This reign is important in the history of Germany because it marks the beginning of the great imperial age, but it has other features of interest. In dealing with the revolt of Ernest of Swabia Conrad was aided by the reluctanceThe nobles and the land.of the vassals of the great lords to follow them against the king. This reluctance was due largely to the increasing independence of this class of landholders, who were beginning to learn that the sovereign, and not their immediate lord, was the protector of their liberties; the independence in its turn arose from the growth of the principle of heredity. In Germany Conrad did not definitely decree that fiefs should pass from father to son, but he encouraged and took advantage of the tendency in this direction, a tendency which was, obviously, a serious blow at the power of the great lords over their vassals. In 1037 he issued from Milan his famous edict for the kingdom of Italy which decreed that upon the death of a landholder his fief should descend to his son, or grandson, and that no fiefholder should be deprived of his fief without the judgment of his peers. In another direction Conrad’s policy was to free himself as king from dependence upon the church. He sought to regain lands granted to the church by his predecessors; prelates were employed on public business much less frequently than heretofore. He kept a firm hand over the church, but his rule was purely secular; he took little or no interest in ecclesiastical affairs. During this reign the centre and basis of the imperial power in Germany was moved southwards. Saxony, the home of the Ottos, became less prominent in German politics, while Bavaria and the south were gradually gaining in importance.
Henry III., who had been crowned German king and also king of Burgundy during his father’s lifetime, took possession of his great inheritance without the slightest sign of opposition in June 1039. He was without the impulsivenessHenry III.which marred Conrad’s great qualities, but he had the same decisive judgment, wide ambition and irresistible will as his father. During the late king’s concluding years a certain Bretislaus, who had served Conrad with distinction in Lusatia, became duke of Bohemia and made war upon the disunited Poles, easily bringing them into subjection. Thus Germany was again threatened with the establishment of a great and independent Slavonic state upon her eastern frontier. To combat this danger Henry invaded Bohemia, and after two reverses compelled Bretislaus to appear before him as a suppliant at Regensburg. The German king treated his foe generously and was rewarded by receiving to the end of his reign the service of a loyal vassal; he also gained the goodwill of the Poles by helping to bring about the return of their duke, Casimir I., who willingly did homage for his land. The king of Denmark, too, acknowledged Henry as his feudal lord. Moreover, by several campaigns in Hungary the German king brought that country into the position of a fief of the German crown. This war was occasioned by the violence of the Hungarian usurper, Aba Samuel, and formed Henry’s principal occupation from 1041 to 1045.
In Germany itself Henry acquired, during the first ten years of his rule, an authority which had been unknown since the days of Otto the Great. Early in his reign he had made a determined enemy of Godfrey the Bearded, duke ofHenry’s internal policy.upper Lorraine, who, in 1044, conspired against him and who found powerful allies in Henry I., king of France, in the counts of Flanders and Holland, and in certain Burgundian nobles. However, Godfrey and his friends were easily worsted, and when the dispossessed duke again tried the fortune of war he found that the German king had detached Henry of France from his side and was also in alliance with the English king, Edward the Confessor. While thus maintaining his authority in the north-east corner of the country by alliances and expeditions, Henry was strong enough to put the laws in motion against the most powerful princes and to force them to keep the public peace. Under his severe but beneficent rule, Germany enjoyed a period of internal quiet such as she had probably never experienced before, but even Henry could not permanently divert from its course the main political tendency of the age, the desire of the great feudal lords for independence.
Cowed, but unpacified and discontented, the princes awaited their opportunity, while the king played into their hands by allowing the southern duchies, Swabia, Bavaria and Carinthia, to pass from under his own immediateHenry’s wars.control. His position was becoming gradually weaker when in 1051 he invaded Hungary, where a reaction against German influence was taking place. After a second campaign in 1052 the Hungarian king, Andrew, was compelled to make peace and to own himself the vassal of the German king. Meanwhile Saxony and Bavaria were permeated by the spirit of unrest, and Henry returned from Hungary just in time to frustrate a widespread conspiracy against him in southern Germany. Encouraged by the support of the German rebels, Andrew of Hungary repudiated the treaty of peace and the German supremacy in that country came to a sudden end. Among the causes which undermined Henry’s strength was the fact that the mediate nobles, who had stood loyally by his father, Conrad, were not his friends; probably his wars made serious demands upon them, and his strict administration of justice, especially his insistence upon the maintenance of the public peace, was displeasing to them.
At the beginning of Henry’s reign the church all over Europe was in a deplorable condition. Simony was universally practised and the morality of the clergy was very low. The Papacy, too, had sunk to a degraded condition and itsHenry and the church.authority was annihilated, not only by the character of successive popes, but by the fact that there were at the same time three claimants for the papal throne. Henry, a man of deep, sincere and even rigorous piety, regarded these evils with sorrow; he associated himself definitely with the movement for reform which proceeded from Cluny, and commanded his prelates to put an end to simony and other abuses. Then moving farther in the same direction he resolved to strike at the root of the evil by the exercise of his imperial authority. In 1046 he entered Italy at the head of an army which secured for him greater respect than had been given to any German ruler since Charlemagne, and at Sutri and in Rome he deposed the three rival popes. He then raised to the papal see Suidger, bishop of Bamberg, who, as Pope Clement II., crowned him emperor; after Clement three other German popes—Damasus II., Leo IX. and Victor II.—owed their elevation to Henry. Under these popes a new era began for the church, and in thus reforming the Papacy Henry III. fulfilled what was regarded as the noblest duty of his imperial office, but he alsosharpened a weapon whose keen edge was first tried against his son.
The last years of Henry III. form a turning-point in German history. Great kings and emperors came after him, but none of them possessed the direct, absolute authority which he freely wielded; even in the case of the strongest the forms of feudalism more and more interposed themselves between the monarch and the nation, and at last the royal authority virtually disappeared. During this reign the towns entered upon an age of prosperity, and the Rhine and the Weser became great avenues of trade.
When Henry died in October 1056 the decline of the royal authority was accelerated by the fact that his successor was a child. Henry IV., who had been crowned king in 1054, was at first in charge of his mother, the empressThe minority of Henry IV.Agnes, whose weak and inefficient rule was closely watched by Anno, archbishop of Cologne. In 1062, however, Anno and other prominent prelates and laymen, perhaps jealous of the influence exercised at court by Henry, bishop of Augsburg (d. 1063), managed by a clever trick to get possession of the king’s person. Deserted by her friends Agnes retired, and forthwith Anno began to rule the state. But soon he was compelled to share his duties with Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen, and a year or two later Adalbert became virtually the ruler of Germany, leaving Anno to attend to affairs in Italy. Adalbert’s rule was very successful. Compelling King Solomon to own Henry’s supremacy he restored the influence of Germany in Hungary; in internal affairs he restrained the turbulence of the princes, but he made many enemies, especially in Saxony, and in 1066 Henry, who had just been declared of age, was compelled to dismiss him. The ambitious prelate, however, had gained great influence over Henry, who had grown up under the most diverse influences. The young king was generous and was endowed with considerable intellectual gifts; but passing as he did from Anno’s gloomy palace at Cologne to Adalbert’s residence in Bremen, where he was petted and flattered, he became wayward and wilful.
Henry IV. assumed the duties of government soon after the fall of Adalbert and quickly made enemies of many of the chief princes, including Otto of Nordheim, the powerful duke of Bavaria, Rudolph, duke of Swabia, andHenry’s personal rule.Berthold of Zähringen, duke of Carinthia. In Saxony, where, like his father, he frequently held his court, he excited intense hostility by a series of injudicious proceedings. While the three Ottos were pursuing the shadow of imperial greatness in Italy, much of the crown land in this duchy had been seized by the nobles and was now held by their descendants. Henry IV. insisted on the restoration of these estates and encroached upon the rights of the peasants. Moreover, he built a number of forts which the people thought were intended for prisons; he filled the land with riotous and overbearing Swabians; he kept in prison Magnus, the heir to the duchy; and is said to have spoken of the Saxons in a tone of great contempt. All classes were thus combined against him, and when he ordered his forces to assemble for a campaign against the Poles the Saxons refused to join the host. In 1073 the universal discontent found expression in a great assembly at Wormesleben, in which the leading part was taken by Otto of Nordheim, by Werner, archbishop of Magdeburg, and by Burkhard II., bishop of Halberstadt. Under Otto’s leadership the Thuringians joined the rising, which soon spread far and wide. Henry was surprised by a band of rebels in his fortress at the Harzburg; he fled to Hersfeld and appealed to the princes for support, but he could not compel them to aid him and they would grant him nothing. After tedious negotiations he was obliged to yield to the demands of his enemies, and peace was made at Gerstungen in 1074. Zealously carrying out the conditions of the peace, the peasants not only battered down the detested forts, they even destroyed the chapel at the Harzburg and committed other acts of desecration. These proceedings alarmed the princes, both spiritual and secular, and Henry, who had gained support from the cities of the Rhineland, was able to advance with a formidable army into Saxony in 1075. He gained a decisive victory, rebuilt the forts and completely restored the authority of the crown.
In 1073, while Germany was in this confused state, Hildebrand had become pope as Gregory VII., and in 1075 he issued his famous decree against the marriage of the clergy and against their investiture by laymen. To the latterPope Gregory VII.decree it was impossible for any sovereign to submit, and in Germany there were stronger reasons than elsewhere for resistance. A large part of the land of the country was held by the clergy, and most of it had been granted to them because it was supposed that they would be the king’s most efficient helpers. Were the feudal tie broken, the crown must soon vanish, and the constitution of medieval society undergo a radical change. Henry, who hitherto had treated the new pope with excessive respect, now announced his intention of going to Rome and assuming the imperial title. The pope, to whom the Saxons had been encouraged to complain, responded by sending back certain of Henry’s messengers, with the command that the king should do penance for the crimes of which his subjects accused him. Enraged by this unexpected arrogance, Henry summoned a synod of German bishops to Worms in January 1076, and Hildebrand was declared deposed. The papal answer was a bull excommunicating the German king, dethroning him and liberating his subjects from their oath of allegiance.
Never before had a pope ventured to take so bold a step. It was within the memory even of young men that a German king had dismissed three popes, and had raised in turn four of his own prelates to the Roman see. AndEffect of Henry’s excommunication.now a pope attempted to drag from his throne the successor of this very sovereign. The effect of the bull was tremendous; no other was ever followed by equally important results. The princes had long been chafing under the royal power; they had shaken even so stern an autocrat as Henry III., and the authority of Henry IV. was already visibly weakened. At this important stage in their contest with the crown a mighty ally suddenly offered himself, and with indecent eagerness they hastened to associate themselves with him. Their vassals and subjects, appalled by the invisible powers wielded by the head of the church, supported them in their rebellion. The Saxons again rose in arms and Otto of Nordheim succeeded in uniting the North and South German supporters of the pope. Henry had looked for no such result as this; he did not understand the influences which lay beneath the surface and was horrified by his unexpected isolation. At a diet in Tribur he humbled himself before the princes, but in vain. They turned from him and decided that the pope should be asked to judge Henry; that if, within a year, the sentence of excommunication were not removed, the king should lose his crown; and that in the meantime he should live in retirement.
Next came the strange scene at Canossa which burned itself into the memory of Europe. For three days the representative of the Caesars entreated to be admitted into the pope’s presence. No other mode of escape than completeScene at Canossa.subjection to Gregory had suggested itself, or was perhaps possible; but it did not save him. Although the pope forgave him, the German princes, resolved not to miss the chance which fortune had given them, met in March 1077, and deposed him, electing Rudolph, duke of Swabia, as his successor. But Henry’s bitter humiliations transformed his character; they brought out all his latent capacities of manliness.
The war of investitures that followed was the opening of the tremendous struggle between the Empire and the Papacy, which is the central fact of medieval history and which, after two centuries of conflict, ended in theThe struggle over investitures.exhaustion of both powers. Its details belong more to the history of Italy than to that of Germany, where it took the form of a fight between two rival kings, but in Germany its effects were more deeply felt. The nation now plucked bitter fruit from the seed planted by Otto the Great in assuming the imperial crown and by a long line of kings and emperors in lavishing worldly power upon the church. In theambition of the spiritual and the secular princes the pope had an immensely powerful engine of offence against the emperor, and without the slightest scruple this was turned to the best advantage.
When this struggle began it may be said in general that Henry was supported by the cities and the lower classes, while Rudolph relied upon the princes and the opponents of a united Germany; or, to make another division, Henry’sHenry IV. and the anti-kings.strength lay in the duchies of Franconia and Bavaria, Rudolph’s in Swabia and Saxony. In the Rhineland and in southern Germany the cities had been steadily growing in wealth and power, and they could not fail to realize that they had more to fear from the princes than from the crown. Hence when Henry returned to Germany in 1078 Worms, Spires and many other places opened their gates to him and contributed freely to his cause; nevertheless his troops were beaten in three encounters and Pope Gregory thundered anew against him in March 1080. However, the fortune of war soon turned, and in October 1080 Rudolph of Swabia was defeated and slain. Henry then carried the war into Italy; in 1084 he was crowned emperor in Rome by Wibert, archbishop of Ravenna, whom, as Clement III., he had set up as an anti-pope, and in 1085 Gregory died an exile from Rome. Meanwhile in Germany Henry’s opponents had chosen Hermann, count of Luxemburg, king in succession to Rudolph of Swabia. Hermann, however, was not very successful, and when Henry returned to Germany in 1084 he found that his most doughty opponent, Otto of Nordheim, was dead, and that the anti-king had few friends outside Saxony. This duchy was soon reduced to obedience and was treated with consideration, and when the third anti-king, Egbert, margrave of Meissen, was murdered in 1090 there would have been peace if Germany had followed her own impulses.
In the Papacy, however, Henry had an implacable foe; and again and again when he seemed on the point of a complete triumph the smouldering embers of revolt were kindled once more into flame. In Italy his son, Conrad, wasHenry and the Papacy.stirred up against him and in 1093 was crowned king at Monza; then ten years later, when Germany was more peaceful than it had been for years and when the emperor’s authority was generally acknowledged, his second son, Henry, afterwards the emperor Henry V., was induced to head a dangerous rebellion. The Saxons and the Thuringians were soon in arms, and they were joined by those warlike spirits of Germany to whom an age of peace brought no glory and an age of prosperity brought no gain. After some desultory fighting Henry IV. was taken prisoner and compelled to abdicate; he had, however, escaped and had renewed the contest when he died in August 1106.
During this reign the first crusade took place, and the German king suffered severely from the pious zeal which it expressedThe First Crusade.and intensified. The movement was not in the end favourable to papal supremacy, but the early crusaders, and those who sympathized with them, regarded the enemies of the pope as the enemies of religion.
The early years of Henry V.’s reign were spent in campaigns in Flanders, Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, but the new king was soon reminded that the dispute over investitures was unsettled. Pope Paschal II. did not doubt, now that Henry IV. was dead, that he would speedilyHenry V. in Germany.triumph; but he was soon undeceived. Henry V., who with unconscious irony had promised to treat the pope as a father, continued, like his predecessors, to invest prelates with the ring and the staff, and met the expostulations of Paschal by declaring that he would not surrender a right which had belonged to all former kings. Lengthened negotiations took place but they led to no satisfactory result, while the king’s enemies in Germany, taking advantage of the deadlock, showed signs of revolt. One of the most ardent of these enemies was Lothair of Supplinburg, whom Henry himself had made duke of Saxony upon the extinction of the Billung family in 1106. Lothair was humbled in 1112, but he took advantage of the emperor’s difficulties to rise again and again, the twin pillars of his strength being the Saxon hatred of the Franconian emperors and an informal alliance with the papal see. Henry’s chief friends were his nephews, the two Hohenstaufen princes, Frederick and Conrad, to whose father Frederick the emperor Henry IV. had given the duchy of Swabia when its duke Rudolph became his rival. The younger Frederick succeeded to this duchy in 1105, while ten years later Conrad was made duke of Franconia, a country which for nearly a century had been under the immediate government of the crown. The two brothers were enthusiastic imperialists, and with persistent courage they upheld the cause of their sovereign during his two absences in Italy.
At last, in September 1122, the investiture question was settled by the concordat of Worms. By this compromise, which exhaustion forced upon both parties, the right of electing prelates was granted to the clergy, andThe concordat of Worms.the emperor surrendered the privilege of investing them with the ring and the staff. On the other hand it was arranged that these elections should take place in the presence of the emperor or his representative, and that he should invest the new prelate with the sceptre, thus signifying that the bishop, or abbot, held his temporal fiefs from him and not from the pope. In Germany the victory remained with the emperor, but it was by no means decisive. The Papacy was far from realizing Hildebrand’s great schemes; yet in regard to the question in dispute it gained solid advantage, and its general authority was incomparably more important than it had been half a century before. During this period it had waged war upon the emperor himself. Instead of acknowledging its inferiority as in former times it had claimed to be the higher power; it had even attempted to dispose of the imperial crown as if the Empire were a papal fief; and it had found out that it could at any time tamper, and perhaps paralyse, the imperial authority by exciting internal strife in Germany. Having thus settled this momentous dispute Henry spent his later years in restoring order in Germany, and in planning to assist his father-in-law, Henry I. of England, in France. During this reign under the lead of Otto, bishop of Bamberg (c.1063-1139), Pomerania began to come under the influence of Germany and of Christianity.
The Franconian dynasty died out with Henry V. in May 1125, and after a protracted contest Lothair, duke of Saxony, the candidate of the clergy, was chosen in the following August to succeed him. The new king’s first enterpriseThe reign of Lothair the Saxon.was a disastrous campaign in Bohemia, but before this occurrence he had aroused the enmity of the Hohenstaufen princes by demanding that they should surrender certain lands which had formerly been the property of the crown. Lothair’s rebuff in Bohemia stiffened the backs of Frederick and Conrad, and in order to contend with them the king secured a powerful ally by marrying his daughter Gertrude to Henry the Proud, a grandson of Welf, whom Henry IV. had made duke of Bavaria, a duchy to which Henry himself had succeeded in 1126. Henry was perhaps the most powerful of the king’s subjects, nevertheless the dukes of Swabia and Franconia withstood him, and a long war desolated South Germany. This was ended by the submission of Frederick in 1134 and of Conrad in the following year. Lothair’s position, which before 1130 was very weak, had gradually become stronger. He had put down the disorder in Bavaria, in Saxony and in Lorraine; a diet held at Magdeburg in 1135 was attended by representatives from the vassal states of Denmark, Hungary, Bohemia and Poland; and in 1136, when he visited Italy for the second time, Germany was in a very peaceful condition. In June 1133 during the king’s first visit to Italy he had received from Pope Innocent II. the imperial crown and also the investiture of the extensive territories left by Matilda, marchioness of Tuscany; and at this time the pope seems to have claimed the emperor as his vassal, a statement to this effect (post homo fit papae, sumit quo dante coronam) being inscribed in the audience hall of the Lateran at Rome.
(Continued in volume11slice8.)
1i.e.the territory once under the jurisdiction of an imperialVogtoradvocatus(seeAdvocate).2The question, much disputed between Germans and Danes, is exhaustively treated by P. Lauridsen in F. de Jessen’sLa Question de Sleswig(Copenhagen, 1906), pp. 114 et seq.3See the comparative study in Percy Ashley’sLocal and Central Government(London, 1906).4TheKreisin Württemberg corresponds to theRegierungsbezirkelsewhere.5The system of compulsory registration, which involves a notification to the police of any change of address (even temporary), of course makes it easy to determine the domicile in any given case.6Actually between 1883 and 1908 over five million recruits passed through the drill sergeant’s hands, as well as perhaps 210,000 one-year volunteers.7These last have a curious history. They were formed from about 1890 onwards, by individual squadrons, two or three being voted each year. Ostensibly raised for the duties of mounted orderlies, at a time when it would have been impolitic to ask openly for more cavalry, they were little by little trained in real cavalry work, then combined in provisional regiments for disciplinary purposes and at last frankly classed as cavalry.
1i.e.the territory once under the jurisdiction of an imperialVogtoradvocatus(seeAdvocate).
2The question, much disputed between Germans and Danes, is exhaustively treated by P. Lauridsen in F. de Jessen’sLa Question de Sleswig(Copenhagen, 1906), pp. 114 et seq.
3See the comparative study in Percy Ashley’sLocal and Central Government(London, 1906).
4TheKreisin Württemberg corresponds to theRegierungsbezirkelsewhere.
5The system of compulsory registration, which involves a notification to the police of any change of address (even temporary), of course makes it easy to determine the domicile in any given case.
6Actually between 1883 and 1908 over five million recruits passed through the drill sergeant’s hands, as well as perhaps 210,000 one-year volunteers.
7These last have a curious history. They were formed from about 1890 onwards, by individual squadrons, two or three being voted each year. Ostensibly raised for the duties of mounted orderlies, at a time when it would have been impolitic to ask openly for more cavalry, they were little by little trained in real cavalry work, then combined in provisional regiments for disciplinary purposes and at last frankly classed as cavalry.