Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Territorial States ◽  
Alternative Structure

What was the Holy Roman Empire in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries? At the turning point between the medieval and early modern periods, this vast central European polity was the continent’s most politically fragmented. The imperial monarchs were often weak and distant, while an array of regional actors played autonomous political roles. The Empire’s obvious differences from more centralized European kingdoms have stimulated negative judgements and fraught debates, expressed in the historiographical concepts of fractured ‘territorial states’ and a disjointed ‘imperial constitution’. This book challenges these interpretations through a wide-ranging case study of Upper Germany between 1346 and 1521. By examining the interactions of princes, prelates, nobles, and towns comparatively, it demonstrates that a range of actors and authorities shared the same toolkit of rituals, judicial systems, and configurations of government. Crucially, Upper German elites all participated in leagues, alliances, and other treaty-based associations. As frameworks for collective activity, associations were a vital means of enabling and regulating warfare, justice and arbitration, and even lordship and administration. The prevalence of associations encouraged a mentality of ‘horizontal’ membership of political communities, so that even the Empire itself came to be understood and articulated as an extensive and multi-layered association. On the basis of this evidence, the book offers a new and more coherent vision of the Holy Roman Empire as a sprawling community of interdependent elites who interacted within the framework of a shared ‘associative political culture’, which constituted an alternative structure and pathway of political development in pre-modern Europe.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Constitutional System ◽  
Territorial States

Interpretations of the Holy Roman Empire have always been fraught and contested, particularly regarding the late medieval and early modern period. German historians have offered two main interpretations of the Empire in recent decades. The first sees it as a patchwork of territorial states, and the second as a Reichsverfassung: a constitutional system characterized by disjunctive or oppositional forces. This Introduction sets out how this book will re-conceptualize the Empire as a more coherent political entity, using Upper Germany as a wide-ranging case study. Viewed comparatively, the evidence from the period between 1346 and 1521 suggests that all kinds of political actors shared in the same structures, dynamics, and assumptions—the same ‘political culture’. In particular, elites constantly interacted within the framework of associations such as alliances and leagues, which are the main focus of this book, and force us to view the Empire as a more interconnected political landscape.

scholarly journals Zrínyi VII. Miklós részvétele a harmincéves háborúban (1642‒1644)

PONTES ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 213-227
Author(s):  
Végh Ferenc
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Military History ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Small Wars ◽  
The Military ◽  
Supreme Commander

The estates of the Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom, as it is well known, took an active role in the struggles of the Thirty years’ War (1618‒1648) on the Habsburg dynasty’s side. At the request of the monarch, many aristocrats and wealthy noblemen, who had been trained in the so-called small wars (German Kleinkriege) practised along the Ottoman border, raised especially light cavalry units and conducted them to the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Nicholas VII. Zrínyi/Zrinski (1620‒1664) the Croatian-Slavonian ban-to-be (1647–1664) himself recruited cavalry companies in three successive years (1642–1644), at the head of which he fought in Bohemia and Moravia against the Swedes as well as in upper Hungary against the troops of George I. Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania (1630–1648). Moreover, he was appointed as the supreme commander of the Croatian-type cavalry two times. The present gap-fi lling paper primarily aims to clear the chronology of Zrínyi’s field operations in these years. It also reveals his probable motives, the characteristics of the negotiations with the imperial high command as well as the gathering of the troops. The case study will enable us to draw conclusions about the military entrepreneurship of this kind, giving an impetus to the research of this neglected field of early modern military history.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Comparative Study

It is clear from the comparative study of Upper German evidence undertaken in this book that multilateral associations were ubiquitous in the Holy Roman Empire in the period 1346–1521, and that they structured the interactions of all the diverse political actors within it. Indeed, inhabitants of the late medieval Empire used an ‘associative’ language of membership and mutual assistance, and the multilateral metaphor of the Quaternion (a symbolic amalgam of political actors of various statuses), when attempting to apprehend and articulate the structure and function of their polity. Modern unitary concepts of statehood and constitutionality, which dominate how we narrate and describe late medieval and early modern history, are inadequate to make sense of the Empire’s structure. The paradigm of ‘associative political culture’ offered in this book therefore not only reconceptualizes the Empire, but also has implications for alternative ways of envisioning political configurations and developments in pre-modern Europe.

Sicherheitsprobleme im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Multiple Challenges

The 16th and 17th centuries, characterised as they were by political, social and religious upheaval, represent a key period for historical security studies. This era was shaped by discourses of threat as well as attempts to find answers to the multiple challenges to public order and security. Such insecurity was doubtlessly accentuated by religious and confessional conflicts, as this comparative study of France and the Holy Roman Empire shows. In fact, the range of contributions in this edited volume on ‘security problems’ demonstrates how much the frames within which the issue of security was raised became more and more diverse over the course of the two centuries. In a time of evident conflict, the notion of ‘security’ was deemed increasingly important, which ultimately made it a leading concept in early modern political culture.

STILL A MONSTROSITY? SOME REFLECTIONS ON EARLY MODERN GERMAN STATEHOOD

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 565-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER H. WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Nation State ◽  
History Of

The German political scientist and philosopher, Samuel von Pufendorf, described the Holy Roman Empire in 1667 as a ‘monstrosity’, because it did not fit any of the recognized definitions of a state. The issue of the Empire's statehood has been the most important consideration in its historiography in recent decades: was it a state? If so, what kind? This review addresses these questions by examining how the debate on the Empire is related to wider controversies surrounding German history, the contemporary process of European integration, and about political organization in general. It explains how these debates are rooted in the political and religious disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that still influence how the history of the Empire is written today. The four principal modern interpretations are identified and assessed: the Empire as a ‘failed nation state’, as a federation, and, more recently, as an ‘Empire-State’ or a ‘Central Europe of the Regions’. The piece concludes by offering a new explanatory framework to assess the Empire's political development.

Lordship and Administration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Interconnected Networks ◽  
Territorial States

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.

scholarly journals VISUALIZING GERMANNESS THROUGH COSTUMES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
FREDERICK G. CROFTS
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Production Networks ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Material Exchange

ABSTRACT Examining the understudied collection of costume images from Heidelberg Calvinist, lawyer, and church councillor Marcus zum Lamm's (1544–1606) ‘treasury’ of images, the Thesaurus Picturarum, this article intervenes in the historiography on sixteenth-century German national imaginaries, emphasizing the import of costume books and manuscript alba for national self-fashioning. By bringing late sixteenth-century ethnographic costume image collections into scholarly discourse on the variegated ways of conceiving and visualizing Germany and Germanness over the century, this article sheds new light on a complex narrative of continuity and change in the history of German nationhood and identity. Using zum Lamm's images as a case-study, this article stresses the importance of incorporating costume image collections into a nexus of patriotic genres, including works of topographical-historical, natural philosophical, ethnographic, cartographic, cosmographic, and genealogical interest. Furthermore, it calls for historians working on sixteenth-century costume books and alba to look deeper into the meanings of such images and collections in the specific contexts of their production; networks of knowledge and material exchange; and – in the German context – the political landscape of territorialization, confessionalization, and dynastic ambition in the Holy Roman Empire between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years War (1555–1618).

scholarly journals Der nordische Fremde: Historische Untersuchung des medialen Schwedenbildes im Heiligen Römischen Reich (1500–1721)

Nordlit ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias E. Hämmerle
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Northern Region ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Northern Regions ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Great Northern War

Until to the beginning of the 17th century the North was rather an unknown and abstract space for the average German-speaking recipient of early modern mass media (for example illustrated broadsheets, newspapers, pamphlets). In the course of the 17th century due to Denmark’s and Sweden’s participation in the Thirty Years War, the northern regions became a central topic in the early modern mass media and therefore forced the recipient to be more aware of it. In the course of the second half of the 17th century the northern kingdoms became less important for the publicists in the Holy Roman Empire and instead they laid their focus on the politics of French and the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the image of the northerners and their stereotypes, which had been introduced to the German speaking readers in the course of the Thirty Years War, lived on until the beginning of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the Great Northern War (1700–1721) brought the people from the northern regions back to the media landscape of the Holy Roman Empire and about the same time the illustrated broadsheet – an almost antiquated genre of mass media that had struggled with the upcoming of the new modern genre ‘newspaper’ – experienced a kind of a renaissance. The aim of this article is to describe how the northern region, with a focus on Sweden, was depicted in early modern mass media between the 15th and the 18th centuries. I will show continuities and changes of the visual and textual representation of ‘northerners’ and ‘Sweden’ in early modern mass media, which were published in the Holy Roman Empire between around 1500 until the end of the Great Northern War in 1721.

Translating Sorrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Central European ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Italian Music

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.

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