, foolishly and
impetuously at first by Hadrian IV, but with more insight and deter-
mination by Innocent III, with whom they were to enter into the region
of the practical and in some measure actually to be carried into effect.
Gregory VII owed much to Nicholas I and the author of the Forged
Decretals; Innocent III owed still more to Gregory VII.
CH. II.
## p. 112 (#158) ############################################
112
CHAPTER III.
GERMANY UNDER HENRY IV AND HENRY V.
The death of Henry III on 5 October 1056 was one of the greatest
disasters which the medieval Empire experienced. It is true that his
power had declined in the latter years of his reign, but the difficulties
before him were not so great that he himself, granted good health, could
not have successfully surmounted them. Imperial prestige had suffered,
especially from Hungary in the south-east; yet even the weak government
of the regency was soon able to restore, though it could not retain, its
overlordship. It was rather in the internal affairs of Germany and in the
Italian kingdom that the death of the great Emperor was fatal. The
German princes needed a master to keep them from usurping or claiming
independence of action. And in Italy the situation was critical, as
Henry III had recognised. Imperial authority was challenged in the
north and centre by Duke Godfrey of Lower Lorraine, the husband of
Beatrice of Tuscany, while in the south the rise of the Norman power
and the prospect of a secular sword on which the now regenerated Papacy
could rely put it in a position to shake off its subservience to its former
rescuer and protector, the Emperor. The more absolute Henry's authority
had been, the greater the loss of imperial prestige should the Papacy be-
come independent.
The heir to the throne was a boy not quite six years
of
had averted the gravest danger to which monarchy was liable—the
danger of a vacancy in the kingdom-as his son Henry had already been
recognised and anointed as king. But he could not avert the lesser,
though often hardly less grave, evil of a regency. Probably in accordance
with the Emperor's own wishes, and certainly following the usual
precedent, the Empress-mother Agnes was recognised as regent, a woman
distinguished only for her piety. Had she combined with this the firm
character of a Blanche of Castile, she might have made of her son a
Louis IX, but she failed alike to maintain imperial government and to
impress her piety on her son. For the few months that Pope Victor II
survived his master and friend, all indeed went well. His counsels brought
peace in Germany (especially in Lorraine and Bavaria), his influence it
was that caused the change in government to be effected with so little
disturbance, and during his lifetime Empire and Papacy were united in
the closest harmony. But with his death Agnes was left to depend on
the counsel of such of the bishops as enjoyed her favour: in particular
Henry of Augsburg, whose influence at court seriously weakened the
regency owing to the jealousy to which it gave rise.
age. Henry III
## p. 113 (#159) ############################################
Regency of Agnes
113
The effect of the five years and a half of Agnes' regency was to pro-
duce a steady decline in the prestige and power of the central authority.
At first, indeed, there was an improvement on the eastern frontiers. The
birth of a son, Salomo, to King Andrew of Hungary had disappointed
the king's brother Béla in his hopes of the succession. To counteract this
danger Andrew made peace with the Empire in 1058, and a marriage-
alliance was arranged between Salomo and Agnes' daughter Judith.
This alliance, however, only produced disaster. An imperial army sent
in 1060 to the assistance of Andrew was severely defeated. Andrew him-
self was killed in battle, Salomo had to take refuge in Germany, and Béla
and his son Géza established themselves as rulers of Hungary. The Duke
of Poland, who had given a refuge and assistance to Béla, seized the
opportunity to throw off the imperial overlordship, and by his continual
alliance with the anti-German party in both Hungary and Bohemia was
able to maintain himself in a practically independent position. The Duke
of Bohemia, therefore, was on the side of the Empire', and his loyalty was
to be of the greatest value, placed as he was in direct contact with the
duchies both of Saxony and Bavaria. During practically the whole of the
eighty years covered by the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V this
situation prevailed in the three countries. There was frequent civil war
in each of them, and the brothers of the ruler were constantly in revolt
against him, but, while the German party maintained itself in Bohemia,
the anti-German party was successful in both Hungary and Poland. To-
wards the end of the period Hungary became more concerned in Eastern
than in Western politics, though its contest with Venice for the coast of
Dalmatia introduced a further complication into the international
situation.
It was not surprising that the frontier-states refused obedience to a
government which could not enforce its authority within the kingdom.
The majesty of the imperial name was still sufficient to leave the
disposition of appointments, both lay and ecclesiastical, in the hands of
the Empress-regent. Agnes, too, was fortunate in the patronage that she
had to bestow, though singularly unfortunate in its disposal. The duchy
of Franconia, as before, remained in royal hands. When Swabia became
vacant by the death of Duke Otto in 1057, Agnes bestowed the duchy on
the Burgundian Count, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, and his marriage with the
king's sister Matilda in 1059 was designed to bind him to the interests of
the court; but Matilda died in 1060, and his subsequent marriage with
Adelaide, Henry IV's sister-in-law, tended perhaps rather to rivalry than
to union with the king. To the leading noble in Swabia, Count Berthold
of Zähringen, was given the duchy of Carinthia in 1061 ; Carinthia, how-
ever, remained quite independent of its duke, and the local family of
1 In 1085 Vratislav II as a reward for his loyalty received the title of king, and
was crowned by Archbishop Egilbert of Trèves at Prague. The title was for his life-
time only, and did not affect his duties to his overlord.
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. III.
8
## p. 114 (#160) ############################################
114
Weakness of the government
Eppenstein was predominant in the duchy. In Saxony, Agnes does not
seem to have attempted to interfere with the recognised claims of the
Saxons to independence within the duchy or with the hereditary right of
the Billung family, and on the death of Duke Bernard in 1059 his son
Ordulf succeeded without challenge. But it was probably with the aim of
obtaining valuable support in Saxony that in 1061 she handed over the
duchy of Bavaria, which had been entrusted to her own charge by
Henry III, to Count Otto of Nordheim. The dukes so appointed used
their new authority solely to further their own ambitious ends, and the
mother exalted her son's most determined opponents. The leading
ecclesiastics were no more disinterested in their aims than the secular
princes. Archbishop Anno of Cologne was entering into relations with
the leading nobles in Germany, and with the Papacy and Duke Godfrey
in Italy, and was using his influence already in episcopal elections; his
nephew Burchard, who became Bishop of Halberstadt, was one of the
principals in every Saxon revolt. The Archbishop of Mayence, Siegfried',
was a man of little resolution, whose weakness of character prevented him
from playing the part in German history to which his office entitled him.
The most serious rivalry to Anno came from the north, where Archbishop
Adalbert of Bremen was establishing a dominant position, partly by
taking the lead in missionary work in Scandinavia and among the Slavs,
partly by the extension of his secular authority so that even nobles were
willing to accept his overlordship in return for his powerful protection.
His ambition, however, aroused the hostility of the Billung family, and
was directly responsible for the first disturbances in Saxony.
It was in Italy that imperial authority was displayed at its weakest.
Here the death of Henry III had enabled Duke Godfrey of Lower
Lorraine to establish an influence which the German government was
unable to challenge. The election of his brother Frederick as Pope
Stephen IX in 1057 was serious in itself, besides the fact that it marked
the end of the imperial control of papal elections. The Empress-regent,
indeed, ratified this election, as well as that of Nicholas II in 1059, but
even her piety took alarm at the Papal Election Decree and the alliance
with the Normans. It shews how serious the situation was when Agnes
could feel herself bound to oppose the reform party and recognise
Cadalus as Pope in 1061, an action which only damaged imperial prestige
still further, since she was unable to give him any support. On the other
hand, Duke Godfrey intervened, probably in collaboration with Anno,
compelling the rival Popes to return to their dioceses to await the decision
of the German government.
But it was not the decision of Agnes that was to settle this question.
The regency had already been taken out of her hands. Dissatisfaction
1 He was appointed by Agnes in 1060; as he was of high birth, he may have
been designed to counter the ambitions of Anno.
## p. 115 (#161) ############################################
Anno's coup d'état at Kaiserswerth
115
with the weak government of a woman and a child had been for some
time openly expressed, especially by those princes whose selfish ambition
had contributed greatly to this weakness. Archbishop Anno had been
intriguing to get control of the government, and the plot that he contrived
was probably carried out with the connivance of Duke Godfrey. The
plot culminated at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine in April 1062, when Anno,
with the assistance of Duke Otto of Bavaria and Count Ekbert of
Brunswick, beguiled the young king on board a boat, took possession of
his person and of the royal insignia, hurried him by river to Cologne,
and there took charge of the government in his name. Agnes made
no attempt to recover her lost authority, and retired at once to the
life of religion to which indeed she had dedicated herself the previous
year.
For two years Anno retained control, and used his authority to
enrich his province and to advance his relatives'. He thought it politic,
indeed, when the court was in Saxony in 1063, to associate Archbishop
Adalbert in the government, and in a diploma of 27 June Adalbert is
described as patronus, Anno as magister of the young king. This was the
title under which he usually appears; the way in which he performed his
tutorship may be inferred from the charges, so constantly repeated after-
wards, of the vicious life of Henry's early years. Italian affairs in par-
ticular engrossed Anno's attention. In concert with Duke Godfrey he
had certainly decided for Alexander II and against Cadalus, but it was
important that the German government should formally have the decisive
voice. At the diet of Augsburg in 1062, and finally at the synod of
Mantua in 1064, Anno dictated a decision in favour of Alexander. But
in this he clearly over-reached himself, and the Papacy, which was
asserting its independence of imperial authority, did not accept the
position that a German archbishop could have the decisive voice in
a papal election. Both in 1068 and in 1070 Anno received a lesson at
Rome as to who was master and who servant. And his absence at Mantua
gave the opportunity to his rival in Germany. Anno returned to find
himself superseded by Adalbert.
For another two years the control rested with Adalbert, who had won
increased fame by a victory in Hungary which temporarily restored
Salomo. The regency, indeed, came to an end when in his fifteenth year
the young king came of age and girded on the sword at Worms on
29 March 1065. But the archbishop remained master, and made
imperial policy subservient to his own ambitions. He received lavish
grants from the royal domain in Saxony, and further impoverished the
1 On 14 July 1063 a royal charter granted one-ninth of the royal revenues to
the Archbishop of Cologne to be distributed among the monasteries of his province.
On 31 August 1063 Archbishop Engelhard of Magdeburg died, and Anno's brother
Werner (Wezil) was appointed to succeed him; he was only second to Anno's
nephew Burchard in instigating revolt in Saxony.
СВ. І.
8--2
## p. 116 (#162) ############################################
116
Short regency of Adalbert of Bremen
crown by a bountiful distribution of royal abbeys, mainly among bishops.
The coming-of-age of the king was to have been followed by his imperial
coronation at Rome, but this was prevented by Adalbert, who feared that
Godfrey and Anno would regain influence over the king in Italy. His
ambition brought about his sudden downfall. Anno was able to engineer
another coup d'état with his old associates, and to unite the leading
bishops and nobles on his side. At the diet of Tribur, in the beginning
of 1066, Henry was compelled to dismiss Adalbert. Though he had used
his authority for merely selfish aims, the principality he had erected
might have done great service to the cause of imperial unity in limiting
the independence of the Saxons, but it collapsed with his fall. The
Billungs, under Duke Ordulf's son Magnus, took advantage of his
humiliation to drive him from Bremen, and the collapse of the German
missions, which he had done so much to foster, among the Slavs and
Scandinavians both completed the ruin of his prestige and diminished the
sphere of imperial authority.
From the fall of Adalbert may be dated the commencement of
Henry IV's personal government. Anno made a bid for power once more,
but the murder of his nephew Conrad, whose appointment to the arch-
bishopric of Trèves he had just secured, combined with a serious illness
to force him into the background. Henceforward he devoted himself to
his province, using his remaining energies in the foundation of monasteries
and the reform of monastic discipline; rather more than a century later
his name was enrolled among the saints of the Church. There was no one
else ambitious or bold enough to succeed Adalbert. The lay princes could
only be roused to take an interest in imperial affairs when their indepen-
dence of action was threatened or when the actual safety of the kingdom
was at stake. A dangerous illness of the king caused alarm as to the
succession, and they united to bring about his marriage with Bertha of
Turin, to whom he had already been betrothed for ten years. The
imperial coronation was again contemplated, and indeed welcomed by the
Pope who was desiring imperial assistance against the Normans, but was
again prevented, this time by Duke Godfrey. Godfrey, alarmed at the
prospect of a revival of imperial authority in Italy, anticipated the
imperial expedition by himself marching against the Normans. His lack
of success compelled the Pope to come to terms with the Normans once
more. By Godfrey's action the German king lost all the advantage he
might have obtained from intervening as protector of the Papacy; the
attempt to interfere in the papal election had already been unsuccessful,
and imperial prestige in Italy was thus completely ruined when Henry
took over the reins of
power.
The regency of the kingdom, in the hands of a weak woman and of
ambitious metropolitans, had had disastrous results for the central
authority. Nor was there much change during the early years of Henry IV's
direct rule. The accounts of his enemies continually refer to the excesses
## p. 117 (#163) ############################################
The royal office
117
at any rate of his youth. The exaggeration of these accounts is evident,
but there is probably a substratum of truth, and the chief blame must fall
on Anno and Adalbert, if not on Agnes as well. The marriage with
Bertha, it was hoped, would prove a steadying influence. The king, how-
ever, was a reluctant, if not an unfaithful, husband, and visited his dislike
of the marriage upon his wife. In 1069 he even attempted to obtain a
divorce, but the Papacy intervened, and the papal legate, Peter Damian,
who never minced his words, compelled the king to receive back his wife.
This seems to have been the turning-point in the reign. From this time
he was a constant and an affectionate husband, and from this time he
clearly abandoned the path of pleasure and devoted himself assiduously
to the task of government.
The history of Germany under Henry IV and Henry V is in the main
a record of civil war, producing confusion and disorder throughout the
country and involving untold hardships and miseries for the lower classes.
The king was faced with formidable opposition even before the Papacy
joined the ranks of his foes. To realise this, as well as to note the changes
that resulted in Germany as a whole, it is necessary at the outset to survey
briefly the political and social structure of Germany. Difficult too as it is
to distinguish between the theoretical and the actual, some attempt must
be made to do so; particularly as the theoretical derives from the past,
and the past ideas, even in this period of change, still have their effect in
determining the relations of the various parts of the constitution to one
another. In the first place, the king held a unique position, obscured as
it often was by the actual weakness of the ruler.
In theory he owed his
throne to election by the nobles, but in fact the hereditary principle was
dominant. Henry IV always insisted on his ius hereditarium against the
claims of Pope and nobles, and it was not until the death of Henry V
that the elective idea, asserted already in 1077 and 1081 at the elections of
the anti-kings Rudolf and Herman, won a victory over the hereditary.
The king alone held office dei gratia, and this was marked by the religious
ceremony of unction and coronation. He was supreme liege lord, com-
mander-in-chief, the source of justice, the enforcer of peace; these
attributes were symbolised by the royal insignia-crown, lance, sceptre,
sword, etc. — the possession of which was so important, as was evidenced
in the contest of Henry V with his father in 1105–6 and again in the
events which occurred after Henry V's death. Further, there were vested
in him the sovereign rights! —lordship of towns, offices, jurisdictions, mints,
tolls, markets, and the like all of which were coveted for their financial
| All that came under the heading of regalia. These were defined by Frederick
Barbarossa's lawyers at Roncaglia. Cf. also the definition of them in Paschal Il's
privilege to Henry V of 12 February 1111 (MGH, Constitutiones, Vol. 1, No. 90,
pp. 141 sq. ).
CH. III.
## p. 118 (#164) ############################################
118
“Princes” of the kingdom
advantages, and these could only lawfully be exercised after the grant of
a charter from the king.
Such a position carried with it potentialities towards absolutism, and
in the case of a strong ruler like Henry III the trend was in that direction.
But to this theoretical supremacy were attached definite limitations as
well. The king was subject to law, not above it, and as supreme judge
it was his duty to do justice ; the breach of this obligation, his opponents
declared, justified rebellion against him. In great issues affecting the
kingdom, or the person and property of a prince of the kingdom, the
king had to act by consent, to summon a diet of the princes and in effect
to be guided by their decision. These “princes ”—dukes, margraves,
counts, bishops, abbots of royal abbeys—owed their status originally to
their official position. With the office went land, and as the lay nobles
ceased in fact to be royal officials their landed position becomes the more
important. The period of transition is a long one, but the change
is especially rapid during the second half of the eleventh century;
naturally public recognition of the change lags behind the fact. One
result of this change from an official to a landed status was the decline
in rank of those nobles who held their fiefs from duke or bishop and not
directly from the king.
Among these lay princes, the dukes held a place apart, differing from
the counts not only in priority of rank. They had owed their position
originally not to appointment by the king but to election by the people
of the tribe, and this origin was still perpetuated in the claim of the
nobles of Bavaria to be consulted in the appointment of their duke. At
the same time the king was especially concerned to insist on the depen-
dence of these offices upon himself; he did not even feel himself obliged
to fill a vacancy in one of them within the year and a day that was
customary with other offices. Franconia during this period remained in
his hands, except that the Bishops of Würzburg were given ducal rights
in the eastern portion ; Swabia after Rudolf's deposition for treason in
1077 remained vacant for two years. On the other hand, in Saxony,
where the duke indeed had only a limited authority, the hereditary right
of the Billung family was not contested.
Of the counts (grafen), the margraves (markgrafen), important
especially for the defence of the eastern frontiers, retained exceptional
judicial and military privileges, and in some cases maintained their inde-
pendence even of the dukes. The counts-palatine (pfalzgrafen) too
retained their old position. They were four in number, one for each
of the tribes that formed the original stem-duchies—Franks, Swabians,
Bavarians, Saxons-and they acted in theory as representatives of royal
justice within the duchies and as the administrators of the royal domains.
Of these the Count-Palatine of the Franks, who had his seat at Aix-la-
Chapelle and was known now usually as Count-Palatine of Lorraine, though
later as Count-Palatine of the Rhine, was the most important. There was
## p. 119 (#165) ############################################
The countryside and the towns
119
no duke in Franconia to usurp his authority; he was, beneath the king,
supreme judge, and commonly acted during the king's absence as his
representative. But there was, on the other hand, a great change in the
position of the ordinary counts. There were few whose authority extended
over the whole of a gau or pagus, as had formerly been usual; of these
few, some, whose control extended over more than one gau, came to be
distinguished in the twelfth century, for example the Count of Thuringia,
by the new title of landgrave (landgraf). In most cases the county had
been divided up, often by division among sons, into several districts each
of them under a count, often of quite small extent. The family residence,
soon converted into a castle, gave the count his name, and, whatever
other dignities the counts might acquire, they never lost their connexion
with the duchy of their origin'. Their political importance, therefore,
varied in proportion to the extent of their lands, and in fact there
was little distinction between those who had merely the title of count
and ordinary freemen with free holdings.
The increasing importance of landed-proprietorship in the status of
nobles had its effect in tending to depress the majority of ordinary free-
men to a half-free status. In the country districts there was little real
distinction between the half-freeman and the freeman who held from
a noble in return for services in work and kind, and who had lost the right
of bearing arms. On the other hand, the rise of the class of ministeriales,
especially when they held land by military tenure, forming as they did an
essential element in the domain of every lord, lay and ecclesiastical, gave
an opening to freemen by joining this class to increase their opportunities
at the expense of a lowering of status. It was a particular feature of the
period. Conrad II had especially encouraged the formation of this class
of royal servant, and on it his successors continued to rely.
As in the countryside, so in the towns there was a tendency to
1
obliterate the distinction between the free and half-free classes, though
in the towns this took the form of a levelling-up rather than a levelling-
down. The “ free air” of the towns, the encouragement to settlers, the
development of trade especially in the Rhine district, as well as the pro-
tection of the town walls, caused a considerable increase in their
population ; they acquired both constitutional and economic importance.
Some towns were royal towns, but all were under a lord, usually a bishop,
and it was to the bishops that the trading element in the town owed its
first privileges. It was to the bishop's interest to obtain for his town from
the king special rights such as the holding of a market and exemption
from tolls in royal towns, and all charters to towns till the latter part of
the eleventh century are granted through the bishops. The first sign of
a change is in the charter of Henry IV to Worins in 1074. The privileges
1 The original home of the Welfs was Altdorf in Swabia. So it was to a diet of
Swabian nobles that Henry the Lion, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was first sum-
moned to answer the charges against him.
CH. INI.
## p. 120 (#166) ############################################
120
Alliance of the towns with the king
granted are of the usual nature-exemption from toll in certain (in this
case, specified) royal towns. But for the first time the charter is given
not to the bishop but to the townsmen, and they are described, for the
first time, not as “negotiatores” or “mercatores” but as “ cives. ” The
circumstances attending the grant of this charter', including the welcome
to the king, the well-equipped military support given to him, the pay-
ment by the community of a financial aid, the reception and preservation
of the charter, all imply a town-organisation of a more advanced nature
than previous charters would have led us to expect. The Jews played an
important part in these early trading communities, and they are specially
mentioned in the charter to Worms; so too the Bishop of Spires in 1086
for the advantage of his town was careful, as he states, to plant a colony
of Jews and to give them special privileges, which were confirmed by the
king in 1090? If Worms was the first town which gives evidence of an
organisation independent of its bishop, it was soon followed by others
where the bishop as at Worms was hostile to the king. The rising of the
people at Cologne against Archbishop Anno in 1074, the expulsion of
Archbishop Siegfried and the anti-king Rudolf from Mayence in 1077,
the expulsion of Bishop Adalbert from Würzburg the same year and the
defence of the city against Rudolf, and, above all, the devotion of the
Rhine towns to Henry IV during his last years, shew clearly a wide
extension of this movements.
The townsmen, then, were coming into more direct relations with the
king. As far as the nobles were concerned, the change is rather in the
contrary direction. The duty of fidelity to the head of the State was still
a general conception; even ecclesiastics who scrupled to take an oath of
liege-fealty to the king did not disavow this obligation. The oath of
fealty was not taken by the people as a whole, but only by the princes of
the kingdom, whether to the king or to his representative, and they took
the oath in virtue of their official capacity and as representing the whole
community. It mattered not whether they held fiefs from the king
or from another noble; it was not the fief but the office, through which
the royal authority had been, and in theory still was, asserted, that
created the responsibility on behalf of the people within their spheres of
control. So the relation of the king with the nobles was not yet strictly
1 See H. Wibel, Die ältesten deutschen Stadtprivilegien (Archiv für Urkunden-
forschung, 1918, Vol. vi, pp. 234 sqq. ).
2 Altmann and Bernheim, Ausgewählte Urkunden zur Erläuterung der Verfass-
ungsgeschichte Deutschlands, pp. 158 sqq.
3 In Flanders, Cambrai set the example by founding a commune in 1077. Here
the movement was also directed against the bishop, but in this case it was, as at
Milan, allied with the Church reform movement. See Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique,
Vol. 1, pp. 192 sq. In Germany proper the movement was definitely royalist in
character.
4 Cf. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, Vol. vi (ed. Seeliger), pp. 487 sqq. ;
G. von Below, Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters, Vol. 1, pp. 232 sqq.
## p. 121 (#167) ############################################
The growth of feudalism
121
a feudal relation. It was not to become so until the end of the twelfth
century, when the status of prince was confined to those nobles who held
directly from the king. The feudum was not yet the all-important thing,
at any rate in theory and law. There were many fiefs without military
service, some without service at all; there were vassals too without fiefs.
But these became, more and more, exceptional cases, and rapidly the
change from the official to the feudal status was being accomplished
in practice. Always the grant of a fief had accompanied the bestowal of
an office; and, as the fiefs had become hereditary, so too had the offices.
In the majority of cases, offices and fiefs had become identified, and the
official origin was preserved in little more than the title'.
In fact, the great nobles were no longer royal officials but territorial
magnates with alods and fiefs to which their children (sons if possible,
but failing them daughters) succeeded, and their aim was to loosen the
tie which bound them to the sovereign and to create an independent
position for themselves. Two circumstances combined to assist them in
this ambition-the rise of the class of ministeriales and the continual
civil war. The military fief became the normal type, and every important
noble had his band of armed and mounted retainers. He soon had his
castle, or castles, as well, built in defiance of the king; for castle-building
was a sovereign right, which only the stress of civil war enabled the noble
to usurp. Medieval society was based especially on custom and precedent.
If the central authority was weak, the nobles began at once to encroach ;
usurpations were in a few years translated into rights, and it was difficult,
if not impossible, for the king to recover what had been lost. Moreover,
while the counts had ceased to be royal officers, the system of maintain-
ing the royal control by missi had long disappeared. This made a fixed
seat of government impossible. The king himself had to progress cease-
lessly throughout his dominions to enforce his will on the local magnates.
There was no system of itinerant justices, and, except in the royal
domains, no official class to relieve the direct burden of the central
government. So there was no permanent machinery which could function
normally ; everything depended on the personality of the ruler.
But from the point of view of the king there were compensations.
Each noble played for his own hand, and there was rarely any unity of
purpose among them. It was from the dukes that the king had most to
fear, and with regard to them he started with many advantages. They
had no claim to divine appointment, no royal majesty or insignia, no
sovereign rights but such as he had granted. The nobles in each duchy
held office in theory from the king, to whom, and not to the duke, they
1 This is true even of the counts-palatine, with the exception of the Count-
Palatine of the Rhine who still retained much of his old official position; for instance,
when Henry IV went to Italy in 1090, the Count-Palatine of the Rhine was appointed
co-regent of the German kingdom with Duke Frederick of Swabia. So too when
Henry V went to Italy in 1116.
CH. III.
## p. 122 (#168) ############################################
122
The royal domain
had sworn liege-fealty', and they were far more jealous of the assertion
of the ducal, than of the royal, authority over them. Moreover the duke
by virtue of his office acquired little, if any, domain in his duchy? Where
his family possessions lay, there alone, in most cases, was he really power-
ful. Agnes in her appointments had at any rate shewn herself wise
in this, that she had appointed as dukes nobles whose hereditary lands
lay outside the duchies to which they were appointed. Berthold of Zäh-
ringen, the most powerful noble in Swabia, was a nonentity as Duke in
Carinthia; Otto of Nordheim, one of the leading nobles in Saxony, could
not maintain himself in his duchy of Bavaria when he revolted in 1070.
In other words, the noble depended on his domain, and this is equally
true of the king. There was no direct taxation' as in England, and the
king had in a very real sense to live of his own. The royal domain* was
scattered throughout the kingdom ; in each duchy there were royal
estates and royal palaces, though the largest and richest portion lay in
eastern Saxony, stretching from Goslar to Merseburg, the inheritance of
the Saxon kings. In the first place, it supplied the needs of the royal
household, and this, as well as the maintenance of royal authority, made
necessary the continual journeyings of the king and his court. The
domain, too, provided a means whereby the king could make grants of
lands whether in reward for faithful service or, more usually, in donations
to bishoprics and abbeys. And, finally, in these manors, as also in the
manors of nobles and ecclesiastics, there emerged out of the mass of half-
free tenants a class of men who played an important and peculiar rôle in
Germany. These royal ministeriales were employed by the king in adminis-
trative posts, as well as in the management of his estates; they were
armed and mounted, and provided an important part of the king's army.
On them he began to rely, therefore, to counteract the growing indepen-
dence of the greater nobles, both in his Council and on military expeditions.
In return, they were granted fiefs, and rose often to knightly ranks,
1 A duke or other noble might obtain an oath of fealty from his vassals, but
there should, by right, be in it a saving clause, preserving the superior fealty due
to the king.
2 Cf. Waitz, op. cit. Vol. vii, pp. 133 sq.
3 Unless the bede comes under this category. But all nobiles were exempt from
this, and other exemptions had been granted by charter.
4 Cf. M. Stimming, Das deutsche Königsgut im 11 und 12 Jahrhundert; B. Heusinger,
Servitium regis in der deutschen Kaiserzeit (Archiv für Urkundenforschung, Vol. viii,
pp. 26–159). Between the royal and the private domain of the king as a rule little
distinction was made. But the issue sometimes arose, notably on the question of the
inheritance of the Hohenstaufen from Henry V; see infra, p. 336.
6 Eventually this had its result in the rise of a number of new noble families to
take the place in German history of older ones that had become extinct. One leading
cause for the disappearance of old noble families—the ecclesiastical career (with its
enforced celibacy) which in the abbeys especially had been almost a prerogative of the
nobility-is very clearly demonstrated by A. Schulte, Der Adel und die deutsche Kirche
im Mittelalter (Kirchenrechtliche Abhandlungen, ed. U. Stutz, LXIII, LXIV).
## p. 123 (#169) ############################################
Alliance with the episcopate
123
sometimes even to episcopal. The same process was occurring in the
domains of the nobles. The ecclesiastical nobles had probably set the
example? , which was followed by the secular nobility and by the king.
As it provided him with the possibility of making himself self-sufficient and
so independent of princely support, it provided them too with a means of
furthering their independence of him.
The royal domain, then, plays a central part in the policy of the
Salian kings, as it was to do with the Capetians in France. During the
regency it had been grievously depleted. But there were many ways
in which it could be increased and in which gaps could be made good-
by inheritance, by exchange, by conquest, by escheat. There were also
other sources of royal revenue, notably the sovereign rights, of justice
and the like, which were assumed by the king wherever he might happen
to be and which were frequently lucrative. From the towns too, as well
as from the domain, he could levy contributions? , and, as has been indicated
above, could look to them for valuable support especially in time of war.
The loyalty and devotion of the Rhine towns is most marked, particularly
when the episcopal lord of the town was disloyal. But only in a few cases
was the bishop himself among the king's enemies, and so a direct alliance
with the townsmen, which might have been as useful to the German
monarchy as it was to the French, occurred only in isolated cases. It was
not to the king's interest to make the bishops antagonistic.
For the alliance with the episcopate had, from the time of Otto I,
been a cardinal factor in the policy of the king of Germany. The political
importance of the ecclesiastical nobles was evident: on them, as well as on
ministeriales and lesser nobles, the king relied both for his Council and
government and for his military expeditions. They could never make
their offices and fiefs hereditary, and they could be depended upon as
a counterpoise to the dangerous power of the dukes; while in the con-
tinual civil wars of this period the summons to the host was not of much
avail, nor could it be made effective without the consent of the nobles.
But they were equally valuable to the king from the economic point of
view. In the first place, the royal abbeys made annual payments in kind,
which began to be converted into money payments or at any rate to
1 Compare with this the prominent part played by ecclesiastics in the drift
towards feudalism in Saxon England (supra, Vol. 11, pp. 375–7). The great differ-
ence is that in Germany it was an unfree class to whom these military fiefs were
granted.
? The tax known as “bede” (petitio, precaria)originally, as its name shews, a
voluntary contribution. On the nature of this tax see G. von Below, op. cit.
pp. 85 sqq. , and generally for the taxation of towns, K. Zeumer, Die deutsche
Städtesteuern (Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, ed. G. Schmoller,
Vol. 1, No. 2).
3 The lay nobles would take part only if they happened to be present, or if they
were summoned to diets on important issues of state or to judge one of their
number. The great offices of the household were held by dukes, but had become
merely titular and ceremonial.
CB. II.
## p. 124 (#170) ############################################
124
The complication of Italy
be reckoned on a monetary basis early in the twelfth century; from these
abbeys, too, when he visited them, he could claim hospitality. There
is no evidence that the episcopal services included fixed payments in kind,
but the obligation seems to have been imposed upon the bishops of main-
taining the king and his retinue during the king's stay in their towns,
whether or no these contained a royal palace. It is at any rate noticeable
how prominently they figure in the itineraries of the Salian kings! . And
on the death of a bishop the king exercised his rights of regalia and took
possession of the revenues of the see during the vacancy, and sometimes
of spolia as well, seizing the personal effects of the dead bishop. These
great ecclesiastical offices were regarded by the king as very distinctly
part of his personal possessions?
