Delenda Intra Multis Partibus: Looking Toward What Worked

It was a process. The breaking up and then, the putting together. It didn't happen all at once or start in one place and spread from there to all other places. It wasn't seen as the only solution for the already centuries old problem of partible inheritance , or the most effective. Until later. There was a lot of bloodshed, betrayal and even brother against brother, slowing down the process. But it did happen and the process did spread. A mix of military and legal struggles brought about eventual leaders, some to certain places before others.The eventual leaders of consequence ended up accepting literate burghers who could run districts. Inherited custom, local tradition, land, and religious focus was changed into established legal bodies, practices, and territorial statutes codified in halls of state.

In German lands, as Thomas A. Brady explains it, the partition of inherited lands had become a problem. In Bavaria it was first corrected in 1504 by a bloody war. There, Duke Albert IV "gained his estate's consent to the rule of primogeniture" as first born son of his family. The Habsburgs had partitioned themselves again and again but did so for a last time in 1564. In Brunswick the Welf dynasties split their inherited lands twelve times from 1202 to 1495. The Saxon partition of 1485 left two relatively weak states to rule over their huge population and formerly profitable mining industry. The lands of Baden and Nassau underwent similar partitions that resulted in weaker states.

"Declaring a dynasty's lands indivisible did not in itself transform patrimonial holdings - partible bundles of rights, incomes, immunities, and jurisdictions - into a unified territorial state. The decisive step was the prince's assertion of his right to legislate, to make law rather than simply to enforce it, and to do so uniformly for all of his lands, regardless of their local traditions." [p. 100]

Again, the process was slow and far from universal. But, as regions and locales came to recognize both the problems - of security, of jurisdiction, and of the traditions of inheritance - happening around them, and the effects of the various solutions, they could see what worked and didn't. This gradual awareness and the proliferation of books, as well as the literate professional, the book trade and awareness growing in the numerous seats of learning in cities, gave rise to an even more greater desire to learn more and try more in new ways. Economics, and a wish to escape from the hazards of want and poverty, even in or despite times of war, drove people as well.

'Good governance'  or gute Policey was the term Brady says appeared by 1500 to describe new regulating statutes. From export restrictions to dress-codes, beer brewing standards to day-laborer and servant wages, new laws could even try to restrict gambling. First these had to combat local tradition and culture, but in time Brady asserts, they came, in the sheer 'aggregate weight of territorial statutes', to influence Imperial policy. A groundswelling of changing norms that the Emperors had to respond to.

Certain laws targeted apprentices, journeymen, servants, day-laborers, even beggars. Anybody who wasn't already devoted to a church or secular master or, like travellers, were independent and whose status to a local authority could be questioned, could only be regulated by new laws. But again, this process was slow and continually changed from place to place.  The norm that was sill understood was one where many differnt polities could have numerous kinds of authority: city, church, bishop, duke or emperor.

The new codification came with new models from the top down. The prince or noble or bishop or duke had a literate assistant support him in all matters. The growing importance of this post grew into cadres of individuals learned in things from mapmaking to accounting. One had to know who controlled what and what could be counted and tallied. and records needed to be kept.The legal prosecutors grew in number but also diplomats as well as the record-keeping chancellors. By the mid-sixteenth century Brady says, burghers from the cities came to fill these sorts of posts in the new growing bureaucracy.

In due time, these became the new indispensable wings of the new territorial state. The obstacles of these were many and would not grow at the same pace everywhere. But while in 1400, Germany may have had one lawyer Jan Vener trained in Bologna in both canon and civil law, 'by 1500, a university-trained jurist was the most important officer' in every regime. More and more the collective memory of a territorial state, housed in the ever-growing archives of records and laws, became greater in importance for a state's decisions than even the noble prince or titular head. "Institutions give governance memory." [p.102]

The process was long, but crucially in a few decades a few of the most notable regimes made necessary transitions in that direction and then many more followed suit. Maximilian made organizational reforms that followed Burgundian models with Treasury, Chancery and Judicial branches. Bavaria had written laws based on Roman models by 1520, while Baden began chancery restrictions in 1504 and set up a central court in 1509.
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quotes and pagination from: Thomas A Brady Jr: German Histories in The Age of Reformations, 1400-1650;  University of California, Berkeley for the Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2009