Local aristocratic rulers on the European continent forcefully maintained their established regional political and economic power through armed strength, and also sought to become vassals of the emperors and also of the papacy, while ongoing warfare threatening order in Europe was further threatened from external sources. Muslim invaders established a prevailing presence by establishing their faith wherever they settled, while subjecting non-Muslims to dhimmi laws, by which Christians and Jews were afforded retaining their beliefs and a degree of self-government in community affairs while subjected to special taxation and discriminatory legislation, such as imposing distinctions on clothing. Saracen invaders from the Umayyad Caliphate, which extended from central Asia to present day Morocco, completely routed the Visigoth kingdom in Spain in 711, and then attempted to add to Gaul to their possessions, beginning in 720. Charles Martel had put an end to this advance at the battle of Tours near Poitiers in 732, which checked their further expansion in western Europe, beyond the Iberian Peninsula. This setback led to driving back Muslims out of Aquitaine, but did not end their attacks on southern Europe. Islamic forces periodically raided the southern coastline of Europe. They acquired control of the island of Sicily after beginning a four-year campaign in 827, beginning with occupying Palermo, where the Byzantine Greeks were too weak to defend their provinces, as well as occupying Corsica, Sardinia, and southern Italy, and also continued to terrorise Italy and southern France, as well as attacking Rome in 843. Arab control of Sicily was consolidated by 902, prior to civil warfare between competing ruling emirs, leading to a Byzantine intervention in 1038, which also included a mercenary Norse contingent led by Harold Hardrada, and Norman mercenaries.
The Norman Viking settlers ravaged the coasts of the Holy Roman Empire from the Loire to the Elbe during this time. Incursions in the West Frankish kingdom into Burgundy in 841 hastened the destruction of the Frankish monarchy by reducing its defences and laying waste to the land, until the Viking threats subsided as they became Christian. In the east, the German rulers had to constantly fight the Slavs, which continued to cause trouble for at least two centuries after Charlemagne had fought them. There were also the Magyar incursions from the central steppes of Asia who arrived in the Hungarian plain in 895, before overrunning German states and northern Italy, and penetrated as far as the West Frankish kingdom.
The history of Anglo-Saxon Britain later became connected with Scandinavian invaders from present day Denmark, Sweden and Norway, who likewise contributed to weakening central authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Scandinavian nations were organized into petty states, comparably to those in ancient Greece, which were engaged in implacable wars. Their chieftains or kings had been elective, before becoming hereditary, which were divided among heirs who would reign over the land, or the sea. The Scandinavia peninsula with its long coastlines and materials for shipbuilding turned the local inhabitants’ attention toward the art of naval construction, and dispossessed heirs to the ruling classes gathered others of the inferior social orders to join them in seafaring in search of plunder on piratical expeditions against weakly defended targeted areas.
The incursions of these Vikings extended they could sail their ships or carry them overland, and established minor kingdoms. They were originally Goths who came from the kingdom of Gothland in northern Europe, before becoming independent, including in Jutland and the neighbouring islands, where they learned to build ships that they could land and then push back off from almost anywhere to maraud neighbouring shores and carry off booty. They first attacked the towns of the coast of the West Frankish kingdom in the early sixth century, and later travelled on rivers, plundering and burning the villages and towns along the northern coasts of the Frisian kingdom that was annexed into the Frankish empire in 734, with further raids continuing into the next two centuries, including an attack on Utrecht in 850, and attacks in Flanders from 851 to 864, which included attacking Ghent.
Their attack near the islands of Noirmoutier was one of the significant raids against the Frankish empire in 799, taking advantage of the internal political divisions that continued in the subsequent decades, particularly after the outbreak of civil wars following Charlemagne’s death in 814. Vikings exploited this situation by sailing down the Seine River in 820. They crossed the Bay of Biscay in 827 and descended on Galicia and fought against the Gothic king of Leon, and following this defeat, continued their voyage along the shores of Iberian Peninsula and entered the Mediterranean, and attacked the Iberian coasts of Galicia in the Christian kingdom of Astorias and the Umayyad Emirate cities of Lisbon, Cadiz and Sevilla in 844. They then crossed through the Straights of Gibraltar, and attacked the Emirate of Nekor in northern Africa, which was followed by attacks on the coast of Murcia and the Balearic Islands, and then Narbonne, Nimes and Valence in southern France in 844, and attacked Paris in 845 until Charles the Bald paid them to leave. Following their defeat by Frankish defenders, they put back out to sea and attacked Luna and Pisa on the Tuscan coast later that year. This marauding force was later decimated in an ambush launched by the emir of Cordoba on their return journey through the Straights of Gibraltar in 861, only to continue their attacks in Iberia on the kingdom of Navarre and sacking Pamplona, and returned to the Loire River in 862. They also remained in West Francia, and seized Rouen in 876, and besieged Paris again in 885.
Viking invasions prevented western Europe as a whole from becoming peaceful and prosperous, and serve to explain the unsettled two hundred years that followed the breakup of Charlemagne’s empire. Normans meanwhile withdrawing from northern Europe to Normandy gave way to develop new states in Scandinavia, including Gorm the Ancient founding the Danish kingdom, and Harald Haardrada following this precedent in Norway. Following the death of the last Carolingian king, Louis the Child in 911, the reigns of Conrad I (911 to 918) and Henry I (918 to 936) demonstrated the failure of attempting to maintain the supremacy of the monarchy in the German states as individual powers that were being established around it, including becoming permanently separated from the western regions of the formerly Carolingian empire. Charlemagne had built coastal defences to keep them at bay, but his grandson Lothair invited them to help fight his brothers. They likewise inflicted great damage on the kingdom of Louis the German. A large body of them led by Erik, the king of Jutland, sailed up the Elbe to Hamburg in 845 and burned most of this town. The Vikings also found that their longships could be sailed and rowed up rivers into the heart of France, and attacked Paris twice, and ransacked it in 857 when it was abandoned to them. The defenceless situation in the West Frankish kingdom that was divided among its great vassals encouraged Vikings who had settled in Normandy besieged Paris for ten months in 885, while hardly any assistance was provided by the great vassals of the monarchy. Charles, the nominal king, concluded a treaty with these Vikings by which he paid them an indemnity and permission to plunder along the banks of the Seine and the Burgundy interior.
Charles the Simple, the king of the West Franks, ceded the province extending from the mouth of the Seine to Caen as an effective solution for establishing defence against the Viking incursions that terrorised those who lived near the North Sea, and save the kingdom from further devastation, including those by the Viking leader Rollo whose attacks ravaged France between 876 and 886 and led to occupation of Rouen. Charles granted Rollo and his followers the region of Neustria, the land around the mouth of the Seine, in 911 in the Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte, in exchange for acknowledging the king of the West Franks as his feudal sovereign, aiding in repelling any Viking invasions, becoming a Christian, and his daughter Gisla in marriage. This agreement was to appease these invaders, as well as prevent further Viking raids into West Francia.
This holding was later enlarged to include the region on the coast at the mouth of the Seine River, north of Brittany, that became known as Normandy as a stable defensive buffer against further Viking incursions on the West Frankish kingdom travelling down the Seine, which kept Paris safe from further Viking attacks. Rollo became the first duke of Normandy who henceforth took the title of Robert I, who introduced the Christian religion to this district, where people gradually learned to appreciate and imitate their neighbours’ way of life. This development effectively protected the western Frankish kingdom from Viking raids along the Channel coast, and also gave them valuable allies to help them in the Loire valley, which became the base from which the Normans proceeded toward invading and subsequently establishing new kingdoms, which further contributed to the continuing fragmentation of the Frankish empire. The adoption of the feudal system in Normandy also led to disputes over territorial possession therein also led to armed conflicts among the nobility over a limited space of available resources, as well as younger nobles seeking fortunes abroad.
The Vikings also established other permanent settlements in Novgorod in 862 that later led to the foundation of Kievan Rus in 882 as trade centres between northern Europe and the Byzantine empire, and using their superior naval technology to settle Iceland from 874, which was followed by establishing a permanent representative body, the Ting, in 930. The discovery of Greenland by Erik the Red in 982 was followed by establishing two settlements on the eastern and western coasts in 986. During this time, the Danelagh composing Viking occupied Britain remained clashing with the Briton kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, until Viking incursions became increasingly reduced as a result of Scandinavian pagans converting to Christianity, which in turn led to facilitating establishing diplomatic ties with the rest of Christian Europe, and establishing separate monarchies in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Vikings were expelled from Britain by Edmund I who regained control over the whole of England when he expelled the Viking kings of York in 945, and reacquired authority over all of Northumbria from the Danelagh when all of the earlier regional antagonisms were overcome, and the king of Wessex was established as the English monarchy.
The reign of Otto I, later known as the Great, in the eastern regions of the former Carolingian empire (936-973) was marked by attempting to restore order by establishing his authority with loyal vassals, while also facing ongoing foreign threats, particularly the encroaching Magyars and Slavs. Firstly, he was not content with remaining the titular ruler of the German states while leaving the effective power outside of his own duchy by limiting with the power of the stem duchies After a series of struggles, he was able to reassert the old Carolingian principle that dukes were royal officials, subject to the control of the king. He tried to consolidate his authority by putting his own relatives into ducal positions, in the hope that they would be faithful to him, but nevertheless revolts were frequent during his reign. Although not completely successful in restoring the empire to what it had been, he was nevertheless able to take the offensive against Slavic tribes to the east, and extended German power beyond the Elbe River as far as the Oder. Bohemia was reduced to a state of dependence, and was forced to recognise Otto’s overlordship. In 955, a great and decisive victory over the Hungarians at Lechfeld turned back the last great raid that these barbarian people made into the German states by deploying heavy cavalry troops, which later led to them giving up their nomadic life, and settled in their kingdom of Hungary by 1000. A series of fortifications erected by Otto and his father Henry along the North Sea coast effectively checked Viking raids, and also ravaged part of southern Denmark.
During a second phase of Otto I’s reign, he renewed Conrad’s policy of relying on the Church as an ally. Following the example of Charlemagne, Otto the Great invaded Italy in 951 to join the German states with those of Italy. After returning to the German states to quell a revolt organised by his son, he was crowned king of the German states in 961, and later crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope John XII in 962, in return for assistance in helping John XII fight the king of Italy, Berengar, who was deposed prior to later being reinstated as a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor. The title of Holy Roman Emperor was hereafter associated almost invariably with the political leadership of the German states in 963, as well as shifting this title from Middle to East Francia, and the establishment of the first German empire as a complex network of feudal duchies and principalities. This also implied a rather vague claim to political headship of Latin Christendom, while the power of the emperor rested largely on the church, which also provided the empire with administrators. In practice, the kingdoms of France and England never admitted any dependence on the German emperor. Even in the German states, his power always remained uncertain since in spite of this central office, as Otto failed to stem the power of the stem duchies, and attempting to bring the highest temporal offices into the hands of his own relatives resulted in civil war.
In a third phase, Otto I turned to the Church support the existence of the crown by making the Church what the duchies the mainstays of monarchical power. He encouraged new ecclesiastical foundations, and made rich gifts of lands and exemptions to the clergy in the interest of being them more closely to himself, beginning with filling archbishoprics with friends and faithful servants on the basis of purely political motives, or selling church offices outright that resulted in accruing considerable revenues. The history of the German church and the kingdom of the German states were to become nearly identical for over a century with church rule being interrelated to political life, as the king’s right to choose bishops constituted Church leadership’s interests that were identical to those of the king while effectively serving as his officials providing a counterpoise to the power of the nobility, and likewise appointed German clergy to the papacy.
Otto II who succeeded his father Otto the Great with his election as the Holy Roman Emperor in 973. The domestic conflicts with the semi-autonomous dukes over whom he exercised nominal control continued, in addition to waging war against the neighbouring Danes, West Franks, Slavs, marauding Saracen Arabs, and Byzantines. The Moravian Slavs founded their first state in 833, which functioned as a buffer state between the Franks to the west, and the Bulgarians and Byzantines to the south, with further Slavic states later coming into existence among the Bohemians, Poles and Magyars who became Christianised by German missionaries. Slavic Bulgars and semi-nomadic Turks established a separate kingdom since 681, that also included Croats and Serbs. The same fluid decentralised conditions remained ongoing the succession of Otto III who became the emperor in 983, until he deceased while suppressing a rebellion in Italy in 1002, and then during the reign of his successor Heinrich, the Duke of Bavaria, who became Heinrich II in 1002 following renewed internecine warfare, king of Italy in 1004, and then Holy Roman Emperor in 1014, during which time war was waged against Poland over control over the kingdom of Bohemia that would be integrated into the Holy Roman Empire. Following his death in 1024, marking the end of the Ottonian dynasty, he was succeeded by Conrad II who initiated the Salian dynasty, and incorporated Burgundy, which had been a part of Middle Francia, into the empire.
Whereas northern Italy was held by the Holy Roman Empire, southern Italy during the early eleventh century was composed of petty states., including Benevento, Salerno and Capua ruled by Lombard princes, apart from remaining Byzantine possessions in Apulia and Calabria. Sicily had been conquered by the Arab Aghlabid dynasty between 830 and 965, who were succeeded by the Kalbid dynasty in 948. A Lombard nobleman, Melis of Bari, entreated a group Normans travelling through Gargano on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Michael in 1017 to overthrown Byzantine rule, and establish his independence, and were later defeated opposing Byzantines at Cannae in 1018. This defeated revolt led to the Normans being engaged as mercenaries by the Byzantines for their own purposes in establishing their control over Troia against opposition against emperor Henry II in 1022, and thereafter leading the Normans to become a primary source of mercenary power in southern Italy until 1025, when they fought for the Byzantines, the papacy, and the Lombards competing for control in this region.
Robert “Guiscard” of Hauteville established his possession of Apulia as count, and Richard of Aversa as prince of Capua. They continued maintaining their presence until ultimately establishing their own independent duchy of Apulia and Calabria in 1059, with Robert “Guiscard” as the duke, upon concluding the Treaty of Melfi that ended a prolonged conflict with the papacy, and became the first aristocratic ruler to become a vassal of the papacy under Gregory VII. Robert and his brother Roger would continue consolidating their possession in southern Italy, and then seek to acquire new possessions in nearby Sicily, where Islamic rulers had possessed after displacing the earlier Byzantines from 830. Civil war broke out in Sicily among three separate principalities in 1052, which led to the papacy calling for the Robert Guiscard to impose order by conquer Sicily for Christendom, and appointed him as the duke of Sicily in 1053.
Normans led by Roger de Hauteville intervened in the civil war in 1060 to assist one of the warring parties, Ibn Timnah, the ruler of Syracuse, and attacked Messina. Robert and Roger later intervened in and occupied the city in 1061, and continued expanding their presence with their Arabic allies, which culminated in establishing a permanent presence by 1063, following the battle of Cerami that secured their control over northeastern Sicily. While the Norman encroachments continued, they refused to receive rewards from the grateful Christian Greek inhabitants of Salerno who had been under threat, this exploit became known throughout the Italian states, in which several Italian nobles engaged Normans into their service. The duke of Naples who had deployed them in his warfare with the prince of Capus bestowed considerable territory to them between the two cities, where they founded the city of Aversa, which attracted other Normans to settle there and establish a new growing principality. Waging local warfare led to further territorial expansion, which they defended against Greeks in southern Italy and Saracens in Sicily. Pope Nicholas II chose to enter negotiations with Richard of Capua and Robert Guiscard, who agreed to protect the papacy against its enemies, assist in the cardinals implement future elections, and acknowledge the pope as their feudal overlord. Richard was enfeoffed with Capua, and Robert with Apulia and Calabria, which the Normans had conquered from the Byzantines. Guiscard also received Sicily, which remained in Saracen control. Normans would thus defend the papacy against dissident Romans, and alleviate pressure from the Holy Roman Empire claiming Italian territories, and permanently displace Byzantine claims in southern Italy. The creations of these fiefdoms of the papacy composed of territory the Normans had taken possession of in southern Italy and would later seize Sicily culminated in duke Roger II being crowned by Anacletus II as king of Sicily on Christmas day in 1130, as well as set a precedent for the papacy later directing the Crusading movements.
Imperial claims in the German states were largely nullified by the difficulty successive emperors found in securing the loyal and obedient service of subordinates. Moreover, German monarchs would to be engaged with maintaining control over their Italian kingdom, such as removing or protecting a pope, instead of giving all their attention to keeping their own kingdom in order, which proved to be a waste of strength in the continued decentralised conditions of separate states. The papacy remained under threat on the Italian peninsula as a result of the presence of Arabic, Byzantine and local Italian rulers, and therefore relied on Holy Roman Emperors for protection, in exchange for crowning those emperors, and ceded imperial territories to bishops as vassals under imperial control. After German emperors made expeditions to Italy to help their popes when their lands were attacked, this led them to claim the right to have some say in the election of the popes. The breakdown of the central government was thus paralleled by a disruption of centralised control over the Catholic church, which became frequently demoralised under feudal conditions. The notion that a German king could appoint a pope would then be challenged by the Gregorian reform movement beginning in 1054 under the rule of Henry IV, which would shift the election of the papacy to a college of cardinals, and the papacy would handle its own officials.
The Holy Roman Emperor continued approving appointments to the papal office until the cardinals elected Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII in 1073, and sought to organise and consolidate the power of the papacy. This new pope was wholly devoted the reform program to restore the church as a centralising and independent force, and wanted to make changes to the church, including the abolition of the practice of married priests; banning the practice of simony, by which bishops could buy their way into office; no bishops were to be appointed by laymen; all new bishops were to travel to Rome to receive the pallium, or the ceremonial scarf, from the pope himself, and not the emperor, and as the only universal bishop. The pope was to have the sole authority to remove bishops. and was convinced that the pope was by right the ruler of all Christendom and the direct representative of God on earth, and therefore intended to raise the pope above all of the princes and kings of the earth, while the latter were to serve the papacy as armed police chiefs who could be toppled from power by absolving their subjects from their oaths of office if monarchs refused to comply with papal mandates on the basis of asserting the Pope’s complete supremacy over the church. His overriding ambition was thus to impose the pretensions and confirm the power of the Catholic church while the papacy was to be exalted over secular authorities, which included the power to depose emperors if they were deemed to be unfit for office.
While the popes who came just before Gregory had often forbidden the clergy to receive investiture from laymen, Gregory re-issued this prohibition in 1075. In forbidding investiture by laymen, Gregory was attempting nothing less than an upheaval of church administrations over the issue of appointing bishops, and removing this authority from feudal control, as the most important members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The bishops and abbots were often government officials, exercising in Germany and Italy powers like those of the aristocracy. The German king also relied on them for advice and assistance in carrying on government, and they were also among his chief allies in his constant struggles with his vassals while subject to monarchical control and being independent heads of principalities within the confines of the empire. Gregory then threatened to undermine the authority of secular authorities by insisting that the bishops were to be chosen according to canon law through the diocese clergy electing a bishop of their choice, without a secular authority’s participation or approval, in contrast to their appointment by a feudal lord. In addition to being the king of the German states, Henry IV was also the king of Lombardy and the nominal ruler of most Italy, which exercised the closest influence on the papacy, and was brought into conflict over appointing his nominees to high ecclesiastical offices, including the key archbishopric of Milan, which had been strenuous disputes between royal and ecclesiastical candidates. Gregory called a synod to consider the state of church affairs in the German states in December 1075, specifically concentrating attention on breaking the power of the emperor of the German states’ control of the church as the most powerful authority in western Europe, which would in turn be followed by the less influential feudal rulers. Including Henry IV himself under threat of excommunication. The resulting Investiture Controversy exposed how lay investiture of bishops as feudal lords in the German states supported the emperor who appointed them for his benefit as vassals and imperial regional administrators, whereas the secular lords supported the papacy for political reasons to preserve their personal power. Henry IV was appalled at this unprecedented exercise of papal authority, which took place when the pope was in conflict with the Normans, the Lombard cities, and the king of France, as well as opposition to him from the nobility within Rome itself.
Lay investiture of clerics and simony was prohibited, which would withdraw the German bishops from being vassals of the German king, and would make them independent heads of principalities within the Holy Roman Empire. A number of Henry advisors and supporters were laid under threat of excommunication if they did not promptly make their peace with the pope as God’s leading representative on earth, to whom all bishops owed unconditional obedience, or would otherwise no longer be entitled to represent their sees. Five of Henry IVs councillors were already excommunicated for simony, when Gregory VII sent envoys with reproaches that caused a chasm between the empire and the papacy, formally criticising Henry IV’s disregard of the ban placed on those five councillors and not fulfilling his pledges of submission to the papacy, and reinforced the command against any form of lay investiture.
The election of Gregory VII as pope had been irregular and tumultuous, and largely disregarded the election decree of 1059, and Henry IV did not provide his consent for his election, which had not been formally requested. Henry IV also chose to emulate Henry III who had deposed three erring pontiffs. Open conflict broke out upon Henry IV appointing the archbishop of Milan, who Gregory VII rejected as suited for this office, and challenged the principle of the emperor’s right to make ecclesiastical appointments. The forthcoming Investiture contest regarding who had the right to invest bishops, leading temporal or ultimate temporal spiritual authority, resulted in Henry convening German synod of bishops at Worms, convened on 24 January 1076, which renounced obedience to the papacy and demanded Gregory VII’s abdication. In turn, Gregory excommunicated and absolved all of Henry’s vassals in the German and Italian of their oaths of fealty. Henry did not have the support of the German princes who wanted to depose him, and there was a widespread revolt, which spread from the Saxons to many discontented bishops and princes in the German states, against the emperor in Germany with the support of the papacy.
While the bishops of Lombardy accepted the decrees of Worms, a number of southern German princes opposing Henry, who they considered to be embarrassing for them, began forming an alliance at an assembly in Tribur in October 1076 for the purpose of electing a new king, agreeing that the affairs of the kingdom were to be determined by the pope in Augsburg during the next festival of the purification, when they would discuss the state of the monarchy, and collectively discuss the future of the church and of the empire. During this time, Henry was made subject to receiving papal absolution within a year and a day, and was forbidden from choosing his advisers and not to administer the affairs of governing until the absolution was granted. Whereas emperors had earlier deposed unsatisfactory popes, not any pope had ever attempted to remove a German monarch in the exercise of spiritual authority. Many bishops and princes ignored Henry’s proclamation of the deposition of the pope, and exploited this dispute to advance their own political purposes, and threatened to dethrone Henry by calling for the election of a new king, unless the excommunication of Henry was lifted by February 1077.
As Henry was unable to suppress this revolt that could potentially lead to permanently diminishing the power of the German monarchy, he sought to maintain his reign by separating the union of the papacy with the German princes at any cost by setting off to see Gregory in January 1077, and effectively beg to retain control over his kingdom from the enemy of the empire’s independence. Gregory VII doubted Henry’s intentions, and since he suspected that he would confront him with force. Upon hearing that Henry had crossed the Alps, Gregory retreated from Mantua to take refuge at the castle of Countess Matilda of Tuscany at Canossa, where Henry met Gregory on 25 January to obtain absolution there while they faced each other directly and privately. Gregory kept him in a humiliating position of self-abasement for three days in the coarse garments of a pilgrim during three days of negotiations, until he finally condescended to receive him and give him absolution from excommunication along with his excommunicated councillors, subject to promising that Gregory should be allowed to resolve problems in the empire by satisfying the German princes’ demands, and ensure the safe passage of the pope and his envoys to the empire. However, Gregory did not directly reinstate Henry as king of the German states, which caused continued uncertainty about the political order therein.
Although Henry IV had won a great diplomatic victory at the cost of tarnishing the honour of the empire through his abasement, this struggle between the empire and the papacy continued as the same grounds for conflict remained, with the papacy elevating itself into the universal position that the empire had held. The feudal lords of the German states who had revolted at the instigation of the pope became increasingly more hostile, and chose Rudolf of Swabia as a rival king who expressly renounced the right of investing bishops, in March 1077, while Gregory remained neutral in this civil conflict for three years. Henry did not heed the papacy’s measures against lay investiture, and continually annulled elections and publicly invested who he chose, while Rudolf was more pliant and waged war against Henry. These rival nobles under Rudolf were left to face Henry’s vengeance, after the papacy renewed the decree against investiture in 1080, excommunicated and deposed Henry a second time during the Lenten synod, and granted the kingship to Rudolf as Gregory’s intention was establishing universal rule.
The humiliation of the emperor was considered to have been exceedingly harsh in the view of most European rulers, especially as Gregory appeared to go back on his forgiveness and started supporting Henry’s enemies. Encouraged by Rudolph’s victory at Flarchheim on 27 January 1080, Gregory followed his supporters to take the decisive step of renewing the ban against Henry, based on the accusation of not maintaining peace and order, and declared Rudolph as the rightful monarch. Henry reasserted his authority over nearly all of the German states in reaction to this assertion of the papacy claiming supremacy in temporal and spiritual matters. This ban proved to be ineffective, as Henry’s supporters remained in place, and garnered greater support in both northern Italy and the German states while aristocratic rulers turned against the papacy. The earlier rebellion further waned following Rudolf’s death in battle at Hohenmolsen in 1080, and assembled German prelates that declared Gregory to be deposed. Nineteen bishops assembled at Mainz placed all of the blame for the civil war on Gregory. A synod in Brixen declared Gregory to be deposed, and appointed his successor, Clement III, the archbishop of Ravenna, and thereby opened a new schism that would continue for the next twenty years. Henry then invaded Italy in 1081 with the intention of installing a new pope and re-establishing imperial power there, which was followed by three years of siege fighting. Gregory initially called on his Norman allies who had recently occupied southern Italy and occupied Rome in 1084 to defend the papacy. However, Robert Guiscard remained preoccupied with the eastern empire to be able to provide any assistance. The Romans themselves revolted against the increasingly unpopular papacy of Gregory that had led to ongoing armed conflict, and allowed Henry to eventually enter the city in May 1081, until Normans were able to retake the city in May 1084. Gregory had to flee the city to the south under Norman protection. Henry then had a Roman synod depose Gregory, and acknowledged Clement III as the Pope on Easter Day, 1084, who then crowned Henry as the emperor on the same day. Gregory remained lacking support among the Roman population, and had to flee to Salerno in Norman territory controlled by his ally, Robert Guiscard, and remained in exile there until he died the following year.
Henry IV was unable to strengthen imperial power, as new revolts broke out in Germany, and sporadic warfare in Germany continued until his death in 1106 as various feudal lords constantly strove to extend their powers at the expense of the emperor, and Henry’s power in Italy almost disappeared. Successive popes supported the German rebels against the empire, and Henry died under the excommunication of the papacy. The dispute between papal and imperial successors continued until 1122 when the pope, Calixtus II, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V, reached a compromise on this dispute at the Concordat of Worms, in which the papacy acquired greater power and independence at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire. Episcopal elections of abbots and bishops in the German states were to be conducted in accordance with canon law, but were to be held in the presence of the emperor or his representative. Moreover, the emperor was accorded the right to invest in the newly elected bishop with the regalia, or the lands and temporal powers of this office, while the competent prelate of the Church invested him with the spiritualia, or religious powers. Thus, the centralisation of the monarchy in Germany was limited by the assertion of papal authority, as the unquestioned control which earlier emperors had exercised over ecclesiastical appointments was reduced. The papacy was also exempted from imperial control while retaining the power to appoint bishops and abbots.
Following the conclusion of this Concordat, there ensued a period of comparative calm in the relations between the pope and the emperor, while the latter was unable to exercise authority over the relatively autonomous rulers of the German states, in contrast to establishing cohesive monarchies in England and France. New tensions in the German states after the Salian imperial line died out in 1125 with the death of Henry V. Rival families disputed the imperial position for several decades during the subsequent reign of Conrad of the Staufen household that later composed the Swabian Hohenstaufen dynasty. Among great nobles who taken every opportunity to seize royal rights during private warfare, the Hohenstaufen dynasty became practically independent of the monarchy and all other temporal powers while extending the influence of the Holy Roman Empire to its greatest extent from 1137 onward. Their first goal after securing power in their home region was control of the city of Rome and of Italy. They were rivaled by the Welf dynasty, who supported the cause of papal claims to rule in both the German and Italian states.
The Hohenstaufen successor Friedrich I, also known as Barbarossa, was elected to the imperial throne in 1152 and inaugurated his reign by making peace with the Welf dynasty, to whom he was related on his mother’s side, by restoring their limited possessions. The cessation of quarrels in the German states allowed him to have a free hand to attempt a genuine subjugation of Italy, which the popes were bound to resist with their allies – the Normans to the south, and the towns of Lombardy in the north that had been able to overthrow the control of feudal superiors. Pope Eugene III, who had lost prestige due to the failure of the Second Crusade, and was faced with demands for the papacy to abandon its temporal possessions, appealed to Frederick Barbarossa in 1153 for assistance, with whom he concluded the first Treaty of Constance, pledging to restore Eugene III to the papal control in exchange for his coronation as the Holy Roman Emperor in the face of domestic dissent from feudal rulers in the East Francia.
Frederick Barbarossa invaded Italy in 1155 to reduce those towns and the papacy to his control. There was then fighting between Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa over the independence of the papacy, rather than being controlled by a secular authority, and declared his right complete power to elect or dismiss members of the clergy, without being subject to papal authority. This would lead to long standing conflicts between the empire and papacy. He won several military victories against those who opposed him, but was never able to hold Italy securely, whereas Alexander III undermined Barbarossa’s power at home by encouraging the Welf-Hohenstaufen quarrel in Germany. A decisive battle was fought at Legnano in 1176, where the armies of the Lombard cities that had formed themselves into a league with papal support, along with their allies from Venice, Sicily and the Byzantine empire met and defeated the imperial German army, as infantry equipped with pikes and crossbows proved capable of withstanding the charge of heavy armed knights.
Frederick abandoned the hope of re-establishing full imperial control of Italy after this defeat, and then arranged a peace with the pope in 1177. Peace was signed with the Lombard cities in the Peace of Constance, which accorded the towns of northern Italy a wide autonomy. Frederick also came to terms with the Normans in 1186, where they had acquired possessions in southern Italy and then Sicily under the leadership of Robert Guiscard by 1072, and then his brother Roger who ultimately expelled the Saracen Arabs from Sicily and Malta by 1091, and was thereafter crowned as Roger I of a Sicilian kingdom. Further internecine struggles also took place in the German states, as Henrich the Lion, the Duke of Bavaria and Saxony was expanding his power in his personal possessions, which also entailed pressing eastward into Slavic territories, and asserting his independence against Barbarossa, which was characteristic of the perpetual lack of cohesion with the Holy Roman Empire. Taking part in the Third Crusade in Palestine would then take precedence over these internal conflicts, and later perished during this journey in an accidental drowning while crossing a river.
A significant change came over the German imperial administration also took place during the twelfth century, After the time of Gregory VII, the German emperors could no longer safely rely on the obedience of German clergymen to administer the empire, and a new basis of the administration had to be found. The Hohenstaufen emperors therefore adopted a policy of awarding small estates to landless commoners who raised their social ranking and composed a lesser nobility serving as vassals of more powerful nobles who could distribute resources to them. According to a royal charter of 1134, these ministeriales as a new strata of nobility that served the emperor directly without any feudal intermediary, and many free knights, seeking the same rewards, voluntarily gave up their own rank and privileges and entered into this connection in exchange for services of a military nature. They composed the core of support for the Hohenstaufen dynasty in their struggles against independent princes, the papacy, and interventions against foreign states. Rudiments of a salaried bureaucracy thus began to develop, staffed partly by ministeriales, and partly by lawyers trained in Roman law. The ministeriales composed the nucleus of the Hohenstaufen royal family armies, who helped these kings in their military struggles with the princes, the papacy, and the Lombards.
The Holy Roman Emperors continued ruling according to who had to be elected by great vassals who maintained their privileges and independence. The German states vacillated between having a central feudal monarchy whether or not the vassals of the central authority could be pacified, such as under the leadership of Frederick I of Hohenstaufen, also known as Barbarossa (1152-1190) or when the princes of Germany as independent rulers constituted a loose alliance of sovereign territories headed by district administrators, consisting of principalities, duchies, counties, free imperial cities, among other domains, under the vague sovereignty of an elected king, One of the most curious examples of petty sovereignties along the banks of the Rhine River were the three counts of Leiningen.
This system functioned to maintain relative order as long as Frederick Barbarossa and his son Henrich VI until his death in 1197. Great feudal nobles, both secular and ecclesiastical, were then able to defy the rudimentary administration that the Hohenstaufen emperors had begun building. A succession dispute over the election of Phillip I and Otto IV broke out and continued until Friedrich II came to power with the support of the papacy in exchange for abandoning control over Sicily, a pledged he reneged on, as well as not engaging in the Fifth Crusade, and became the undisputed king in 1215, and granted the underlying nobles greater independence and rights. Heirs of the ministeriales became “imperial knights” whose only political superior was an emperor who they no longer always obeyed. As a result, the German states came to be an aggregation of large and small secular and ecclesiastical states. In contrast to the towns in France and England where they constituted the backbone of royal power by supplying taxes to the central government, German towns either fell under the control of a local prince or asserted their effective sovereignty as free imperial cities that were independent of outside of either imperial or regional rulers’ control.
Emperor Frederick II (1211-1250), the son of Henry VI and the last Hohenstaufen emperor, did not assert his authority over lay and ecclesiastical lords who were transformed into petty sovereigns by his grant of privileges to them in 1220 and 1231, and abandoned the earlier rights of the earlier Holy Roman Emperors. The Holy Roman Empire hereafter became a collection of states bound together only in name and scarcely in fact by a common fealty to the emperor. Friedrich’s action was motivated by his interest in his Norman inheritance, and then hoped to create a strong and united Italian state on the basis of his power as king of Sicily. Abandoning the German states meant simply meant relinquishing claims that would be difficult to enforce in any case, and which would be impossible to enforce if he were to concentrate attention on building up his power in Italy. Frederick II was also known for arranging for the sultan of Egypt, Al Kamil, to surrender Jerusalem and a strip of seacoast during the Sixth Crusade in the Treaty of 1229 in a remarkable act of diplomacy.
Frederick’s plans for Italy aroused the bitter hostility of the popes, who were all imbued with the ideal of papal supremacy over all of the rulers of Christendom, and then excommunicated him four times. Both Friedrich and his heirs on one hand and the popes on the other relied mainly on paid armies of mercenaries composed of commoners fighting on foot with gunpowder fired weapons, rather than nobility on horseback, as a result of an increased circulation of currency, rather than the earlier system of depending on vassals in exchange for land grants. The papacy could also seek support from the English and French monarchies. Manfred, the last of the Hohenstaufens in the Italian states as the king of Sicily, lost the Battle of Benevento in 1266 to the pope’s French ally, Charles of Anjou the brother of the French king Louis XI, who drove the Germans out of southern Italy and Sicily. This signified the end of the German empire in the Italian states, which, like the various German states, remained divided between towns and various independent nobles who established their regional authority, and maintained their power by building castles that served as local administrative centres.
Henry VI’s death in 1250 following imprisonment and execution at the hands of Charles of Anjou marked the end of the conflict between papacy and Holy Roman Empire. Charles of Anjou retained control over Apulia as a result of ending hostilities against the Holy Roman Empire in an alliance with the papacy, but was deprived of controlling Sicily. Charles as the king of Sicily became the subject of increasingly continual discontent among the local population, where he had imposed heavy taxation for the previous crusade, and the announcement of renewed tax burdens for the next crusade in Syria caused greater resentment for what was considered to be an unnecessary invasion attempt for personal profit, just as with the conquest of Naples that was undertaken under the guise of having a crusading purpose. A conspiracy among the Ghibellines led to killing all of the approximately eight thousand French in Sicily on the night of 30 March 1282, in what became known as the Sicilian Vespers. The Holy Roman Empire endured renewed civil strife within the empire where various feudal states sought greater autonomy.
There was a prolonged succession dispute to the leadership of the Holy Roman Empire between supporters and opponents of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, known as “The Great Interregnum,” when not a single monarch could achieve universal recognition, as the empire was devoid of an effective central authority, which would become divided among the princes and cities. Power would be concentrated in these petty states, as the earlier elective monarchy functioning with the sanction of the papacy would become a ducal aristocracy in which regional rulers would not pledge allegiance to a central authority, and the cities would maintain their independence from the aristocratic rulers. These circumstances culminated into the fragmentation of the empire into a multitude of separate states in which local rulers consolidated their holdings. This included growing cities that acquired greater local autonomy, when there was not any central authority. Independent cities created commercial unions that would enable them to assert their own political and economic autonomy from the regional nobility and monarchies during this time, which included the Swabian, Rhenish, Lusatian and Hanseatic Leagues, which organised collective defence, and regulated weights, measures, and coinage while asserting their autonomy with armed guilds that formed their main strength. Ghent and Bruges in Flanders became noted for their civil privileges, manufacturing commerce, and industry while forming a Hansa, or commercial association during the twelfth century, which expanded to seventeen cities. The Hanseatic League, a commercial as well as political association that originated with an agreement between Lübeck and Hamburg in 1241 would effectively function as an independent state while consisting of several member cities that formulated foreign policy, waged wars, and monopolised trade in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Separate cities in the Rhneland, Swabia and Franconia that were in open enmity with petty nobility joined their resources for mutual protection.
The Holy Roman Empire remained functioning under the representation of a minor count, Rudolf I of Hapsburg, who married his son to the daughter of Charles of Anjou, who pledged his allegiance to the papacy and the French monarch. He was eventually elected as the king of the German states in 1273, without the official ratification of the papacy, while also ending the Great Interregnum. He followed Frederick’s example of abandoning attempts at central control, and instead expanded his own possessions. Although Rudolf was able to establish control over Bohemia, Austria, Styria, and Istria by 1286, the German states remained divided, and its king was without central monarchical authority while power existed mainly in the hands of the king’s powerful vassals. The German kings continued to call themselves emperors, but few went to Rome to be crowned by the pope, and no other serious effort was made to reconquer the Italian territory and following the examples of Otto the Great, Frederick I and Frederick II, while the Holy Roman Empire was devoid of an effective central authority. Austrian possessions continued to be extended in the Holy Roman Empire after Rudolf of Hapsburg came to power. German princes then elected kings from different royal houses to maintain their own independence from a central authority. The German states agreed in the Declaration of Renza in 1338 that the election of the emperor would no longer be subject to the papacy’s approval, and would then be chosen by the rulers of the states of the empire, who would simultaneously become the king of the German states.
Since there Holy Roman Empire no longer had a permanent central authority as local rulers maintained their sovereignty over separate states, a decision was made to separate the administration of the German states and the Holy Roman Empire in the form of the Golden Bull of 1356. Karl IV, who had began his reign in 1346, consolidated the election of the emperor by seven separate electors constituting a college of prince-electors with the underlying hope of ending civil warfare as a result of succession disputes, which separated the imperial authorities from the separate states. Three ecclesiastical electors – the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, and four secular ones – the king of Bohemia, the count palatinate of the Rhine, the duchy of Saxony-Wittemberg, and the margrave of Brandenburg as independent rulers functioned within their indivisible holdings, while these separate states altogether constituted an electoral monarchy administering the affairs of the empire in their separate jurisdictions. As the Holy Roman Empire hereafter depended on these electors, they would eventually begin to regularly choose the ruler of the Austrian possessions as their emperor, so that title of emperor became hereditary during Hapsburg rule.
Vassals of this fragmented empire became hereditary princes who maintained support for the emperor at their own inclination, and expected their independent interests to be appeased by receiving concessions augmenting their wealth and power at the expense of this weak central authority, such as the emperor conceding royal dues from customs, mines and other local resources to the princes, and acquiring greater authority over provincial estates in which less privileged segments of local populations were afforded assembly representation, in exchange for local rulers petitioning them for assistance when necessary, with the potential for receiving grants and privileges. Cities achieved their independence from the authority of the emperor, and hitherto free peasantry who lost the protection of the central monarchy and fell under the jurisdiction of the nobility. Imperial revenue was mainly generated through contributions in exchange for granting privileges of exercising greater authority in their states, exemptions from certain duties, legitimising other illegitimate heirs, settling disputed inheritances, levying taxes on Jews within the empire, and trafficking in titles of nobility and university positions. Social positions as whole became divided among the emperor, ecclesiastical nobility composed of bishoprics and abbeys, temporal princes, the counts of the empire, the knights of the empire, the hereditary country nobility who pledged allegiance to the emperor while also sought to extend their authority against the princes or were reduced to submission by more powerful neighbours, the vassals of the princes, free citizens of the cities and the free peasantry, and serfs.
The Hapsburgs eventually established a semblance of unity in the territories under their control upon Frederick of Hapsburg becoming elected the leader of the Holy Roman Empire in 1440, and was then later crowned as the emperor by the pope in 1452. The Hapsburg lineage would hereafter become the permanent emperors for the remainder of the Holy Roman Empire’s existence, which would continue expanding through establishing intermarriage ties, dynastic inheritances, and conquests. Fragmentation of political authority continued as various territories continued to be redistributed throughout the disintegration of the earlier stem duchies, which were superseded by smaller hereditary principalities that were held as fiefs by princes of the empire and the consolidation of their powers. The Frankish duchies of Lotharingia, Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia and Swabia continually changed political shapes, including parts of Swabia and Lotharingia coalescing into Switzerland as an enduring entity that became permanent in 1499, whereas Swabia as a whole disintegrated into different tiny states. Connections between a central authority and a network of subordinate ties were not ensured in the various German states throughout the Middle Ages that caused continued fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, whereas there were separate developments in consolidating a central monarchy in other European states, such as in France and England, were established on the strength of firmer ties between the central monarchy and its vassals.
Establishing order authority developed separately in an eastward movement on the continent. Much of the early eastward colonisation under the Hohenstaufen dynasty was peaceful, with German, Dutch and Flemish settlers who feudal lords invited to become settlers receiving larger parcels of land than they had inhabited that were consolidated in single rather than scattered allotments. They also introduced agricultural methods to the Slavs relating to reclaiming hitherto seemingly worthless marsh and swamp lands, as well as the marshes around Bremen, where their methods were adopted by German settlers. Thinly populated Slavic lands along the southern Baltic coastline, Silesia and Transylvania were rich in marsh districts and uncut uninhabited forests where these settlers introduced new agricultural methods. German colonists thus came to settle in the territories of the Czechs, Moravians, Poles, the Baltic tribes of the Pomeranians, Lithuanians and Abrodites, and the Sorbs in the Spree forest. Count Adolf of Holstein, a vassal of Henry the Lion of Saxony, called in Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian and Frisian colonists who began building Lübeck, which became the first German city on the Baltic Sea. Henry the Lion waged constant wars against them that led to developing unprecedented German colonisation of formerly Slavic territories, along with Albrecht the Bear who originally possessed territory in the Anhalt and was granted the North Mark by emperor Lothar in 1134, followed by later acquiring the Slavic territories of Havelberg and Brandenburg. They vastly increased the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire at the expense of the Slavs through warfare as well as new colonisation. Henry the Lion’s warfare led to creating the duchies of Mecklenburg Strelitz and Schwerin following the subjugation of the Abodrites, and expansion into Pomerania and Rugen.
Later colonisation in these regions was motivated by religion with the support of crusaders’ funds, as well as waging the northern crusades against the pagan Wends from 1147, which left devastation and depopulation of the land that prepared the way for calling in German colonists. A minish rush led to the colonisation of the territory around the Erz mountains where silver was discovered in about 1160, along with tin and copper. The systematic colonisation of Brandenburg under Albrecht the Bear took place at the same time, along with the displacement of the earlier Slavic populations, with these territories allocated to his vassals and new settlers. Monastic orders were especially active in furthering colonisation, and established themselves as far north as Usedom by 1150, while taking responsibility for calling in settlers into reclaimed lands.
Ongoing warfare that continued for the next three centuries in the east enabled the Order of the Teutonic Knights, that had been founded in Acre in 1192, to lead the German colonisation eastward on the southern region of the Baltic in separate crusades there from 1200 to 1309, culminating in exporting grain and amber from fortified ports on the Baltic Sea, while missionaries conducted evangelising efforts alongside resident administrators in Marienburg as the capital of the order. The Teutonic Order became germanising agents after having left the efforts of the Third Crusade in Palestine in 1191, which was followed by engaging in subjugating the Balkan Kumani elements by protecting the boundaries of Hungary during the reign of Andreas II, who banished them due to their suspiciously increasingly independent power. They then later began subjugating the pagan Prussians and other Slavic tribes, including the early Prussians as separate Baltic pastoralist pagan tribes between the Vistula and the Memel region, including the Lithuanians, as the last pagans in Europe, who were scattered over a wide region along the Baltic Sea coast. The first major attempt to evangelise them by force was the Wendish crusade against them that took began in 1147, which resulted in Henry the Lion of Saxony increasingly expanding his power through extending his territory. Eastward expansion was followed by the Livonian crusade in 1198 and against the Prussians in 1215. The Teutonic Knights intervened in Prussia in 1226 with the sanction of the bishop of Prussia, the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, with other crusaders from the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdom of Poland and the duchy Pomerania, which further opened the way to Germanic and Slavic settlers following their conquests in an eastward expansion from the west, as Christian merchants and missionaries from the west were joined by armed escorts, which blurred the lines between trade, conversion and conquest, with the papacy sanctioning sanctified warfare in northern crusades organised under ecclesiastical authority to establish its permanent presence through armed colonisation.
The Teutonic knights established their own crusader states in eastern Europe, while they considered themselves to be direct subject to the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and the papacy. Prussia was subdued in approximately in 1230, while the Knights of the Sword conquered Livonia. These knights crossed the Vistula by 1231, and established their authority over the entire bank of the river as far north as Culm, and then reached its mouth by 1237 and began extending their territorial possessions along the Baltic, which then led to founding Thorn in 1231, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with its centre of governance in Memel in 1251, and Königsberg in 1254, proceeding by establishing strongholds and building garrisoned fortresses that would extend their spheres of influence during the advance of the main army, in the same manner that had been practiced in Palestine, while waging war against the duchy of Lithuania and the kingdom of Poland, as well as marauding Mongols in 1241, and the kingdom of Novgorod in 1242. Colonists followed everywhere they had conquered and established farmland and municipal functions, with opposition to their authority having been overcome by 1283. Their centre of authority was later established at Marienburg in 1309, which consolidate this order’s presence in northeastern Europe, with Germanic territorial boundaries likewise established in Silesia and Posen.
The pretext for its Christianisation mission later ended in 1386, when Prince Jagiello of Lithuania married the heiress of Polish monarchy, which united these two countries in which Christianity was imposed as the state religion. However, further warfare would ensue between this Order and the Polish and Lithuanian kingdoms, including at the battle of Grünwald/Tannenberg in July 1410 that greatly weakened the Order, which was compelled to cede territory to Poland, and enabled other Slavic people to encroach upon German populations along the Baltic. The cities that the Order had established would become particularly important for the development of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic Sea coast. Colonists followed into ninety-three new cities and fourteen hundred villages that were established by 1410 as self-governing administrative centres with local Teutonic rulers governing separate districts, and became subject to the authority of the Order’s grandmaster as its head of gradually more permanently established settlement with agrarian fields parcelled out to new peasant settlers by this armed monastic order that maintained trade connections with the Hanseatic League, and building the Marienburg as the world’s largest brick castle.
An alliance formed between Livonia and Poland in 1410 composed a threat to Prussia and its trade along the Vistula River that remained subject to toll gate fees, leading to a major clash against their combined forces against those of the Teutonic Order between Grünewald and Tannenburg. Losses against the prevailing power of the Poles and the Lithuanians led to the Treaty of Thorn in 1411 that temporarily halted the order’s expansionist efforts, and ineffective successors of the earlier leaders opened the way to increasingly greater degrees of factionalism and regionalism, leading to increased fragmentation of authorities within the territories of this order, in which earlier jurisdictions became decentralised. The Prussian estates voiced opposition to the authority of the order, and solicited support from Poland, which led to establishing the Prussian Confederation in 1440, which united the primary cities of Danzig, Elbing, Königsberg, Culm, and Thorn in opposition against the authority of the Teutonic Order, and create an alliance between the Prussian Confederation and the Kingdom of Poland.
Separate wars against the Polish kingdom culminating in the Thirteen Years’ War in 1454, which exposed how the Teutonic Order proved to be unprepared while lacking defensive resources to defend all of its territories against combined Polish and Prussian forces. This prolonged conflict further weakened the coherence of this order, which rendered it obsolete as an institution that had the purpose of subduing and Christianising pagan peoples in the Baltic region. Bolstering its defences with mercenaries following the decimations of earlier populations as a result of the plagues necessarily led to increasing taxation for this purpose, which in turn led to discontent among merchants and the nobility. A revolt broke out against the order in 1454, and the confederation appealed for assistance from the Polish king, Casimir IV, in exchange for becoming his vassal state. The Teutonic Order appeared to maintain its control by defeating in the battle of König on 18 September 1454, but ultimately became decimated in a prolonged war of attrition, culminating in losing its stronghold in Marienburg to the Poles in 1460, and the destruction of the order’s fleet and making it more difficult to secure mercenaries to bolster defences. The elector of Brandenburg who dreaded the increasing power of Poland attempted to stem its influence with Bohemian mercenaries who he was unable to sustain. They revolted against him and sold sole the whole of western Prussia to Casimir. The German population in turn revolted against Polish rule. A final attempt to seize Konitz succeeded, and Pope John Paul II sending a delegate to sanction a peace settlement. The Order’s possessions were reduced into as a vassal state of the Polish kingdom in the second Treaty of Thorn in 1466, with western Prussia becoming a part of Poland as an autonomous region known as Royal Prussia, while the order retained control over eastern Prussia, which later became effectively independent under the authority of the Livonian Order composed of members of a branch of the Teutonic Order. Prussia thus ultimately became a secular state as a vassal of the Polish kingdom, with its new capital set up in Königsberg at the end of the war with the signing of the Second Peace of Thorn on 19 October 1466. Western Prussia became Royal Prussia, whereas eastern Prussia remained a separate sovereign state under the authority of the Teutonic Order as a vassal state of the kingdom of Poland.
What were significant developments during this period of European history?
What were their causes and effects?
Structured problem solving
1. Students begin with brainstorming the reading question prompt
2. Organise groups of 4.
3. Follow the steps in a problem solving procedure:
Identify the problem
Generate possible solutions
Evaluate and test the various solutions
Decide on a mutually acceptable solution
Implement the solution (in writing)
Evaluate the solution (supported by the evidence)
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