The Holy Roman Empire and Central Europe
The Holy Roman Empire in the late Middle Ages was not a national monarchy at all, and that is precisely why it belongs in a guide to the rise of national monarchies. By the time of the Council of Constance (1414–1418), the Empire was a federation of several hundred princely territories, ecclesiastical electorates, and free imperial cities, bound together by a common allegiance to a German king who would, if he could get to Rome, be crowned emperor by the pope. The three articles in this section examine that federation from three angles: the constitutional document that gave it shape, the Golden Bull of 1356 issued by the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV and still in force in 1806; the long dynastic story of the Habsburgs, who would turn a minor Swiss-Austrian patrimony into the ruling house of Central Europe; and the reign of Frederick III (king of the Romans from 1440, emperor from 1452 until his death in 1493), the longest-reigning Habsburg, whose apparent failure was in fact the foundation of everything his son and grandson would do.
An Empire that was not a kingdom
A useful way into the late-medieval Empire is to notice what it was not. It was not England, with its common law and its parliament at Westminster; it was not France, where the Capetians and Valois had spent three centuries narrowing the territorial princes into royal office-holders. The Empire was a community of distinct political bodies, each with its own law and representation, gathered under an elective head whose powers were defined less by statute than by custom, oath, and Reichstag resolution. Thomas Bisson’s survey of medieval European monarchies, and R.J.W. Evans’s longer study of the Habsburg monarchy, both treat the Empire as a counter-example to the western model — an arrangement that survived precisely because it did not try to do what Louis XI was doing at the same moment in France.
The great territorial dynasties — the Wittelsbach dukes of Bavaria, the Wettin dukes of Saxony, the Luxemburgs of Bohemia, the Jagiellons of Hungary and Poland, the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg — were kings in all but name within their own lands. The emperor’s practical instruments were the chancery at Vienna, the Hofkammer, and the Reichstag, and even these had to be operated through negotiation with the princes. Jean Bérenger’s work on the late-medieval Empire has done as much as any to recover the texture of that negotiation: the diets at Augsburg and Nuremberg, the Swabian League, and the long shadow cast by the Council of Basel (1431–1449) over the emperor’s relation with the papacy.
The Golden Bull of 1356 and the electoral constitution
The constitutional cornerstone of the late-medieval Empire is the subject of the first article, The Golden Bull of 1356 and imperial elections. The Golden Bull, sealed at Nuremberg and Metz in December 1355 and January 1356, was the work of Charles IV of Luxembourg (1316–1378), king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, who needed to fix the procedure by which the imperial title was to be transmitted. The Bull fixed the number of electors at seven — the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the king of Bohemia, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, and the margrave of Brandenburg — and gave them privileges that would, in time, become the seedbed of a separate constitutional tradition.
The Golden Bull’s reach was extraordinary. It governed the election of every Holy Roman Emperor from Günther of Schwarzburg (1349) to Francis II (1806), and it is the reason that the imperial title, alone among the great European crowns, was elective in a legally regulated way. The 1742 election of Charles Albert of Bavaria in opposition to Maria Theresa’s husband Francis Stephen, and the 1745 “family compact” by which Francis Stephen was chosen in his turn, would be governed by the same text. Robert Folz’s study of the imperial idea treats the Bull as the document that converted the Empire from a personal into an institutional monarchy — an institution, however, in which the institution was the limitation of the monarch.
The Habsburg path to hegemony
The two remaining articles cover the dynasty that would, by Frederick III’s death in 1493, be the only serious candidate for the imperial title in the next three centuries. The rise of the Habsburg dynasty traces the family’s trajectory from the thirteenth-century Habsburgs of the Aargau through the acquisition of Austria under Rudolf IV in the 1360s and the death of the Tyrol line in 1363, to the great inheritance of 1457 — the duchies of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. Peter Wilson’s long history of the Holy Roman Empire, and the older work of Hugo Hantsch on the Habsburgs, both treat the dynasty’s fifteenth-century rise as a long preparation: loss of German influence in the west, consolidation in the east, and the slow build-up of a dynastic and matrimonial strategy that would, by 1516, bind Habsburg to Trastámara, Jagiellon, and the Burgundian inheritance.
Frederick III and the realities of imperial power treats the last emperor crowned in Rome by the pope (1452) and the longest-reigning Habsburg of the Middle Ages. His reign of fifty-three years has often been treated as a failure — a Habsburg who lost Switzerland at Sempach (1386, under his father), endured the Austrian rising of 1462, watched Constantinople fall in 1453, and saw Matthias Corvinus take Vienna in 1485. The more recent reading, associated with Bérenger and the Austrian historians of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, is that Frederick’s apparent inertia was a deliberate strategy: he kept the Austrian duchies intact, secured the succession of his son Maximilian in 1486 and 1493, married Maximilian to Mary of Burgundy in 1477, and laid the diplomatic groundwork for the European position the dynasty would hold into the 1640s. The Habsburg Empire that took shape in the 1490s was the Empire that the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) would eventually dismantle, and the late-medieval Empire in the older sense effectively ended with him.
Articles in this section
- The Golden Bull of 1356 and imperial elections
- The rise of the Habsburg dynasty
- Frederick III and the realities of imperial power