Post by eurofed on Jan 19, 2020 19:50:57 GMT
ITTL the Hohenstaufen dynasty of the HRE enjoyed the same degree of luck and success as the other best-performing royal families that developed their European states into strong, centralized monarchies. I.e. at least 200-300 years of reasonably long-lived, competent, healthy, lucky, and talented rulers, with no premature deaths, serious dynastic crises, lengthy and disruptive civil wars or interregna, or clearly unfit successors. This enabled the HRE to consolidate Germany and Italy into a multinational state using neo-Roman universalism, Latin, and Imperial civic identity as unifying elements. The Hohenstaufen Emperors merged the Kingdom of Sicily in the HRE and crushed the opposition of German princes, Italian municipalities, and the Popes to their rule. In due time, they leveraged their domestic success to expand the borders of the empire and absorb Poland, Hungary, and North Africa too.
The family success story began with Frederick I Barbarossa. In addition to all his OTL achievements, he was able to deal a decisive defeat on rebellious Italian cities and German princes including his treacherous cousin Henry the Lion, bringing the former into line and seizing most possessions of the latter. He fought off the Popes to a favorable draw. He died a few years after leading the Third Crusade to a successful conclusion, which allowed recovering Jerusalem and conquering Aleppo and Damascus. The rich booty he brought back from the crusade enabled his son to assert his rights on the Kingdom of Sicily which he got by marriage. He started his family’s policy of using Roman legal tradition as a tool to centralize the HRE and legitimize the Emperors’ rule, and building up the lower nobility, the ‘ministeriales’ class, pro-Imperial burghers, and secular bureaucrats as a power base to counterbalance and overpower unruly princes and cities, and hostile Popes.
His son Henry VI lived to a ripe old age like his father and considerably advanced the work of centralizing Germany and Italy. He crushed the attempts of rebellious princes to defy his rule and mostly added their possessions to the Imperial demesne. This included the Welf, which he effectively wiped out, and the Dukes of Bohemia whose aspirations to royal dignity he suppressed. He dealt new decisive defeats to rebellious Italian city-states, consolidating Imperial power across northern and central Italy. He also successfully established the hold of his family on the Kingdom of Sicily, which he got from his wife Constance. His domestic successes in Germany and the premature death of the Archbishop of Cologne, the main opponent to the plan, allowed him to get the ‘Erbreichsplan’ reform ratified that changed the HRE from an elective to a hereditary monarchy.
His successes in Italy enabled him to bring the conflict with the Popes to a successful conclusion. He defeated and captured Pope Innocent III, had him tried and deposed by a Council, and his claims of papal supremacy on secular monarchs condemned as heresy. He dismantled and absorbed the Papal States in the HRE, and revoked Peppin’s Donation. The efforts of the Popes since Gregory VII to oppose the authority of the Emperors and other monarchs and claim the superiority of Church on state were dealt a blow they were unable to recover from. Defeat of the Popes under the Hohenstaufen emperors undid the political gains they had made during the Investiture Controversy, drastically reduced their power and prestige, and largely returned the Church to the state of decentralization and subservience to royal authority that had existed before the Gregorian Reform. Henry VI paid back the humiliation of his namesake at Canossa with interest.
Henry's successes and long life enabled his talented son Frederick II to inherit an intact and greatly expanded power base across Germany and Italy. He built up on it and advanced the centralization process of the HRE considerably throughout his life with various legal reforms. He developed the HRE and the Kingdom of Sicily as centrally governed states with an efficient bureaucracy, and accomplished their legal merger. His father had educated him to pay equal attention to the various components of the Empire, and he established a policy of doing so, and using members of the royal family and trusted ministers as vicars (i.e. non-hereditary viceroys) to supplement Imperial authority in an area when the Emperor was absent for sustained periods or personally busy elsewhere. During his reign, the opposition of the princes, cities, and the Church to centralized Imperial rule really started to tone down and die out to levels similar to the other successful European monarchies. Like it happened for the other successful European monarchies, development of an efficient royal bureaucracy did a lot to enable absolutist centralization and counterbalance the power of the nobility. Past a point, the urban elites across the Empire came to recognize the benefits of Imperial rule, and switched to support it or at least make themselves content with it.
His reforms and great interest for knowledge and learning, combined with a situation of Imperial peace and prosperity across Germany and Italy created conditions favorable to trade and scientific inquiry that enabled a significant acceleration of the progress to Renaissance in economic and cultural terms.
The power, stability, and prosperity of the HRE under the Hohenstaufen emperors allowed the Germans and the Italians to develop their expansion process in Eastern Europe and the Med much beyond the terms of OTL Ostsiedlung and Norman re-conquest of Sicily. Frederick II won a series of narrow victories in Poland and Hungary that in combination with unfavorable conditions in Central Europe for steppe nomad armies helped the HRE resist and fight off the onslaught of Mongol invasions that devastated Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Mongol rampage caused considerable disruption and damage to Poland and Hungary. This and the outreach of HRE military power favored by the wars against the Mongols allowed a considerable expansion of Imperial power and influence on Poland and Hungary in the following decades.
This was especially relevant for Poland, due to its state of political fragmentation since the 12th century, and made the weak and divided Polish principalities unable to oppose the absorption of Pomerania, Silesia, Greater Poland, and Krakow into the HRE. Their ineffective resistance to expansion of Imperial rule eventually drove Frederick to claim the crown of Poland and crush the Piast opposition, even if the eastern principalities of Masovia and Sandomierz largely remained outside his control.
Frederick II also leveraged his power base in southern Italy to engage in the successful re-conquest of the Kingdom of Africa, which the Normans had established in Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and Tripolitania and later lost to the Almohad Caliphate. Frederick’s defeat of the Almohads combined with the major successes the Christian princes had been reaping against the Moors in Iberia to improve the pace of Reconquista considerably and foster its eventual expansion to North Africa.
Frederick’s sons Henry VII (whose sons did not survive to adulthood) and Conrad IV (who succeeded his brother) continued their family’s work to a satisfying degree of competence and success, if perhaps in a slightly less impressive way. Given the vast and ever-growing size and complexity of the HRE, they balanced the centralizing reforms of their forebears by formalizing the Imperial Diet as an institution to give proto-parliamentary representation to the Estates and regions of the Empire. They continued their father’s policy in Eastern Europe and North Africa, fighting off new Mongol invasions of Poland and Hungary, conquering the eastern Polish principalities, and expanding Imperial control across Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. During their reigns, all of Poland got merged in the HRE.
The military successes and colonial expansion of the HRE in North Africa favored the Reconquista coming to a complete success in Iberia with the fall of Grenada in the 13th century, and its expansion against the weakening Almoads in Morocco. Much the same way, Imperial control of Poland ensured the Teutonic Order enjoyed near-optimal conditions to enforce its ongoing conquest and colonization of Prussia, Lithuania, and the Baltic region under HRE suzerainty.
Hungary successfully fought off Mongol invasions with Imperial help, although at the price of considerable damage. Such damage favored a decline of royal authority and combined with the lapse of the native Arpad dynasty at the end of the 13th century to plunge Hungary in a state of political fragmentation similar to the one Poland had previously experienced. Much like divided Piast Poland, this provided favorable conditions for expansion of Imperial rule in the kingdom and its assimilation in the HRE. Bringing Hungary in the Imperial fold largely became the main life task and accomplishment of Conrad V (OTL Conradin) and his son Frederick III during the turn of the century and the first half of the 14th century. They claimed the title of King of Hungary, suppressed the resistance of the Magyar magnates, restored order in the kingdom, and merged it into the HRE. They also continued to entrench and expand Imperial rule across the Maghreb.
The considerable expansion of the empire’s borders with the annexations in Central Europe and North Africa prompted these emperors and the Imperial Diet to enact a major territorial reform that largely rationalized and consolidated the HRE’s internal borders. The territory of the HRE was reorganized in a series of Imperial Circles for the purposes of taxation, defense, and representation in the Diet. The Circles typically had a regional size, and the system was roughly similar to the old stem duchies but spread out on a larger scale that encompassed Germany, Italy, Central Europe, and North Africa. More symbolically, the HRE was defined as the legitimate successor state of the WRE according to the 'translatio imperii' theory, as well as the indissoluble union of seven kingdoms (Germany, Italy, Burgundy, Sicily, Poland, Hungary, and Africa). The HRE coronation ceremony came to minimize the Pope's role, and instead emphasized the Emperor's divine mandate to rule.
The vast size and multinational complexity of the HRE drove it ever more decisively to embrace neo-Roman universalism and Imperial civic nationalism as a unifying ideology and identity, and use Latin as a lingua franca. With the inevitable changes wrought by modernity, the HRE was going to hold on to these traits for the future. By the time the Black Death was scheduled to hit Europe, two centuries of successful state-building, centralization, expansion, and consolidation had forged the HRE into a solid and functional state that had nothing to envy from the other successful European monarchies, could easily stake a claim to be Europe’s top dog, and had good chances to weather and survive any future storm.
Establishment of such a powerful state in the heart of Europe is surely going to cause many ripple effects on the rest of the continent, and later the world, since in all likelihood it not going to affect Europe’s rise to global hegemony in a negative way. Quite possibly, it is going to have a significant influence on the power struggle between England and France during the Angevin-Capet clashes and later the Hundred Years’ War. Historically the Hohenstaufen Emperors were allies of France against England, but that might easily change given different circumstances. IOTL, the French later became hostile and a serious rival for control of Italy, but that does not seem feasible here. Barring extraordinary events, TTL strength of the HRE seems more than sufficient to deter or defeat any French attempt to contest control of Italy. Moreover, the Pope’s hostility to Imperial rule that favored these attempts has been crushed ITTL. Finally yet importantly, if the French make themselves too much trouble, the HRE can easily retaliate by allying with England, with potentially disastrous effects for France.
The TL already assumes Imperial expansion in North Africa is going to accelerate the pace of the Reconquista considerably and cause it to spill over in the Maghreb to encompass the entire area. It also seems inevitable that the existence of a powerful and stable European empire with a sizable power projection in the Med is going to affect the course of the Crusades in a way substantially favorable to Christianity. The TL already assumes the Third Crusade is a decisive success, and with Henry VI at the helm, the Fourth Crusade is going to take a rather more productive course. The sack of Constantinople does not happen, the Byzantine Empire is not critically weakened, the damage caused by the Manzikert disaster is mostly reversed with Latin help, Jerusalem is recovered, the Crusader States substantially reinforced and expanded, and the Muslims considerably pushed back in Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. On the other hand, the Mongol onslaught in the Middle East is going to cause considerable damage and disruption to the entire region.
The TL assumes Frederick II's very successful reign, his great interest for scientific knowledge, and the stability and prosperity of Germany and Italy under Imperial rule are going to accelerate the coming of the Renaissance to some significant degree, although it is not that easy to tell exactly how much. Almost surely, the power of the HRE and its easy access to the Atlantic through the Low Countries is going to make it into a most serious competitor for the other seafaring European powers. In all likelihood, it is going to grow into a larger and stronger analogue of France, a mixed land power/sea power, although its position ensures Baltic, Eastern European, and Mediterranean issues are always going to absorb a significant chunk of its attention and resources.
The family success story began with Frederick I Barbarossa. In addition to all his OTL achievements, he was able to deal a decisive defeat on rebellious Italian cities and German princes including his treacherous cousin Henry the Lion, bringing the former into line and seizing most possessions of the latter. He fought off the Popes to a favorable draw. He died a few years after leading the Third Crusade to a successful conclusion, which allowed recovering Jerusalem and conquering Aleppo and Damascus. The rich booty he brought back from the crusade enabled his son to assert his rights on the Kingdom of Sicily which he got by marriage. He started his family’s policy of using Roman legal tradition as a tool to centralize the HRE and legitimize the Emperors’ rule, and building up the lower nobility, the ‘ministeriales’ class, pro-Imperial burghers, and secular bureaucrats as a power base to counterbalance and overpower unruly princes and cities, and hostile Popes.
His son Henry VI lived to a ripe old age like his father and considerably advanced the work of centralizing Germany and Italy. He crushed the attempts of rebellious princes to defy his rule and mostly added their possessions to the Imperial demesne. This included the Welf, which he effectively wiped out, and the Dukes of Bohemia whose aspirations to royal dignity he suppressed. He dealt new decisive defeats to rebellious Italian city-states, consolidating Imperial power across northern and central Italy. He also successfully established the hold of his family on the Kingdom of Sicily, which he got from his wife Constance. His domestic successes in Germany and the premature death of the Archbishop of Cologne, the main opponent to the plan, allowed him to get the ‘Erbreichsplan’ reform ratified that changed the HRE from an elective to a hereditary monarchy.
His successes in Italy enabled him to bring the conflict with the Popes to a successful conclusion. He defeated and captured Pope Innocent III, had him tried and deposed by a Council, and his claims of papal supremacy on secular monarchs condemned as heresy. He dismantled and absorbed the Papal States in the HRE, and revoked Peppin’s Donation. The efforts of the Popes since Gregory VII to oppose the authority of the Emperors and other monarchs and claim the superiority of Church on state were dealt a blow they were unable to recover from. Defeat of the Popes under the Hohenstaufen emperors undid the political gains they had made during the Investiture Controversy, drastically reduced their power and prestige, and largely returned the Church to the state of decentralization and subservience to royal authority that had existed before the Gregorian Reform. Henry VI paid back the humiliation of his namesake at Canossa with interest.
Henry's successes and long life enabled his talented son Frederick II to inherit an intact and greatly expanded power base across Germany and Italy. He built up on it and advanced the centralization process of the HRE considerably throughout his life with various legal reforms. He developed the HRE and the Kingdom of Sicily as centrally governed states with an efficient bureaucracy, and accomplished their legal merger. His father had educated him to pay equal attention to the various components of the Empire, and he established a policy of doing so, and using members of the royal family and trusted ministers as vicars (i.e. non-hereditary viceroys) to supplement Imperial authority in an area when the Emperor was absent for sustained periods or personally busy elsewhere. During his reign, the opposition of the princes, cities, and the Church to centralized Imperial rule really started to tone down and die out to levels similar to the other successful European monarchies. Like it happened for the other successful European monarchies, development of an efficient royal bureaucracy did a lot to enable absolutist centralization and counterbalance the power of the nobility. Past a point, the urban elites across the Empire came to recognize the benefits of Imperial rule, and switched to support it or at least make themselves content with it.
His reforms and great interest for knowledge and learning, combined with a situation of Imperial peace and prosperity across Germany and Italy created conditions favorable to trade and scientific inquiry that enabled a significant acceleration of the progress to Renaissance in economic and cultural terms.
The power, stability, and prosperity of the HRE under the Hohenstaufen emperors allowed the Germans and the Italians to develop their expansion process in Eastern Europe and the Med much beyond the terms of OTL Ostsiedlung and Norman re-conquest of Sicily. Frederick II won a series of narrow victories in Poland and Hungary that in combination with unfavorable conditions in Central Europe for steppe nomad armies helped the HRE resist and fight off the onslaught of Mongol invasions that devastated Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Mongol rampage caused considerable disruption and damage to Poland and Hungary. This and the outreach of HRE military power favored by the wars against the Mongols allowed a considerable expansion of Imperial power and influence on Poland and Hungary in the following decades.
This was especially relevant for Poland, due to its state of political fragmentation since the 12th century, and made the weak and divided Polish principalities unable to oppose the absorption of Pomerania, Silesia, Greater Poland, and Krakow into the HRE. Their ineffective resistance to expansion of Imperial rule eventually drove Frederick to claim the crown of Poland and crush the Piast opposition, even if the eastern principalities of Masovia and Sandomierz largely remained outside his control.
Frederick II also leveraged his power base in southern Italy to engage in the successful re-conquest of the Kingdom of Africa, which the Normans had established in Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and Tripolitania and later lost to the Almohad Caliphate. Frederick’s defeat of the Almohads combined with the major successes the Christian princes had been reaping against the Moors in Iberia to improve the pace of Reconquista considerably and foster its eventual expansion to North Africa.
Frederick’s sons Henry VII (whose sons did not survive to adulthood) and Conrad IV (who succeeded his brother) continued their family’s work to a satisfying degree of competence and success, if perhaps in a slightly less impressive way. Given the vast and ever-growing size and complexity of the HRE, they balanced the centralizing reforms of their forebears by formalizing the Imperial Diet as an institution to give proto-parliamentary representation to the Estates and regions of the Empire. They continued their father’s policy in Eastern Europe and North Africa, fighting off new Mongol invasions of Poland and Hungary, conquering the eastern Polish principalities, and expanding Imperial control across Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. During their reigns, all of Poland got merged in the HRE.
The military successes and colonial expansion of the HRE in North Africa favored the Reconquista coming to a complete success in Iberia with the fall of Grenada in the 13th century, and its expansion against the weakening Almoads in Morocco. Much the same way, Imperial control of Poland ensured the Teutonic Order enjoyed near-optimal conditions to enforce its ongoing conquest and colonization of Prussia, Lithuania, and the Baltic region under HRE suzerainty.
Hungary successfully fought off Mongol invasions with Imperial help, although at the price of considerable damage. Such damage favored a decline of royal authority and combined with the lapse of the native Arpad dynasty at the end of the 13th century to plunge Hungary in a state of political fragmentation similar to the one Poland had previously experienced. Much like divided Piast Poland, this provided favorable conditions for expansion of Imperial rule in the kingdom and its assimilation in the HRE. Bringing Hungary in the Imperial fold largely became the main life task and accomplishment of Conrad V (OTL Conradin) and his son Frederick III during the turn of the century and the first half of the 14th century. They claimed the title of King of Hungary, suppressed the resistance of the Magyar magnates, restored order in the kingdom, and merged it into the HRE. They also continued to entrench and expand Imperial rule across the Maghreb.
The considerable expansion of the empire’s borders with the annexations in Central Europe and North Africa prompted these emperors and the Imperial Diet to enact a major territorial reform that largely rationalized and consolidated the HRE’s internal borders. The territory of the HRE was reorganized in a series of Imperial Circles for the purposes of taxation, defense, and representation in the Diet. The Circles typically had a regional size, and the system was roughly similar to the old stem duchies but spread out on a larger scale that encompassed Germany, Italy, Central Europe, and North Africa. More symbolically, the HRE was defined as the legitimate successor state of the WRE according to the 'translatio imperii' theory, as well as the indissoluble union of seven kingdoms (Germany, Italy, Burgundy, Sicily, Poland, Hungary, and Africa). The HRE coronation ceremony came to minimize the Pope's role, and instead emphasized the Emperor's divine mandate to rule.
The vast size and multinational complexity of the HRE drove it ever more decisively to embrace neo-Roman universalism and Imperial civic nationalism as a unifying ideology and identity, and use Latin as a lingua franca. With the inevitable changes wrought by modernity, the HRE was going to hold on to these traits for the future. By the time the Black Death was scheduled to hit Europe, two centuries of successful state-building, centralization, expansion, and consolidation had forged the HRE into a solid and functional state that had nothing to envy from the other successful European monarchies, could easily stake a claim to be Europe’s top dog, and had good chances to weather and survive any future storm.
Establishment of such a powerful state in the heart of Europe is surely going to cause many ripple effects on the rest of the continent, and later the world, since in all likelihood it not going to affect Europe’s rise to global hegemony in a negative way. Quite possibly, it is going to have a significant influence on the power struggle between England and France during the Angevin-Capet clashes and later the Hundred Years’ War. Historically the Hohenstaufen Emperors were allies of France against England, but that might easily change given different circumstances. IOTL, the French later became hostile and a serious rival for control of Italy, but that does not seem feasible here. Barring extraordinary events, TTL strength of the HRE seems more than sufficient to deter or defeat any French attempt to contest control of Italy. Moreover, the Pope’s hostility to Imperial rule that favored these attempts has been crushed ITTL. Finally yet importantly, if the French make themselves too much trouble, the HRE can easily retaliate by allying with England, with potentially disastrous effects for France.
The TL already assumes Imperial expansion in North Africa is going to accelerate the pace of the Reconquista considerably and cause it to spill over in the Maghreb to encompass the entire area. It also seems inevitable that the existence of a powerful and stable European empire with a sizable power projection in the Med is going to affect the course of the Crusades in a way substantially favorable to Christianity. The TL already assumes the Third Crusade is a decisive success, and with Henry VI at the helm, the Fourth Crusade is going to take a rather more productive course. The sack of Constantinople does not happen, the Byzantine Empire is not critically weakened, the damage caused by the Manzikert disaster is mostly reversed with Latin help, Jerusalem is recovered, the Crusader States substantially reinforced and expanded, and the Muslims considerably pushed back in Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. On the other hand, the Mongol onslaught in the Middle East is going to cause considerable damage and disruption to the entire region.
The TL assumes Frederick II's very successful reign, his great interest for scientific knowledge, and the stability and prosperity of Germany and Italy under Imperial rule are going to accelerate the coming of the Renaissance to some significant degree, although it is not that easy to tell exactly how much. Almost surely, the power of the HRE and its easy access to the Atlantic through the Low Countries is going to make it into a most serious competitor for the other seafaring European powers. In all likelihood, it is going to grow into a larger and stronger analogue of France, a mixed land power/sea power, although its position ensures Baltic, Eastern European, and Mediterranean issues are always going to absorb a significant chunk of its attention and resources.