What was left of empire? The old idea was no longer applicable in the 15th century. The Holy Roman Empire was a monarchy, a sacred office and its servitors, charged with and responsible for defending the Church Universal. But actual power was quite limited. For one thing, the Emperor could call his princes but they need not respond affirmatively. Many stayed in active rebellion. Thomas A Brady tells the story of many turbulences between those princes, or the burghers and merchants, and the small handful of emperors in the years 1430-1520. Brady also writes much about the idea of reform for both the Empire and the Church, in these years, from a German perspective. But an overview here of a number of things Frederich tried and accomplished will give some idea of his influence, in the relations of his office and the lack of power he had, despite his vaunted reputation, in those days. But to get this sense of scale you have to go back to when there were two popes.
The Church Councils of Constance (1414-18) and then Basel (1431-49) resolved the schism of the previous century involving rival popes. The Counsel in Basel established that the council itself - literally a group of cardinals called consiliars - was able to overrule any figure standing or acting as pope. But to do this they needed external powers who would agree and legitimize this claim. This oversimplifies the knotty problems involved, but is only merely mentioned as backdrop here. The reason for including or seeking the opinion of an emperor is that this was just the sort of thing an emperor had the authority to do. He could also add leverage like any sovereign might attempt when the Church or its members could not decide.
This was the other shoe, as it were, announcing the arrival of Archduke Frederick of Styria as more than just another archduke and protector of a famous line and instead, gave him a grand entrance onto the European stage. Briefly, he and his advocate Ennea Silvio Picolomini (later pope Pius II) made requests in exchange for agreement with the Council's conclusions. They asked for, and in 1446, gained permission to nominate six bishoprics in Austria and in a number of other abbeys there.[p.92]
Six years earlier, in another dramatic story, Frederich had become protector of the heir to the Imperial throne after King Sigismund and his heir had died. [pp. 87-8] In six more years, 22March 1452, Frederich himself would become the last emperor to be crowned by a pope in Rome. [p.93] In this position, housed in Innsbruck, Frederich III would watch the changes in Europe of the fifteenth century for some forty years.
"The fundamental problem of Frederick's long life was not his rule over the Empire but his struggle to become master in his own Austrian house." [p. 90]There were the Hussite wars in Bohemia in the 1430's, the Austrian civil wars in the 1440-50's, numerous cities revolted, egged on by local princes, burghers and others, especially in the 1470's. There were feuds over the partition of duchies and other inherited lands. German and Imperial forces could and did go and fight, often for the right price. The Wars of the Roses in England and the Burgundian wars under Charles could rage on, all with little personal involvement from Frederich.
They took their toll but his own son would go on to glorify himself in them.
Frederich and his son did leave Austria for Trier once, to meet Charles the Bold of Burgundy. They sought a greater peace with Burgundy in 1473. War subsequently broke out and in just a few years, Charles achieved peace in 1477. He was cut down in battle with a Swiss pike splitting his head. His daughter and sole heir, Mary of Burgundy was married to Maximilian in short order, thus uniting two powerful houses, if still somewhat separate by a great number of small principalities and duchies in between. She would live only five years more.
Later, after so many wars, with so much longstanding uncertainty, Frederich would call a Diet for Public Peace. But this had to be addressed some nine years later under Maximilian in 1495, two years after Frederich's death and with the French army in Italy. Later still, this problem wasn't solved a generation later, as Brady reminds us, as merchants and burghers would petition young Emperor Charles V when he visited in 1521 to quell the bandits and roving bands that were destroying trade on the empire's roads.
Even so, while Frederich III managed to accomplish only a few things in his long life and rule, these few all had a great impact. One was his sole heir, Maximilian who would succeed him as another Habsburg emperor, for twenty-six more years. Another was the familial Habsburg control over Tyrol, Outer, Inner and both Upper and Lower Austria.[p.91] This took, all told, nearly 65 years. Once secured, the Habsburg name would then be able to hold Austria as its power-base for the next 400 years. As Brady puts it,
"Frederich nevertheless achieved the crucial preconditions - unity and indivisibility - of Austria's passage from a gaggle of medieval patrimonial principalities into an early modern territorial state. Austria's importance to this story lies less in the priority or strength of its state formation than in the timing of it. It occurred at precisely the right moment to underpin the monarchy's role in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation." p. 106_________________________________________________
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
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