Read Online Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder - Free Book Online Page B

endowed with enough territory to pay for its abbey and ensure a daily sequence of prayers for Henry the Fowler, a great slaughterer and forced converter of pagan Saxons in the early tenth century, who was buried there. Sometimes just as small, but far more important, were the Imperial Free Cities, lands generally focused on a single trading town, which had special privileges and were ruled by merchant oligarchies rather than a single lord. Some of these cities were consistently very important and close to the Emperor, such as Frankfurt and Nuremberg, some were quiet backwaters. Others were more remote from Imperial concerns and had extensive links with the outside world, such as the Hanseatic cities in the north, most famously Hamburg and Lübeck. Each had its own specialization, such as Lüneburg with its salt mines or Hall with its mint. Most consistently insignificant of all were the micro-territories: for example, the hundreds of bits owned by Imperial Knights, many in Swabia, and often consisting of just a tumbledown castle, a handful of vineyards and perhaps lucky access to some unfortunate river where the knight could charge a pointless toll for each trading boat rowing past.
    This mass of political entities (hundreds by the later fifteenth century) was all held in place by the authority of the Emperor. As can be imagined, the very small states were frantically loyal as they needed Imperial sanction to survive at all – they tended to have elaborate shields decorating their fortress walls to show their allegiance and warn off casual predators. They supplied tiny packets of troops and often contributed to Imperial entourages in terrific costumes as well as populating many jobs within the Church. But even the larger territories believed in the Emperor, and such a system, as can be imagined, generated a staggering number of legal disputes, whether about inheritance, rights or financial and military contributions, and much of the Emperor’s time was engaged in settling these disputes. This ceaseless, wearying round of hearings and travelling, which, of course, left numerous irritated or alienated losers in its wake, was central to the Empire’s existence and the ability to provide justice was as important as success or failure in war in creating an Emperor’s reputation. Much of the chaos of Frederick III’s long reign stemmed from his losing interest in all this, and one of the reasons that the Habsburgs enjoyed their extraordinary run of success after the fifteenth century was that they felt a surprising and consistent level of inter-generational diligence (with the startling, ruinous exception of Rudolf II with his rooms full of unopened letters). They were always dealing with a stream of grumpy, trigger-happy and often quite poorly educated noblemen waving around forged ‘ancient’ documents of a kind familiar to the Habsburgs themselves and insisting on the application of this or that right. I do not refer much to the issue again in this book, but it should be kept in mind as an important sort of background hum at all times – an always inadequate but prestigious Imperial bureaucracy sorting through land and inheritance disputes which could take generations to resolve and which found its final expression in the great scenes of dusty paperwork in Leoš Janáček and Karel Čapek’s 1926 opera, The Makropoulos Case , with Janáček even coming up with a beautiful, repetitive theme to represent unending Imperial legal processes.
    So the Emperor needed physically to demonstrate his status by moving around his immense lands, and every town had a complex set of obligations to him, later expressed by the often very elaborate ‘Imperial Halls’ which survive in many ex-territories today, consisting of a lavish assembly room (swagged with toadying but chirpy murals extolling the Emperor’s greatness and the extreme personal closeness to him of his host’s ancestors) and an entire wing of bedrooms – sometimes only