The Changing Face of the Holy Roman Empire

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 269-280
Author(s):  
Hamish Scott
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The North ◽  
Defensive Role ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Baltic

Few institutions have possessed as enduring importance in Europe's history as the Holy Roman Empire. Dating its foundation to Charlemagne's coronation in 800, it survived for a millennium, being dissolved only in 1806 in the face of the overwhelming threat from Napoleonic imperialism. Its geographical extent was equally remarkable: at its peak, imperial territory stretched eastward from the North Sea as far as Poland, and southward from the shores of the Baltic deep into the Italian Peninsula. Around 1800, shortly before its nemesis, the Empire was Europe's second largest polity, with a territorial area of around 687,000 square kilometers. It was eclipsed only by Russia, which during the later-seventeenth and eighteenth century had expanded spectacularly. Its population too was impressive: with around twenty-nine million inhabitants, its only rivals were France and Russia. Claiming descent from ancient Rome, the Empire long embodied the idea of a unified Christendom, while its defensive role against Ottoman expansion from the late fifteenth century onward sustained its religious mission even after the Protestant Reformation. Yet it is often squeezed out of accounts of Europe's past, an exclusion which is particularly evident for the early modern centuries.

Associations and the Discourses of Peace, Common Weal, and Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
German Nation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Almost All

Associations such as alliances and leagues were not merely functional tools. The rhetoric found in treaties and correspondence suggests that some members of associations perceived their participation as an activity freighted with political and moral significance. Almost all alliance and league foundation treaties and renewals contain appeals to clusters of ideas, centred on the concepts of divinely ordained peace, the common good of the community, and the Holy Roman Empire (conceptually linked, from the late fifteenth century, to the ‘German nation’). These discourses can only be found in this precise form in one other setting: the imperial diets and Empire-wide correspondence and legislation that they produced. This indicates that members of associations claimed to be involving themselves in the most significant and legitimate spheres of political activity in the Empire, even when their immediate objectives were modest and localized, or the legality of their alliances was challenged by other authorities.

scholarly journals Practice and power: the rise and disappearance of the Franzosenärzte, or doctors of the French pox, in Nuremberg, 1495–1560

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-97
Author(s):  
Monica O’Brien ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Healthcare System ◽  
Medical Practitioner ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Medical Marketplace ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The City

During the late fifteenth century a new category of medical practitioner appeared in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire: the Franzosenarzt or French pox doctor. Until now, there has been no dedicated study of these practitioners. Through an analysis of municipal records from Nuremberg (circa 1495 to 1560), this paper offers the first dedicated investigation of the Franzosenärzte in this city, focusing on uncovering their relationships with Nuremberg’s civic and medical hierarchies. It demonstrates why the Franzosenärzte gained a footing within the city’s municipal healthcare system, but remained subject to the suspicions of the civic and medical authorities. These suspicions, combined with a competitive medical marketplace and Nuremberg’s economic difficulties, precipitated the disappearance of the Franzosenärzte from the city around 1557. Nevertheless, for a brief moment, the Franzosenärzte’s practical expertise in treating the French pox unsettled Nuremberg’s nascent medical hierarchy and the ambitions of the city’s physicians.

The Empress, the Elector and the Painter

2018 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-49
Author(s):  
Ben Pope
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Reference Material ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Fifteenth

German MS. 2 is a previously unstudied armorial dating from the mid-sixteenth century. This article shows that it was produced in the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Younger for Elector August of Saxony, and that it was copied from an earlier armorial of c.1500 which was kept in Cranach’s workshop, probably as reference material. Much of the original content and structure of this ‘old armorial’ has been preserved in Rylands German 2. On this basis, the original armorial can be located in a late fifteenth-century Upper German tradition of armorial manuscripts known as the ‘Bodensee’ group. It was also closely linked to the Habsburg dynasty, and appears to have been dedicated to Empress Bianca Maria Sforza. The armorial therefore opens significant new perspectives on the relationships between artists and heraldry and between women and heraldic knowledge, and on ways of visualising the Holy Roman Empire through heraldry.

scholarly journals The Temporal and Spatial Structure of Medieval Expulsions of Jews

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerice Doten-Snitker
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Event History Analysis ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Social Interdependence ◽  
History Analysis ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Political Value

What social processes guide the spread of ethnic or racial exclusion? I investigate the diffusion of medieval expulsions of Jews from polities in the Holy Roman Empire. For medieval rulers, religious and material concerns were strong rationales against expulsion. Yet expulsions increase markedly in the fifteenth century. Did an expulsion by one government affect another government’s choices about expulsion? Using event history analysis methods, I document the limited spread of expulsion among over 500 polities in the western Holy Roman Empire, 1385-1520 CE. Temporal and spatial trends indicate that expulsions in politically and economically powerful cities spurred expulsions generally but suppressed them nearby. The adoption of expulsion followed political and economic incentives that were embedded in inter-city relationships, particularly after theological changes gave expulsion fresh political value. Social interdependence can spur as well as squelch racial extremism.

Circa 1533: Anxieties, Desires, and Dreams

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Crouzet ◽  
Jonathan Good
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Marguerite De Navarre ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Inaugural Address ◽  
New Covenant ◽  
Last Judgment ◽  
The One

AbstractIn Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and France, one can discern in the last decades of the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth a powerful anguish about the future, taking one of two forms: either the vision of an imminent Last Judgment, or a great rupture in time, announcing the dawn of a new Covenant. In France, one of the peculiar features of this historical process was the tension that built up around the year 1533, one thousand five hundred years after the death of Christ. This tension could explain the offensive launched individually or collectively by the men who stood behind Marguerite de Navarre-men of faith who hoped to bring the kingdom into the evangelical sphere of the Word of God, given to each and to all. Their defeat, following the inaugural address of Nicholas Cop, and the two Affairs of the Placards, left the way open for the emergence of a sharp division between, on the one hand, a "popery" proclaiming that the End of Time had come, and, on the other, a Calvinism seeking to "de-eschatologize" the human understanding of time.

France, Prussia, or Germany? The Napoleonic Wars and Shifting Allegiances in the Rhineland

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-640
Author(s):  
Michael Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
First Republic ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
City States

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

New Light on Secular Polyphony at the Court of Holland in the Early Fifteenth Century: The Amsterdam Fragments

1992 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob C. Wegman
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Regional Government ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Middle Dutch ◽  
First Time

Around 1400, the northern Netherlands were little more than a loose collection of quarrelling principalities, unified to some degree by their common language, Middle Dutch. Formally this unruly area was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the German emperor's political weakness laid it wide open to the territorial ambitions of the Burgundian dukes. Under their rule, the Netherlands saw centralized regional government for the first time in their history. But it was not until the sixteenth century, when their Spanish Habsburg successors were increasingly regarded as foreign oppressors, that anything like a unified sovereign Dutch state came within sight.

scholarly journals Bremen’s trade with the North Atlantic, c. 1400–1700

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Adolf E. Hofmeister
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
The North ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Island Communities ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Insight Into

There is little evidence of Bremen merchants in Norway before the royal charters issued from 1279 onwards, even though Bremen had been the seat of the missionary archbishop for the Nordic countries since the ninth century. Trade in Bergen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dominated by the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea coast led by merchants from Lübeck. Despite opposition from Hanseatic merchants sailing to Bergen, merchants from Hamburg and Bremen developed new trading posts to barter cod on Iceland and Shetland in the fifteenth century. Traders from Hamburg and Bremen on Iceland competed for licences issued by the Danish king. The 1558 debt register of a merchant from Bremen in Kumbaravogur provides considerable insight into this trade. The Danish king restricted sailings to Iceland to Danish merchants from 1601. On Shetland the Scottish foud allotted landing places to foreign skippers and traders. Merchants from Bremen became respected members of the island communities and in the seventeenth century they changed to trading in herring. Several tariff rate rises led to the end of Bremen sailings to Shetland by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bremen merchants in Norway succeeded in breaking the Lübeck dominance in Bergen in the sixteenth century. By 1600, other Norwegian harbours in the North Atlantic, notably Stavanger, were also destinations for ships from Bremen.

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