The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a major player in medieval and early modern Europe. It was an inordinately complex agglomeration of hunÂdreds of kingdoms, principalities, counties, duchies, Free Imperial Cities, prince-bishoprics and other units.153 It never developed an effective polity-wide governing institution, however.
The local assemblies (the Landtage), though widespread, eventually declined; as they did not define the regime as a whole, it is commonly judged “absolutist.” Given the findings of this book, it is not surprising that it displayed many of the constitutional building-blocks found in England, some to an even higher degree. It exhibited intense levels of local resistance, for instance, as the historian Blickle has provocatively argued.154 Yet for the Imperial Diet, the emperor’s role was key: he issued the summons and could ennoble princes and thus admit them to its chamber.155 He also served as judge.156 Similarities even in petition-making are striking.157 The main difference, I argue here, lay in ruler power. Systematic evidence on early values of key variables for this account, for instance distribution of land, collective responsibility, or the imposition of service, is not readily accessÂible. The task instead is to suggest that they are congruent with the book’s logic; future studies can test the claims in more detail.Ruler weakness is observed at both the imperial and local levels. The emperor’s original task was to sustain the Peace of God, as in other weaker states like France.[1152] He was originally elected, like Polish and Hungarian kings,[1153] so his power was shared with the lay and ecclesiastical princes. As with France and Castile, the Diets included towns and nobles but the rural population mostly lacked independent representation, reducing the terriÂtorial anchoring of the regime.[1154] Judicial integration was accordingly weak.
The Diet was separate from the two judicial institutions, the Imperial Chamber Court and the Aulic Council, which after the 1490s decided cases that affected the whole empire, not the individual territories - similarly to the personal imperial court that preceded them.[1155] No instituÂtional fusion was achieved, therefore, and the Diet never acquired the governing functions its equivalent in England did; contemporaries comÂplained it was ineffective.[1156] The radical adoption of unanimity in voting on religious issues after 1555 (which implies weaker capacity to compel subjects into agreement) further “made imperial politics much more difficult.”[1157] Size mattered of course, but the deeper reason, as Ertman noted, was that emperors lacked a “geographically compact base.”[1158]Moreover, imperial courts could not penetrate the localities.165 Imperial weakness is now re-written by historians as a symptom of jurisÂdictional autonomy retained by local princes, a process underwritten by imperial legislation in the thirteenth century.166 Local diets (Landtage) accordingly proliferated at that level after the 1400s. These units were also quite small; Hesse had a population of 250,000, Wurttemberg probÂably 450,000, whilst Prussia was more sparsely populated.167 Yet, in some provinces nobles and major towns sought independence as Imperial Knights and Cities, so they “disappeared from the diets, which henceforth were attended only by the clergy and the towns.”168 Deprived of the most powerful actors, the diets were accordingly weakened; elseÂwhere, the nobility dominated them.169 So the estates “never succeeded in translating their considerable financial leverage into effective participaÂtion in areas of government other than direct taxation” at the polity level, despite handling petitions. They did not become “co-rulers” as in England, Poland, Hungary, and Sweden.[1159] Despite having greater powers than the English Parliament in fiscal and foreign policy, even war, they had no judicial functions nor could they initiate legislation; they only presented grievances through petitions, as in Hesse.[1160] So they ultimately weakened after 1648.
Princes and emperors, this account implies, thus faced powerful landÂlords originally and were less able to compel them systematically either through taxation[1161] or service. This resulted in weaker territorial anchorÂing of ruler power in the principalities and weaker judicial integration. Urban weakness, often deemed to enable absolutism,[1162] is better seen as endogenous to weak ruling powers. The decline of towns in parts of Germany after the sixteenth century noted by Barrington Moore[1163] was preceded by the commercial tax privileges of the nobility, whilst towns shouldered most of the tax burden.175 The nobility’s “strong anti-urban” bias176 could only be consequential where state protection of towns was weak - a weak bourgeoisie would thus be the result of urban decline not the cause. Where German princes “were much weaker” than English kings and the nobility and free cities gained tax exemptions whilst others carried the fiscal burden, the foundations for robust and inclusive repreÂsentative institutions were lacking.177 Conversely, where the prince was stronger than the nobility, the diet was stronger too, as in Wurttemberg - there the diet also received petitions, displaying institutional fusion, and the countryside was also represented, albeit not independently.178 Why Prussia built a strong state out of similar conditions without developing a constitutional regime after the seventeenth century cannot be fully answered without recognizing both the parallels and differences with England on many levels.
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This chapter has aimed to show an alternative path to parliamentary practice that emerges when the crown cannot compel the higher nobility as comprehensively as English kings could. The latter did not allow military service to displace other obligations, including taxation. Weaker kings elsewhere had to allow this and to include lower social strata to counteract the higher nobility, generating in some cases at least second-best constitutionalism. This dynamic is closer to the barÂgaining model challenged in this book, as rights were conceded to these lower groups as a result of weakness. But this was not a model that produced effective and durable polity-wide governing institutions. Nonetheless, the Hungarian, Polish, and Swedish cases showed that to the degree that assemblies continued, this was predicated on the infraÂstructural, especially judicial, build-up under strong kings, as well as the conditional relations between the ruler and the subjects involved in the constitutional practices. To the degree that rulers were even weaker, as in the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, the representative activity that did occur did not succeed in shaping the regime and eventually atrophied.
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