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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New Worlds

Imperial Spain

The hegemonic aspects of late nineteenth-century European imperialism were clearest in the global dominance in which even the continent’s smaller countries shared – notably Belgium’s notorious rule in the Congo. This new imperial age had begun with Portuguese and Spanish conquests in the later fifteenth century and differed fundamentally from the imperial ideal embodied by the Empire. Spain is the most interesting case here, because it acquired the largest European empire (prior to the British) while its king was also Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Medieval Iberia was governed by multiple rival kingdoms. Documents for the king of Asturias used terms like basileus and rex magnus in the tenth century. These kingdoms were imperialist in the hegemonic sense, based on the victories of Asturias over the Moors and other Spanish kingdoms. The same impulse explains the intermittent use of the title totius Hispaniae imperator in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. By 1200, Spanish writers rejected ideas that their country had ever been part of the Carolingian empire, citing Charlemagne’s defeat in the Pyrenees in 778. Unlike their role in the Crusades, Holy Roman emperors played no part in the Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors.

Already prior to the Staufers’ collapse, Vincentius Hispanus wrote ‘the Germans have lost the Empire by their own stupidity’, suggesting Spanish kings had demonstrated better credentials by battling Muslims. Such claims received some attention outside Spain, assisting the election of Alfonso X of Castile as German king in 1257. Although ‘foreign’ like his rival for the royal title, Richard, earl of Cornwall, Alfonso was nonetheless the grandson of the German king Philip of Swabia and a Staufer ally. His election to the imperial office was also backed by Pisa and Marseille (then part of Burgundy), reflecting the wider Mediterranean connections of these parts of the Empire. Unlike Richard, who was elected simultaneously by a rival faction, Alfonso never went to the Empire, though he initially acted as German king by issuing charters to the dukes of Brabant and Lorraine, as well as petitioning the pope to prepare an imperial coronation.

Alfonso’s nominal rule ended in 1273 and remained an isolated interlude. Meanwhile, individual Spanish kingdoms acquired their own Mediterranean dominions. Catalonia briefly held the duchy of Athens, a fragment of the crumbling Byzantine empire in the fourteenth century. Aragon acquired Sicily (1282) and Sardinia (1297), whilst also absorbing neighbouring Catalonia and Valencia, before finally joining Castile in 1469 to create a united Spain. Spain joined the Italian Wars after 1494 to press claims to Naples. Potential conflict with imperial interests was defused through dynastic marriage with the Habsburgs, leading to Charles V’s accession in Spain in 1516, three years ahead of his election as emperor. At that point, Charles ruled 40 per cent of all Europeans, controlled the continent’s major financial and economic centres (Castile, Antwerp, Genoa, Augsburg), and enjoyed access to Spain’s seemingly unlimited colonial wealth.

The combination of Europe’s last Christian empire and foremost New World one proved an unsteady mix lasting only for Charles’s reign. Charles was the last and greatest of the travelling emperors. Whereas none (except the three crusading emperors) had ventured far beyond imperial frontiers, Charles visited England and Africa both twice, France four times, Spain six, Italy seven and Germany nine. Meanwhile, conquistadors claimed Mexico, Peru, Chile and Florida in his name. As the French philosopher and jurist Jean Bodin already noted in 1566, the association with the rapidly expanding New World made the old Empire appear smaller, not greater.

Antoine de Granvelle advised Charles V to designate his son Philip as successor rather than his younger brother Ferdinand I, because effective exercise of the imperial office clearly required considerable wealth. Charles had planned to nominate Philip as his brother’s successor in a bid to establish alternating emperors from Austria and Spain, but was thwarted by Ferdinand’s opposition in 1548. Instead, Philip was assigned Burgundy, thus retaining a place within the Empire at the partition of the Spanish and Austrian branches in 1558. By that point it appeared that Spain had a better claim to represent the universal Christian mission. Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia included a map devised in 1537 by Johannes Putsch showing Europe as a monarch: Germania was merely the torso, whereas Iberia represented the head (see Plate 17). This appeared still more justified once Philip annexed Portugal in 1580 after its king disappeared in battle against the Moors: now Spain held the other European world empire.

Philip had lived in Germany from 1548 to 1551, knew many princes personally, and still considered himself an imperial prince even after succeeding his father as king of Spain in 1556. These Hispano-German contacts would be largely broken by his death in 1598, while concessions to Protestants at the Peace of Augsburg (1555) reinforced Spanish perceptions of the Empire as in decline. Spaniards increasingly articulated their own universalist claims based on victories over the Ottomans and heretics – the success of their arguments is demonstrated by the way history remembers their naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto (1571), rather than the more substantial conflicts fought by Austria in defence of Hungary. Spain’s ruler, it was claimed, was Europe’s premier king, because he was the most godly. This allowed Spain to assume self-appointed leadership without directly antagonizing their Austrian cousins, who still held the imperial title. Considering himself the senior Habsburg, Philip III felt entitled to succeed Rudolf II, but also grand enough already to dispense with doing so. In 1617 he traded support for Ferdinand II’s election as next emperor in return for territorial concessions from Austria intended to improve Spain’s strategic position. Spain backed Austria during the Thirty Years War in the expectation that Ferdinand II would help it against the Dutch rebels and France on the grounds that Spanish possessions in Burgundy and northern Italy were still part of the Empire.

Biology overtook strategy after 1646 as the Spanish Habsburgs faced extinction, precipitating a decline that was more personal than structural. Spain increasingly relied on Austria, especially to defend its north Italian possessions against France. Nonetheless, there was considerable Spanish resistance to the prospect of Austria inheriting their empire at the death of the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II, in 1700. Britain and the Dutch Republic backed a continuation of existing arrangements using the Austrian Archduke Charles to found a new Spanish Habsburg line. Emperor Leopold I cooperated, but clearly intended securing Spain’s possessions in Italy for Austria. Austrian biological failure in turn undid these arrangements. The deaths of Leopold (1705) and his eldest son and successor Joseph I (1711) left Archduke Charles as the sole Habsburg candidate for the imperial title (as Charles VI). Britain and the Dutch opposed the resurrection of Charles V’s combined Old and New World empire, forcing Charles VI reluctantly to renounce Spain and its overseas possessions by 1714.

No Place in the Sun

Although Austria recovered direct control of Burgundy and northern Italy, it remained excluded from Spain’s colonial riches. This was compounded by Anglo-Dutch confirmation (in 1713) of the closure of the river Scheldt to international commerce, conceded by Spain as part of its peace with the Dutch in 1648. These arrangements secured Amsterdam’s supremacy over Antwerp, which had been Europe’s principal Atlantic entrepôt under Charles V. Such exclusion from lucrative global trade has long been part of the charge sheet cited by German nationalist historians for the Empire’s supposed weakness. Even more recent, balanced accounts blame Charles V for denying Germany a chance to participate in early European colonialism through assigning Burgundy’s maritime towns to Spain in 1548. ‘Defeats’ in the Thirty Years War a century later allegedly compounded this by transferring many North Sea and Baltic ports to Sweden. Germans were supposedly unable to engage effectively in colonial trade, retarding economic and social development, which had to be pushed through at great political cost during the later nineteenth century when Kaiser Wilhelm II vociferously demanded his ‘place in the sun’ of European imperialism.

Quite apart from ignoring the extensive commercial activity of Italians who still lived within the Empire during this period, these arguments underestimate German involvement in colonial trade. Maximilian I and his family used the south German merchants like the Fugger, Welser, Herwart and Imhoff firms to procure precious stones from the Far East and New World. Germans, Netherlanders and Italians from the Empire were heavily involved in Portuguese colonial and trading ventures in India, and later in Dutch activity in Brazil, Africa and Indonesia. For instance, Count Johann Moritz of Nassau-Siegen was a key figure in disseminating scientific knowledge to Europe while he was governor of Dutch Brazil from 1636 to 1644. Thousands of German soldiers served the Portuguese, Dutch and British in the Indies and Americas, most notoriously in the failed attempt to suppress the American Revolution (1775–83).

The absence of a strong, centralized monarchy did not inhibit direct colonial ventures from the Empire. Despite the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, Duke Friedrich III of Holstein-Gottorp founded the port of Friedrichstadt as a North Sea base for colonial commerce in 1621. Having secured imperial privileges, the duke also despatched a trade mission to Russia and Persia (1633–6). Opposition from other Holstein towns and a peasant insurrection frustrated these ventures. Colonial activity was promoted as a panacea to the problems of economic development after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. As many other Europeans discovered, the actual costs generally outweighed the benefits: In 1669 Count Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Münzenberg was deposed by his relations after losing his money buying a large tract of Dutch Guiana.

Brandenburg-Prussia undertook the largest of these ventures. Having failed to buy Tranquebar on the Bay of Bengal from Denmark, the elector founded the Brandenburg African Company in 1682, directly modelled on its much larger and better-financed Dutch rivals. This engaged in the Atlantic triangular trade, transporting 30,000 African slaves to the Americas and importing sugar, wood, cocoa, indigo and tobacco through its base at Emden. The Brandenburg navy never exceeded 34 warships and proved too small to overcome Dutch and French hostility. The main post was sold to the Dutch in 1717, with the last transferred to France four years later. In 1667 Austria founded an Oriental Company to trade with Persia and the Ottomans. Disrupted by the Turkish Wars (1683–1718), this resumed in a new form in 1719 at Trieste, which Charles VI designated a free port. A new Austrian navy was established under an English admiral, while conscripted peasants built a road over the mountains linking Trieste to Vienna. Its subsequent bankruptcy in 1734 was due to its being tied to the Austrian state lottery, which went bust. A separate Ostend Company was founded in 1722 to circumvent the embargo on the Scheldt and open trade with India and China. This was abandoned in 1731 to purchase Anglo-Dutch support for Austrian interests in Europe. Prussia also briefly operated an Asiatic Company trading with China during the 1750s.

Adverse circumstances precipitated all these failures. The Empire also lacked the central focus present in the combination of government support and financial capital available in Iberia, England, France and the Dutch Republic. However, the primary reason was that such activity was never a priority for any of the Empire’s multiple authorities. Eighteenth-century German territorial governments were more concerned to attract migrants than see valuable taxpayers and potential recruits emigrate to distant colonies. Numerous Germans indeed sought better lives in British North America, providing the origins of the ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ (Deutsch) and the word ‘dollar’ (deriving from the German silver coin Taler). Nonetheless, Brandenburg-Prussia attracted 74,000 immigrants between 1640 and 1740, including 20,000 French Huguenots, followed by another 285,000 people by 1800. A further 200,000 migrants were enticed by the Habsburgs to settle in Hungary, while Catherine II induced 100,000 to settle in Russia. In all, 740,000 Germans moved east compared to 150,000 heading for North America during the eighteenth century.

The Hanoverian succession in Britain in 1714 did not change the Empire’s relationship to European colonialism. Concerned that his electorate might become a British dependency, George I kept Hanoverian government, armed forces and laws entirely separate. Britain-Hanover remained a purely personal union that fragmented in 1837 with the accession of Queen Victoria, who, as a woman, was disbarred from succeeding in Hanover, which went its brief, separate way under its own kings until annexed by Prussia in 1866. The British crown played a prominent role in promoting what became the world’s largest empire, but private capital also loomed large in the chartered companies active in North America, the Caribbean, Africa and especially India. Queen Victoria’s assumption of an imperial title 18 years after the dissolution of the Mughul empire remained confined only to India. Likewise, republics such as France and (from 1898) the USA acquired colonies without assuming the formal trappings of empire. The mission and intent of these New World empires were very different from those of the Old World’s Holy Roman Empire.

Emperors in their Own Kingdoms

Europeans developed their own critique of empire long before they began subjugating non-Europeans. European anti-imperialism originated in papal propaganda during the Investiture Dispute and especially with the onset of renewed conflict against the Staufer emperors from the mid-twelfth century. Responding to renewed papal schism after 1159, John of Salisbury posed the rhetorical question to Frederick I: ‘Who is he that subjugates the universal church to a particular church? Who has appointed the Germans the judges of nations? Who has granted such a coarse and violent folk the power to install a prince above humanity?’

However, the papacy’s own actions simultaneously invalidated its claims to supplant the emperor as universal judge. Increasingly, legal scholars rewrote imperialism from a benevolent common Christian order to present it as unwarranted hegemony of one power over another. Initially, these arguments were directed primarily at strengthening royal authority within each kingdom, rather than challenging the Holy Roman emperor’s pre-eminence. The early thirteenth-century Italian lawyer Azo of Bologna claimed each king was ‘an emperor in his own kingdom’ (rex imperator in regno suo est), defining sovereignty at this point as freedom from internal constraints on royal power. England’s King John claimed in 1202 that ‘the kingdom of the English can be compared to an empire’ for the same reason, though through Magna Carta his barons compelled him to acknowledge there were indeed limits. Unlike in the Empire, sacralization of monarchy continued in the west, where it was used to elevate kings above fractious nobles. The crime of lèse-majesté, previously reserved to protect the emperor, was increasingly employed to defend kings. Even criticizing the king was now equated with sacrilege. These arguments were employed nationally, with each set of scholars claiming them exclusively for their own king whilst still acknowledging the emperor’s authority as extending over other European kingdoms.

The early Renaissance added impetus to this debate by disseminating a new understanding of Aristotle’s political categories, and with attempts to write national histories, all of which encouraged the view that Europe was composed of distinct countries each claiming descent from ‘free’ peoples. French monarchs found these arguments especially useful in their struggles for influence against early fourteenth-century popes and emperors. The organization of the Council of Constance (1414–18) into ‘national’ groups of bishops is widely acknowledged as marking the general acceptance of Europe as composed of distinct sovereign jurisdictions.

Gradual disenchantment with the ideal of a singular Christian order raised the question of how the various kingdoms should interact peacefully. It proved hard to conceive of anything other than some kind of hierarchy. Christian doctrine maintained the imperfection of earthly existence and divinely ordained socio-political inequality. The new theories of monarchy elevated each king above his own lords, making it difficult to accept that he was not also superior to other monarchs. Unfortunately, this intensified competition between monarchs, since precedence had to be actively asserted.

These developments encouraged new interest in the emperor as arbiter of this potentially violent new order, not least because the Reformation removed the pope as an acceptable alternative, while the rapid accumulation of territories in direct Habsburg possession at last gave the emperor the means to intervene effectively in European affairs. French opposition and Charles V’s inability to defuse the religious controversy swiftly closed this opportunity. Spanish power and pretensions after 1558 attracted growing criticism that it was usurping the traditional imperial role through seeking an illegitimate ‘fifth monarchy’. Although drawing on the traditional ‘four world monarchies’ ideology, this predominantly French and Protestant critique was implicitly hostile to the Empire, not least because its proponents usually saw Austria as Spain’s willing spear carrier. Imperialism now meant the illegitimate subordination of sovereign monarchies and their peoples.

Meanwhile, sovereignty assumed its modern definition through the response of Jean Bodin to the civil wars in his native France after 1562. Bodin expounded the view that sovereignty was indivisible and could not be shared either with groups or individuals within a country or those outside it. This idea formed the basis of the modern definition of the state, as articulated by Max Weber and others much later. Sovereignty becomes a monopoly of legitimate authority over a clearly demarcated area and its inhabitants. The sovereign state is responsible for internal order and can command its population’s resources. External relations were redefined accordingly as the central government’s exclusive prerogative. The earlier concern for loyalty was replaced by an insistence on authority. Medieval vassals had usually been free to act independently provided they did not breach good faith with their overlord. Such action was increasingly regarded as treasonable disobedience, and mercenary service and other ‘extraterritorial violence’ were gradually criminalized between about 1520 and 1856 by states insisting on an exclusive power to make war.

The Empire as International Actor

Europe’s shift from a medieval to a modern sovereign state order coincided with the Empire’s own reforms, consolidating it as a mixed monarchy where the emperor shared power with a complex hierarchy of imperial Estates. Sovereignty remained fragmented and shared, rather than becoming concentrated in a single, ‘national’ government. To many later commentators, this merely appears further evidence of the Empire’s ‘decline’. However, medieval emperors had never monopolized powers of war and peace. Rather, imperial reform constructed new, collectively shared powers in response to the changing international circumstances and new methods of warfare. Crucially for the Empire’s subsequent history, these constitutional changes were made while the shape of the wider European order remained open and Charles V’s accession in 1519 lent new substance to traditional claims of imperial pre-eminence.

Measures adopted between 1495 and 1519 distinguished between wars against non-Christians and those against other Christians. The former were still understood in established terms as repelling the Ottoman menace, rather than the colonial conflicts waged by conquistadors and others in the New World. As we have seen, peace with Muslims was considered impossible, so no formal declaration of war was necessary. The imperial Estates were only allowed from the 1520s to debate the level of ‘Turkish assistance’ (Türkenhilfe), not the emperor’s right to demand it. By contrast, conflicts with Christians were handled as judicial rather than military issues, because the emperor was expected to remain at peace with his fellow monarchs. The emperor could not demand assistance, though his obligation to consult the Reichstag since 1495 before making war in the Empire’s name was lightened in 1519 to discussing this only with the electors. Moreover, like his medieval counterparts he was still free to wage war using his own resources.

As a collective actor, the Empire approached war with Christian neighbours on a similar basis to breaches of its own internal ‘public peace’ declared in 1495. Rather than escalating conflict through an imperative to mobilize, imperial law sought to minimize violence by forbidding imperial Estates to assist those disturbing the peace. Acting through the Empire’s new supreme courts, the emperor could issue ‘advocates’ mandates’, identifying lawbreakers as ‘enemies of the Empire’ (Reichsfeinde). Although imperial Estates were required to assist in restoring peace, this system effectively ruled out mobilization for offensive war. Moreover, it drew on established medieval practices by requiring incremental action proceeding first with public warnings to desist, before force could be used. This process has often been mistaken for wilful inaction and has made it hard to identify if and when the Empire moved from peace to war in particular circumstances.

The Reichstag at Speyer declared France an enemy of the Empire in 1544, but this exceptional act rested on that country’s temporary alliance with the Ottomans and was not repeated. The emperor continued to use advocates’ mandates against Christian enemies, including during the Thirty Years War and the conflicts against Louis XIV after 1672. The declaration of ‘imperial war’ (Reichskrieg) by the Reichstag against France on 11 February 1689 represented a significant innovation. The Empire had already mobilized to repel the French invasion of the Palatinate in 1688, but by expressly drawing on the 1544 precedent the new declaration sought to rally moral and material support by placing France on a par with the Ottomans. The practice was repeated in 1702, 1733, 1793 and 1799, in each case following actual mobilization through advocates’ mandates and other, more decentralized constitutional mechanisms.

Formal ‘imperial war’ was a useful tool for the Habsburgs in steering the imperial Estates to support their objectives, but as a powerful symbol of collective action for the Empire’s ‘conservation, security and well-being’ it also stood in stark contrast to the search for personal gloire exemplified by Louis XIV’s belligerence. Military action was also collective. Rather than create a single, permanent army, the Empire raised forces when needed by drawing on troops provided by the imperial Estates. Imperial law thus sanctioned the militarization of the Empire’s principalities, giving their rulers a vested interest in preserving the overall constitutional framework as the legal basis for their own military power.

However, the authority to raise troops and taxes from their own subjects also allowed princes to engage as individual actors in the new European politics. Other monarchs always needed troops and were often prepared to pay for German assistance by promising money and influence to help princes achieve their own objectives. This created considerable public-order problems during the early sixteenth century as soldiers were discharged at the end of each campaign, often subsisting as marauders through the winter until hired again in the following spring. The provision of troops to both sides in the French and Dutch civil wars from the 1560s also threatened to drag the Empire into these conflicts. The Reichstag legislated through the 1560s and 1570s to assert control through the imperial Estates, who were empowered to restrict their subjects’ service as mercenaries and to coordinate police action against marauders. These changes entrenched the monopoly of ‘extraterritorial violence’ in the hands of the imperial Estates as part of their ‘German freedom’, whilst preserving the collective structure by banning any military action harmful to the emperor or Empire.

As with the right of Reformation from 1555, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 simply incorporated this military authority in modified form rather than granting new powers. The principal change was to explicitly deny military authority to mediate nobles, towns and territorial assemblies. This has been widely misunderstood. The standard verdict was that ‘the Empire in its old sense had ceased to exist’ because ‘every authority was emperor in its own territory’. In fact, the princes did not receive new powers to make alliances; their dealings with outside powers remained constrained by the obligation not to harm the emperor or Empire. In practice, their engagement in European relations varied according to their inclination, material resources, geographical location and status within the Empire’s constitutional order. The really significant change was that this order was increasingly at odds with the evolving sovereign state system. The gradual acceptance of Bodin’s idea of indivisible sovereignty detached it from social status, shrinking the circle of legitimate public actors from all lords to just mutually recognized states. By contrast, princely status remained both social and political within the Empire’s internal hierarchy. As imperial Estates, princes possessed only shares of the Empire’s fragmented sovereignty, expressed as ‘territorial sovereignty’ (Landeshoheit), which remained circumscribed by imperial law and the emperor’s formal position as their feudal overlord. Thus, in an international order increasingly characterized by independent states, princes occupied an anomalous position of being neither fully sovereign yet clearly something more than the aristocrats of western countries.

This explains the intensity of princely involvement in European wars and diplomacy from the late seventeenth century when all the larger principalities developed permanent armies and maintained envoys in major European capitals. There was ‘an epidemic of desires and aspirations for a royal title’, since this alone was now equated with sovereignty: being an elector or duke was no longer enough. Arguably this contributed to international instability, either indirectly through the provision of auxiliaries, or through direct intervention as belligerents like Saxony, Prussia and Hanover in the Great Northern War. However, even more centralized European states were scarcely better at curbing autonomous violence by their subjects, whether in the form of the English and Dutch armed trading companies or the colonial militias which, for example, triggered the French and Indian War in 1754. Perhaps more remarkable still was the fact that, despite being the most heavily armed part of Europe, the Empire did not fragment into the kind of warlordism characterizing China after 1911.

The Empire and European Peace

A Holy Roman emperor was no longer expected to act as Europe’s policeman by the later sixteenth century, but there was still scope for the emperor as peacemaker. Such action was often in the Empire’s interests, as well as in tune with the traditional imperial ideal. Although repeated efforts to resolve the Dutch civil wars failed, Maximilian II brokered an end to the Danish-Swedish War of 1563–70, securing 50 years of peace for northern Germany.

The Westphalian settlement explicitly linked the Empire’s internal equilibrium to wider European peace through its combination of constitutional changes within an international settlement. The ‘German freedom’ of the imperial Estates was formalized to prevent the emperor converting the Empire into a centralized state capable of threatening its neighbours. Immediate practical conditions shaped this more than theoretical considerations. The Peace of Westphalia forbade Austria from assisting Spain, which remained at war with France until 1659. The unsettled conditions along the Empire’s western frontier encouraged Elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn of Mainz and like-minded princes to seek a wider international alliance to guarantee the Westphalian settlement and secure permanent peace. When these efforts faltered around 1672, Schönborn and others tried interposing themselves as a neutral ‘third party’ to prevent the Empire being dragged into the wars against France.

These efforts generally ran counter to the interests of the Habsburgs, who managed to scupper them by presenting the princes as dupes of the deceitful French. Nonetheless, the option of formal Reichsmediation collectively through the Reichstag retained considerable moral weight since it was first proposed in 1524 as a way of ending Charles V’s war with France. Ferdinand III recovered Habsburg influence lost earlier in the Thirty Years War by inviting the imperial Estates to participate in the Westphalian peace congress. The Reichstag’s permanence after 1663 offered further possibilities, because the presence of envoys from most European states gave it the character of an international congress. Offers to mediate were made in each subsequent major war, but were always frustrated by Habsburg opposition and the growing ceremonial difficulties posed by the discrepancies between imperial Estates and European sovereigns.

The Empire’s limitations as an active peacemaker did not diminish interest in its place in the continent’s tranquillity, especially amongst those dissatisfied with the free-market approach to peace that relied on a supposedly self-regulating ‘balance of power’. Because the Empire had represented an idealized universal order during the Middle Ages, it should not surprise us that writers after the sixteenth century also saw the Empire as a model for a common European system. Prominent exponents included the political philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf, the Abbé St Pierre, William Penn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Their proposals involved states surrendering at least part of their sovereignty to one or more common institutions inspired by the Reichstag and the Empire’s supreme courts. They offered a positive assessment of the Empire at a time when others felt it was in terminal decline. Yet their idealized discussions bore little resemblance to the Empire’s political and social realities. Peace in the Empire remained rooted in pre-modern methods of consensus-seeking and the defence of corporate rights, in contrast to the new ideals of sovereignty, individual rights and (after 1789) popular control of hegemonic state power.

New Worlds

Imperial Spain

No Place in the Sun

Emperors in their Own Kingdoms

The Empire as International Actor

The Empire and European Peace

Imperial Spain

Antoine de Granvelle advised Charles V to designate his son Philip as successor rather than his younger brother Ferdinand I, because effective exercise of the imperial office clearly required considerable wealth. Charles had planned to nominate Philip as his brother’s successor in a bid to establish alternating emperors from Austria and Spain, but was thwarted by Ferdinand’s opposition in 1548. Instead, Philip was assigned Burgundy, thus retaining a place within the Empire at the partition of the Spanish and Austrian branches in 1558. By that point it appeared that Spain had a better claim to represent the universal Christian mission. Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia included a map devised in 1537 by Johannes Putsch showing Europe as a monarch: Germania was merely the torso, whereas Iberia represented the head. This appeared still more justified once Philip annexed Portugal in 1580 after its king disappeared in battle against the Moors: now Spain held the other European world empire.

No Place in the Sun

Emperors in their Own Kingdoms

The Empire as International Actor

The Empire and European Peace

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