Teutons II

Who Were the Teutons?

When Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome in 962, he was reviving an idea more than founding a state. The lands he ruled stretched from the North Sea to the Alps and from the Rhine to the Elbe, and the people who lived in them spoke a dozen related German dialects, owed loyalty to a dozen different dukes, and would not have called themselves a single nation. What held them together was the crown, the Church, and a shared conviction that the empire of the Germans was the legitimate heir of Rome in the Latin West. Over the next four centuries this loose federation, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, became the largest and most populous polity in Latin Christendom, even as it remained the least centralized.

Homeland and Way of Life

The German lands were a country of forests. Oak and beech still covered most of the interior in the year 1000, broken by river valleys where villages clustered along the Rhine, the Main, the Danube, and the Elbe. The great medieval clearing, the slow and stubborn work of axe and plow, opened new fields decade by decade and pushed settlements deeper into woods that had stood since Roman times. Peasants lived in long villages of timber and thatch, raised rye and oats on the heavier northern soils, kept pigs in the woodland, and brewed beer where the climate refused vines. In the south and along the Rhine, vineyards climbed the slopes and monasteries grew rich on their wine. Towns multiplied after about 1100, many of them founded fresh by an emperor or a bishop on a market charter, and by 1300 the empire counted hundreds of small walled cities where a generation earlier there had been only a crossroads.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The German emperors fought on too many fronts at once. To the south lay Italy, which the imperial title obliged them to govern and where the rich communes of Lombardy resisted them with money and stubbornness. To the east lay the Slavic and Baltic peoples, against whom German lords, settlers, and crusading orders pushed steadily through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At home, the great dukes of Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia were nearly kings in their own right, and an emperor who pressed them too hard could find himself fighting a civil war. The mounted knight in heavy mail, often a younger son with little but his horse and his service, was the backbone of any field army. After about 1230, the Teutonic Order carried this military culture to the Baltic, where it built brick castles in the marshes of Prussia and waged a long, harsh war against the pagan Lithuanians and the Orthodox Russians of Novgorod and Pskov. The empire's deepest limit was its own structure: every emperor had to be elected, every election could be contested, and the balance between crown and princes was renegotiated in every generation. The Golden Bull of 1356 finally wrote the rules down and confirmed what had long been true in practice, that the empire was a federation of princes who happened to share an emperor.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The Church in the German lands was unusually entangled with secular power. Bishops were also princes, ruling cities and territories in their own right, and emperors had long claimed the right to invest them with the symbols of their office. The quarrel that followed, the Investiture Controversy of the late eleventh century, set the emperor Henry IV against Pope Gregory VII and ended with an emperor standing barefoot in the snow at Canossa to beg absolution. The wound never quite healed. Yet German Christianity also produced some of the period's most intense religious life: the Cistercian monasteries that cleared the eastern forests, the mystics of the Rhineland who wrote in plain German rather than Latin, the Beguines who lived in lay communities of pious women in the Low Countries and along the Rhine. Crusading orders, especially the Teutonic Knights, gave noble younger sons a way to serve God with a sword. Below all this ran an older substrate of customary law, sworn oaths, and village assemblies that the emperors never really replaced.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

The Teutons sat at the meeting point of three worlds: the Latin West, the Slavic and Baltic East, and the Mediterranean South. German merchants pushed up the rivers into Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary, and along the coasts they founded the trading towns that would soon league themselves together as the Hansa, with Lübeck at their head. German peasants migrated east in their tens of thousands, invited by Slavic and Hungarian rulers who wanted their plowing skills, and the language followed them as far as Transylvania. German emperors crossed the Alps again and again to be crowned in Rome and to fight in Italy, often leaving their northern affairs to drift. By the time the Golden Bull formalized the empire's constitution in 1356, the political center of gravity had shifted from the old Saxon and Franconian heartlands toward Bohemia and the eastern marches, and the cities of the Hansa were richer than many princes. The empire would last another four and a half centuries, but the shape it would carry into the early modern world, decentralized, urban, contentious, and proud of its Roman name, was already set.