Bavarians II

Who Were the Bavarians?

The Bavarians traced their name to a tribal confederation that had settled the upper Danube in the sixth century, in lands that the retreating Romans had once called Raetia and Noricum. By the late twelfth century, when the emperor Frederick Barbarossa stripped the duchy from the unruly Henry the Lion and granted it in 1180 to Otto of Wittelsbach, they were one of the oldest stem duchies of the German kingdom and proud of it. The Wittelsbachs would hold Bavaria for the next seven hundred and thirty-eight years, an unbroken stretch of dynastic continuity matched almost nowhere else in Europe. Under their rule the Bavarians kept a strong sense of being a people apart within the empire: Catholic, rural, conservative in speech and custom, and slow to accept anything that came from the north.

Homeland and Way of Life

Bavaria was a country of rivers and edges. The Danube ran through it from west to east, the Inn and the Isar came down out of the Alps to meet it, and the great forests of the Bohemian frontier walled off the eastern marches. To the south, the land rose into the foothills and then into the high Alps, where summer pastures fed cattle and winter snow cut villages off from the world for months at a time. The soil along the river valleys was good for barley and oats but only middling for wheat, which is one reason Bavarians turned so early and so completely to brewing. Beer was the everyday drink of peasant and townsman alike, and the monasteries, with their disciplined labor and their water rights, became the great brewers of the duchy. By the thirteenth century a Bavarian abbey without a brewhouse was almost a contradiction in terms. Munich, founded in 1158 as a market by Henry the Lion at a crossing of the Isar near a community of monks, grew steadily under the Wittelsbachs and became the ducal seat in the early fourteenth century.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The Bavarians fought less often than their western neighbors and more stubbornly when they did. The duchy's terrain rewarded foot soldiers over knights, and the foothill villages produced hardy infantry recruited from free peasants and townsmen rather than from the lower nobility. Mercenary service became a Bavarian and Alpine specialty: a younger son with a pike could earn a season's wages fighting for whoever was hiring, and these men carried the habit home. The Wittelsbach dukes themselves spent most of their energy on inheritance disputes within their own family, since Bavarian custom divided the duchy among sons rather than passing it whole to the eldest. The line's greatest moment came with Louis IV, who was elected king of the Romans in 1314 and crowned emperor in Rome in 1328, the first Wittelsbach to wear the imperial crown. His long quarrel with the popes at Avignon, who excommunicated him repeatedly and refused to recognize his election, set the tone for Bavaria's reputation as a stronghold of imperial Catholicism that nonetheless would not be told what to do by a French pope.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

Bavaria was monastic country. The great Benedictine houses of Tegernsee, Wessobrunn, Niederaltaich, and Andechs had been founded centuries before, and the Cistercians and Premonstratensians added new ones throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These abbeys were not just places of prayer. They cleared forest, drained marsh, ran schools, copied books, brewed beer, raised cattle, and held some of the best land in the duchy. A Bavarian peasant's life moved to the rhythm of their bells and their feast days. Pilgrimage was woven deeply into ordinary devotion: to local shrines in the Alpine valleys, to the great churches of the duchy, and farther afield to Rome and Santiago. The Bavarians took the saints seriously and liked them concrete, with relics one could see and processions one could walk in. When religious controversy reached the duchy, it tended to lose. Heresies that flourished elsewhere in the empire found little soil here, and the Wittelsbachs prided themselves on a settled, traditional Catholicism that would still be defining Bavaria three centuries later, when most of northern Germany had gone over to Luther.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

Bavaria sat on a hinge. The roads from Italy to the German north crossed the Alps and ran through Bavarian territory, bringing merchants from Venice and Verona to the markets of Augsburg and Regensburg, and salt from the mines of the eastern Alps moved out along the same routes in barges down the Inn and the Danube. Eastward, the duchy bordered Bohemia and the Austrian lands of the rival Habsburgs, with whom the Wittelsbachs maintained a long, cold competition for influence in the empire. Westward lay Swabia and the imperial free cities. The Bavarians borrowed from all of these neighbors but were absorbed by none. By 1329, when the Treaty of Pavia formally divided the Wittelsbach inheritance between the Bavarian and Palatine branches of the family, the duchy was firmly established as one of the great powers of the empire's south, with its own dynasty, its own dialect, its own monastic culture, and its own beer. Almost everything that later centuries would recognize as Bavarian was already in place.