The Holy Roman Empire

Because the imperial title was from the sixteenth century on almost continuously vested in members of the Habsburg dynasty, the Habsburg emperor adopted the imperial double-headed eagle with an inescutcheon showing the coats of arms of their lands, devised to underscore the ties between the imperial title and the Habsburgs.

When the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, the Habsburgs adopted parts of the symbolic imagery of the old empire for the Austrian Empire, which was now fully bound up with the dynasty. Henceforth, the double-headed eagle was Austrian. It lost its nimbus, bore an inescutcheon with the coat of arms of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, and was supplemented with the Order of the Golden Fleece. Above this hovered the Austrian imperial crown. When the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was founded in 1867, a popular interpretation established itself that saw the two heads of the imperial eagle standing for the two halves of the realm.

Völkerwanderung is a German word, borrowed from German historiography, that refers to the early migrations of the Germanic peoples. In a broader sense it can mean the mass migration of whole tribes or ethnic groups.

— Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. The Role of Migration, p. 15

Rather than "invasion", German and Slavic scholars speak of "migration" (German: Völkerwanderung, Czech: Stěhování národů, Swedish: folkvandring and Hungarian: népvándorlás), aspiring to the idea of a dynamic and "wandering Indo-Germanic people".^[36]

Historians have postulated several explanations for the appearance of "barbarians" on the Roman frontier: climate change, weather and crops, population pressure, a "primeval urge" to push into the Mediterranean, the construction of the Great Wall of China causing a "domino effect" of tribes being forced westward, leading to the Huns falling upon the Goths who, in turn, pushed other Germanic tribes before them.^[37] In general, French and Italian scholars have tended to view this as a catastrophic event, the destruction of a civilization and the beginning of a "Dark Age" that set Europe back a millennium.^[38] In contrast, German and English historians have tended to see Roman–Barbarian interaction as the replacement of a "tired, effete and decadent Mediterranean civilization" with a "more virile, martial, Nordic one".^[38]

The scholar Guy Halsall has seen the barbarian movement as the result of the fall of the Roman Empire, not its cause.^[38] Archaeological discoveries have confirmed that Germanic and Slavic tribes were settled agriculturalists who were probably merely "drawn into the politics of an empire already falling apart for quite a few other causes".^[39] The Crisis of the Third Century caused significant changes within the Roman Empire in both its western and its eastern portions.^[40] In particular, economic fragmentation removed many of the political, cultural and economic forces that had held the empire together.^[41]

The rural population in Roman provinces became distanced from the metropolis, and there was little to differentiate them from other peasants across the Roman frontier. In addition, Rome increasingly used foreign mercenaries to defend itself. That "barbarisation" parallelled changes within Barbaricum. To this end, noted linguist Dennis Howard Green wrote, "the first centuries of our era witness not merely a progressive Romanisation of barbarian society, but also an undeniable barbarisation of the Roman world."^[42]

For example, the Roman Empire played a vital role in building up barbarian groups along its frontier. Propped up with imperial support and gifts, the armies of allied barbarian chieftains served as buffers against other, hostile, barbarian groups. The disintegration of Roman economic power weakened groups that had come to depend on Roman gifts for the maintenance of their own power. The arrival of the Huns helped prompt many groups to invade the provinces for economic reasons.^[43]

The nature of the barbarian takeover of former Roman provinces varied from region to region. For example, in Aquitaine, the provincial administration was largely self-reliant. Halsall has argued that local rulers simply "handed over" military rule to the Ostrogoths, acquiring the identity of the newcomers.^[10] In Gaul, the collapse of imperial rule resulted in anarchy: the Franks and Alemanni were pulled into the ensuing "power vacuum",^[44] resulting in conflict. In Spain, local aristocrats maintained independent rule for some time, raising their own armies against the Vandals. Meanwhile, the Roman withdrawal from lowland England resulted in conflict between Saxons and the Brittonic chieftains (whose centres of power retreated westward as a result). The Eastern Roman Empire attempted to maintain control of the Balkan provinces despite a thinly-spread imperial army relying mainly on local militias and an extensive effort to refortify the Danubian limes. The ambitious fortification efforts collapsed, worsening the impoverished conditions of the local populace and resulting in colonization by Slavic warriors and their families.^[45]

Halsall and Noble have argued that such changes stemmed from the breakdown in Roman political control, which exposed the weakness of local Roman rule. Instead of large-scale migrations, there were military takeovers by small groups of warriors and their families, who usually numbered only in the tens of thousands. The process involved active, conscious decision-making by Roman provincial populations.

The collapse of centralized control severely weakened the sense of Roman identity in the provinces, which may explain why the provinces then underwent dramatic cultural changes even though few barbarians settled in them.^[46]

Ultimately, the Germanic groups in the Western Roman Empire were accommodated without "dispossessing or overturning indigenous society", and they maintained a structured and hierarchical (but attenuated) form of Roman administration.^[47]

Ironically, they lost their unique identity as a result of such an accommodation and were absorbed into Latinhood. In contrast, in the east, Slavic tribes maintained a more "spartan and egalitarian"^[48] existence bound to the land "even in times when they took their part in plundering Roman provinces".^[49] Their organizational models were not Roman, and their leaders were not normally dependent on Roman gold for success. Thus they arguably had a greater effect on their region than the Goths, the Franks or the Saxons had on theirs.^[50]

KEY POINTS

• • The Holy Roman Empire was a fragmented collection of largely independent states, which, after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, was divided between Catholic and Protestant rulership.

  • The Peace of Augsburg ended early conflict between German Lutherans and Catholics and established a principle in which princes were guaranteed the right to select either Lutheranism or Catholicism within the domains they controlled.

  • Although the Peace of Augsburg created a temporary end to hostilities, it did not resolve the underlying religious conflict, which was made yet more complex by the spread of Calvinism throughout Germany in the years that followed.

  • The war began when the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose religious uniformity on his domains, forcing Roman Catholicism on its peoples, and the Protestant states banded together to revolt against him.

TERMS

• Ferdinand IIHis rule coincided with the Thirty Years’ War and his aim, as a zealous Catholic, was to restore Catholicism as the only religion in the empire and suppress Protestantism.

• Peace of AugsburgA treaty between Charles V and the forces of Lutheran princes on September 25, 1555, which officially ended the religious struggle between the two groups and allowed princes in the Holy Roman Empire to choose which religion would reign in their principality.