Oswald Spengler. Le Déclin de l'Occident. Esquisse d'une morphologie de l'histoire universelle. (Première parution en 1931),Trad. de l'allemand par M. Tazerout Édition en deux volumes (01-10-1948) --- (or Gutenberg project The Decline of the West)

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[The Monarchs- Emmett Cooke. Music intro starts slowly fades out]

The Staufers and the Papacy

As with so much in the Empire’s history, this apparent decline was soon reversed by new trends beginning in 1138 with the reign of Conrad III, who initiated the line of kings from the Staufer family lasting until the mid-thirteenth century. The Staufers capitalized on the fact that the pope still regarded the German king as the only monarch worthy of being crowned emperor. Conrad referred to himself as emperor even without being crowned.

This practice was continued by his nephew and successor, Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, who assumed imperial status immediately at his royal coronation in 1152 and named his own son ‘Caesar’ without papal involvement in 1186. The later Staufers followed suit, with Frederick II taking the title ‘elected Roman emperor’ in 1211, and it is likely that this practice would have become firmly established had he emerged victorious in his struggle with the papacy after his imperial election in 1220. This assertion of imperial identity rested on the further development of the Empire as a collective political structure, since it tied imperial powers to the German royal election involving the major lords, and not to the coronation by the pope. Henry IV had already proclaimed ‘the honour of the Empire’ (honor imperii), and the Staufers developed this as something in which all lords shared, giving them a stake in defending it against the papacy.

The stress on honour unfortunately hindered imperial policy in Italy by discouraging concessions that might have secured compromises or won allies like the cities that combined in the powerful Lombard League in 1167 to demand self-government. Frederick Barbarossa’s expedition to Italy in 1154 was the first for 17 years and ended a 57-year period in which German monarchs had spent only two years south of the Alps. The prolonged absence weakened the personal networks that might have assisted peaceful negotiations. The emperor did not seek conflict but was determined to reassert imperial authority. The 1,800 knights accompanying his first expedition were already considered a large army, and he returned with 15,000 on his second campaign in 1158.

However, the armies were never sufficient to master such an extensive and populous country. The need for local bases added urgency to Barbarossa’s insistence on reviving imperial regalia, including the right to garrison towns, levy taxes and demand military assistance. Inevitably, he was sucked into local politics. Northern Italy was a dense mosaic of bishoprics, lordships and cities, often enmeshed in their own conflicts. Support from one for the emperor usually prompted its rivals to back the papacy. Already on the first expedition Tortona was sacked and destroyed after it had surrendered, because Barbarossa was unable to restrain his Pavian allies.

The return of the notorious ‘German fury’ damaged imperial prestige, further hindering the desired pacification. The pattern was repeated in four subsequent campaigns between 1158 and 1178. Barbarossa achieved local successes, but he could never control all of Lombardy.

The pope was not averse to cooperating with the emperor to escape the now oppressive influence of the Normans, whom he had been forced to raise to royalty as kings of Sicily in 1130. The Normans and the French had through their interference in Roman politics already created a schism (1130–39). However, they now combined to back a majority candidate as pope against an imperial-backed anti-pope in a renewed schism (1159–80). Like Henry IV, Barbarossa was excommunicated, but unlike the Salian emperor he accepted a compromise in the Treaty of Venice 1177. The presence of Sicilian and English representatives at the negotiations revealed the internationalization of Italian affairs, which were clearly no longer an internal matter for the Empire. Although he made significant concessions to the Lombard League, Barbarossa was acknowledged as suzerain of northern Italy.

He was able to return to Italy from 1184 to 1186, this time without an army, and consolidate peace through an additional agreement with the Normans involving the marriage of Barbarossa’s son Henry to Constanza d’Hauteville, daughter of the king of Sicily. The unexpected death of the Norman king in 1189 opened the prospect of the Staufers acquiring both Sicily and its dependent territories, later known as Naples, in southern Italy. Timing favored the Staufers, because the Saracen victory at Hattin in 1187 and subsequent capture of Jerusalem distracted the papacy, which now also needed imperial assistance for the planned Third Crusade. Despite opposition from many Norman lords, by 1194 Barbarossa’s son, now Henry VI, had secured Sicily. This success encouraged an escalation of his ambition. Already in 1191, Henry had rejected papal claims to suzerainty over Naples and argued this was under imperial jurisdiction. Within five years he was planning to integrate the former Norman kingdom within the Empire and convert the German monarchy into a hereditary possession.

Papal-imperial relations had shifted dramatically in the emperor’s favor. The extinction of the Normans deprived the pope of a counterweight to imperial influence, reduced his temporal jurisdiction to the Patrimonium, and left him facing an emperor more powerful than any since Otto I.

Contingency again intervened, this time with Henry’s unexpectedly early death at 31 in September 1197, followed by that of his wife Constanza 14 months later, which left their four-year-old son, Frederick II, as a ward of the pope. The Staufers’ German supporters picked Frederick’s uncle, Philip of Swabia, as a more viable candidate in the royal election of 1198, but the situation was exploited by their local rivals, who elected Otto IV from the Welf (Guelph) family, leading to civil war until 1214.

The response from Pope Innocent III reflected the political high stakes. After some initial hesitation, in 1202 Innocent issued a decretal, or judgement of the papal court, called Venerabilem. This restated the Gregorian interpretation of the Two Swords doctrine that all authority, including temporal, flowed from God through the pope to kings. Innocent did not challenge the division of spiritual and secular authority enshrined in the Worms Concordat and agreed that the Germans were free to elect their king but claimed that popes had the right of approbation. This suggested he could veto candidates, for example on the grounds they had sinned. He also rebutted the Staufer practice of assuming imperial prerogatives immediately on their accession as kings, arguing that only popes crowned emperors. By distinguishing the wider Empire from the German kingdom, Innocent sought to usurp imperial authority in Italy and southern Burgundy. He claimed the status of imperial vicar, or governor if either there was no emperor, or he was absent from Italy. Within 50 years, canon lawyers were claiming the pope was really the true emperor, since he had translated authority from Byzantium.

Venerabilem entirely reversed the position under the Ottonians, who had claimed broadly similar powers over the papacy. However, it also revealed how the papacy remained bound to the Empire. No pope could reduce the Empire to the status of any other kingdom without devaluing his own pretentions as sole emperor-maker. This explains why, despite extensive periodic tensions, popes crowned every German king from Otto I to Frederick II, except Conrad III and Philip of Swabia.

In practice, Innocent was unable to steer events. Both sides in the German civil war shared a desire to restrict papal influence. Hoping to prevent a union of the Empire and Sicily, Innocent eventually endorsed Otto IV, but this merely alienated some of that king’s supporters who now viewed him with suspicion. By 1207 Otto was obliged to ask for a truce, only for Philip of Swabia to be murdered in an unrelated dispute the following year. Otto skillfully rallied most of Philip’s supporters by assuming the same imperial goals in Italy, including attempting to control the south. Having just crowned Otto emperor, Innocent was compelled to excommunicate him a year later in 1210 and join France in supporting the young Frederick II of Sicily as the new Staufer candidate. Otto overreached himself by joining his uncle, King John of England, in an invasion of France that ended in a rout of the imperial army at Bouvines, east of Lille, on 27 July 1214. Having already been crowned German king in 1212, Frederick was able to assume power unchallenged.

Frederick II is probably the most controversial of all emperors (crowned in 1220). The English chronicler Matthew Paris called him Stupor Mundi, or the ‘amazement of the world’. He was certainly astonishing. Intelligent, charming, ruthless and unpredictable, he often appeared to act on a whim. His supporters saw him as fulfilling a messianic mission, especially after his recovery of Jerusalem in 1229.

His papal opponents called him the Beast of the Apocalypse and compared him to Nero in destroying the Empire. Later generations have shared this mix of awe and revulsion: hated by Luther, Frederick was celebrated by Nietzsche as a ‘free spirit’. The emperor had 19 children by 12 different women and deposed his son and designated heir. Frederick regarded himself as a true Christian, yet spoke some Arabic, tolerated Muslims, and had his own Saracen bodyguard. However, he was not a modern multiculturalist, nor as innovative as some biographers have claimed.

Frederick reneged on his agreement with Pope Innocent as soon as he felt sufficiently secure in Germany. By 1220 it was obvious he had resumed his father’s programme of uniting Sicily and the Empire. The papacy reluctantly played along, hoping the emperor would lead a new crusade. Relations broke down, leading to Frederick’s excommunication in 1227, which had to be lifted after he recovered Jerusalem through bloodless negotiation. Problems resumed after 1236, leading to his renewed excommunication for alleged heresy three years later – this time permanently. The issues remained the same as those under the previous three emperors, but now the pope employed the new weapon of crusader indulgences to rally military assistance in addition to backing a series of German anti-kings from 1246. The situation returned to that under Barbarossa where neither side could gain a decisive preponderance, yet this time no one was in the mood to negotiate. Imperial defeats in Italy between 1246 and 1248 were reversed in later counterattacks, and the situation remained open at Frederick II’s death in 1250. The Staufer failure was contingent, not structural.

Frederick’s son Conrad IV and other relations rapidly lost control of Germany after 1250, in turn hastening their demise in Italy in the face of local revolts in Naples and papal support for Charles of Anjou, the French king’s younger brother, whose conquest of Sicily was sanctioned as a crusade. The death of the last Staufer claimant in 1268 secured the papacy’s primary goal of preserving its suzerainty over Sicily and Naples whilst keeping these separate from the Empire. However, the failure of either pope or emperor to gain the upper hand in the prolonged war since 1236 increasingly encouraged contemporaries to regard both as merely ordinary monarchs.

PAPACY AND EMPIRE FROM 1250

Empire and Papacy in the Age of the ‘Little Kings’

The period from Frederick II’s death in 1250 to Henry VII’s imperial coronation in 1312 was the longest without a crowned emperor in the Empire’s history. Without coronation journeys, there was also no royal presence in Italy. However, the imperial ideal remained potent, attracting the first ‘foreign’ candidates in what proved a second ‘double election’ in 1257 when both Alfonso X of Castile and Richard, earl of Cornwall, were elected German king. Between 1273 and 1313 the German kingdom was ruled by a succession of men who had only been counts prior to their election. All saw the imperial title as a means of asserting themselves over the more powerful dukes (see pp. 377–96). Imperial traditions remained strong. Rudolf I, Adolf of Nassau and Albert I were all buried in the imperial crypt in Speyer Cathedral next to the illustrious Salian emperors. Henry even had Adolf and Albert expressly moved there to convey a sense of legitimate continuity after a brief renewed civil war in 1298.

The papacy also remained interested in the Empire. Like their previous choices of protectors, the popes found that the Angevins (the Anjou family) quickly escaped their control as they added Sicily and Naples to their existing possessions in Provence. The revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers led to the loss of the island to the king of Aragon in 1282. This severed the link between Sicily and mainland Naples that had existed since the Norman conquest around 1070, and so released the papacy from the threat of encirclement. However, the Angevins remained powerful, even exercising a protectorate over the papacy for about twenty years after 1313. Additionally, the popes had to deal with increasingly assertive western monarchs like the kings of France. Embarking on a prolonged series of wars with England, the French kings redirected annual fees paid by their clergy from the papacy to their own war chest. Faced with these problems, a strong but largely absent emperor again appeared an attractive option to the papacy.

Pope Gregory X urged the German electors not to repeat their double election of 1257 when Richard of Cornwall died in 1272. Three years later the pope also persuaded Alfonso of Castile to renounce the German royal title he had never actually exercised. The new king, Rudolf I, thrice planned to go to Rome for a prearranged coronation, only for other events to intervene. Meanwhile, French pressure on the papacy mounted, encouraging Clement V to welcome the arrival of Henry VII, who had been elected German king in November 1308. Henry’s arrival late in 1310 encouraged unrealistic expectations amongst those, like Dante, who identified themselves as Ghibellines and hoped Henry would restore order and end the violent factionalism raging in many Italian cities. All initially went well as Henry was crowned king of Italy in Milan in January 1311. However, the Italian cities were no longer accustomed to accommodating imperial expeditions, while the Angevins marched north from Naples to block any attempt to reassert imperial jurisdiction over southern Italy. Some cities paid Henry to go away, but others resisted, providing excuses for his largely mercenary army to repeat the ‘German fury’ of old. Henry’s brother Walrum was killed, while his wife died (of natural causes) and most of his troops went home. Delays meant that Henry missed the planned date of 2 February 1312 for his imperial coronation, which had been scheduled to coincide with the 350th anniversary of Otto I’s coronation. Roman resistance had to be overcome by a violent assault in which Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, the only senior German lord accompanying Henry, split the skull of a defender with his own sword (see Plate 6).

Clement had meanwhile decamped to Avignon, where the papacy was obliged by French pressure to remain until 1377. With St Peter’s still held by his opponents, Henry was forced to stage his imperial coronation (the first since 1220) in the Lateran palace on 29 June 1312. Only three cardinals officiated on Clement’s behalf, while Guelph crossbowmen fired at the imperial party in the banqueting hall afterwards. It was hardly an auspicious beginning. The end came soon. Having failed to capture Florence, Henry caught malaria and died at Buonconvento, near Siena, on 24 August 1313.

Another double election to the German throne in 1314 saw Louis IV ‘the Bavarian’ pitted against Frederick ‘the Fair’ until the latter renounced his claim in 1325. Learning from Innocent III’s failure in 1198, Pope John XXII refrained from posing as arbiter and instead declared the throne vacant, establishing the new idea of vacante imperio to strengthen papal claims to exercise imperial prerogatives in the absence of an emperor. Louis’ determination to dispute this opened what proved to be the final round of old-style papal-imperial conflict. Louis appointed Count Berthold of Neuffen as his own imperial vicar in 1323 to exercise prerogatives in Italy, thereby directly challenging papal claims. Pope John responded with the full range of measures developed since 1073, but now underpinned by a much more substantial administration. Proceedings were opened at the papal court in Avignon, which predictably condemned Louis as a usurper, hence John’s reference to him as merely ‘the Bavarian’ to deny him legitimacy in Germany. Louis’ excommunication (1324) and a crusade (1327) followed as the dispute escalated.

Unlike his predecessors, Louis enjoyed support from leading intellectuals who were alienated both by the papacy’s move to Avignon and by its condemnation of popular movements such as the Franciscan Spirituals, who took the vow of poverty literally. Those arguing for imperial supremacy as a way to a new order included Dante, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Johannes of Jandun, but their writings were not widely disseminated for another century. In practice, Louis relied on traditional methods, forcing his way into Italy in 1327–8 aided by local supporters. His imperial coronation by two Italian bishops on 17 January 1328 was the first since 817 without either a pope or at least a papal legate officiating. Advised by his supporters, Louis cited Otto I’s example in order to depose John XXII on the grounds he had abandoned Rome and to install his own pope, creating the first schism since 1180. This had little effect given that John was safe under French protection in Avignon.

French involvement continued the trend present since at least the 1170s that papal-imperial disputes were open to external influence. France repeatedly hindered negotiations, because the dispute allowed it to prolong what Petrarch called the papacy’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’ in Avignon. John’s imposition of the interdict suspending church services in Germany was widely resented and ignored, and cost him the moral high ground by appearing to punish ordinary Germans. Already in 1300, the leading German lords had rejected papal attempts to fan their dispute with King Albert I. Now in 1338 they backed Louis’ decree Licet iuris explicitly endorsing the Staufer’s earlier idea that the German king was already emperor-designate entitled automatically to exercise imperial prerogatives immediately after his election. For once, an intellectual directly influenced events, as Lupold of Bebenburg supplied the legal and historical arguments for Louis’ decree. This programme was continued by Charles IV, who emerged as Louis’ challenger and, soon, successor, culminating in the Golden Bull of 1356, which excluded the pope entirely from German royal elections.

The Luxembourgs and the Papacy

Like Pope Innocent’s Venerabilem, the imperial statements implicitly acknowledged limits. It was difficult to nationalize the imperial title without accepting it no longer represented superiority over other kings. In short, Louis and Charles still sought the idealized cooperation with the papacy that their predecessors had failed to secure. Charles used a brief coincidence of Guelph and Ghibelline sentiment in Italy to travel with only 300 troops for his imperial coronation, which was conducted by a papal legate in Rome in April 1355. This was the first coronation since 1046 not to be marred by serious violence. The papacy still insisted on the prerogatives claimed in Venerabilem, while the German lords continued the line resumed in 1338. Pope Gregory XI was ignored in 1376 when Charles’s son Wenzel was chosen as king of the Romans, the title henceforth used for the successor designate in the Empire.

Gregory’s death in March 1378 changed the direction of papal-imperial relations. Gregory had only moved the papacy back to Rome from Avignon 22 months earlier. The Romans had grown accustomed to self-government, while the cardinals regarded themselves like the electors in the Empire and were not prepared to be treated as papal functionaries. France’s reluctance to lose its influence added a third factor. The result was the Great Schism lasting until 1417 and coinciding with a period of dramatic intellectual and religious development. The founding of universities during the twelfth century ended the church’s monopoly over education. The Great Schism accelerated this, since central Europeans were no longer as keen to attend Paris or the Italian universities due to the disruption in public life. Charles IV had already provided an alternative by founding Prague University in 1348. This had been followed by Vienna (1365) and fifteen more universities by 1500, while student numbers in the Empire more than doubled across the fifteenth century to reach over 4,200. New, critical approaches associated with Renaissance Humanism increasingly challenged established claims, including the Donation of Constantine, which was proved by Lorenzo Valla to be a forgery in 1440. Such criticism appeared most suspicious amidst the surge in popular religious practices, which threatened to escape official supervision. These included new shrines attracting thousands of pilgrims, such as Wilsnack in Brandenburg between 1383 and 1552, as well as Marian cults, fresh waves of monasticism and relic collecting.

Debates surrounding faith and practice gave urgency to those about church governance, since one could not be resolved without the other. They also merged with reform discussions in the Empire, where the idea of the electors and lords exercising collective responsibility meshed with the new concept known as conciliarism emanating from the University of Paris, which argued that papal monarchy should be balanced by a general council of bishops and cardinals. Practical politics added further impetus. Both Wenzel and Richard II of England were deposed by aristocratic conspiracies within a year of each other, while France descended into civil war from 1407, which widened with England’s involvement eight years later. The instability prevented imperial coronations for either Wenzel or his rival after 1400, Ruprecht (Rupert) of the Palatinate. Wenzel’s refusal to stand down, even after the election of his younger brother Sigismund in 1410, extended the political uncertainty in the Empire until his death in 1419. By that point, the Empire faced its own heretical movement, the Hussites in Bohemia, as well as the menacing advance of the Ottomans through Sigismund’s own kingdom of Hungary to the east.

Sigismund’s decisive intervention demonstrated the continued potency of the imperial ideal, whilst also showing how much had changed since Henry III ended the earlier schism in 1046. Whereas Henry had acted unilaterally, Sigismund had to consider other kings and the multiple influences within the church. First, he allied himself with the conciliarists who had convened a general council in Pisa and elected their own pope in 1409 in defiance of both Avignon and Rome. Having won support to convene his own council in Constance in November 1414, Sigismund outmanoeuvred all three popes, who either abdicated or were deposed by 1417, allowing the church to be reunited under the reform-minded Pope Martin V.

The Great Schism greatly weakened the papacy, which now confronted the more radical conciliarists who chose Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy in 1439 as what proved to be the last anti-pope. Although conciliarism fizzled out with his abdication ten years later, the renewed schism extended the time for European monarchs to bargain concessions from the Roman papacy. This proved particularly important for the Empire, where monarchical authority was shifting from reliance on imperial prerogatives to the direct control of extensive dynastic possessions – a method perfected by the Habsburgs, who ruled the Empire from 1438 with only a single break until its demise in 1806. The Vienna Concordat secured by Frederick III on 17 February 1448 joined that of Worms from 1122 as the fundamental document regulating the imperial church until 1803. It did not go as far as its French equivalent in halting all papal taxes within the realm, but nonetheless curtailed papal influence over appointments at all levels of the Empire’s church hierarchy. Unlike the nationalized Gallican church in France, there was no single ecclesia Germania. Instead, other leading princes negotiated their own concordats on the Viennese model between the 1450s and 1470s to cover the lesser clergy within their jurisdictions.

Nonetheless, conciliarism had fostered greater cohesion amongst what were increasingly regarded as national episcopates, including that in Germany. A synod of German bishops at Mainz in 1455 drew up the first Gravamina nationis Germanicae, or complaints of the German church, to be presented to the pope. The issues were taken up at the Empire’s assembly in 1458, and subsequent Gravamina became integral elements of imperial politics, especially because they often served imperial interests in the continuing disputes with the papacy over jurisdictions in northern Italy.

Habsburg-Papal Relations

Sigismund’s success in ending the Great Schism in 1417 appeared to reset papal-imperial relations to the era of Charles IV. Sigismund was the first German monarch to go to Italy after the fiasco of Ruprecht’s abortive Roman expedition in 1401–2. His imperial coronation on 31 May 1433 was the first since 1220 by a universally accepted pope and represented the culmination of two-year’s peaceful presence in Italy. The Vienna Concordat smoothed the way for Frederick III’s imperial coronation on 19 March 1452, which proved to be the last in Rome. It was also the last occasion on which an emperor performed Strator service for a pope. The ceremony was already at odds with the new political balance, as the Habsburgs were amassing what would soon become the largest personal possessions held by any imperial family and which provided an entirely new basis for imperial authority.

The new reality was obvious with Habsburg involvement in the Italian Wars, which opened in 1494 with a French attempt to supplant imperial influence over northern Italy whilst asserting direct control of the south. French ambitions were first checked by Frederick III’s son and successor, Maximilian I, and then completely reversed by his great-grandson, Charles V, who was both Spanish king and emperor by 1519. Charles’s power far exceeded even that of Henry VI, enabling the Habsburgs to complete the process under way intermittently since the 1130s and remove papal involvement from the imperial title. Already in 1508 the pope agreed that Maximilian I could simply assume the title Elected Emperor when the way over the Alps to his coronation was blocked by his Franco-Venetian enemies. That year, Lupold von Bebenburg’s most important treatise on the imperial title appeared in book form, using the newly invented print media that now disseminated the arguments behind the fourteenth-century constitutional changes. Meanwhile, the Empire was undergoing a fundamental transformation through rapid institutional growth, consolidating its definitive, early modern form as a mixed monarchy in which the emperor shared power with an increasingly finely graduated hierarchy of princes, lords and cities collectively known as the imperial Estates. The formalization of new forms of representation in the imperial diet (Reichstag) around 1490 distinguished the members of the Empire more clearly. Popes continued to send legates to participate in the Reichstag into the 1540s, but already before the Protestant Reformation made them unwelcome it was becoming obvious they were merely representatives of a foreign potentate.

Nonetheless, the Habsburgs were not ready to sever all ties to the papacy. Arriving in the Empire from Spain in 1521, Charles V rejected the calls of evangelical reformers to purge Rome of what they considered the Anti-Christ. There was no return to the earlier imperial intervention to reform the church. Instead, Charles responded in line with the division between secular and spiritual responsibility that had slowly emerged since the Worms Concordat. The Reformation was dealt with as an issue of public order, with doctrinal questions left to the papacy. The pope’s reluctance to compromise on doctrine made Charles’s position extremely difficult in the Empire, while both clashed in Italy over conflicting territorial ambitions. The low point was the infamous sack of Rome by imperial troops on 6 May 1527, an event still commemorated annually at the memorial to the 147 Swiss Guards killed defending the Vatican.

Chastised, Pope Clement VII crowned Charles as emperor in Bologna on 24 February 1530 in the last such ceremony where a pontiff officiatet. The venue was chosen to fit with Charles’s campaign, but was still staged with great pomp and was intended to assist efforts to conclude the Italian Wars with a successful peace. Charles’s triumphal entry into the city presented him as a victorious Roman emperor. Charles obtained papal recognition in 1531 that his younger brother, Ferdinand, would succeed him directly without a coronation. By the time this occurred in 1558, Ferdinand had already concluded the Peace of Augsburg (1555) accepting Lutheranism alongside Catholicism as an official religion in the Empire. Ferdinand I’s accession provided the first opportunity since the Reformation to alter the emperor’s place in the imperial constitution. Protestants wanted to strike the clause committing the emperor to act as advocatus ecclesiae, and substitute an obligation to uphold the Peace of Augsburg. The Catholic imperial Estates eventually persuaded them to retain the original language. At Maximilian II’s election as king of the Romans in 1562 this was reworded as general protection of the Christian church, omitting any reference to the papacy; a formula retained thereafter, though clearly interpreted along more traditional lines by the still Catholic Habsburgs.

The imperial and German royal titles had been merged, consolidating the change of 1508 and ensuring the undisputed assumption of imperial prerogatives immediately upon election. There was now a single coronation, conducted by the archbishop of Cologne, who had generally presided over German royal coronations since the Carolingian kings and whose role was accepted even by the Protestant imperial Estates. Ferdinand IV’s coronation as king of the Romans in 1653 made liturgical concessions to Protestantism, and merely required the monarch to respect rather than obey the pope. The ceremonial alterations freed the emperor from the need to go to Rome, removing a major reason for cooperation with the papacy at a time when both were struggling to redefine their roles in a rapidly changing international order.

It was politically impossible for the emperor to cooperate unconditionally with the Counter-Reformation agenda embraced by the papacy at the Council of Trent (1545–63). The constitutional rights secured by Lutherans in the Peace of Augsburg were part of the Empire’s increasingly elaborate web of collective liberties that could only be altered through mutual agreement. The Habsburgs managed the Empire by presenting themselves as impartial guardians of all liberties, whilst remaining personally Catholic and imposing their faith on their own direct subjects. While the pope applauded Habsburg efforts in their own lands, even zealous emperors like Ferdinand II were heavily criticized for not capitalizing on moments of military strength to rescind all Protestant rights in the Empire. France and especially Spain (which became independent of Habsburg Austria in 1558) displaced the emperor as the pope’s primary international champions

The pope’s influence in the Empire declined sharply, and efforts to influence a more zealous Catholic line by delaying recognition of Ferdinand III’s accession in 1637 failed to inconvenience the emperor. From 1641 publication of papal decrees in the Habsburgs’ own lands required the emperor’s permission, and a year later demands for papal book censorship were rejected on the grounds that this was a sovereign right of all monarchs. The papal reform of holy days was ignored, because this interfered with events important to the political calendar. More momentously, the pope’s protest when the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 was already pre-empted by a clause asserting the treaty’s validity regardless of what the pontiff thought.

The last papal–imperial clash – and the first since 1527 – occurred in 1708–9 when Austrian troops invaded the Papal States to assert Habsburg and imperial feudal jurisdictions in Italy over the pontiff’s counterclaims. There were also tense moments in the late eighteenth century when Emperor Joseph II championed the dissolution of the Jesuit order and secularized hundreds of Austrian monasteries. However, Joseph and Pope Pius VI also exchanged official visits in 1782–3. Relations were never quite those of equal sovereign states. Vestiges of the shared past lingered beyond the Empire’s demise in 1806, especially as the papacy generally now saw Austria as a more reliable protector than France, which was tainted with revolution after 1789. Concern for his traditional place as head of universal Catholicism prevented Pius IX from assuming the leadership of a liberal united Italy in 1848 as this would have entailed declaring war on Austria, which still controlled most of the north. Austria allowed thousands of its troops to serve as volunteers in the papal army until 1870 and did the same in the ill-fated Catholic-imperial project of Archduke Maximilian in Mexico between 1864 and 1867. Pius IX performed a symbolic translation of the old Empire in 1860 by reworking the still-official prayers for the Imperator Romanorum to one explicitly for the Habsburg emperor. Finally, Austria retained a formal veto in papal elections until 1904. As we shall see, these lingering connections were typical of the Empire’s legacy in later European history.

[The Monarchs- Emmett Cooke. (full) slow rise, peak, fades out]

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