Boundaries

Although boundaries feature prominently on our maps of the Empire, this chapter argues that they did not pose a particular obstacle to most travellers until the mid-eighteenth century. One circumstance in which territorial borders became relevant were safe-conduct processions. Neighbouring rulers had to agree on the boundaries at which their escorts handed over travellers, creating an opportunity to confirm, challenge, and negotiate territorial boundaries. Using manuscript drawings and paintings from Mühldorf in Bavaria, this chapter discusses the importance of visual records and the material setting in these situations. However, concerning everyday forms of mobility, borders only played a subordinate role. Self-designed maps show that tolls were not usually levied at territorial boundaries, but at toll stations along important thoroughfares. Before the mid-eighteenth century, the geography of governed mobility is therefore more appropriately understood in terms of channels and corridors than through territories and boundaries, a quality the Empire shared with other polities outside Europe.

The Ordering of Movement

Early modern authorities attempted to promote, restrict, and channel the movement of goods and people for reasons that ranged from economic considerations to political motives and public health. In practice, however, these interferences only had mixed success. In the Holy Roman Empire’s dense landscape of ill-defined, overlapping political entities, the control over moving goods and people was a permanent point of contention. While the Empire’s history has often been written in distinctly diachronic terms, this study approaches the Empire in a spatial perspective and stresses its interest beyond the bounds of German history. Conflicts around the ordering of movement were often framed as matters of safe conduct, a quasi-sovereign right to authorize and protect the movement of various goods and people. While safe conduct always maintained a protective function, at the hands of the Empire’s territorial authorities it became a powerful instrument of political, fiscal, and symbolic power as well as a vehicle for gaining control over important thoroughfares.

Freedom of Movement

The normative problems raised by inter-polity mobility and its restriction engaged courts, councils, and universities throughout the Empire. Some jurists based their theories of free movement on the idea that roads and rivers were exempt from ownership and therefore free for all to use, replicating arguments from the ‘battle of the books’ around the freedom of the seas. Transit was another key concept for negotiating the ordering of movement. In spite of ubiquitous restrictions, some scholars advocated sweeping rights to inter-polity transit and free movement. Like other apologists for free movement, these authors catered to specific political interests. Consequently, the ideological opposition to freedom of movement was substantial. Many jurists argued that justified fears could warrant restrictions of free movement or even that it could be restricted at the full discretion of the ruler, often recurring to domestic analogies and to the language of property.

Protection

The protection of roads and rivers was often a precondition of mobility, but protection could also serve as an excuse for self-interested interference with traffic flows. This was the case on the River Weser, which was contested between the City of Bremen and the counts of Oldenburg. Bremen employed armed vessels to protect the river from privateers but also impeded Oldenburg from levying customs duties, to the point of a virtual ‘toll war’. Bremen also struggled to discipline its soldiers whose exactions sparked the protest of boatmen and the riverine population. The way in which safe conduct justified self-serving economic and political goals—on the Lower Weser as elsewhere—can be understood as a dynamic of ‘securitization’, a process in which an issue is presented as existentially threatened and requiring extraordinary emergency measures. In academic debates, some jurists sublimated these tensions into an exclusionary and selective conception of free movement.

Channelling Movement

Across the Empire, authorities competed to channel fiscally exploitable movements of goods and people through their dominions. Because it combined high traffic volumes with strong political fragmentation, this chapter focuses on Thuringia. Issuing letters of passage was one of the most effective means of monopolizing the legitimate means of movement. In practice, however, the issuance of passports and similar documents implied a bureaucratic burden and a symbolic subjection that not all were willing to accept. Distinctions between designated and forbidden roads were another hallmark of the early modern roadscape. By criminalizing the use of certain roads, authorities hoped to channel flows to their benefit, but local communities and travellers often had their own views on which roads were licit. The rulers’ deputies on the ground played a key role in a context where conflicts of interest and petty corruption were common, with their position often oscillating between unchecked authority and downright helplessness.

Introduction

In the politically dense and fractured landscape of the Holy Roman Empire, safe conduct provided a key framework for negotiating freedom of movement and its restriction. The introduction sets out how the book uses safe conduct to approach the Holy Roman Empire in a spatial rather than diachronic perspective. It describes how authorities in the Empire restricted, promoted, and channelled different forms of mobility for political, fiscal, and symbolic reasons. Spatially these efforts were rarely concentrated at borders, which challenges anachronistic assumptions about the functioning of early modern borders. Conflicts around the enclosure of movement led to controversial debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with human mobility, adding a new chapter to the history of free movement. Drawing on manuscript, visual, and printed sources as well as self-designed maps, this book offers a new perspective on the unstable relation of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

Theatres of Transit

Deputies of territorial rulers often escorted foreign persons of rank, merchants, prisoners, or corpses when they moved through their dominions. This physical form of safe conduct was a way of honouring or protecting travellers, but it also offered a means of signalling a ruler’s claims over a thoroughfare. When several parties disputed the right to escort a traveller, the escorts attempted to gain the vanguard of the processions. It was not uncommon for these encounters to escalate into violence, leading to protest, absenteeism, and outright mutiny among subjects, travellers, and officials, as in the small County of Wertheim where the processions often assumed a warlike character. In a world where processional rankings and symbolic gestures were regarded as authentic indicators of social and political realities, these theatres of transit offered a means through which to express and broker profound dissensions over the politics of mobility.

Conclusion

The enclosure of movement in the Holy Roman Empire, studied here through the lens of safe conduct, engendered a highly contingent interplay of obstructive and accelerating factors that affected the geography and temporality of different forms of movement in different ways. Spatially, these efforts were not concentrated at territorial borders but at settlements, toll stations, and other choke points, indicating that late modern border talk is unsuitable for understanding the ordering of movement before the mid-eighteenth century. The fact that early modern freedoms of movement, however poorly enforced, did not exist by default but by deliberate design challenges the image of the early modern ‘state’ as a preventer of mobility. This conclusion places the book’s findings in a broader perspective and argues that the history of the Holy Roman Empire offers an alternative framework not just for understanding other parts of the early modern world but also for appreciating ambiguities inherent in the late modern border regime.