Dynasty, territory, and monarchy in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire: the ‘Valois’ of Burgundy (1363-1482) and the ‘Habsburgs’ of Austria (1365-1519) compared (original) (raw)

As a decentralised and fragmented polity with a long-standing electoral system for appointing its monarchs, the late medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire presented unique challenges and opportunities to the aristocratic dynasties based within its notional borders. It is a commonplace of German historiography that the Roman monarchy became ‘dynasticised’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which is to say that it became the target of princely families seeking to enhance their Hausmacht. Yet in some respects this interpretation misrepresents the characteristics of ‘dynasty’, in terms of how contemporaries in the Empire seem to have conceptualised this notion. As historians, we find it convenient to subsume the aims of political actors within reified ‘dynastic’ wholes (the ‘Luxemburger’, the ‘Wittelsbacher’, the ‘Hohenzollern’, and so on), while the late medieval sources seem more concerned with princes and nobles as individual rulers (or co-rulers) tied to a territorial zone and political community (Landschaft, Herzogtum, comté, États, etc.). For those princes who aspired to become, or succeeded in becoming, kings or emperors of the Romans, there is a similar lack of evidence of purely ‘dynastic’ ideas in the sources. Instead, these accentuate the traditions and functions of the office of the imperial monarchy, as well as defining the monarch in relation to his other territorial and jurisdictional titles and rights. These discursive and ideological patterns in the late medieval evidence will be substantiated by reference to two of the most important ducal dynasties with royal aspirations in the Empire: the ‘Valois’ house of Burgundy (domus Burgundie, maison de Bourgogne) and the ‘Habsburg’ house of Austria (domus Austrie, Haus Österreich). The dukes of Burgundy ruled a growing territorial complex which brought them increasingly into the orbit of imperial politics, and in the fifteenth century they sought to obtain royal status, whether through election as kings of the Romans or through the acquisition of a new crown of Burgundy (or ‘Lotharingia’). Though these ambitions were never fulfilled, the negotiations for a Burgundian crown reveal a recurrent emphasis on the territorial and communitarian foundations of the dukes’ authority and dynastic legitimacy. The dukes of Austria, meanwhile, were scattered amongst an archipelago of south German territories, and the political image of each member of the dynasty was crafted primarily by reference to the specific titles he bore and the local relationships that came with it. At the end of the fifteenth century, as one ‘Habsburg’ branch gained a firm grasp on the crown of the Romans, a preoccupation with a mythologised Austrian dynasty did emerge, but only in conjunction with more customary references to official functions and the claims and agendas of subject territories and regions. The paper will draw from these examples the need to avoid isolating ‘dynasticism’ as a ‘factor’ in late medieval politics. In a fragmented and competitive political space like the Holy Roman Empire, dynastic concerns were always embedded in a nexus of aims which had to take into account – and discursively valorise – the territorial and communitarian components of a prince’s patrimony.