The purpose of this article is to reconsider the political order in medieval Germany after the Investiture Controversy. During the second half of the 12th century, medieval Germany is generally been understood to have reorganized its political system ...
The purpose of this article is to reconsider the political order in medieval Germany after the Investiture Controversy. During the second half of the 12th century, medieval Germany is generally been understood to have reorganized its political system under feudalism. In this view, feudalization facilitated political particularism, through which lords of Territorial States emerged as princes (Fürsten) who came to dominate the political order of medieval Germany. However, medieval Germans did not conceptualize their political order in terms of feudalism. Rather, feudalism is a historiographical concept presupposed by later scholars. It is therefore necessary to analyze the political order of medieval Germany without relying on feudalism.
To this end, this study proposes the concept of the Kingdom of Germany (Regnum Teutonicorum), drawing on the scholarship of E. H. Kantorowicz and E. Müller-Mertens. The Kingdom of Germany was a means of maintaining its vested interests and identity within the empire by consolidating personal bonds among the ruling class, especially the emperor and princes, when the public political institutions were relatively underdeveloped compared to other Western European kingdoms. Through the electoral system, the princes functioned as a mechanism for maintaining a political order centered on the emperor.
The operation of this kingdom became evident during Frederick I’s Italian campaigns. The emperor and the princes mobilized against the pope and the Italian city-states in response to perceived challenges to their honor, which was bound up with political authority. In this process, the imperial court functioned as the institutional framework through which the Kingdom of Germany was articulated.