The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  The most attractive option was to be found even farther north than the Lombards: the Franks, then mostly living in what today are the Low Countries. In 752, a year after the Lombards defeated the exarchate, Pope Stephen II traveled to Quierzy, in northern France—he was the first pope to cross the Alps—to persuade the Frankish king, Pepin the Short, to accept the duty of protecting Rome, and the papacy. His plea worked. In 754, Pepin invaded Italy, defeated the Lombards, and gave Ravenna back to the papacy in the so-called donation of Pepin. The pope, in return, anointed Pepin and his two sons, Carloman and Charles, patricia Romanorum: Roman “patricians.” Subsequent historians would, rightly, mark this as the inauguration of the “Frankish papacy.”

  The orthodox Franks, now ruled by a Carolingian dynasty, came as a salvation to the besieged bishops of Rome. In 772, another pope, Hadrian I, invited Charles to continue his father’s work. He did just that, in 774, with the complete defeat of Lombard power in Italy. Twenty-six years later, on Christmas Day, 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charles—by then “the Great”: Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne—as the “most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great and pacific emperor, governing the Roman Empire.”*

  Just as feudalism owes its emergence to Charlemagne—some historians date it to the lands granted to soldiers who followed Charlemagne back across the Pyrenees after the failed invasion that is memorialized in The Song of Roland—so, too, does the medieval papacy owe him its survival. Even before his Augustan elevation, Charlemagne had created the so-called papal states: mostly the old Rome-Ravenna corridor, plus parts of Tuscany and Lombardy, all of them directly ruled by the bishop of Rome.

  Charlemagne’s son and successor, Louis the Pious, had three sons of his own—Pepin, Louis, and Lothar—and announced his intention to have the Carolingian Empire ruled by them in partnership. The westernmost portion of the Frankish world, what would become France, would be the responsibility of Pepin; the east, Louis. Lothar, the eldest, received the title of Augustus Romanum, formal sovereignty over his brothers, and direct authority over of what is now a large part of Germany and the Low Countries, along with Burgundy and Provence. When Louis the Pious died in 840, the results were predictable. The brothers went to war; and after the dust had settled, the Carolingian Empire was no more.

  The collapse of Charlemagne’s empire remade the map of Europe. During the four centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, while the German-speaking areas of Europe enjoyed a population explosion identical to that of the French-speaking areas to their west—by 1300, the population of the Germanophone areas of the Holy Roman Empire was about 13 million—they saw nothing of the same political consolidation. At a time when the temporal power of the popes was never higher, they were determined to keep any emperor from becoming so powerful as to become a threat to, rather than a defender of, Rome. Part of this was simple geopolitics: the papal states were easily surrounded, both north and south, particularly after the Arab armies conquered Sicily in the ninth century and were conquered in their turn by Normans—those aggressive Norsemen again—in the eleventh. But part was a dedication to what might be called antinationalism: the belief in a European polity, Christendom, that was unified by religious belief and nothing more. Ten years after Charlemagne’s death in 814, Agobard, the archbishop of Lyon, described a Europe in which, paraphrasing Galatians 3:28: “There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All are one in Christ.” This vision remained the fundamental and enduring dream of the papacy for the next five hundred years.

  The dream didn’t anticipate the nation-building talents of leaders like King Henry II of England; or, for that matter, King Robert Bruce of Scotland. The centrifugal forces of nationalism proved stronger than the centripetal pull of Catholicism. One modern historian has observed that “by 1300 it was evident that the dominant political form in Western Europe was going to be the sovereign state . . . the universal Church had to admit that the defense of the individual state took precedence of the liberties of the Church . . . [and] loyalty to the state was taking on some of the overtones of patriotism.” The earliest evidence appeared in the western third of the old Frankish empire as well as in the territories conquered by Duke William of Normandy. It is no coincidence that France and England (and, somewhat later, Castile, as the germ of a reconquered Spain) were far enough from Rome to germinate the first European versions of modern nation-states. Nor that Germany and Italy, largely because of their predecessors’ vulnerability to papal intereference, never coalesced into something approaching their modern forms until the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly a millennium after Otto the Great, the Duke of Saxony, was crowned Otto I in 962.

  Otto was the first of a long line of Germans to wear the crown of Holy Roman Emperor, which by then included the Kingdom of Italy and (from 1032 on) Burgundy. For each emperor, another crown preceded the imperial one; a group of German princes named a “King of the Germans” who would also be known, in the period between his election and his imperial sanctification, as “King of the Romans.” Though technically an elective office, dynasties emerged; Otto’s line, the “Ottonians,” was succeeded by another extended family, the Salians, and eventually, the Hohenstaufens, from the coronation of Frederick Barbarossa in the early twelfth century until the death of his grandson, Frederick II, in 1250.

  The second Frederick embodied the highest aspirations of medieval society: he spoke half a dozen languages; was a gifted soldier, scholar, and musician; was the founder of the University of Naples and leader of the most successful and least bloody of all the crusades, which concluded when he negotiated a treaty that returned Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to the crusader “Kingdom of Jerusalem.” After centuries of intermarriage, Frederick was not only King of the Germans and Holy Roman Emperor, but ruler of Burgundy and (through his mother) King of the Two Sicilies—that is, both the island and the southernmost portion of the Italian boot. He was, in short, the papacy’s greatest threat since the Lombards: a single monarch who ruled all the territories surrounding the papal states. By an accident of history, the sovereignty of Germany had become the most important strategic concern of the bishops of Rome.

  As the thirteenth century turned into the fourteenth, they weren’t shy about expressing that concern. Adolf of Nassau was elected King of the Germans in 1292 but never crowned by Boniface VIII, who took time off from his long-running feud with Philip IV of France to accuse Adolf of being the “mercenary knight” of Edward I of England. Albert of Habsburg defeated Adolf in battle in 1298, and was subsequently elected his successor, but wasn’t invited to Rome for a coronation until 1303—an invitation that Albert declined. When Albert was killed in 1308, months after attending the marriage of Edward and Isabella in Boulogne, Henry VII of Luxembourg became the new King of the Germans.

  Henry was crowned Holy Roman Emperor four years later, the first since the death of Frederick II, more than sixty years before. The ceremony was held, as tradition demanded, in Rome, though the pope was not there; Clement V had already moved to Avignon. Henry’s reign started so well that Dante Alighieri extolled his virtues in De Monarchia, though not in a way that the pope might have chosen. The Florentine poet’s argument—that the imperium was derived from God, rather than the pope, and any proper emperor, like Henry, should reduce the Church to its spiritual duties only—was not the sort of thing that endeared any emperor to any pope.* It’s easy to imagine the sighs of relief that attended Henry’s death, only fourteen months later.

  A vacant imperial—not to say German, or even Roman—throne meant an election. Though the empire comprised dozens of duchies, principalities, counties, and Free Imperial Cities (free from rule other than that of the emperor, including Basel, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne), the King of the Germans was traditionally chosen by seven electors. Those electors were archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, as well as the four highest princes in the fractured territory: the king of Bo
hemia, the margrave of Brandenburg, the count palatine of the Rhine, and the duke of Saxony.* The first candidate to win four out of the seven was the victor.

  If only. While the titles of the legitimate electors were clear enough, the names of the men entitled to vote on behalf of those titles was not. Which is why, on October 19, 1314, five months after Bannockburn and six months before the start of the rains of 1315, the electors assembled at Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen to choose their new king, and four of them cast their votes for Duke Friedrich IV of Austria, known as the Fair. Which would have been conclusive, except that the following day the archbishop of Mainz demanded another election. And in that one, a different majority of electors chose Frederick’s rival, Ludwig IV of Wittelsbach. Just as the rains began their destruction of northern Europe’s agricultural core, the Holy Roman Empire was about to embark on an eight-year-long civil war.

  • • •

  The lesson from the Great Famine most easily recalled, because most frequently repeated, is that “natural” disasters are most disastrous when humanity gives them a push. All of rural England suffered through the floods and murrains of the famine years, but the territories that played host to the armies of Robert Bruce and Edward II experienced the very worst of it. The grain harvest failed all over the Kingdom of France, but Flanders—at war with a succession of French kings for decades before the rains began—starved. And all over northern Europe, the farther you were from the land—that is, the likelier you were to live in a town or a city—the more you suffered when it was no longer able to grow sufficient quantities of food.

  So it was farther east.

  Germans and western Slavs were just as dependent upon buying and selling foodstuffs as their western neighbors. To connect villages and manors throughout the region and to facilitate trade between locals, they created a reasonably well-integrated system of fairs and markets for people living within a day’s travel of one another. The buyers and sellers weren’t locked into long-term relationships as they were in the English wool trade; many, perhaps most, were essentially barter arrangements that effectively served their purpose of bringing together producers and consumers of food.

  When the farms of Saxony, Alsace, and the Rhineland lost their harvests to the rains of 1315, the manorial lords who depended on the rents from those farms for gold, as well as the townsmen who depended on them for food, were strapped. They couldn’t replace lost income by shifting to other activities, and neither could they purchase food from anywhere nearer than the Mediterranean. For most, the best available option was alienation: essentially pawning property to raise cash, which happened dozens of times between 1315 and 1320. Literally hundreds of pieces of real property (and, sometimes, just the rents from them) were alienated during 1315–1317, often at fire-sale prices. This was true at every level of society; Duke Otto I of Pomerania, the margrave of Brandenburg—one of the empire’s seven electors—alienated enormous parts of his estates in 1317 for a fraction of their earlier value. Both buyers and sellers knew that the property was producing no income at all. The most frequent descriptive word in bills of sale was nihil: nothing. Princes and barons pawned their properties an acre at a time. Monasteries and other ecclesiastical properties regularly sold their farmlands to others, less destitute, who just as frequently resold them in their turn, all while they were being taxed to pay for the armies of two outstanding aspirants to the imperial throne, and to finance planned Crusades at the behest of their own liege lord: the pope.

  The most obvious solution to the food shortage was trade. But though some high-value trade goods traveled up Europe’s inland waterways like the Rhine, and overland from northern Italy and points east (raw wool was exported from England to Flanders, to return as cloth), and England was importing thousands of tons of salted fish annually from the northern Baltic nations, most of northern Europe’s traditional trade in food traveled less than ten miles from source to consumer.

  An economic disruption of the magnitude of the Great Famine, extending, as it did, well beyond the German-speaking areas of Europe, upended such traditions. Once the combination of flood, famine, and self-inflicted destruction drove up the price of grain by several hundred percent, some of the Holy Roman Empire’s merchants did take advantage of the prices England (and, to a lesser degree, France) was willing to pay—and, the eagerness of both to keep Baltic grain out of the mouths of Scots and Flemings. The most audacious, and by far the most important, of those merchants were part of a seagoing consortium that would become known as the Hansa, or Hanseatic League.

  The advantage of conveying goods by water rather than land is startling. The Roman Empire is rightly lauded for the roads it built from Syria to Spain, but from its beginnings Roman commerce was far more dependent on seaborne trade, for the obvious reason: it cost less to ship grain from Alexandria to Cartagena than to send it seventy-five miles by oxcart. Egypt was the Mediterranean’s granary for a thousand years not just because of its farms’ productivity but their locations: none of its cultivated land was more than a few miles from either the Nile or a canal.

  And since Roman roads were virtually nonexistent east of the Rhine, the rivers that led to the Baltic were obvious choices to serve as the great arteries of central European commerce. During the ninth and tenth centuries, colonies of Norsemen appeared everywhere from the Seine to the Vistula, but they marked the high point of Scandinavian trade into Europe, as German-speaking merchants started to overtake them by the beginning of the twelfth century. In 1157, King Henry II of England granted the merchants of the city of Cologne a charter with special trading privileges. In 1159, Duke Henry of Saxony founded the city of Lübeck on the western shore of Baltic entirely to compete with Danish and Swedish merchants; two years later he signed a treaty with the rulers of the Swedish-controlled island of Gotland to establish a trading partnership in the town of Visby, largely for trade in Russian furs from Novgorod. Within a decade, the men from Lübeck were clearly the senior partners, establishing trading posts—kontors—everywhere they could, including Bruges and even London.*

  Other cities, watching the first Hanseatic cities grow rich on the exploding Baltic trade, were eager to join in. A road network was built, connecting Lübeck with Luneberg and Hamburg. Cologne and Bremen became, like Flanders, authorized trading centers for English wool. The territory between Lübeck and Novgorod—the settlements around the Gulf of Riga (modern Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia)—was transformed from a sleepy farming region into a huge market for buyers and sellers of the raw materials of shipbuilding: timber, flax (for sails), and hemp (for ropes). In 1252, the countess of Flanders granted the eager Germans yet another set of trading privileges. Though it wouldn’t be formally established as the Hanseatic League until 1369, the merchants of Cologne, Lübeck, Hamburg, Riga, and half a dozen other Baltic port cities formed the Hansa.

  The Hansa depended on trade. However, trade depends not just on buyers and sellers, but some mechanism to enforce contracts, trade agreements, and the like. The Hanseatic League was that mechanism, a response to the vacuum caused by the chronic inability of the Holy Roman Empire to assert political control over its independent cities. Like the Italian city-states that dominated the Mediterranean during the same era, the cities of the Hansa were walled ports in regions without an overlord—and even when feudal lords thought about conquering them, walled port cities were virtually impossible to besiege or even intimidate. The cities of the Hansa weren’t a true political confederation; they fielded no armies, and were likelier to outfit pirates than naval vessels. But they could, and did, defend their interests. In 1294, Eric II, king of Norway, tried to take back the privileges his father, Magnus VI, had granted to the Hanseatic cities. He was forced by embargo and blockade to give the Lübeck merchants the right to trade; they graciously allowed him to keep all trading rights to the north of Bergen, offering, as a consolation prize, the commerce between Iceland and Greenland, which had peaked during the days of Erik the Red
and been on a steady decline ever since.

  Yet the Hanseatic League was safe from neither the era’s climate change nor the Great Famine itself. The great ports of the Baltic froze in 1303, 1307, 1318, and again in 1321. German-speaking Europe weathered similar dramatic price increases for all foodstuffs, from grain to beer to cheese. Anyone reading the chronicles of the day can’t avoid being struck by how often the word “penuria,” or penury, appeared. In 1316, the chronicler of Würzburg noted “the poor beset by penury and hunger were greedily eating the carcasses of cattle.” His opposite number, in Salzburg, described 1317 as “the year of penury and the severest hunger.”

  German weather was as terrifying as it was in France or Britain: the floodwaters of the Mulde River at Grimma, southeast of Leipzig, were so violent that the entire church of the Austin Canons was lifted off its foundations and swept away. The Moldava River in Bohemia was frozen solid by November 20, 1315—and it remained solid enough for travel by sleigh until March 28 of the following year. Northern Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals—a population that had expanded dramatically for four consecutive centuries and that depended on farmland that had become steadily less productive for nearly as long—saw two consecutive harvests destroyed.

  The actual results were terrible enough that it must have seemed that the Apocalypse was at hand. So horrified were eyewitnesses that their testimony needs to be read not as survey data but as evidence that they believed that the disaster was utterly without precedent. A chronicle of the kings of Bohemia—the Königsaller Geschichts-Quellen—stated that five hundred thousand people had died in the diocese of Metz over a six-month period . . . obviously an exaggeration, since the population of the city of Metz never exceeded twenty thousand during the fourteenth century. In the same vein, an “infinite number perished” in Lübeck. During 1315, a chronicler wrote that in “Germania,” “a third of the people were brought low.” Another famine chronicle from the Rhineland city of Trier recorded that in 1316, “the dead bodies of many paupers, infected by famine and pestilence, were found in the public streets, and in many cities, great communal pits were consecrated in the cemetery.” In the Thuringian town of Erfurt, “innumerable dead bodies were seen lying in the public streets, in the cities, in the towns, and in the villages, [and] five great pits were made before the city, where innumerable cadavers were thrown in daily.”