Society and Politics in Germany

1500-1750

G. Benecke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135031572
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First Published in 2006. This book attempts a new interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. It makes use of regional printed materials and of unpublished state archives from north-west Germany, a large and important region of which no thorough study has yet been published in English.

Part One

Introduction

I

Early Modern Germany

THERE is no good textbook on early modern Germany. Perhaps the subject is unimportant and thus of little interest. The mass of work on Luther and the Reformation would seem to suggest otherwise. Is it because historians are lazy? To unravel the history of all the German states from the scattered and voluminous archives that survive in such a way that the parts do indeed effectively explain the whole is a superhuman task. Yet this is what a good textbook must finally be shown to have accomplished. No one is anywhere remotely near to being able to do this. The subject is wide open to the research worker. The groundwork has simply not been done.

At present what can be done is to provide a new framework to interpret sources in such a way that early modern Germany can be understood for what it was—not for what it had been in the medieval past, nor for what it was to become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether or not even this turns out to be a philosophical and ideological impossibility, such a framework would enable us to look at specific states within their own regions, and also to say something significant about the interrelationship of each specific state and early modern Germany as a whole.

This study seeks to do that by showing the federal importance of the regional and local sources that have been examined. So this is not a textbook. The work was originally a doctoral dissertation. It assumed prior knowledge of background, structure and events in early modern Germany, which Part I of this book now briefly seeks to outline. What was early modern Germany? What was the structure of its society? How did its politics function?

By ‘early modern’ we mean a period of time. This is not precise: yet it is not insignificant notation, if it is used to indicate new trends, movements, crises, real or abortive changes as well as any underlying or superficial continuities. It is insignificant only if we use it too literally as chronology. The dates for the beginning and end of ‘early modern’ must fluctuate according to theme and subject. For Germany ‘early modern’ could be thought to begin to apply from 1450 to 1550, although this could be pushed back earlier, and to end at about 1750 to 1850.

By the fifteenth century German territories were developing an identity of their own. They built up their own territorial assemblies, administrations, law courts, procedures and tax systems. State structures emerged, exercising internal power in new ways. New systems came into conflict with older beliefs about politics. This caused much of the tension that can be noted as the beginning of an ‘early modern’ period. Whilst German peasants and artisans increasingly rebelled in the name of the good old justice (Das Gute Alte Recht) of God and King, state officials were pioneering new forms of law (Gesetz) to bypass the old, unworkable ideal of justice (Recht). The official established his ruler's rights (Gerechtsame) and enforced legislation by prerogative (Gesetz und Gebot).

In theory feudal ties had been contractual, freely and voluntarily made. In practice they were subordinated increasingly to a new obedience and loyalty of subject (Untertan) to ruler (Landesherr). Although feudal law was retained in early modern Germany, it was employed to deal with fewer and fewer privileged families and their privileged properties, whilst state officials worked out greater and greater numbers of duties for the mass of the subject population (see Chapter VII).

Existing beliefs and systems were modified or allowed to linger on. Old was not replaced by new in any revolutionary or rational way. The early modern method of change was to claim to return to the true old way, as with Luther's appeal to the Bible and primitive church, or to exploit an existing institution in a new, harsher way, as demonstrated in the increase in serfdom and latifundia in regions such as those east of the lower Elbe.

In the fifteenth century the German territories already formed a loose federal unit. A fixed procedure for electing the German king was operating by the fourteenth century. The rulers of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg became the body of Electors and formed the first chamber of an imperial assembly which itself was fully operational as a federal body of arbitration and included most of the territorial rulers of Germany as members by the time of King Wenceslas in the later fourteenth century. The reign of his father, the Emperor Charles IV, marks the real beginning of this new federal system in Germany. By the fifteenth century all the territorial rulers, whether ecclesiastical and elected or lay and dynastic, who were below the rank of Elector, had become one body at the imperial assembly called the Council of Ruling Princes (Fürstenrat). The third and last group to form as a distinct body at the imperial assembly were those town councils from the chief centres of population, finance and taxation in fifteenth-century Germany called the imperial towns because they owed allegiance directly to the king or emperor.

These three groups of Electors, ruling princes and imperial towns discussed reform in royal administration, defence and taxation, internal security and law and order, ecclesiastical affairs and foreign war with the kings and emperors of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. A better system of procedure and record was developing by the end of the fifteenth century and politics had become two-tiered. There were territorial assemblies within the German states, and imperial assemblies at national level where the heads of the German states themselves were the actual members, thus producing an overall federal discussion, direction and control of German politics.

This system was shaped by brilliant and far-reaching plans of reform in the 1490s, especially by arrangements over law and order and taxation made at the imperial assembly of Worms in 1495, influenced by the genius of the Arch-Chancellor of Germany, Count Berthold of Henneberg, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. This is not to say that Berthold's federal system was fully successful. The federal system faced the crisis of early ‘monopoly capitalism’, the knights’, peasants’ and artisans’ revolts defeated at the hands of the ruling princes in the 1520s and 1530s, and finally the reforms and civil wars of religion in the mid-sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. But a federal system of some form or other always reasserted itself. ‘Early modern’ thus includes the concept of some kind of native German grass-roots federalism which developed in the fifteenth century and continued until the eighteenth century.

What of the term ‘Germany’ at that same period of time? According to a rather generous contemporary estimate for the first decade of the eighteenth century made by the Austrian Habsburg War Council, the German Empire, including Bohemia and the Spanish Netherlands, had a population of nearly 28 million, comprising:

65 ecclesiastical states with 14 per cent of the total land area and 12 per cent of the total population;

45 dynastic principalities with 80 per cent of the land and 80 per cent of the population;

60 dynastic counties and lordships with 3 per cent of the land and 3

per cent of the population;

60 imperial towns with 1 per cent of the land but 3

per cent of the population. The imperial knights (well over a thousand of them) finally managed to control 2 per cent of the land but only 1 per cent of the population of Germany.¹

The kingdom of Germany was part of a religious and pseudoclassical myth, the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was a piece of medieval ideology, a claim for universal rule and Christian concord. This myth was not abolished. It was cherished by early modern Germans. In the early sixteenth century, as the links with Rome became harder to uphold, the concept was elaborated as ‘the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. This was formally retained until the impact of Napoleon and his armies on Germany, and the title was finally surrendered by the Habsburgs in 1806. Yet this grand ideology never played any real part in the internal affairs of the kingdom of Germany. The Holy Roman Empire was an anomaly, useful as an appeal to encourage support for foreign war, wherever general defence was necessary, and for crusading whenever the European diplomatic situation allowed. The Holy Roman Empire was the residual medieval ingredient in the early modern concept of Germany and it contrasts with modern elements such as frontiers and sovereign nation states. Early modern Germany thus stands between the two concepts—medieval universalism and modern nationalism—containing elements of both but subject to neither.

Early modern Germany never had clearly defined frontiers. Too many feudal jurisdictions made such modern rationalization impossible. To that extent historical atlases oversimplify and mislead. Historical maps give useful impressions of where any German state was situated at any one point of time but cannot, except in a very detailed, piecemeal way, explain the whole overlapping complexity of feudal jurisdictions, overlordships, inheritances, partitions and alienations, which shifted the lines with such rapidity that no frontier could ever be fixed. Equally there was no clearly defined concept of state sovereignty for Germany as a whole. Loyalty was to a specific state within Germany. To the Hessian, ‘fatherland’ was Hesse, and ‘abroad’ was Bavaria. Similar views were held in all German states in early modern times. Thus early modern Germany was not a nation state. It was not a political unit like England. That does not mean to say it was not a political unit. It was just different: it fitted into no clear category of Aristotelian forms which states might assume, a fact which annoyed early modern German lawyers, publicists and political thinkers as much as nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist historians. Yet the reality remained: early modern Germany was not a nation state, and yet it was still a working political reality. Thus, to repeat, ‘Germany’ includes the concept of some kind of native grass-roots federalism synonymous with the German term, Reich, at this time, which developed in the fifteenth century and remained into the eighteenth century.

Where within the regions of Germany did power over the federal whole really reside, and how did this power shift? By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this power was the rivalry between Austrian Habsburg and Brandenburg-Prussian Hohenzollern administrations. But this was not the case in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Austrian Habsburgs were certainly at the centre of early modern German power politics; not so the Brandenburg-Prussian Hohenzollerns who were the holders of the poorest of the six German Electorates. The Habsburgs held power on the geographical fringes of Germany, hence their continued need to keep the universalist ideology of the Holy Roman Empire alive.

How had this situation come about? Where were the German heartlands? The geographical boundaries of Germany have never for long been static. The early medieval stem-duchies produced internal regional expressions which were used in the sixteenth century independently of the German states that already existed as the Circles (Reichskreise) of a federal system of peace-keeping. Such were, above all, the regions between the Rhine and the Elbe, Lower Saxony, Westphalia, the Rhinelands, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Hesse and Thuringia. With the eastward expansion of the twelfth century new marches were driven into Slav Europe. The Teuton took over in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony and Austria.

The centre of German politics was originally the Rhineland and the south-west. It had an ecclesiastical-electoral basis. It was centred on the archbishoprics of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, and had the co-operation of the dynasties of the north-west and south-west, the Saxons and Swabians. The Saxons colonized eastwards and built up a state within a state. In the later twelfth century the greatest power contest between Saxon Henry the Lion and Swabian Frederick Barbarossa was resolved in favour of the latter's universalist ideals, which were in turn destroyed in the turmoil of Italian politics in the thirteenth century. With the help of the papacy the German ruling princes both ecclesiastical and lay had re-established in German internal affairs the equilibrium which had been threatened by Barbarossa's overmighty imperial dynasty of Hohenstaufen. When the Hohenstaufens disappeared in the 1260s the centre of German politics did not move back to the ecclesiastical principalities of the Rhineland. The Rhineland states indeed remained one of the most important factors in German politics, but they were joined increasingly by the new dynasties of the east—the Luxemburgers in Prague with their heirs the Habsburgs of Austria and to a much lesser extent the Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg, and finally the Wettiners in Saxony. These dynasts were rulers of the German colonial Slav east. It was from here that new economic power built upon extensive new farming and methods of colonial taxation could flourish unrestricted by the older allodial and feudal traditions of the west. Added to this in the east was a development in the mining of precious and bulk metals for which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe showed an insatiable appetite. The balance between old and new, between the ecclesiastical Rhineland of West Germany and dynastic Elbian-Danubian East Germany, was held by the dynasties of the centre—the Palatine and Bavarian Wittelsbachs, the Brunswick Guelphs, the Hessians, Württembergers and Franconian Hohenzollerns, each with their own regional sphere of influence. Quite independent of these and often in direct economic competition to them, came the imperial towns of the south-west as well as the Hansards, urban economic units of the north. In the fifteenth century, therefore, power was diffused regionally throughout the kingdom of Germany. It was balanced between the old elective ecclesiastical west, the new colonial east, the traditional dynastic centre and the important municipalities of south and north. This meant that there was no dominant centre of power from which strong policies could emanate in a European world which was getting more national, more aggressive, more bureaucratic, more centralized and more expensive to run. Against this fifteenth-century Germany offered an alternative, a loose federal co-operation of internally independent territorial courts and administrations. In that respect fifteenth-century federal Germany successfully went against above all the west European trend towards nation states. To survive with a weaker system of power politics meant, however, that a compromise had to be reached within federal Germany. The Habsburgs, a territorially strong dynasty, were repeatedly chosen as German kings and Holy Roman Emperors to take on the overall direction of German foreign policy, defence, and law and order—but they were never given full power. The German ruling princes, whether they inherited or were elected or were ecclesiastical or lay, or even urban town councillors, always retained their own freedom of action and yet remained within an overall framework of allegiance to Habsburg kings and emperors. This was because they as the ruling princes of the German states collectively determined what federal politics would be. They formed the early modern Reich, an untranslatable federal whole, that had little to do with the Hohenstaufen past, and certainly nothing whatsoever to do with the German Reichs of Bismarck and Hitler.

¹ See Chapter VII, note 2 and the Appendices.

II

Early Modern German Society

BEFORE the birth of human rights in the eighteenth century, Europea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Part One Introduction
• Part Two Territorial States in North-west Germany
• Part Three Society and Politics in One State: the County of Lippe
• Part Four Relations between State and Federation: Lippe and the Empire
• Part Five Conclusion
• Appendices
• Maps
• Bibliography
• Index