Secularity and the Chasm Theory of History

Religion and Urbanity Online, edited by Jörg Rüpke and Susanne Rau. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022

The duality of ecclesiastic and secular power runs like a red thread through medieval European history. The fact that the primacy between these two definitive powers was contested, that they were 'unranked' or their order changed frequently according to the circumstances, determined the dynamics of the period from the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire until the Reformation and beyond. This relationship played out in the most concentrated form in the seats of ecclesiastic power, the cathedral cities,

Bishops’ Identities, Careers, and Networks in Medieval Europe, 2021

2023

The Heythrop Journal, 2016

Michael Psellos was an eleventh century Byzantine philosopher, statesman and rhetorician, and, for his time, a pivotal exponent of Platonic philosophy. Though he is primarily known for his Chronographia, he wrote voluminously. '493 titles and 515 letters survive', Papaioannou tells us (250). In Chicago, IL Michael Rhodes Constructing Antichrist: Paul, Biblical Commentary, and the Development of Doctrine in the Early Middle Ages.

Speculum, 2020

General accounts of the political history of later medieval Europe have tended to stress the development of discrete, more-or-less coherent units. A typical approach in such accounts is to list the most prominent European kingdoms and principalities, and to characterise the most important trends in their development in terms of that which contributed (however gradually and incompletely) to their consolidation and constituted the vertical ‘lineaments of state power’. This way of thinking about politics has long posed a problem for the German-speaking spaces within the Holy Roman Empire. Given that a path towards increasingly centralised statehood under a monarch or prince is held up as the norm, it is not surprising that – in light of the weakness of the kings of the Romans and the fragmentation of the Imperial political map – German scholars have concluded that ‘das römisch-deutsche Reich den Weg zur modernen Staatlichkeit nicht gefunden [hat]’, and furthermore that ‘in den Territorien weitgehend verwirklicht wurde, was dem Reich als Ganzem versagt blieb, so daß es in Deutschland eher die Territorialherrschaften waren, die den Grundstock für die Ausbildung des modernen “Anstaltsstaates” gelegt haben’. The notion that the Empire’s late medieval political development was shaped by the creation of Territorien – Territorialstaaten, even –emerged in the early modern principalities within the Empire, and has overshadowed the historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ever since. There have been attempts to render this idea of crystallising authority within compartmentalised lordship-territories less anachronistically and less abstractly as socially-grounded Landesherrschaft and Landeshoheit, notably under the influence of Otto Brunner’s concept of autogenic lordship in tradition- and community-derived Länder. The word ‘state’ is thus now avoided, but the historiographical vision of the Empire remains that of a patchwork of evolving political units (Flächenherrschaften) characterised by growing governmental authority. As Ernst Schubert conceded in his recent overview of princely lordship in late medieval Germany, scholarship of the Empire remains in the grip of this model of territorial political power below the level of the crown even though scholars are questioning the meaning and value of the concepts (Territorium, Landesherrschaft, and so on) which underpin it. The Empire as a whole has not been fully abandoned in the search for a political narrative for later medieval Germany. Since Peter Moraw’s 1985 history of the 1250-1490 period the role of the monarchy and the estates have been viewed constructively through the influential paradigm sketched out in that book. According to Moraw’s model, there was a transition from an ‘open constitution’ (offene Verfassung), in which political entities existed side-by-side within the boundaries of an Empire towards which they had no major obligations, to a kind of ‘configured consolidation’ (gestaltete Verdichtung), which was the loose and dualistic but increasingly institutionalised form that the Empire took as a consequence of the interplay of the interests of great dynasties on the Imperial throne on the one hand and the combined efforts of the leading Reichsstände to defend and assert their personal and territorial agendas on the other. This framework is offered as a means of making sense of how ‘die Vielzahl der Machtträger im Reich’ and their ‘freie Kräftespiel’ fed into the shape and dynamic of the Imperial polity as a whole. These conceptualisations of the Empire and its constituent parts have gone a long way towards fashioning a convincing narrative of political developments in the German lands. However, in the south-west of the Empire there was a level of political activity which is very evident in surviving documentary sources, but which the existing models of the unitary Territorial- and Reichsverfassungen and the predominantly vertical links within them do not fully apprehend: the sub-monarchical level of lateral interaction between local elites . Verfassungsgeschichte is good at identifying relationships within a political unit, but not across or between multiple units, especially the kind of fragmentary and protean units which formed fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Oberdeutschland. The lateral interaction amongst such units is exemplified by the numerous alliances, leagues, and Landfrieden undertaken by and between a range of political actors along the length and breadth of the Upper Rhine, including princes, counts, margraves, prince-bishops, abbots, and free and Imperial cities. Other kinds of formal association in the area, such as coinage leagues and multilateral jurisdictional contracts, as well as informal networks spanning multiple polities (between creditors and debtors, relatives in extended noble dynasties, etc.), also point to the mutual entanglement of a variety of political actors and entities across ‘territorial’ boundaries. These essentially horizontal associations appear to have been so widespread and multitudinous that it seems appropriate to explain these activities in terms of an associative political culture in the concerned south-western regions. The aim of this paper will be to demonstrate the existence of this political culture in a particularly challenging period for the Imperial monarchy and for peace and order in the Empire – the reigns of Wenceslas, Rupert of the Palatinate, and Sigismund. It will attempt to do so by sketching out the uniquely intense series of criss-crossing alliances which dominated the political landscape of the Upper Rhine between the 1370s and the 1430s. These alliances, and the lateral relationships which underpinned them, shed some light on a bewilderingly complex series of conflicts – the ‘town wars’ of the 1380s, the feuds of Strasbourg in the 1390s, the anti-Austrian Reichskrieg of the 1410s, and the anti-badisch coalition of the 1420s – which can seem chaotic and inexplicable when viewed solely from the perspective of the individual political entities involved, or from that of a ‘zoomed out’ overview of Imperial history. The paper will seek to substantiate the case for associative political culture further by reference to some other specific examples of lateral interaction, such as knightly societies and trans-jurisdictional mediatory practices. It will also consider how the activities of more or less autonomous regional powers below the level of the crown intersected with the idea and reality of the Empire as a whole and its monarchs. The presence in many alliance treaties, not least royally-sanctioned Landfriedensverträge, of a rhetoric of concern for general peace and order and the honour of the Holy Roman Empire suggests a conscious link between associative activity and the overarching Imperial polity. More concretely, kings could and did attempt to harness associations to their own agendas, particularly those associations with close established customary ties to the crown’s remaining administrative structures, such as the league of ten Imperial cities in the Reichslandvogtei of Alsace (the so-called ‘Décapole alsacienne’). The half-brothers Wenceslas and Sigismund provide an instructive comparison, in that the former’s rigid opposition to most formal associations (notably Städtebünde) left him with far less influence than the latter was able to garner through a policy of careful support for key actors and their allies, although neither could fully direct associative dynamics in the south-western localities. The turbulence in south-west Germany which followed Charles IV’s experiment in hegimoniales Königtum cannot be fully understood without considering how associative activity fits into both regional and crown-level politics. The contention in this paper will thus be that we stand to gain by thinking about sources pertaining to later medieval Germany in a framework other than that of the Verfassungsgeschichte of either a territory or of the Empire as a whole. Instead, a consideration of political structures – discourses, networks, and behavioural patterns as well as formal ties and institutions – could yield new perspectives and resolve apparent difficulties in the Empire’s historical development. The specific case of the later medieval Upper Rhine suggests that some of the prevalent structures of this kind could be characterised as elements of an associative political culture on the basis of the extensive evidence of lateral interaction between poorly hierarchised neighbouring powers. Associative political culture in all its forms offers one possible alternative solution to Moraw’s ‘drängendes Problem’ of ‘die Suche nach dem Gemeinsamen in der deutschen Geschichte innerhalb ihrer ausgeprägten Vielfalt’. This paper will attempt to make it clear that lateral interactions between variegated powers are an important but neglected aspect of the political history of the Empire and perhaps of Europe more generally in the later middle ages.