Late Middle Ages

Frederick III and the realities of imperial power

Frederick III (1415–1493) ruled the Holy Roman Empire for fifty-three years, longer than any of his medieval predecessors and almost every emperor of the early modern period. He was elected King of the Romans in February 1440, crowned emperor by Pope Nicholas V in Rome on 16 March 1452 — the last papal-imperial coronation in history — and he died at Linz on 19 August 1493. He has been a difficult figure for historians. The Austrian tradition, working from a substantial body of Habsburg material in the Mittheilungen des Vereines für Geschichte der Stadt Wien and from the dynastic histories of the late nineteenth century, made him a saintly founder of the dynasty. The nationalist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working in a Bismarckian register, made him a cipher, a Habsburg Caesar with no armies and no real policies. The recent scholarship — Heinz Stoob, Paul-Joachim Heinig, Franz Fuchs, the late Odilo Engels, the essays collected in the Heidelberger Jahrbücher — has done better. It sees a king who, faced with the realities of the late medieval Empire — its territorial princes, its great cities, its ecclesiastical electorate, the threat from the Ottoman frontier — adopted the only policy that would preserve the dynasty. That policy was patience, and Frederick practised it longer than any of his contemporaries would have believed possible.

From Habsburg count to emperor

Frederick was born in Wiener Neustadt on 21 September 1415, the third son of Ernest the Iron, duke of Austria and Styria. His brother Albert, the eldest, succeeded their father in 1424; Frederick, by a series of dynastic agreements (the Treaty of the Hapsburgs of 1424, the Bruderschaft of 1426, the still more famous arrangement of 1446 by which Frederick inherited the remaining Austrian lands and Albert was compensated by the duchy of Württemberg for life), was set up for the imperial career. The instrument of this elevation was the Council of Basel. Sigismund, the last of the Luxembourg emperors, had been dead since 1437; his son-in-law Albert of Habsburg, the king of Hungary and Bohemia, had followed him in 1439, killed at the disastrous Battle of Neszmély. The electors needed a king, and they were prepared to take one from the western house of the Habsburgs in default of any other candidate.

Frederick was elected at Frankfurt on 2 February 1440 by all seven electors — an unanimity that was to be denied to his successors for the rest of the Middle Ages. The coronation at Aachen was on 17 June 1442, the same year in which the Council of Basel, which had been working for some time on the matter, succeeded in moving the papacy toward the eventual Concordat of Vienna (1448) with Nicholas V. Frederick’s first years as King of the Romans were spent almost entirely in the Austrian lands; his first visit to the Empire west of the Inn was not until 1449. The unworldliness of the man, which is so visible in the surviving portraiture, was matched by an unworldliness in his policies. He did not, as a French king of the same period would have done, regard the Empire as a territory to be governed; he regarded it as an inheritance to be preserved.

The Imperial Diets, 1456–1471

The crucial constitutional test of the reign came in the 1450s. The dispute with Pope Nicholas V, which centred on Frederick’s insistence on a neutral papal-imperial approach to the reform of the German church and the unending quarrel over the archbishopric of Mainz, came to a head at the Diet of Frankfurt in 1456. The next major Diet, at Regensburg in 1454, had already begun the slow work of the imperial reform programme that would culminate in the 1480s and 1490s. The reform programme of the so-called Reformatio Sigismundi of 1438/1439, drafted in the circles of the imperial court of Sigismund and given a wider currency in the Rothe Buch of the early 1450s, was the seedbed of the later ideas. The imperial circle (Reichskreis) system, which would become the working administrative unit of the Empire from 1500, was first canvassed in the years around 1456; the Matrikel of military contribution, which was debated at the Diet of Worms in 1455 and again in 1471, was the unfinished business of Frederick’s reign.

The point is not that Frederick was a great reformer. He was not. The reform was driven by the territorial princes and the great ecclesiastical electors, and above all by the officials of the imperial chancery — Kaspar Schlick, the Bohemian chancery clerk, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the humanist who would become Pope Pius II, and Friedrich Lange, the secretary who kept the chancery running. Frederick’s contribution was to let the reform happen, and to keep the institution of the Diet alive. The Diet of Augsburg of 1471, the Diet of Trier of 1473, the Diet of Regensburg of 1474, and the Diet of Augsburg of 1487 were the moments in which the late medieval imperial constitution was, slowly, refitted. As Joachim Whaley has argued in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford, 2012), the Empire of the late fifteenth century was, in many respects, a federal polity in the making.

The Austrian lands and the dynasty

The core of Frederick’s power was always the Austrian lands. He came to rule them in their full extent in 1457, when his brother Albert died of dysentery at Graz. The inheritance — the duchies of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, the county of Tirol, the windfall territories in Vorarlberg, and a series of wardship rights in Swabia and elsewhere — was the largest single block of territorial inheritance in central Europe. Frederick’s territorial policy was a mixture of patient accumulation, careful marriage diplomacy, and a willingness to defend the inheritance by force when necessary.

The early and middle parts of the reign were spent in a long set of feuds with the great territorial families of the eastern Empire. The quarrel with Ladislaus Posthumus, the Habsburg-Luxembourg son of Albert II, who had been kept in the custody of Frederick Eynzinger in Wiener Neustadt, was the longest single crisis: Ladislaus, who had inherited the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia in 1444 and 1453, was the subject of an agreement at Wiener Neustadt in 1452, but the relationship was intermittent until his death at Prague on 23 November 1457. The quarrel with the Hunyadi family in Hungary, the long defence of the Austrian frontier against the Ottomans after the fall of Belgrade in 1456 and the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1448, and the recurring embassies to Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary from 1458, all consumed the resources of the dynasty in the 1450s and 1460s.

The crisis came in 1485, when Matthias Corvinus invaded the Austrian lands and captured Vienna on 1 June 1485. Frederick, the emperor of 33 years’ standing, was forced to take refuge in Linz and to conduct a campaign of reconquest from his cousin Sigismund of Tyrol. The humiliation of the next three years, the papal-imperial negotiations of 1486, and the eventual restoration of the eastern line of the Danube by the Treaty of Pressburg in 1491 (by which Maximilian, Frederick’s son, was betrothed to Matthias’s daughter Anna, but which also recognised the loss of most of Matthias’s conquests) were the turning point. The treaty also confirmed the rights of the Habsburgs in Hungary in default of a Jagiellon heir, a right that would matter enormously in 1526.

The reality of imperial power

The most striking thing about Frederick’s reign is the smallness of the imperial apparatus. There was no standing imperial army. There was no imperial taxation. There was no imperial bureaucracy beyond the chancery and a handful of ecclesiastical officers. The chancery of the late medieval Empire, which was housed at various points in the itinerary of the king and his officials, was the only continuous institution of the central government. The Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht), the supreme court of the Empire, was not founded until 1495, the work of Maximilian. The Imperial Council (Hofrat) was the personal council of the king. The Diet (Reichstag) was an assembly of the princes, ecclesiastical and secular, meeting as a body in the imperial cities — Frankfurt, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Worms, Trier, Cologne.

The combination of personal rule by the king and a federal assembly of the princes produced a constitutional system that was strikingly different from the centralised monarchies of France, England, and Spain. The princes had the right of rebellion in cases of breach of the Landfrieden, the right of resistance to imperial violation of the customary laws, a doctrine that had been developed in the late thirteenth century in the courts of Philip of Sponheim and Rudolf of Habsburg and would be given its definitive form in the late fifteenth-century pamphlets of the Reichsreform. The princes had the right to mint their own coins, to maintain their own armies, to make war and peace in their own names, subject only to the Landfrieden and to the formal pre-eminence of the imperial title. The king had the right to receive the customary feudal dues, to grant the imperial fiefs, to confirm the privileges of the cities, to convene the Diet. The Empire of Frederick III was, in constitutional terms, a federation of sovereign princes and free cities, presided over by a Habsburg who was always short of money, always at odds with one of his neighbours, and always able to fall back on the principle that the dynasty would outlast the present crisis.

The Habsburg inheritance and the verdict of history

The achievement of Frederick III was dynastic. He married Eleanor of Portugal in 1452, who bore him Maximilian on 22 March 1459. He arranged the marriage of Maximilian to Mary of Burgundy in 1477, the most important dynastic marriage of the century, and the marriage of his grandson Philip the Handsome to Joanna of Castile in 1496, by which the Habsburgs would eventually inherit the Spanish kingdoms. He secured the election of Maximilian as King of the Romans in 1486, and the coronation at Aachen in 1486, by which the succession was effectively settled. The Emperor’s last years, from 1487 to 1493, were spent in Linz, in the gradual retirement of an old man, and the last great dynastic act, the Privilegium Maius of 1359 — the document by which Duke Rudolf IV had forged the privileges of the Austrian archduchy and which Frederick had confirmed in 1453 — was the seal on a long process of territorial and juridical consolidation.

The historiography of Frederick has been transformed. The late nineteenth-century verdict of a weak, almost pathetic ruler has been replaced by the more considered reading of a king who knew what he could and could not do. The great debate of the 1980s, between the modernists (Knittler, Rausch, the Czech and Austrian historians of the Pilsen school) and the primordialists (the older, federalist school of Heimpel, Bosl, and the late Karl Brandi), was about whether the Empire of the late fifteenth century was a coherent polity or a constitutional fiction. The answer, as so often in late medieval history, was both. The Empire was a federation of imperial princes under a Habsburg king; it was also, in the institutional forms that Frederick had done so much to keep alive — the chancery, the Diet, the Landfrieden, the Reichskreis — the constitutional ancestor of the German federal tradition. The reign of Frederick III is best read, finally, not as a failure but as a success of a particular kind: the success of a dynasty that outlasted the medieval Empire by about 350 years, and of a constitutional order that outlasted it by about 1,000.

References and further reading

  • Heinz Stoob, Kaiser Friedrich III. (1415–1493). Lebensbild und Problemstellung (Graz, 1991).
  • Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806 (London, 2011).
  • Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (2 vols, Oxford, 2012).
  • Robert J. W. Evans, The Coming of the Three Kings (Cambridge, 2012).
  • Franz Fuchs and Paul-Joachim Heinig, eds, Kaiser Friedrich III. in seiner Zeit (Cologne, 2000).