Political and Social Norms in Urban Communities in the Holy Roman Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Hans-Christoph Rublack
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Holy Roman Empire

scholarly journals Images of Cities on the Nomismata of the Principality of Epiros from the First Half of the Thirteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 301-309
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Denisov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Architectural Elements ◽  
The City

This paper has analysed the images of Arta and Thessalonike on eight types of billon nomismata minted in the Principality of Epirus in 1224–1248. These images were represented separately or included into the portraits of local rulers from the Doukai family: Theodore I (1215–1230), Manuel (1230–1237), John (1237–1244), and Michael II (1237–1267). There are two types of representation of the city on the coins. The first image followed the Byzantine iconographic tradition of the eleventh and twelfth century and appeared on the coins from 1224–1244. It comprises the scene showing the heavenly patron of the community (St. Demetrios) or archangel Michael giving a Doukas the model of Thessalonike. This scene underlined the religious legitimation of the ruler’s power over the local community and implied schematic presentation of the city as a model. To the second type occurring on the nomismata from 1237–1248 features the images of urban architectural elements (gates, walls, and towers) incorporated into the ruler’s portraits or shown separately on the reverse. These images also underlined the ruler’s relation with the local community; they are typical of more detailed execution of drawing of fortifications (blocks, embrasures, and flags). The second type images appeared on the coins under the influence from iconographic samples from the Holy Roman empire caused by the political alliance between the Doukai and Friedrich II Hohenstaufen (1212–1250). Using the representation of their power as the patrons of urban communities, the Doukai gained support for their policy from the local inhabitants and used it as a support for their power and struggle for the Byzantine heritage.

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.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Bounds of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
To Come

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

The Role of the City in Merovingian Francia

2020 ◽  
pp. 581-610
Author(s):  
S. T. Loseby
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Urban Network ◽  
City Councils ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Range Of Functions ◽  
Fierce Competition

The Merovingians inherited an urban network from the Roman Empire that remained substantially intact. Although Gallic cities had long been declining in extent and sophistication, during late antiquity their landscapes were adapted to contemporary priorities through the provision of walls and churches, and their politics was transformed by the emergence of bishops as leaders of urban communities. When the upper tiers of imperial administration disappeared, this equipped the vast majority of cities to survive as the basic building blocks of Merovingian kingdoms that were initially conceived as aggregations of city–territories. In ruling through their cities, the Merovingians expanded upon existing mechanisms for the extraction of taxes and services, while relying on centrally appointed bishops and counts rather than city councils for the projection of their authority. This generated fierce competition between kings for control of cities and among local elites for positions of power within them. In the later Merovingian period, however, the significance of cities diminished as stable territorial kingdoms emerged, political practice was centralized around the royal courts, and the Roman administrative legacy finally disintegrated. But the cities remained preeminent religious centers, and, with the beginnings of economic revival, continued to perform a range of functions unmatched by other categories of settlement.

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).

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