Gone Medieval - Holy Roman Empire

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Voltaire famously wrote that the "The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” But Dr. Eleanor Janega believes that literally everything about Voltaire’s statement is wrong - in the medieval context.In this explainer episode of Gone Medieval, Eleanor attempts to describe this important and powerful entity that lasted for around 800 years, stretching from Sicily to the North Sea, from Burgundy to Poland, which was home to some of the wealthiest and most important cities in medieval Europe and a huge percentage of the medieval European population.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. I'm Eleanor Yonaga, and today on Gone Medieval, I'm afraid you're stuck with just me. And that's because we are going to be talking about one of my areas of fascination and expertise, the Holy Roman Empire. I'm going to try to explain some 800 years of history over one of the largest contiguous political blocks in Europe in under an hour, so wish me luck. odds are you've heard the name Holy Roman Empire, but you can't necessarily define what it is. You might kind of think of it as a shorthand for the German lands, or indeed Germany, in the medieval period. However, that's not quite right.

In the shortest possible terms, the Holy Roman Empire was one of the most important and powerful entities in medieval Europe. As I've said, it lasted for about 800 years, give or take, and was only brought down by Napoleon. It was a polity which ruled over vast swaths of Western and Central Europe. At times, its domain stretched from Sicily to the North Sea, or from Burgundy to Poland. It was home to some of the wealthiest and most important cities in medieval Europe, and a huge percentage of the medieval European population. It began under a Frankish ruler, but soon there were Germanic emperors, then Czech, then Swiss-Austrian. It was, in short, an empire with borders with...

changed and grew based on warfare and conquest, or sometimes just marriage. But for all its importance and prestige, many people now can't actually tell you what it was. Today, though, we're going to change all that. If you do know something about the Holy Roman Empire, odds are it's in reference to this Voltaire quote. The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy Roman nor an Empire. Now, this is an incredibly cute little throwaway quote that people like to say to me constantly for some reason. However, literally everything about it is wrong. In the medieval context, Roman means essentially Christian,

and more specifically Western Christian with ties both to the papacy and to the imperial prestige of Rome itself. As an institution, it's specifically linked to the concept of Christendom. the part of the world where Christians live and rule and which are teaching the ideas of Christ. And for medieval Europeans, the idea was that the most important thing about Rome was its Christianity. It's great that it was a huge political bloc that conquered plenty of lands, but the best thing that it ever really did was convert its citizens to Christianity. All of this starts with someone I'm sure you've heard of, the Emperor Charlemagne. He doesn't rule something that we would call the Holy Roman Empire,

but he is crowned emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800. As a result of being crowned emperor, his lands were referred to as the Roman Empire. And up until the 13th century, we see this block of land called things like the Imperian Christianum or Empire of Christians, the Romanum Imperium, or Roman Empire, or sometimes the Universum regnum, or universal kingdom. Charlemagne's coronation was, as I said, performed by a Pope, Pope Leo III. And this was widely regarded at the time as a nice thing to do for the papacy. You see, in the year 800, the papacy wasn't particularly important in the way that it would become later down the line.

Part of this was that Pope Leo III had been minding his own business, walking down the street in Rome one day, when he was attacked by members of a rival political group in Rome. He was beaten almost to death and rescued by a few of Charlemagne's bodyguards who happened to be in Rome. He was whisked away to Ahead, Charlemagne's incredible imperial capital, and it was there that he was nursed back to health.

In order to show his goodwill towards the church and his support of Leo more particularly, Charlemagne thought it would be pretty cute to have Leo crown him, in his imperial coronation. It also meant that using the Pope in this way really connected Charlemagne with Rome and Romanness. This would become a problem later down the line,

but for Charlemagne, it was an absolute blinder. He was very well accepted as the Roman emperor and generally pretty universally liked. Charlemagne and all the following emperors derive their power from the concept of translisio-imperi, a Latin term which means translationalis. of power. So it's all well and good to have a Roman pope crown you, but the idea here is that that coronation shows the power that has been transferred to them specifically from Rome.

They viewed history as a series of transfer of this power, from the Romans to the new emperors, or sometimes just to local kings who happened to get in there after the so-called fall of Rome. The idea is that the Romans gave way to the Franks who settled after this supposed fall, with Charlemagne at their head. Eventually, the Imperial Crown passed from Charlemagne after his death in 1814 to his sons, then to his grandsons, that at the time they weren't so concerned with keeping a contiguous whole of the imperial lands together. Instead, when a ruler died, they would divide their lands among their sons.

Then their sons would divide it among their grandsons, and as you can see, this has a way of debilitating a kind of centralized power. Meanwhile, over in East Rangia, the stem duchies appeared. These are places that you may know like Bavaria, Franconia, the delightfully named Lotharingia, who was named after its rulers, Lothar, one of Charlemagne's sons, or Saxony and Swabia. Around 888, the Carolingian line had completely died out, so these dukes got together to elect a new king.

For them, having an overreaching emperor or king was a pretty great way of organizing things, and it meant that it could marshal them all into one specific military block should any trouble arise. And frankly, there was rather a lot of trouble at the time. Whether it's Vikings floating down the river in your backyard or Magyars at the gates,

it didn't hurt to have someone say, hey, we're all getting together, we're raising an army, and we're going to take care of things. It's through this process, a desire to have an overarching emperor or king, and a willingness on the part of Dukes to elect who that would be that a new dynasty comes to power, the Atonians. The Atonians come to power because they are incredible warriors,

and they spend a lot of time protecting the eastern borders of the German lands against Magyar invasions. The Magyars are a particularly warlike group of people who settled in what is now Hungary and are the reason why Hungarians speak something completely different to everybody else. This dynasty are referred to as the Ottonians, specifically after one King Otto, who was elected in Aachen, just like Charlemagne had been in 936. He was keenly aware of the idea that he needed to be upholding the same sort of holy and political ideas that Charlemagne had been doing. He was also aware of the fact that he had a lot of pressures from outside people who were not considered to necessarily be Christian.

One of the big stressors that the Carolingian dynasty had faced were the pagan incursions from the Vikings. That had died down a little bit, but no one knew exactly what it was the Madgar's were doing, and so everyone agreed that there needed to be some kind of marshalling of power, and Otto was just the man to do it. However, so far, this is a fairly German story, but that all changed in 9.51. A queen down in Italy named Adelaide found herself, widowed and besieged on all sides by enemies who wished to take her lands. Fearing the worst,

she wrote to Otto and asked him to come to her aid. Now, this is the sort of invitation that a single man such as Otto could not resist, so he rode down the road to Italy, fought off her attackers and married her, once again linking power over the German lands with the Italian lands, and a perfect recipe for declaring himself the emperor, just like his hero Charlemagne. It's at this point with this incredible amalgamation of land that Otto is crowned, not just king, but emperor. The empire began to amalgate more land under it during this time, and by the year 2002, it had absorbed the Duchy of Bohemia. A few decades later, in 1032, the kingdom of Burgundy in what is now France also joined. So, the empire now can.

consisted of Italian, French, German, and Slavic duchies, but had an overarching leader in their emperor. So what does that mean? Well, basically the idea is that there were imperial rules and laws that guided all territories under the crown of the empire, but on the whole, there was still plenty of local autonomy, culture, and a local ruler, your duke, who saw to the day-to-day business of each separate duchy or province. You would have Roman law, but a local leader, and this was a pretty great mix for most people concerned. As the empire grew in importance, however, so too had the church been growing. The Pope, who had been little more than the Bishop of Rome when Charlemagne brought him in to enhance his coronation, had much more power

a few hundred years later, and the church was becoming a very sophisticated legal juggernaut. They began to take an exceptionally dim view of the emperor, suddenly ruling so much land, and more specifically land that surrounded their own papal states on the Italian peninsula. They were also not particularly happy with the emperor's insistence that emperors were able to appoint their own bishops to possessions. More to the point, they were also really not amused by the fact that the emperor had been appointing popes himself for quite some time. Eventually, the great reforming pope, Gregory the 7th, came to the papal throne in 1073, And he decided that he was going to do something about this whole imperial nonsense.

This kicked off what we call the investiture controversy, where rulers across Europe, but more specifically holy Roman imperial leaders, squabbled with the Pope about who it was who got to appoint bishops. But most particularly, this took its toll on one emperor, Henry IV. Henry had come to the throne as a minor, and his mother had been unable to keep control of his lands, or to appoint the popes that she wanted. Hence Gregory the Great getting to the papal throne in the first place.

When Henry came of age, he therefore wanted to rectify this as quickly as possible. He did this first by taking back the Italian lands that he thought of as rightfully his and part of the empire, but lands that the papacy specifically wanted as their own. This, on top of his insistent that he got to choose his own bishops, was a bridge too far for Gregory the Great, who excommunity. communicated Henry IV. To atone, Henry went to Canossa in Italy to beg the Pope's forgiveness, and there Gregory famously made him stand for three days outside barefoot in the snow in order to receive it. The so-called walk to Canossa worked as a gambit for Henry, but it also established a new and dangerous

precedent for emperors. As a result of it, popes could see that they were actually able to threaten emperors and that they had a way to ensure that they would cease to appoint their own bishops. To ensure that the papacy would retain power over bishops, these ideas were formalized in the 1122 Concordat of Verms. In it, it was agreed that emperors wouldn't try to appoint their own bishops anymore, but they did get to come to bishop's elections. They could intervene in any disputes between candidates, and they would have their own special investiture ceremony after the church won when a bishop was elected. So while they weren't actually able to appoint a bishop, their power was still very much in the room when it happened. They could be the tie-breaking vote amongst candidates,

and really it put a lot of pressure on varying candidates to do exactly what a local duke or, more particularly the emperor, wanted once they were elected. Meanwhile, the empire was also codifying how it would choose its emperors. Yes, you have dynasties like the Otonians where it's assumed that someone's son is going to inherit from them, but that isn't always how things shook out. The election process involved a formal election by the seven prince electors. Three of these were archbishops,

the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. There were also four secular rulers involved. the Duke of Saxony, the Count of the Palatinate and Rhine, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Bohemia. The requirement here was that you needed the votes of all seven imperial electors. And once a candidate was chosen by all seven, he was declared king of the Romans. After one became king of the Romans, they would usually travel to Rome, where the Pope would crown him Holy Roman Emperor. Because the imperial electors were very powerful men in their own right, they tended to elect people that they thought would be easier to control. Sure, you occasionally got a dynasty like the Otonians, but if things were getting a bit much or too much power was amalgamating itself in one area, it was possible to install people who could be considered more tractable or easy to deal with.

This is how the Hohenstaufenz came to power. The short-lived Staling dynasty came to an end with Henry V. Not because there were no other salians around to elect, but because the Prince Electures instead decided on Lothar, the old and not particularly powerful Duke of Saxony in 1125. It was under this dynasty that the Holy Roman Empire was consecrated in 1157, as per the wishes of one emperor you may have heard of Frederick I Barbarossa. Barbarossa was an incredibly canny statesman, and this idea of consecrating the empire was part of his own push to emphasize the Romaness of it.

It was also a direct challenge to the papacy, which had simultaneously been growing in power and prestige. However, the northern Italian city states such as Milan, as well as the papacy, were not particularly keen on this idea. But the popes had a way of getting in front of it. According to them, because tradition stated that popes crowned emperors, like the Pope had crowned Charlemagne, it was actually the popes who decided who emperor was. Thus, ultimately, they were the authority of whoever was emperor and that power resided within them. They had one specific way of explaining this, a complex allegory called the allegory of the sun and moon. This idea stated that emperors were like the moon.

The moon, you see, does glow at night. It's certainly bright and a beautiful thing to see. But it doesn't shine of its own accord. Instead, it's only reflecting the light of the sun. In the same way, we were supposed to understand that emperors reflected the power of the papacy, which the papacy had instilled in that. Moreover, as far as the popes were concerned,

And the reason that the empire existed in the first place was specifically because popes couldn't do violence. Christendom wasn't just a static place. It was something that was constantly under threat. It needed defense. Crusades needed to be called. Someone had to do all this dirty, violent work, and people who were within the church and were dedicated to God were not supposed to be involved in bloodshed.

So instead, they chose people like the emperor to go out and do their bidding, when violence was necessary. This was all well and good, but emperors, in contrast, mostly ignored it, and came up with their own allegory in return. This was called the allegory of the two swords. The idea here was that Jesus had two swords, one that he gave to the Pope,

which represented power on earth of a religious kind, and another which he gave to emperors, which was specifically about temporal power and, you know, all that religious violence that needed to be done. So none of this had to do with the Pope really giving power to the Emperor. Instead, Jesus himself had decided on how the division of power was going to work out, and Polks were just being a bit churlish if they refused to see that. Besides, the power and prestige of the empire is growing all the time.

I mean, what are the popes really going to do about it? It's not like they can shed blood. So if the emperors choose to come up with their own allegory, who's going to do anything about it? The popes, however, had one more argument up their sleeves, and this was the so-called donation of Constantine. The donation of Constantine was a supposed Roman imperial decree from the 4th century emperor Constantine the Great. In it, it's alleged that when Constantine separated the Roman Empire into East and West and took control of the East, he left the Western part of the Empire and Rome to the Pope.

As a result of this, that meant that ultimately the Pope was in control of any kind of empire that you could find in Western Europe. Trouble with this document is that it was a forgery, and more particularly we think we know now that it was an 8th century forgery. But it was used increasingly, especially in the 13th century, to bolster claims to authority by the papacy and to bring down the emperor. It wasn't until the 15th century that people figured out that it was a fake, and so at the time, the Constituatum Domini Constantine Imperatoris would be brought up in debates all the time. But that's one thing. Debating the scholastic points of empire is happening kind of over in church circles,

and at the meantime, the empire is expanding even more. A part of this is what we call the Ostseidloom, a move further into the Western Slavic states, meaning that parts of what is now Poland, such as Pomeranian, as well as Austria and Slovenia, had now come under Holy Roman imperial control. At the same time, Bohemia, owing to its power, influence, and, well, lots of money, was raised from a duchy to a kingdom in its own right, though it was still under the umbrella of the empire. Henceforth, the imperial elector formerly known as the Duke of Bohemia would be the king of Bohemia.

And in 1254, it was official. This new consecrated Roman Empire was also holy. It's during this time that the cities within the empire, more generally, had also begun to rise in power and prestige. The wealthy Bergers, a term which means the skilled craftsmen and traders who lived within cities, often managed to negotiate with the emperor to give them increased autonomy from their local overlords in exchange for paying taxes directly to the imperial crown. Places such as Basel, Cologne, and Augsburg would eventually become known as the Imperial Free Cities

and were considered a major asset to the crown. For those who lived within the city, there were also perks like being able to elect your own representatives, your own mayor, and really decide on how legal disputes would be handled within the city itself. This was a huge step forward for a lot of ordinary people. While the empire was ticking over very nicely indeed, by the 14th century yet another change of dynastic hands came, as then-emperor Louis or Ludwig the Bavarian was becoming a thorn in the side of the papacy.

He had been excommunicated and yet refused to acknowledge it. Instead, he went about creating his own anti-Pope and in general refusing to cooperate with the church. As a result, the papacy under Pope Clement VI took matters into its own hands and elected, a new king of the Romans, the Emperor Charles IV, from the relatively unknown house of Luxembourg. Charles was as much of an anti-king of the Romans as Louis' pet pope was an anti-Pope, having been elected by only the three archbishop electors and his father, then King of Bohemia, John of Luxembourg. You might know him as the guy who rode into battle blind and was killed at the Battle of Cressy. However, this was an incredibly worthwhile gamble for Clement, who had been charged.

Charles's tutor, and he figured that the relatively unknown young Czech guy was going to be someone that he could easily control. Louis and the three other imperial electors ignored all of this, pointing out that you technically need all seven imperial votes to become King of the Roman and calling Charles instead the priests king. Eventually, a war was planned to settle the score, but instead Louis died of a stroke on a bear hunt in 1347. As a result, the title of of King of the Romans was Charles's to claim. In a move which signals the power that the papacy wanted to hold over emperors, however, they did not crown Charles the Emperor until 1355.

And this shows that little bit of power that popes were still hanging on to. Until one received an actual coronation from the Pope, one was not the Emperor. The idea was they could kind of string Charles along, getting them to do whatever it was they wanted, until that coronation took place. Eventually, however, he simply gained too much power and they had to give in. And to be fair, the papacy's worries were perhaps well-founded. Rather than being an easy-going lapdog of the Pope,

Charles was an incredibly skilled statesman, and he set about going against the wishes of the papacy and attempting to codify the electoral system in his favor. The result was the Golden Bowl of 1356. It established that rather than needing all seven votes to be elected, it just needed a simple majority, like the one that he had managed to achieve. Moreover, it insisted that becoming emperor was a foregone conclusion once someone was elected. The Pope had to concede immediately, and the only thing that should delay a coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor was the time it took to travel to Rome to receive one. By the 15th century, the empire was chafing under its old quasi-Roman laws and the realities of late medieval life.

It used to be that when one became emperor, one also gained a lot of status and wealth from doing so. This came in the form of receiving control over the so-called Reichskut, or the imperial lands that would provide enough money for emperors to do whatever holy wars they needed, such as going on crusade, and also live a fairly lavish imperial life. However, as time had gone on, as a result of complex treaties, time, varying ways of collecting taxes, the empire in some place that had fractured into very small duchies indeed,

meaning it was more and more difficult for emperors to get any money at all whatsoever out of being an emperor. Instead, they often had to draw on their own hereditary lands and finances, something which we call the house spruce, mark, to finance their lives and any of their wars. Now, this is a perfectly fine thing to ask of, say, Charles IV, who owned Bohemia, the richest

state in the Holy Roman Empire with its own silver mines. It's another thing entirely, if you are, say, a Swiss family who comes to the throne and doesn't have very much money to throw around. At the same time, things became difficult for the empire because the papacy was experiencing the great schism. You may remember this as... has the time when there's at least two popes, one who is in Avignon, one who is in Rome, and occasionally, just for spice, you'll throw in an extra pope in Pisa.

If one's imperial authority rests on the idea that you're crowned by the pope, what do you do when there are three of them? This really, really complicates things for emperors going forward, and it was calling into question the idea of the papacy altogether. How can we say that this is a sacred institution if no one can even say who rules it? Even worse, at this point, Bohemia had been cut off from the empire after the successful rise of the Hussites. The Hussites were emphatically not Catholic. Instead, they believed in getting directives from the Bible, in personal spiritual responsibility,

and doing everything in Czech rather than in Latin. And they weren't afraid to fight about it. They broke away from the empire had revolt and Bohemia was now, by and large, run by varying bands of Hussites. These were not a group of people who were going to pay anything towards an empire that claimed its power emanated from Rome, and they certainly weren't going to do it if that money went into German coffers. A series of reforms was thus enacted. These included the establishment of the Reichs-Kemoglicht. This was a sort of judicial institution that was independent of the emperor, but who,

oversaw Roman laws. This way people could feel like they were a little more removed from specifically imperial control but still benefiting from all of the Roman laws that they saw as powerful and meaningful. However, it was still established at the 1495 Diet of Verms that regardless of who heard court cases, Roman law still applied to anyone within the Holy Roman Empire, and ultimately a part of that Roman law was the figurehead of the emperor. At the same time, a new and seemingly harmless dynasty had also come to the throne after the Luxembourg line died out. This was the Habsburgs. They had initially been a poor robber baron family in Switzerland, but had managed to come to the Austrian throne through marriage within the Luxembourg family.

The stage was thus set for one of the most powerful families ever to rule in Europe to take control. However, this transition would not be easy. With the rise of new forms of Christianity, including the Protestants who came along to do basically everything the checks had already done but in German, it would for an institution reliant on popes and elections from friendly members of the nobility to function. Even worse, if you have a prince-electer suddenly convert to Protestantism, how can you get them to vote for an emperor who receives his power in theory from a coronation by the pope? This means that the whole idea of the Holy Roman Empire was now in question. If the church wasn't the representative of God on Earth,

how could the emperor be the military representation of God? Even worse was the fact that new and bigger challenges were being thrown at the empire all the time. With the collapse of Christian Constantinople in the east and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, how could the throne claim to be the representation of God on earth and all his, military might, when they couldn't even keep the Ottomans off of their own borders. With Turks at the gates of Vienna, how can you say that you are God's chosen military representation on Earth? As the modern period began to demand even more and more institutional input from its rulers, it was also becoming harder to administrate to the satisfaction of the huge

varieties of people that the empire encompassed. Wealthy burgers in Vienna were hardly very impressed when their taxation money wasn't going to keep away the Ottomans, or when their emperor was living in Spain. All of these questions notwithstanding. The fact of the matter is that the empire still stood for another few hundred years. Its institutions were strong enough, and the people who lived in it believed enough in its power that it could keep going until Napoleon eventually took over most of Europe. So, whilst all of these are definitive problems, especially in a modern world, for a very medieval institution.

It isn't to say that the empire was necessarily weak or flawed. It's just that there are huge challenges to running a giant empire, as anyone would know. Trying to sum up the Holy Roman Empire is almost impossible. After all, the entire point of it is that it was an empire, one that was home to many differing peoples and cultures who were united by their Christianity or holiness, and their adherence to laws that could trace themselves back to Rome.

This looks just like the power of ancient Rome, where sure, people would administrate their lives in Latin, but go home and speak Hebrew if that was the case. Empires by their very definition are huge contiguous groups of individuals that are brought together by law, and you can't say that that wasn't on show here. As a result, I think that you can agree, that the throwaway quips of snarky 18th century writers might seem cute.

But if you dig into the history of the Holy Roman Empire, they lose their charm. You can hardly find anything more holy or Roman or imperial. You just need to understand what that means. Thanks for listening, and I hope you will never repeat that Voltaire quote again. This has been gone medieval by history hit, and if you've liked what you heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at gone medieval at

history hit.com. Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday. Until next time.