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Introduction; Land and Resources; People; Culture; Economy; Government; History

The Last Hohenstaufen Kings

More ambitious even than his father, Henry VI wanted to dominate the known world. To secure peace in Germany, he put down a rebellion by the returned exile Henry the Lion and then restored him to power. He forced the northern Italian cities to submit to him, and on the basis of an inheritance claim through his Norman wife, he seized Sicily. Intending to create an empire in the Mediterranean, he exacted tribute from North Africa and the weak Byzantine emperor. However, when Henry died suddenly in 1197 while planning a new crusade, his empire immediately fell apart. The German princes refused to accept his young son, Frederick II, as king and thus initiated a new civil war between backers of the Hohenstaufen Philip of Swabia and those of the Welf Otto of Brunswick. When Otto invaded Italy, Pope Innocent III secured the election of Frederick II in 1211 on the promise that the young king would give up Sicily so as not to surround papal territory.

Outstandingly accomplished in many fields, Frederick II, who reigned from 1212 to 1250, was called Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World). Determined to keep Sicily as his base of operations, he revised his coronation promise to the pope, giving up Germany rather than Sicily to his young son Henry. In exchange for the German princes’ support of his Italian campaigns, Frederick allowed them to usurp many of his own powers, making them virtually kings in their own territories. On the empire’s eastern frontier, he granted a fief to the Teutonic Knights, a military religious order that eventually created the Prussian and Baltic states, on the condition that they convert the natives to Christianity.

In Sicily, Frederick suppressed the local nobility, reformed the laws, founded the University of Naples, and kept a brilliant court, where he shone as scientist, artist, and poet. He was also an excellent soldier, diplomat, and administrator, and led a successful crusade to Jerusalem in 1228. In his absence, however, Pope Gregory IX invaded Sicily. Frederick quickly returned and made peace with the pope, but by 1237 he was waging battle against a second Lombard League of cities in northern Italy. Once again, their ally, the pope, excommunicated Frederick, but this time Frederick responded by seizing the papal states. Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, fled to Lyon and declared the emperor deposed.

Frederick died before he could secure his position against the league, however, and under his successor, Conrad IV, the Hohenstaufens were finally ousted from Sicily. The empire then suffered the turmoil of the Great Interregnum (1254-1273), during which two non-Germans—Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castille—claimed the crown, although neither was ever crowned. The German princes, meanwhile, exploited the absence of an emperor, further solidifying their own political independence. At the very time that French and English kings were centralizing their power, German lands moved ever further into political pluralism and fractured authority. The Great Interregnum marked a decisive turning point in the history of Germany and the empire, beginning the slow decline of real imperial power.

Decline of the Empire and Growth of Habsburg Power (1250-1519)

By the end of the 13th century, dynastic realignments resulted in the gradual replacement of the stem duchies by several new principalities. Three of the new dynastic powers in particular—the Habsburg, Wittelsbach, and Luxemburg families—struggled to secure the imperial crown. In 1273 the electors ended the Great Interregnum by choosing Rudolf of Habsburg, a minor Swabian prince who was unable to repossess the lands that the principalities had usurped. Instead, Rudolf I concentrated on aggrandizing his own dynastic holdings. Aided by the Wittelsbachs and others, he defeated the rebellious Ottokar II of Bohemia and took the lands of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola (modern Slovenia). The Habsburgs thus became one of the most powerful dynasties in the empire.

Rudolf reigned until 1291, and his two immediate successors were deposed and murdered by the princely electors. Still seeking a weak emperor, in 1308 they chose Henry, count of Luxemburg. Anxious to restore imperial claims to Italy, Henry VII crossed the Alps in 1310 and temporarily subdued Lombardy. He died in 1313 while trying to conquer Naples from the French. His death precipitated a civil war that raged until the Wittelsbach candidate for the throne, Louis the Bavarian, defeated his Habsburg rival at the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322. Louis IV reigned until 1347.

At Rhense in 1338, the electors made the momentous declaration that henceforth the king of the Germans need only be the majority choice of the electors, instead of the unanimous one as was previously the case. This decision averted a civil war. They also declared that he would automatically be emperor without being crowned by the pope. This was reflected in the king’s title, official by the 15th century: Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation.

The popes, of course, objected to this change. Clement VI immediately opened negotiations with Charles, king of Bohemia and grandson of Henry VII. In 1347 Charles was chosen by five of the seven electors, who had deposed Louis IV. Charles IV diplomatically ignored the question of papal assent. In the Golden Bull of 1356, he specified the seven electors as the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg, and the king of Bohemia. Because the bull made their lands indivisible, granted them monopolies on mining and tolls, and secured monetary gifts from all imperial candidates, these seven rulers were now the strongest of all German princes.

Charles then began building a great state in the east by entrenching his own dynasty in Bohemia, buying Brandenburg (which allowed him to become one of the seven electors), and taking Silesia from Poland. To obtain cash, he encouraged the silver, glass, and paper industries of Bohemia. He also oversaw a major cultural revival, adorning his capital Prague with new buildings in the late Gothic style and founding the first German university in Prague in 1348.

Charles’s son, Sigismund, who reigned from 1410 to 1437, was involved in calling the Council of Constance (1414-1418). The council invited the popular religious reformer Jan Hus (John Huss) to come to the assembly under imperial protection to present his views. Huss’s proposals for ecclesiastical reform challenged not only the authority of many church figures but also the political and cultural dominance of Germans in a predominantly Czech region. When he arrived in Constance, Huss was immediately imprisoned, tortured, and burnt at the stake as a heretic. His death was considered a martyrdom by many Czechs in Bohemia and led to a series of confrontations, known as the Hussite Wars, during the 1420s and 1430s. While the more radical branches of the revolt were suppressed, moderates won some concessions from both Sigismund and the church in exchange for reconciliation.

When Sigismund died without an heir, the electors unanimously chose his Habsburg son-in-law Albert of Austria as Emperor Albert II. Albert died shortly thereafter, in 1439, but from that time on the imperial crown became in practice, although not officially, hereditary in the Habsburg line. Albert’s cousin and successor Frederick III successfully reunited different branches of the Habsburg family that had been previously split by inheritance, but he lost Hungary and Bohemia and sold Luxemburg to France. He also continually struggled with the German princes and the ever-encroaching Ottoman Empire on his eastern borders. In 1486 the princes forced him to cede his authority to his son Maximilian, but he retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor until 1493.

Maximilian I, who reigned from 1486 to 1519, was a knight and art patron. He enthusiastically laid many plans for the empire, but these never materialized. His chief success was in arranging marriages to benefit his family. By his own marriage to Mary of Burgundy, he acquired a rich territory that included thriving Dutch and Flemish towns. By marrying his son, Philip the Handsome, to Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, Maximilian ensured for his heirs all of the expanding Spanish empire, including possessions in Italy and the Americas. He betrothed his grandson Ferdinand to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia, thus adding those states to his inheritance. The office of emperor meanwhile had become an increasingly symbolic position, to be used in the next five centuries to further Habsburg dynastic ambitions.

Life in Germany During the Middle Ages

Feudal Society

With the decline of the Roman Empire and particularly with the onset of Viking and Magyar raids during the 9th and 10th centuries, political authority became increasingly fractured and localized throughout western and central Europe. The model for political authority developed from the Roman and Frankish tradition of seignorialism. In this tradition, large landowners provided farmland and protection to their tenants in return for taxes and labor. This tradition gradually evolved into a variety of forms, collectively known as feudalism.

In general, all types of feudal relations in the Middle Ages shared two features. First, and most importantly, all political relationships were based on personal bonds, or contracts, between two individuals, whether between king and noble or noble and peasant. Such mutual loyalty had been the basis for the comitatus, a group of warriors in ancient German societies. By the time of Charlemagne, the formation of a lord-vassal relationship between two warriors, or nobles, was increasingly formalized, usually involving the exchange of military service and loyalty for land. Land tenure—the key to personal wealth and power—was the second universal element of feudal relations. In most instances, kings were the largest landowners, and they secured the support of other nobles by giving each of them an estate, or fief.

By the beginning of the 11th century, most parts of Germany were dominated by aristocrats. Everywhere nobles monopolized the right to bear arms. They held supreme jurisdiction within their own lands and dispensed all types of justice. Only taxation, which was considered an exceptional and generally temporary practice in medieval Europe, required the approval of the emperor and all of the other nobles. The German nobles and the emperor gathered irregularly and in different locations in an imperial assembly, or diet, eventually called the Reichstag. A similar meeting within a territory, or land, was called a Landtag.

The German nobility ranged from the powerful seven electors and the princes of more than 240 states to the minor imperial knights who held fiefs directly from the emperor. Violent conflicts among noble families were common throughout the Middle Ages and usually aimed at expanding a dynasty’s landholdings. Arranged marriages provided another method of dynastic expansion and consolidation. Beginning in the 11th century, many families constructed castles, both for defense and as a sign of social importance.

About 90 percent of the German population during the Middle Ages lived in small, rural communities and worked on the land. In many regions peasant families entered into an unfree relationship with landowners, commonly known as serfdom. Serfs were required to give part of their labor to the landlord. The majority of those who worked the soil in Germany, though, were free tenant farmers who gave nobles a share of their annual harvest as rent. Peasants—all of those who farmed the land and bred livestock—relied on local secular and ecclesiastical patrons for various kinds of protection, both from invaders and criminals as well as from natural disasters such as famine and flood.

The material conditions of the peasants’ lives were generally harsh. Infant and child mortality was exceptionally high: One out of two babies born did not reach adulthood. Most Germans lived in one-room wooden or mud shacks with all the members of their family and even some domesticated animals. The diet consisted largely of bread, some vegetables, and beer or wine. Meat was expensive and generally reserved for holidays and other special occasions. Whether tenant or serf, peasants relied on the lord for most services—including milling and baking—and were required to provide him with their own labor at certain times. Famine and taxes occasionally drove some individuals to revolt, but the result was always violent suppression. More often peasants negotiated with landlords for better conditions or simply fled to the nearest city.

Population Growth and Movement

At the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, there were probably only about 700,000 people in the area of modern Germany. These numbers rose gradually to about 3 million by the year 1000. As elsewhere in Europe, the population of Germany then boomed for the next three centuries, possibly growing as high as 12 million people by the end of the 13th century. In addition to contributing to the growth of towns, the growing number of people increased the demand for food and arable land. One result was the push to the east, a deliberate policy of German settlement of various areas east of the Oder, Vistula, and Memel rivers. From the 12th century to the 14th century, recruiters, working for German lords, led wagon trains of Germans to settle thinly populated Slavic lands. Monastic orders such as the Cistercians and the Premonstratensians also came to the new frontier. The Teutonic Knights moved their headquarters to Marienburg in eastern Germany and led a crusade against the pagan Prussians. The knights’ defeat in 1242 by Russian prince Alexander Nevsky marked the eastern limit of German expansion, but by then most of modern-day eastern Germany, northern Poland, and the Baltic states had been overrun by German settlers. Tensions between German and Slavic cultures in these areas have endured into modern times.

The later Middle Ages were dominated by the plague, a deadly disease known as the Black Death. Perhaps as many as 5 million Germans—about one-third of the population—died during the first wave of plague from 1348 to 1350, and subsequent outbreaks prevented the population from recovering to preplague levels until 1500. For those peasants and workers who survived, the decrease in the labor supply generally meant more favorable leases and wages. In the eastern lands, however, nobles reacted in the opposite manner. Determined not to lose their privileges, they brutally cracked down on their tenants, introducing what is known as a second serfdom, with even more oppressive feudal demands.

Commerce and the Growth of Towns

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, urban centers everywhere in Europe declined dramatically. By the beginning of the 11th century, however, trade revived and towns began a three-century growth spurt. A few, such as Trier and Cologne, were based on Roman settlements, but the majority were new centers, some connected to nearby castles or monasteries. In eastern Germany, cities such as Breslau (modern Wrocław, Poland) and Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia) developed as part of deliberate colonization. Cologne and Frankfurt prospered greatly because they were on the routes that traders traveled between Germany and the large merchant fairs of Champagne, in what is now northeastern France. Mainz grew because it lay on the trade route across the Alps to Italy. Of the 3,000 German towns established by 1300, almost all were small, with populations under 1,000. Cologne, the largest city in medieval Germany, had a population of 30,000 at its peak in the early 14th century.

As their economic power grew, the cities’ demands for freedom from attack and from feudal tolls often led to war with neighboring nobles. Shrewd town magistrates were able to use the ongoing struggle between German emperors and princes to their own benefit. Beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1183, emperors granted some cities complete political autonomy and the right to form alliances in exchange for tax revenues. These were called imperial cities. Most were located in southern Germany and formed defensive unions such as the Swabian League.

Meanwhile, in the north, several German and Scandinavian towns—particularly Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen—combined forces to form the powerful trade association of the Hansa, or the Hanseatic League. At its peak in the early 15th century, the league monopolized all trade on the Baltic and throughout northern Europe. The league constructed canals and roads, arranged commercial treaties, and even waged war.

In Switzerland, eight city-states, or cantons, won their independence from the Habsburgs in the 13th century. They were eventually joined by others in the Helvetic (Swiss) Confederation, which has endured to this day. As befitted a decentralized empire, no one city gained undisputed prominence, although Prague served as the imperial capital during the 14th and 15th centuries.

During the later Middle Ages, the cities became increasingly important in an expanding money economy. In the south, the imperial cities of Nürnberg and Augsburg, home of the Fugger Bank, thrived on mining and trade with Italian city-states. The growth of trade was accompanied by a marked increase in production of finished goods beginning in the 12th century. Throughout Germany, skilled artisans organized themselves into guilds devoted to a particular specialty, for example weaving. The guild was a local monopoly that held complete power over production quality and quantity, prices, and admission into its ranks. By the late Middle Ages, guilds had gained for their members the most powerful economic and political positions in the cities.

The medieval city was dominated by a few powerful people, just as the countryside was. The key difference was that in the cities, the various merchant and craft guilds (both virtually hereditary by the 15th century) struggled with one another for political power. Those who were successful dominated the town councils. Beginning in the 12th century, these councils legislated on a variety of matters, including safety, hygiene, and social behavior. The majority of the urban population—artisans, shopkeepers, day laborers, and the destitute—had no say in governing the city.

Many German cities included Jews who in theory were under the special protection of the emperor, but in fact they endured countless organized attacks, or pogroms, throughout the Middle Ages. By the end of the 13th century, most German cities required all Jews to live within an enclosed district (ghetto), supposedly for their own safety, but sporadic persecutions persisted.