Pax urbana as a result of arbitration procedures between town councils and lords

The establishment and perpetuation of urban peace were integral components of the political and legal culture in the German towns in the later middle ages. The efforts to make the space within the city walls a safe haven for citizens and inhabitants alike involved, in the first place, legislation by the council and efforts to put it into effect.

What actually happened was that bishops, dukes and other town lords sought ways to regain control over the towns. This was an important aspect of the so-called â€?state building’ process, which took place on the territorial level in Germany.²⁴ The feudal lords referred to their old rights and tried to put them into effect again, sometimes by using force against the towns and their office holders. Therefore, councils and office holders had to defend their legal status against the attempts to curtail their legal and political power and scope. In this context, we find another notion of pax urbana. Here, urban peace was the result of the settling of conflicts between a town and its citizens on one side and the lord of the town on the other side.

To conclude a pax urbana with the lord of the town was a means to secure important features of a town’s self-government, because the citizens had not been able to resist encroachments in every case. I will explain this by comparing the fate of Halle/Saale and Magdeburg, which both came under attack by their lord, the archbishop of Magdeburg, in 1478/1479 and 1496/1497, respectively. Archbishop Ernst (1476–1513) was pursuing a policy of pressure and enforcement of his acquired rights against the towns in his lordship.²⁵ Being the superior lord of the towns in his archdiocese, he wanted to transform the largely independent municipalities into county towns (â€?Landstädte’) under his direct rule. It is necessary to mention that Ernst became the administrator of Magdeburg in 1476 when he was 11 years old. Therefore, his father, Duke and elector Ernst of Saxony (1441–1486), and his councillors directed the policy and ruled in his name. Between 1485 and 1487, he gained personal independence and pursued his own territorial policy, which was more or less in line with his father’s. Saxon troops conquered Halle in September 1478. This event marked the end of autonomy for Halle, because the citizens lost their right to legislation (burkore) within the town and the archbishop could reject newly elected members of the council if they displeased him. Furthermore, the town had to cancel its membership of the Hanseatic League, to which it had belonged since its inception. The symbol of the town’s liberties – the statue of Roland by the market place – was encased in wood.²⁶ The Roland sculpture had symbolised the libertas (freedom) of the town; it expressed autonomy from the lord.²⁷ Its encasing sent a clear message: the autonomy of the town, which had consisted of self-government and legislation and had been based on the association of the citizens, was abolished.

The question arises as to why the councillors in Halle had not been able to negotiate a pax urbana like their fellows in Magdeburg had a few years later. Since the 1430s, there had been internal strife among the owners of the salt springs, the so-called â€?Pfänner’,²⁸ who represented the urban patricians on one side and members of the guilds and craft guilds on the other side. Members of the Pfänner had been accused only to pretend to foster the common good of the town, while in fact pursuing their private interests. Over the years, a deep mutual distrust had developed and the tension between the social groups reached a climax in 1476. The Pfänner wanted the support of their fellow citizens against Archbishop Ernst, who demanded (for the first time) payments before he was willing to approve their use of the salt springs, which he regarded as some kind of fief.²⁹ The Pfänner argued that all citizens, belonging to a universitas civium and all equal in legal respect, had to contribute to the confirmation of their springs by the archbishop. Alternatively, they were to fight together for the continuation of the privilege not to pay for the permission to use the salt springs. The craft members in the council, on the contrary, argued that a payment had to be made by the Pfänner alone because they gained most of the profit from the production of salt. They – together with the majority of the citizens – thought that the patricians only emphasised the legal equality of all citizens in order to rescue their own economic and social position at the expense of the community. Therefore, councillors of the craft guilds like Hans Seele (a blacksmith) or Jakob Weissack (a shoemaker) collaborated with the lord of the town to disempower the Pfänner economically and politically. Markus Spittendorf, who was a citizen of Halle and an attentive observer of the conflict, summarised the ubiquitous hostility during the last years of the 1470s as follows: â€?wir von Halle hasseten und neideten uns, und einer verfolgte den anderen’ (â€?we, citizens of Halle, hated and envied each other, and one quarreled with the other’).³⁰ This constitutes the crucial point.

We do not know whether Archbishop Ernst thought using military force would help him subdue all towns in his dominion, because he and his father managed to conquer Quedlinburg in 1477 and Halberstadt in 1486 in this way. In both cases, the towns lost their liberties like Halle and were subjected to the archbishop’s rule.³¹ However, when Ernst approached Magdeburg in the 1490s, things turned out differently.

A council ruled Magdeburg. Ever since 1330, the five most important guilds (cloth merchants, grocers, furriers, shoemakers/tanners, tailors) annually elected one member each to the council; the other guilds (butchers, bakers, brewer, blacksmiths, sign makers, goldsmiths, sheet maker and â€?Schröter’ (transport workers)) chose another five aldermen.³² These ten councillors co-opted two patricians. The members of council provided the civic officers like the mayor, the treasurer, the keeper of the account books and so on. The members of the council and the officers were responsible to and had to work for the utilitas publica or Gemeinen Nutzen (common good) of the community and town. In the final 30 years of the fifteenth century, two goals of the council’s policy were of particular importance in respect to the political key category, the common good. The first goal of the political activities of the council was to guarantee peace, order and justice within the city walls. In this respect, the councillors and judges in Magdeburg acted in line with the practice in the towns described in the first part of this chapter. In the following, I will concentrate on their goal to defend and secure the freedom of the citizens against the attacks of regional princes; to that end, the councillors pursued the imperial freedom (â€?Reichsfreiheit’).

The troubles between Archbishop Ernst and the council of Magdeburg began in the 1480s when the lord questioned the legal status of Magdeburg. In 1482, he demanded the payment of approximately 9,000 gulden for the defense of the Empire against the Turks. The council, in turn, claimed to pay this money directly to the Emperor, which indicated that Magdeburg was only responsible to the Emperor without any middling overlord. The conflict dragged on for several years and was waged at the imperial court with arbitrators from both sides who exchanged arguments for and against the imperial status of Magdeburg. In the end, the aldermen agreed to an arbitration award in 1486: they paid the money and did homage to the archbishop. However, this conflict shows the political strategy of Magdeburg’s council: act as a unity, avoid violence or using force, use all means for diplomacy and wait for the next chance to argue with the archbishop over the legal status of the town. The next chance became available in the middle of the 1490s.

Since the arbitration award in 1486, the council tried to show that Magdeburg was de facto still a free city. One possibility to demonstrate this was to practice the highest jurisdiction and administer capital punishment, like that of a man who had been convicted of being a cabbage thief and was duly hanged.³³ The archbishop, for his part, arrested citizens in the town, a power that the council claimed for itself. Ernst also accused the council that it had allowed attacks on clerics in the city. Like the administration of law, the suzerainty over the walls and gates was an indicator of the legal status of a town, and the council was determined to defend it. But Ernst, in his turn, also claimed these rights. Furthermore, the council asserted that the archbishop had disrupted the urban peace by attacking the market or sales monopoly of the town.

As in Halle in 1476 and in Halberstadt 1486, the iura et libertates of Magdeburg were at stake. Both parties alleged that their opponent interfered with their fundamental rights; from the perspective of the council, the archbishop was a peace breaker. Ernst on the other hand saw another unruly government that refused to accept his supremacy. The situation was similar to the conflict with Halle 25 years ago. Yet there were significant differences. His father and brothers, who had used the sword to achieve their political objectives, had carried out the action against Halle and Halberstadt. Archbishop Ernst tried to gain power by different means: he sought the recourse of the law rather than that of military force. Another difference was that the council in Magdeburg was not divided during the period of this conflict. There is no evidence of unrest or discontent within the council or the city. Therefore both parties agreed to settle the disputes in a fruntlich guttlich handel (â€?freundlichen und gütlichen Ausgleich’; an amicable settlement), which in practice meant by way of an arbitration procedure.

Instead of preparing for a military conflict, both parties, citizens and archbishop, finally agreed to install a court of arbitration and each party was to nominate members. A court of arbitration (â€?Schiedsgericht’) in contrast to a court of law was based on a contractual agreement and aimed to mediate in conflicts by compromise and not by judgement.³⁵ The archbishop appointed Nicolaus von Zinna and Woldemar, prince of Anhalt; the council of Magdeburg was represented by Heyne Alemann, a former mayor, Heise Rulffs, a juryman of the town’s court, and Hans Kotze. The court was given the power to decide on the contentious points and the parties agreed to accept the arbitral decision. The arbitrators were to handle the legal dispute between the archbishop and the council as amicable negotiators (gutliche hendeler) and not as judges.³⁶ As a second step both parties appointed representatives who had to defend the respective claims and reject the mutual accusations before the board of arbitrators. The negotiators of the archbishop were Adolf, provost of the cathedral chapter, Ludwig, guardian of the Franciscan order, Andreas Proles, Heinrich Loser and Johannes Breitenbach, doctor of canon and civil law. Thomas Sulte and Heinrich Alemann, mayors, together with the legal adviser Thomas Mauricii, defended the arguments of the citizens.³⁷

The results of the negotiations were drawn up in a charter in January 1497. With this charter, an urban peace (pax urbana) was set up and the relations between the archbishop – the factual lord of the town – and the citizens of Magdeburg were built on a new basis.³⁸ The accord was effective until 1666, the year in which Magdeburg was incorporated into the emerging state of Brandenburg. But this was not an urban peace between the citizens of a town (by swearing mutual oaths as we have seen earlier); this was a pax urbana between the town and its lord, which certainly had an impact within the city walls.

With regard to the administration of justice, it was decided that the jurisdiction of the city court did not include the areas of clerical immunity, which also comprised the new market on the â€?Domfreiheit’. The clergy and members of the archbishop’s court remained subject to canon law only. However, the officials of the council and the archbishop should prosecute disturbers of the peace.³⁹ In contrast, the council successfully defended its control over the walls and gates of the town. The archbishop and his servants, in turn, had the right to enter the town as they liked.⁴⁰ Concerning the sales monopoly, the citizens had to accept that the archbishop or the cathedral chapter could sell wine and beer in pubs and taverns, but the council was allowed to prohibit the citizens to buy in these taverns.⁴¹ The council accepted the town rule of Archbishop Ernst, but simultaneously he acclaimed the iura et liberates of the city.⁴² He conferred two annual fairs and received 6,666 florins in return.⁴³

The regulations in the charter were a compromise. Archbishop Ernst was recognised as the lord of the town and this strengthened his position as a prince in the Empire and as a feudal lord. The council did not succeed in its attempts to expand or even defend the freedom of the town. However, it was very successful concerning the economic disputes, because as part of the treaty the merchants and craftsmen got numerous forms of relief which fostered their businesses, not least because now the urban peace was secured by the mutual obligations described in the charter.

It is important to stress that such arbitration proceedings were a feature of urban legal culture around 1500. The board of arbitrators was a court neither of the town nor of the archbishop. As a result, its decision was not a verdict. The arbitrators declared that they had decided on the lawsuit and the countersuit in terms of reconciliation, amicable agreement and friendship (�sune, guthe und fruntschafft’). They offered a compromise that would be acceptable for both sides. The use of this mode to address the conflict indicates that both parties recognised each other as equals. They tried to find a solution on the basis of a consensus or broad agreement. By using the process of arbitration, the parties showed their willingness to respect each other and to come to terms with the arbitral decision. The charter of January 1497 is evidence of this, because with it the decision was transformed into a legally attested treaty between the archbishop and the council of Magdeburg. It was valid for all persons within the urban space, not only for specific groups of inhabitants. This procedure enabled both parties to achieve some of their aims: the council of Magdeburg for its citizens regarding the economic prospects, and Archbishop Ernst, because he was recognised as the feudal lord of the town. Therefore both parties had achieved their most important political objectives for the time being.