Holy Roman Research Articles

Central Europe in the Fifteenth Century: Patterns of Conflict and Negotiation

Abstract The nine articles in this collection are the product of two workshops hosted at the University of Chicago in 2022 and 2023 in affiliation with the University of Vienna. They build on recent work that has called attention to the extraordinary political and religious diversity in the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, and Central Europe more broadly. Pushing back against older historiography, in which this period was frequently overlooked or framed by uncritical use of such broad categories as the “state,” the “territory,” the “estates,” and the “feud,” this collection recognizes the polycentric nature of the fifteenth century's structures and institutions. Specifically, these articles return to the sources, especially documents of practice rather than normative texts, to open the door to a new understanding of conflicts and negotiations. They illuminate the patterns of conflict and negotiation evident in specific historical contexts by examining actors, networks, and practices of community building—as well as the processes through which conflicts emerged, evolved, and were negotiated and settled. Rather than relying on time-honored categories and meta-narratives, the contributors embrace the messiness of social and political relations and of the extant source material to shine new light on key themes in the fifteenth century's history.

Racializing Pacific Islanders: Jewish Facial Features, Popular Anthropology, and the German Colonization of the Palau Islands, 1873–1925

In 1862, the German naturalist Carl Semper traveled through the Palau Islands, a Spanish colony in the Southwestern Pacific. He published an account of his travels in 1873 and claimed that the people of Palau possessed Jewish facial features. Although his book was rejected by professional anthropologists in Imperial Germany, popular anthropologists widely circulated his observation that Palauans shared physical characteristics with Jewish people. This article demonstrates that the racialization of Pacific Islanders, specifically those inhabiting the Palau Islands, was rooted in antisemitic notions about Jewish people as a race built on stereotypes about particular traits. This topic has been thus far overlooked by scholars of German colonialism, German anthropology, and German discourses on the Pacific Islands, particularly the Palau Islands.

“There Can Be No Agreement to Take up Arms against the Turks Unless We First Restore the Empire”: The Fall of Constantinople and the Rise of a New Political Dynamic in the Holy Roman Empire, 1453–1467

Abstract While the Europe-wide cultural impact of the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmed II is well known, its political reverberations in the Holy Roman Empire have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that the events of 1453 inaugurated a new dynamic in the empire that facilitated the polity's consolidation and the creation of new collective institutions within it long before Maximilian I (1486–1519), whose reign is often presented as a constitutional turning point. Some prince-electors had been calling for more effective peace-keeping and judicial institutions for decades before 1453 but lacked the leverage to compel kings and emperors of the Romans to accept political change on their terms. The fall of Constantinople provided a focal point for these negotiations: in return for promising to support an anti-Ottoman crusade, the reformists were able to force a compromise on new peace-keeping legislation at the diets of the 1450s and 1460s. This compromise was catalyzed by public pressure. There was a widely held expectation that leading imperial protagonists should fulfill this mission to defend Christendom, manifested in orations, diplomatic missives, poetry and songs, plays, and early printed pamphlets produced within and for a range of German-speaking public spheres.

Finance capitalism in industrializing autocracies: Evidence from corporate balance sheets in imperial Germany and Russia

AbstractRussia and Germany both industrialized later than England and the United States, and both countries retained authoritarian autocracies until World War I. On the basis of a large collection of firm‐level balance sheets, this paper presents new evidence revealing the likely impact of these systematic disparities on emerging industry's access to capital. Contrary to the standard ‘economic backwardness’ and ‘law and finance’ literatures, we argue that differences in financing between Russian and German corporations were consistent with authoritarian control of corporate entry as well as Russia's agricultural economy and overall lower level of economic development.

[Family reconstitution and online genealogies to analyze the sex-specific differential mortality in the historical context].

Family reconstitution and data from online genealogies, such as FamiLinx, are two potential sources for investigating mortality dynamics for the period before official lifetables became available. In this paper, we use two of them, the family reconstitution of Imhof and the FamiLinx dataset based on geni.com, to estimate dynamics in life expectancy and discuss the sex-specific differential mortality in the German Empire. Sex-specific lifetables are estimated for the territory of the German Empire from the individual data of the family reconstitution and the online genealogies. On the basis of these lifetables, we estimate the conditional life expectancy and derive the corresponding sex-specific differential mortality. Findings are compared with the official lifetable of the German Empire in 1871-1910. The contribution of each age group to the differential mortality is determined using the stepwise-replacement algorithm. The family reconstitution overestimates conditional life expectancy less than FamiLinx after 1871, when official lifetables are available in the German Empire. However, both sources fail to capture the sex-specific mortality differentials of the official lifetables at the end of the nineteenth century and show ahigher life expectancy for males instead of females. The bias in sex-specific mortality rates is particularly pronounced in the age groups 15to45. Finally, we discuss possible explanations for the biased findings. Notability bias, the patriarchal approach to family trees, and maternal mortality are important mechanisms in the FamiLinx dataset. Censoring due to mobility serves as apotential reason for the bias in the family reconstitution.

Lutheran Churches during the Thirty Years War

Abstract Literary and artistic sources from the era of the Thirty Years War provide vivid accounts of the destruction and desecration of churches. This essay looks beyond these highly emotive descriptions and explores the fate of churches in Electoral Saxony, one of the worst-affected areas of the Holy Roman Empire. It considers patterns of destruction and argues that the plundering and desecration of Lutheran churches by Swedish troops was especially shocking to contemporaries. After the war, the reconstruction and refurbishing of churches was a key part of recovery. Records emphasize the importance of local communal endeavours in restoring what had been lost, from whole buildings to furnishings such as altarpieces and liturgical vessels. Wartime destruction reinforced the Lutheran proclivity for well-ordered and ornate places of worship. The essay ends with a consideration of wartime commemoration, investigating how the traumas of the period registered in the material fabric of Saxony’s churches.

:Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany

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Bismarck’s Circus: The German Foreign Office and the Emergence of an Imperial Secret Service, 1867–1890

Based upon this new study, the traditional image of Bismarck as a conservative statesman who did not rely on espionage to conduct his diplomacy must be completely revised. The available source material shows clearly that the German chancellor created and funded a large and effective secret service organization within the Foreign Office. This imperial intelligence agency existed outside of the constitutional framework of the German Empire but was an integral component of the conduct of diplomacy in this era and helped to make Bismarck the most successful statesman of his era.

Tagging Manorial Police Regulations in Medieval and Early Modern Flanders: Some Methodological Reflections

In the1990s, the team around Karl Härter and Michael Stolleis at the Max PlanckInstitute for European Legal History (today: the Max Planck Institute for LegalHistory and Legal Theory) developed a four-tier taxonomy to tag policeordinances in the Holy Roman Empire. This taxonomy contained some 1,200keywords, divided into 5 societal sectors, 25 regulatory areas, and c. 200police matters. The goal of this taxonomy was to enable comparative,interterritorial research. In our present research, we took this taxonomy,designed for princely legislation and ordinances promulgated in imperial towns,and applied it to a corpus of 109 medieval and early modern police regulations,containing thousands of legal provisions on all aspects of daily life in manorsin the county of Flanders. While the taxonomy was very helpful for analysingthese provisions, there were also some challenges related to the fact that wewere applying the taxonomy to another region and to another normative sourcetype. Given the continuing process of elaborating the taxonomy and the translation from Germaninto different languages, we argue that some coordination is necessary to avoidthat the meaning of the keywords gets lost in translation. Applying thetaxonomy is not a self-evident process. It is indispensable to have a users’guide and careful decision about translations to guarantee that the taxonomycan become a standard tool for tagging normative sources and enabling thecomparison of norms across territorial and linguistic borders.

From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family’s Odyssey, 1768–1870, by Alexander M. Martin

From the Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars: One Family’s Odyssey, 1768–1870, by Alexander M. Martin

The impact on Spain of Anglo-French informal imperialism in the colonization of Morocco, 1898–1914

In the decade before the First World War, Spain failed in its attempt to establish an independent role in the fierce competition between the French, British and German Empires for influence in the Western Mediterranean. The exercise of informal power by France and Britain forced Spain’s Restoration elites to conform to British and French imperial interests in France’s colonization of Morocco. The article suggests Spain’s governing parties were unable to manage the essential mediating role for collaborating elites in informal empires, as defined by Ronald Robinson, between the demands of the imperial powers and the political pressures arising from changing social forces within the country. Spain’s dilemma was an early example of the conflict that faced many newly independent colonies later in the twentieth century: how to reconcile the growing aspirations for national self-determination in a world dominated by competing imperial powers, themselves increasingly facing internal contradictions and crises.

Hunting, Planting and Malaria: How Cameroonian Ecosystems Changed the Basel Missionaries’ Worldviews

How did the land change the missionary? Almost all early missionaries, sent by the Basel Mission to the African colony Kamerun of the German Empire, died of malaria ( Klimafieber). On the fourth day after arrival in 1886 the first missionary died. In any case, Cameroonian ecosystems reshaped the self-conception and worldviews of missionaries. They used hunter's language, romanticised and conquered the land and its imagined virgin forests; Basel missionaries became strangers to themselves – involved in plantation policy, violent against, but at the same time absolutely dependent on, the local population. Most anthropological or historical studies on the Basel Mission and other Protestant missions in Cameroon focus on politics, economics, education and how the missionaries did change the land. However, how African agency influenced missionaries’ perspectives and activities is rarely acknowledged or discussed, which has so far limited historiographical works to a humanocentric understanding of mission. The article explores how the worldviews of the missionaries (especially Friedrich Autenrieth, Paul Steiner and Heinrich Norden) were challenged by the natural environment. In particular, it investigates how concepts of God, mission, culture/nature and human were renegotiated and reshaped while working and travelling the land. This analysis of printed travelogues, novels and articles therefore combines the question of the missionaries’ reactions to climate, disease, fauna, flora and the montane environment with an examination of how these were presented to specific target groups. To concentrate on the agency of African ecosystems consequently decentres the historiography of Christian mission that has separated the human from the non-human agency of nature. 1

Freedom and Totality: How Hegel Became Hegel

Hegel saw freedom not primarily as a property of the individual’s will, but of a totality (from which individual freedom is metaphysically derived). This aspect of Hegel’s political theory stemmed from his attempt to construct a state that could foster a renewal of Christian spirituality. This project had to confront the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, which Hegel attributed to the self-interestedness of its component parts. This historical case for the priority of the whole over its parts, however, was soon supplanted by a philosophical argument for a political totality whose freedom entailed its subordination of conflicting parts within itself.

Ein Beitrag Martin Hartmanns: „Japan und der Islam“

Abstract In this article, the authors give an edition of an article by the famous Orientalist Martin Hartmann (1851–1918), one of the founding fathers of the journal Die Welt des Islams, accompanied by an introduction and commentaries. In Hartmann’s text, which has remained unpublished, he comments on the possible consequences of the Russo-Japanese War (1904/05) and its outcome for Japan’s relationship with the Islamic world in general and the Muslims of China in particular. Hartmann takes a clear stance here against the Russian Empire on the one hand, but also against the policies of the European powers towards Japan on the other, and urges a prudent approach to the victor of the aforementioned war. This should be understood, among other things, against the background of the problematic relations between the German Empire and Japan since the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the German Empire’s efforts to push Japan out of China. The original manuscript of this unpublished article is kept in the archives of the University of Halle.

[Urology in Upper Palatinate-what archeology, historical research, and historiography reveal : Part1: from Roman Antiquity to the late Middle Ages].

Since 1924, it has been possible to qualify as aspecialist in urology in Germany. The first hospital departments for the treatment of urological conditions were established as early as the end of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. However, the beginning of specialist medical care in the Bavarian administrative district of Upper Palatinate, often known as the "poorhouse" of Germany until the second half of the last century, was much later. Nevertheless, the lineage of "urological" activity here can be traced back to much earlier eras. Of course, it must be accepted that the evidence from times long past is weak. This is especially applicable when it comes to atopic such as the treatment of the sick and the preservation of health, which is not only considered ascience but also often acentral focus of life for us today, because in history it was often only mentioned in the fight against epidemics and in anecdotal descriptions. This is acircumstance which, when looking at the history of urology, gives rise to the hope of finding one or two interesting sources. This article not only aims to trace the history of the development of urology in arural area from contemporary history to the present day, but also to explore the treatment of urological diseases in this region since late antiquity. Furthermore, we invite readers to look at other places of urological remembrance in asimilar way.

The Symbolic Strategies of Amédée VIII: A Utopian Vision Examined through Alignments and Artistic Representations

This article explores the intricacies of the Duchy of Savoy during the 15th century, exploring its complex connections with Africa, the Crusades, and the Holy Empire. Focused on the reign of Amadeus VIII, who later became Pope Felix V, the study investigates the unique devotion to Saint Maurice d'Agaune and Saint Anthony the Great within the Duchy. The research unveils new evidence through architectural alignments, religious symbolism, and artistic representations, notably analyzing Konrad Witz's "La Pêche miraculeuse." It discovers significant alignments from Chambéry to Ripaille, Basel, and Magdeburg, indicating political and symbolic strategies. The article introduces the concept of an "inclined cross," aligning Savoy with Magdeburg, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Turin. The symbolic reading of the Savoy Knot, associated with the motto Foedere et Religione Tenemur (F.E.R.T), suggests a mnemonic tool possibly derived from maritime practices, providing insights into the Duchy's unique strategies and perspectives. This Savoyard motto, a relic of the Middle Ages and some of its medals or coins, happily cultivated its reputation for mystery or obscure meaning. The methodology involves expanding references, exploring heraldry, and examining religious and spiritual connections. The article proposes a potential link between Savoy's alignments and Egyptian or Ethiopian influences, supported by pilgrimages from these regions. It suggests the existence of a coherent utopia imagined by Amadeus VIII, fostering a new perspective on the artistic achievements of the time. The erasure of symbolic constructions, orchestrated by subsequent figures like Enea Silvio Piccolomini, is discussed, leaving enigmatic traces of the Duchy's engagement with Africa.

Germany, Blockade and Strategic Raw Materials in the Era of the Two World Wars

The concrete lessons that the Nazi regime drew from the Allied sea blockade of the First World War have only been studied in fragments. Our knowledge of the effects of blockade and the effectiveness of German countermeasures during the Great War is vague, contradictory and, above all, incomplete, mainly for a lack of data. Based on hitherto unused secret surveys and statistics commissioned by the Nazi government to examine Great War lessons, this article shows that imports of raw materials were drastically reduced early in the war, and that this reduction was largely due to blockade. Despite this massive decline and low pre-war stocks, substitution and conservation measures made Imperial Germany surprisingly resilient in the case of many essential raw materials. Based on these quantifications and the conclusions drawn, explicitly or implicitly, in interwar studies, this article presents the general lessons the Nazi government drew from the Great War blockade. As the post-1933 measures show, the Nazi regime did learn the lessons, at least in this respect. This had important implications for the Second World War: as Nazi planners became convinced that, with proper preparation, Germany could withstand a raw materials blockade, they became more willing to gamble on war.

Gelehrtennetzwerke an der Universität Basel und ihre Verbindungen nach Ostmitteleuropa 1460–1550. Perspektiven zu Forschungsdaten aus dem Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG)

This study uses the example of data from the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) to highlight various aspects of dealing with research data in historical research. The RAG is a project focused on scholars from the Old German Empire (1250–1550), whose lives and studies are collected and evaluated in a prosopographical database. The database combines quantitative and qualitative methods for the collection, analysis, and interpretation of research data. Using the example of scholars included in the RAG who stayed at the Basel University in 1460–1550, the author presents the basic approaches to network analysis used in the project. The example of Basel scholars in the RAG shows how students and scholars from Eastern and Central Europe can be identified in this network. Although their numbers by mid-sixteenth century were not high, a qualitative examination of their biographies shows that they had a variety of contacts in Basel prior to their arrival and that they played an important role in early relations with Eastern and Central Europe. In addition to personal encounters linked to studies and related activities, correspondence and general references in written works are also taken into account.

Study of Historical wars during the thirty years in Europe (1618-1648)

This paper investigates the emergence of Protestantism in the 16th century, leading to a profound rift with Catholicism and culminating in the Thirty Years' War triggered by the Defenestration of Prague in 1618. Examining the complexities of this conflict, the paper explores why nations such as France, Sweden, and Denmark supported the Protestants, contrasting with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire's alignment with Catholics. The narrative extends to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a transformative agreement reshaping Europe's political and religious landscape. Analyzing the social events surrounding the war, the paper highlights its role in separating religious institutions from politics. Adopting an analytical and descriptive approach, the research draws insights from historians, presenting a comprehensive understanding of the war's impact on the relationship between religion and politics.

The protestant ethic and entrepreneurship: inside the black box

We provide one of the first investigations of the cultural and value dimensions through which Protestantism affects entrepreneurship by focusing on the historically predetermined religious minorities residing in the regions of the former Holy Roman Empire. By exploiting the minorities’ strong attachment to religious ethic, we find that Protestantism significantly affects the probability to be an entrepreneur and that the effect is relatively larger when we consider larger enterprises. A formal mediation analysis suggests that among the rich set of individual characteristics and values typically associated with entrepreneurship available in our data, the dimensions that mediate the effect of Protestantism are education and a taste for individualism. In particular, such mediating factors explain around 26% of the total effect of Protestantism on entrepreneurship.