Why did the HRE fail to state-ify like France or England did?
>>17280469it was doomed the moment the church went from being the emperor's personal bureaucry to being the emperor's primary opponent
>>17280469"Roman Emperor" and "King of the Germans" were two different and separate titles that weren't necessarily held by the same person at the same time.The titles were granted by the Pope and the prince-electors respectively and since the two had opposing interests it was hard to be both Roman Emperor and King of the Germans at the same time.This meant that by design the Holy Roman Empire was hard to centralize, especially since the various dukes and princes enjoyed the freedoms they had.
>>17280469Two major events>The Investiture Controversy>The Great InterregnumThe first one was more minor, basically it eventually took the church out of the hands of the king and into the Popes with all the war that came with it. Henry IV spent most of his reign crushing rebels and supporters of Papal power rather successfully too but the cat had been let out of the bag and the first major challenge to royal power presented itself. Power in general was still pretty much in the hands of the king and the king alone until the 13th century, while somebody like Barbarossa was less of a zealot in keeping all the dukes under his thumb (although he still cared very much) like Henry IV he was sstill appointing a great deal while refusing to allow feudal inheritence. The next breaking point, and the most important is the Great Interregnum after Frederick II's death. There was no king in Germany for nearly 30 years. It resulted in the complete destruction of royal power, the ruin of royal lands and their patrition into the lands of various princes. By the time an actual king came into power the new HRE all the memes are familar with came into existence. The king was weak and the princes had free reign, which was not the case earlier. Ottonian and Salian kings were the most centralised rulers at the time besides Byzantium.Something similar almost happened in England after the Anarchy with royal lands dismembered and with powers, prerogatives given over and many new Earls made. However England had Henry II who in the early years of his reign worked through force and military victory over the country to reverse this. Cutting the amount of Earls in half, recovering rights and retaking royal lands. Although it wouldn't be as good as it was under Henry I. Germany never had such a king who could reverse the destructive process so it simply remained and continued to get worse.
>>17280516>The titles were granted by the Pope and the prince-electors respectively and since the two had opposing interests it was hard to be both Roman Emperor and King of the Germans at the same time.Becoming King of the Romans (or of Germany) was in the minds of the Germans the start of imperial power even if they didn't have the title of Emperor. They were largely one in the same. Elections in early Germany were sort of optional. A few emperors merely appointed their son king and that was the end of it, no election involved. Nor could one actually be made emperor without already being King of the Romans, it just didn't happen. In Carolingian times it was the case but the Carolingians didn't really have all this, or care that much about Papal opinion.>especially since the various dukes and princes enjoyed the freedoms they had.They didn't really have that much freedoms early on. In fact most of them were appointees and did not inherit their positions until later.
>>17280469>>>
>>17280469Great Interregnum fragmentned it20-year-old period without emperors.France always had a clear king.
>>17280469The HRE had a unique history of treaties that granted a variety of princes special rights - and as those rights became "common law" (so to speak) it was very hard (and unpopular with the respecitve princes) to take them back - even though many attempts were made. The three big treaties were:1) Confoederatio cum principibus ecclesiasticis (1220): Emperor Frederick II. granted the ecclesiastical princes many regalian rights (freedom to raise their own taxes, built their own castles, found their own cities and most importantly: freedom to enect law - which resulted that an ecclesiastical judgment was automatically accepted by the secular imperial court). In return the ecclesiastical princes supported this son, Henry VII., as canidate for the next King of the Germans.2) Statutum in favorem principum (1231/32): Here Henry VII. granted the secular princes of the HRE similar rights to those that were confirmed in the previous treaty. Emperor Frederick II. confired those rights in 1232. The reason behind this was that Henry VII. greatly supported and promoted the Free and Imperial Cities, which angered the secular princes. As they prostested he and his father were obliged to grant them special regalian rights as well to keep them from rebelling. Side note: it is interesting that under Frederick II. the decentralization of the HRE took its roots as he in turn, transformed the Kingdom of Sicily into a very centralized state. 3) The Golden Bull of 1356: due to many internal conflicts both Emperor Charles IV. and the great secular and ecclesiastical princes of the HRE agreed that the mechanism for the election of King of the Germans needed to be reformed and stabalized. Thus the positions of the three ecclesiastical Prince-Electors and the four secular Prince-Electors were formalized (which give those even more privileges). This wasn't so bad for Charles IV. and most of his successors, as he was the King of Bohemia, which was also a Prince-Elector.
>>17280589This as well. Both the external conflicts with the church, the Interregnum due to the unregulated mode of succession of King of the Germans and the subsequent three treaties gave rise to the power of the princes.
>>17280469the german inheritance customs : every son must inherit something.Obviously it couldn't be the only factor but i mean LOOK AT THIS SHIT.
>>17280765forgot pic rel.
>>17280765>the german inheritance customs : every son must inherit something.Real division wasn't practiced entirely within the HRE. >LOOK AT THIS SHIT.You should have elaborated on the different tower homes of the three distinct lines of the Eltz family and the fact that the castle was administered as a joint family estate.Pic rel for reference: the sections B; C and D belonged to individual lines of the Eltz family.
>>17280769What's wrong with that?
Bump
>>17280488Not even true. There are many times the church opposed the emperor in centralization and supported opposing nobles to disrupt centralization.
>>17282087Which would make the church the emperor's opponent, as that anon said.
>>17280674You seem to know a lot, so I'm piggy back and ask a follow up question.In HRE, why did anyone accept free cities?Imagine you are a lord with dozen cities that are generating you nice profit, and then one day you hear that the emperor has decided make some of them Free Imperial Cities.Why would you accept that?
>>17280469>fail toUnification was never the goal of the HRE in the first place, it worked exactly the way it was supposed to and lasted for centuries longer than most empires or superstates do.
>>17283756>Why would you accept that?What are you going to do about it?
>>17283772Rebel, sack the city the ground, use the loot to hire mercenaries to fight the emperor.
>>17283761>Unification was never the goal of the HRE in the first placeIn there was any goal the Emperors had it was to keep royal power as much as possible, which is the exact opposite of what happened.
>>17283775>rebelOk>sack the cityYou arrive at the city and find that it has formidable walls, supplies to withstand a siege far longer than you can afford to pay your soldiers for, and a courier arrives to tell you that the league that this city is now a part of has decided to embargo you so your sources of income and now drying up even faster, the urban population in what loyal towns you have left are getting really pissed really fast and soon you might face rebellions in your own lands, all while you're also directly opposing an emperor who would love nothing more than you arrest you and strip you of your titles - and these rich cities are willing to bankroll him to trade your overlordship for a more favorable one.
>>17283756Good to see that at least somebody has an actual interest in history. To answer your question: Firstly you need to differentiate between Free Cities and Imperial Cities within the HRE (it doesn't help that both of those often are conflated and that the early differences cease to exist with the progress of time): Free Cities often times belonged on a nominal basis to a prince (often times ecclesiastical ones) but were able to affirm some degrees of independance from them, which later got formalized and recognized by the imperial authority. Imperial Cities on the other hand were in direct vassalage towards the emperor and thus not "free" in the sense the aforementioned Free Cities were - the term Free Imperial City (Freie Reichsstadt) is a misnomer. >How do they come into existence?As mentioned Free Cities were able to emancipate themselves from their previous princes. A good example of the would be Cologne: here the the secular bourgeois and citizens of Cologne allied themselves with the Duchy of Brabant, County of Berg and County of Mark and fought against the forces of the Archbishop of Cologne at the Battle of Worringen in 1288. The secular forces won the battle, the Electorate of Cologne had to grant many rights to the winning side which they weren't able to recover and amongst those was the independence of the city of Cologne from its archbishop. The satus as a Free City for Cologne became only official in 1475 but the archbishop was never able to recover the city. This way of fighting for emancipation is certainly the most dramatic way but there were other paths for becoming a Free or Imperial City. Often times a noble family simply died out and its former territory had to be divided up again and this duty fell to the Emperor as the chief feudal lord of the HRE. Thus he simply elevated cities into the position of Imperial City to add them to his portfolio. This happend to Zurich in 1218 as the fhouse of Zähringen died out. (1/2)
Or a prince might have the imperial or papal ban imposed upon him and cities (or any other territory) could be removed from his portfolio as a punitive action.And the least existing way for becoming an Imperial City would simply being already within the imperial demesne and simply growing to become a city.What unites those cities is that both the Free and the Imperial Cities enjoyed imperial immediacy and thus were directly represented at the Imperial Diet. This granted them much influence and as the princes got ever more rights over time (see my first post) those rights were also bestowed upon the cities (there were also Imperial Villages). (2/2)>pic relPerpetual Imperial Diet in Regensburg - the representatives of the Free and Imperial Cities are seated in the foreground.
