Jakša Kušan’s Forgotten Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Croatia*

Josip Mihaljević

Croatian Institute of History

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):107-132 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.107

Croatian journalist and writer Jakša Kušan (1931–2019) was one of the most prominent Croatian émigré dissidents. By editing and publishing the non-partisan magazine Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia), he tried to inform the global public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Yugoslavia, even under constant threat of being attacked by the Yugoslav secret police. After the fall of communism, he returned to Croatia and continued his work in the media and the civil sector for a brief time. In this article, I offer an overview of the most relevant of Kušan’s oppositional activities during the period of communist rule in Croatia and Yugoslavia and consider the roles and impact of his activities. I also venture some explanation as to why his life and work have mostly been forgotten in today’s Croatia. One possible answer to this question could be his complex relationships with the Croatian dissidents who won the first multiparty elections in Croatia in 1990. My discussion is based on the findings of the COURAGE project (Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries), oral history sources, and archival documents of the Yugoslav secret police.

Keywords: Jakša Kušan, Croatian émigré, dissent, socialist Yugoslavia, Croatia, democracy, COURAGE project, Yugoslav secret service

Introduction

The life of Jakša Kušan is a relevant topic in the history of dissent and non-conformism in the former socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Kušan, who spent much of his life in exile, was one of the most prominent journalists and publishers of the Croatian diaspora. From 1955 to 1990, he propagated a vision of a democratic and pluralistic Croatia. By publishing the non-partisan newspaper Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia), he sought to inform not only the Croatian emigrants but also the Yugoslav and Western public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Yugoslavia and to emphasize the precarious position of the Croatian nation in the federal Yugoslav state. The communist authorities in Yugoslavia attempted to hinder his activity in exile by creating an extensive network of agents and informants around Kušan. Despite the efforts of the Yugoslav State Security Service (UDBA/SDS),1 however, Kušan managed to publish the journal for more than three decades. The journal earned the epithet of the most respected political magazine among Croatian émigrés. Although Kušan was emotionally attached to the idea of creating an independent and sovereign Croatia, he believed that in the political struggle, one should avoid indulging in the emotions that led many Croatian émigrés to political radicalism. He believed that Croatian émigrés would not gain the support of the Western world if they showed any willingness to use terrorist methods.

Croatian political emigration would significantly contribute to Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kušan strongly supported many of the Croatian dissidents and oppositional figures who eventually won the first multi-party elections in Croatia in 1990. However, Kušan’s connections with the people who formed the new government were severed very quickly, and he found himself on the margins of political life. Although he performed some public duties in the 1990s, mostly in the civil and NGO sector, Kušan did not participate actively in political life, and he wrote less and less and stopped publishing. Gojko Borić claims that Kušan was marginalized from the moment of the establishment of the Republic of Croatia as an independent state and that today he has been almost completely forgotten and his legacy has become a matter of debate.2

This paper has two main goals. The first is to emphasize the most relevant of Kušan’s oppositional activities during the period of communist rule in Yugoslavia and consider the roles and impact of his activities. The second is to venture some explanation as to why his life and work have mostly been forgotten in today’s Croatia. The discussion is based primarily on the findings of the COURAGE project (Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries),3 oral history sources (interviews), and archival documents. The COURAGE project researched Kušan as a significant oppositional figure to socialist Yugoslavia, describing his private collection of books, photographs, and letters related to the activities of Croatian émigrés.4 As part of this project, two long interviews were conducted with Kušan in 2016 and 2018.5 For this article, a dossier (intelligence file) on Kušan created by the notorious UDBA (the secret service of socialist Yugoslavia) was also analyzed. Files of the Croatian branch of the UDBA, including the file on Kušan, are held today at the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb and recently became available to researchers.6 In this research, I have used various books from the fields of history, political science, and diaspora studies, as well as various articles from scientific and other journals and online sources.

Kušan’s Life before Exile

Kušan was born in Zagreb on April 23, 1931 to a middle-class family. During World War II, when he was still a boy, his family did not sympathize with the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH), which was a fascist puppet state supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Kušan’s family was Western-oriented, appreciating parliamentary democracy and liberalism. They listened to Western radio stations, such as the BBC.7 Nevertheless, hopes for the establishment of democracy were dashed after the end of the war. After the overthrow of the fascist regime of the NDH, another form of totalitarianism, the communist one, rose to power in the new Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija, or FNRJ).8

Kušan finished high school in 1950 in his hometown. As a high school student, he corresponded with members of the International Friendship League.9 He also came into conflict with philosophy professors over the issue of ideology, and similar conflicts arose when he pursued the study of law at the University of Zagreb. Unlike most of his colleagues, who wrote essays and seminar papers based on texts by Karl Marx, Kušan took an interest in subjects associated with the works of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, authors who were not widely promoted at the time. Due to his nonconformist views, he soon came into conflict with the communist party nomenclature at the university.10

During his student days in Zagreb, he was part of a circle of young intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the political situation in Yugoslavia, especially with the oppressive methods used by the regime and the lack of cultural ties to the Western world. In 1953, they began to hold regular gatherings, and they started entertaining the idea of establishing a political organization, which was prohibited by law. In 1954, they organized an illegal organization called the Croatian Resistance Movement (Hrvatski pokret otpora, or HPO).11 They illegally procured newspapers published by Croatian emigrants, but they were disappointed by these publications, which did not meet their expectations or standards. In their assessment, the Croatian émigrés were uninformed and did not have close enough ties with their homeland. Kušan felt that the émigrés were more concerned with relations among the Croatian émigré communities (and the differences that divided these communities) than they were with the fate of the people in Croatia. The first proclamation made by the HPO, which was written in 1954 and bore the title “Message of the Croatian youth from the homeland to Croats in exile,” was an appeal to Croatian emigrants to set aside their petty disputes and problems and work together for the sake of Croatia.12 Kušan was the main founder of HPO and also the person who authored all the organization’s documents.13 The group was also dissatisfied with the attitudes of the Western states, many of which supported Josip Broz Tito and his communist regime in Yugoslavia because of his dispute with the Soviets. They therefore decided that someone from the group should go to the West and engage in journalistic work there. Kušan volunteered to be that person, in part because he was already under police surveillance.14 Kušan had caught the attention of the authorities because he had defended a friend, a student at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, at the Disciplinary Court of the University of Zagreb. His friend had been accused of having publicly expressed political beliefs that were not in line with party propaganda.15 The case turned into a strong demonstration against the communists, who led the student organization at the faculty.16 Partly in response, at the beginning of 1954, students who were members of the party organizations began to take revenge on Kušan and forbade him to attend lectures and exams. They soon initiated disciplinary proceedings against him at the Faculty of Law. As a consequence of these proceedings, Kušan was given a comparatively lenient punishment for having “exceeded his right to defense,” but this meant that he was subjected to police interrogations and also received death threats. Kušan decided to move to Belgrade to continue his law studies. According to him, the atmosphere in Belgrade was completely different, and he was not under the same strict control that he had been put under in Zagreb.17

Fleeing Yugoslavia and Founding the Magazine Nova Hrvatska

In Belgrade, while pursuing his studies, Kušan worked as a tourist guide for English-speaking groups of tourists. At the end of April 1955, he received a Yugoslav passport, and he left Yugoslavia in May. He crossed the border with Austria and traveled to Italy, where he stayed for a short time before moving to The Hague via Rome, where in 1955 he received a scholarship at the Academy of International Law. One of the judges of the Hague Tribunal, Dr Milovan Zoričić, helped him obtain the scholarship. In early 1956, he settled in Great Britain, where he was given political asylum. In London, he continued his education at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1957 to 1961, but he did not complete his studies because he was too busy working as a journalist and editor.18 In 1956, HPO, his organization in Croatia, was discovered by the Yugoslav authorities. Its members were arrested and, in 1957, were sentenced to prison.19

In 1958, Kušan received a scholarship from the Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE), which had been founded in 1951 by the American National Committee for Free Europe.20 At this university, especially during its summer seminars held in Strasbourg, respectable members of the liberal academic community from the United States, as well as many prominent European emigrant intellectuals gave lectures. At the same time, it was a gathering place for refugee students from countries under communist rule, who were educated at the institution in a liberal democratic spirit. The Yugoslav communists contended that it was a school for CIA informants.21

In Strasbourg, Kušan connected with many young intellectuals from Europe, and especially with his compatriots. He began to cooperate with some of them in efforts to further the political education of society as a whole and to call attention to the harmfulness of totalitarian rule in Yugoslavia. Kušan continued to maintain contacts with like-minded people from his homeland, and he soon created a network of associates to work together on efforts to inform the public. In 1958, he founded the magazine Hrvatski bilten (Croatian Bulletin) in London.22 In 1959, the magazine was renamed Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia, or NH). The primary goal of the periodical was to inform the Croatian public abroad about the events in their homeland and to reveal the truth about the undemocratic practices of the communist regime in Yugoslavia. One of the aims of the magazine was to set aside the ideological differences within the Croatian émigré communities and work together for Croatian independence. The desire to unite the various political currents in the Croatian diaspora is clearly evident from the slogan at the top of the front page of the first issue of the magazine: “Croats of all parties, unite!”23

From the mid-1960s, NH became the most influential polemically oriented magazine in which discussions concerning solutions to the Croatian question were held. It was initially published monthly, but from 1974 until it was discontinued in 1990, it transitioned to a bi-monthly publication schedule. In the beginning, it was distributed through its trustees, and later it was sold in public places.24 It had the largest circulation of publications among the Croatian diaspora (some editions ran up to 20,000 copies). As an editor-in-chief, Kušan advocated democracy and the freedom of the individual and freedom of peoples. He believed that only a politically informed and educated individual could be an active factor in his social environment, and he saw this principle as a shield against political manipulation of individuals and political parties.25 About Kušan’s work as editor-in-chief, Borić said that he adhered to the principle of objectivism, which meant drawing a strict distinction between information and commentary and taking into account different views on the contents of his reporting. That was an especially hard task, because it was difficult to gather reliable information from totalitarian Yugoslavia.26 According to Gojko Borić, one of the founders of NH, the magazine differed significantly from other Croatian émigré publications, which tended only to report on news from the homeland that confirmed their political views.27 Kušan’s main goal was to educate Croatian emigrants politically, in part to make them less susceptible to the false promises made in the propaganda of some radical Croatian emigrants.

The NH often published news that the Yugoslav government did not want to get out, and the comments NH gave when interpreting certain news and events were negative towards the communist regime in Yugoslavia. The editorial also received confidential information, mostly from anonymous senders, and that information was published or rejected, depending on the assessment of its credibility. The editorship was always at risk of falling prey to false claims, which happened in some cases, which is why some Croatians in exile criticized the magazine and declared such rare failures as hoaxes contrived by the Yugoslav secret services.28

The correspondence with associates from the country was handled through encrypted messages. Thus, for example, in correspondence with one of his friends and associates who he did not know was a UDBA informant with the code name Rajko,29 Kušan wrote at the end of 1964 that he was interested in the Congress of Lawyers in Belgrade, which meant the Eighth Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, or SKJ). Kušan also wrote that he “expects a baby in a few days,” which was a coded message to indicate that he was expecting a new issue of NH.30 For the transmission of messages and information, the editorial board of NH used people who occasionally traveled from Yugoslavia to the West. The NH associates and informants were most often people from the closest family circle of the NH journalists.

The Yugoslav authorities were also bothered by the fact that NH was smuggled to and illicitly distributed in Yugoslavia. Kušan also sent NH to his homeland by mail to the many ordinary citizens whose addresses had been made public, for example, as part of some prize games in the newspapers. Through secret channels, a pocket-size edition (14.5 x 10 cm) of the magazine the articles in which could only be read with the use of a magnifying glass was usually sent to Yugoslavia.31 Kušan also sent NH to numerous political leaders in Croatia, such as members of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia.

The Yugoslav secret services constantly followed the writing of NH and tried to prevent the publication of the magazine, which is evident from the UDBA file on Kušan. As early as the beginning of 1958, the UDBA learned from Tihomil Rađa’s conversation with a UDBA informant that in the summer of 1957 in Strasbourg Kušan and Rađa had agreed to launch Hrvatski bilten.32 In the mid-1960s, the UDBA stated in its reports that “the editorial office of this paper is one of the main centers of subversive-propaganda and anti-Yugoslav activity.”33 The UDBA tried to gain access to Kušan’s store of documents and the magazine’s archives, which included files on contributors and associates. They never succeeded, although they managed to get some of the documents.34

Kušan’s Political Views and His Activities in the Diaspora: A Thorn in the Side of the Yugoslav Communist Regime

Throughout his life in exile, Kušan continuously raised the question of Croatian national independence and spoke openly about the suppression of human and civil rights in socialist Yugoslavia, which is why he was constantly under the surveillance of the Yugoslav secret services.35

From the documentation of the UDBA, one can learn a lot about Kušan himself. According to the reports from the early 1960s, Kušan initially worked under difficult conditions. This is clear from the report of UDBA’s informant Rajko, who visited Kušan in London in 1964. He states that Kušan was not making any profit from NH and that the Kušans lived off the salary of his wife, Zdenka:

He worked day and night, ate almost nothing, and looked like a biblical ascetic—thin, pale, bloodshot eyes, badly in need of a shave, hollow. Usually, they don’t eat enough: they drink tea in the morning, and then she goes to work, and he works in the apartment, and they take the main meal only when she comes and prepares it around 6 o’clock, and even that meal is less than our average lunch.36

Another UDBA informant (code name David) offered similar reports concerning the difficult living conditions of Jakša Kušan in October 1965. He reported that Vinko Nikolić, one of the most prominent Croatian émigré intellectuals, said that Kušan lived under comparatively modest, even meager circumstances and that he edited his magazine on an old-fashioned typewriter.37 He also noted that another Croatian emigrant, Jure Petričević, had said that Kušan lived in poverty and that he depended mainly on the help of some Englishmen.38

Nevertheless, in the second half of the 1960s, Kušan was better off financially because he got a job as an associate to Viktor Zorza.39 In September 1967, Rajko talked to Kušan’s brother, Zlatko. They touched on Jakša’s activities in London. Zlatko told him that Jakša had secured regular employment with the prominent English liberal newspaper The Manchester Guardian and that he worked as a close assistant to the editor for Eastern Europe, the Polish Jew Victor Zorza, one of the most respected journalist experts on Eastern European politics and a man with strong ties to the Liberal Party in Britain. Kušan allegedly collected and systematized news and data on which Zorza wrote his articles and comments.40 The UDBA’s agents considered him a man close to the British Foreign Office. Consequently, it was assumed that Kušan was also leaning on the British secret services.

Kušan sympathized with the left in Britain. Thus, one UDBA informant reports that Kušan, as an English citizen, consistently voted for the Labor party.41 From his youth, Kušan had been a sympathizer of the Western form of political rule, especially the British. However, when he left Yugoslavia as a young man in 1955, he was not against socialism. He considered that, due to the character of the regime, it was impossible to expect the introduction of pluralism, but that a big step would also be to allow a faction within the Party.42

From the very beginning of his activities in London, Kušan stood out as someone who espoused different views regarding the realization of Croatian independence. Although he harshly criticized the communist regime in Yugoslavia, he thought that the liberalization process within the League of Communists of Yugoslavia could expand the space of freedom in the country.43 He advocated for reconciliation between nationalists and communists and felt that the radical methods used by some organizations in the Croatian diaspora were not good or effective as means of fulfilling Croatian goals. He claimed that terrorism was unacceptable both to the Western and the Eastern blocs, which were already inclined to preserve Yugoslavia. He advocated a strategy of gradually building democratic consciousness and cooperation among Croatian emigrants with the liberal wing of Croatian communists. In this sense, in the second half of the 1960s, one of the missions of his journal was to encourage democratization processes within the League of Communists of Croatia and to promote the Croatian reform movement (Croatian Spring) in the West in the hopes of gaining foreign sympathy and support.44 He believed that through the liberalization of the regime in Croatia, the situation in the whole of Yugoslavia could be liberalized. He believed that the League of Communists of Croatia could eventually turn into some kind of socialist or social democratic party. In such a democratic environment, Croats would then be free to decide in a referendum whether to stay in Yugoslavia or secede.45 Because of his conciliatory attitudes towards the communists, Croatian émigrés with more right-wing leanings were suspicious of Kušan, and some of them even called him a communist and a UDBA man.46

Kušan was constantly under surveillance by the UDBA through its numerous agents, collaborators, and informants,47 and his correspondence was secretly controlled. Due to his activities in exile, the District Court in Zagreb opened an investigation into his activities in February 1965.48 The Yugoslav Embassy in London invited him several times and sought to persuade him to stop his political activities in exile while promising him some privileges. Kušan refused, although he had to bear in mind that his family (parents and brothers) still lived in Yugoslavia, and they were also under surveillance by the UDBA.49 Zlatko was arrested in 1959 and charged because he had corresponded with his brother. He defended himself at the hearing, saying that maintaining a written relationship with his brother was not a criminal offense.50 He was forced to explain the way in which they corresponded. They sent messages encrypted in Braille, and Zlatko received the letters from his brother at the address of one of his friends who was blind, and he would send a letter to Jakša addressed to one of Jakša’s English friends.51 Zlatko was later invited by the UDBA to take part in “informative interviews” several times, and in 1972, he was even detained and interrogated for 10 days.52 The UDBA also conducted “informative interviews” with Jakša’s other brother, Petar, in 1975, and his passport was confiscated because he once visited his brother Jakša during his travels abroad.53 In 1977, they confiscated the Jakša’s mother’s passport, and they only returned it seven years later, in 1984.54 The return of the passport was just another UDBA setup. They gave her passport back, but in return, during her visit to London, she was expected to try to persuade Jakša to stop his anti-Yugoslav activities.55 The UDBA failed in its endeavor.

The UDBA speculated that Kušan had maintained contacts with the British intelligence service while still a student in Yugoslavia, because during his stay in Italy in 1955, he had received a British visa “in an unusually short time” and “some photos and other published materials in Nova Hrvatska indicate that Kušan has access to British diplomatic and intelligence sources.”56 The UDBA suspected that the British intelligence service was providing scholarships offered by Kušan to young and talented students abroad who had distinguished themselves through their hostile activity against Yugoslavia.57 However, after reviewing all the documents in his UDBA file, I did not come across any documented evidence of his alleged collaboration with the UK services. The only thing the UDBA had were reports submitted by its informants, who said that some of Kušan’s associates had said that he had connections to the British services.58 In an interview for the COURAGE project, Kušan pointed out that his choice of London as a place to work and publish was a complete success because it was an open environment that received refugees from all around the world and provided him with full protection from the Yugoslav secret services. “The UDBA did threaten us,” he said, “but the English authorities always gave police protection whenever we reported threats. That is why the authorities in Belgrade often said that we were collaborators with some British secret services, and in the end, they never touched us.”59

The editorial office of NH was originally located in a small basement room in London and was constantly struggling with a lack of money for publishing. Moreover, in the second half of the 1960s, the periodical almost went out of publication, because Kušan himself was too busy with his work as an analyst for The Guardian. In 1969, no issues of NH were published. In 1970, one regular issue and one double issue were published, and in 1971 only one was released. In addition to financial difficulties and lack of time, the reason for the reduced publication is that Kušan himself wondered if NH was needed at all. Kušan believed that, in the more liberal atmosphere in Croatia in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, the local magazines and newspapers were freeing themselves from the shackles of communist censorship and were presenting the situation in the country more and more objectively.60 During the Croatian reform movement, better known as the Croatian Spring (1967–1971), Kušan nurtured sympathy for the movement because it was a process he had hoped for.61 Jakša was delighted with Većeslav Holjevac, a former high-ranking partisan officer and long-time mayor of Zagreb, who, since the mid-1960s, had advocated in support of cooperation between the homeland and Croatian émigrés. Kušan described Holjevac’s book Hrvati izvan domovine (Croatians Abroad), which was published in 1967, as the first real step towards buildings ties with the Croatian émigré communities, and he noted that Holjevac had enabled several associates of the Emigrant Foundation of Croatiato come into contact with Croatian émigré organizations, including associates of NH.62 Kušan believed that during the Croatian Spring, especially within the League of Communists of Croatia, a process of democratization was taking place that would eventually lead to the disintegration of the communist regime and, ultimately, the democratization of the whole of Yugoslavia. He was more than disappointed when the Croatian reform movement was suppressed in late 1971 and early 1972.

Although he was disappointed with the collapse of the Croatian spring, this event meant new life for Kušan’s magazine. Communist censorship once again shackled the media in Croatia, so NH became more important. Ironically, communist censorship indirectly saved the journal. Censorship in Croatia reached such a level that the Hrvatski pravopis (Croatian Orthography) written by Stjepan Babić, Božidar Finka, and Milan Moguš, published in 1971, was banned by the Yugoslav authorities for political reasons shortly after it went into print. The Yugoslav authorities destroyed the entire print run of 40,000 copies. Only a few internal copies were preserved. This act of censorship was part of the Yugoslav authorities’ confrontation with the Croatian Spring at the end of 1971, because the Croatian orthography was created within the Matica hrvatska, the most important cultural-oppositional institution in socialist Croatia. However, the editorial board of NH, headed by Kušan, managed to get a copy and publish it in London in 1972. For many years, this book was a best-seller in the Croatian diaspora because it was a symbol of the Croatian Spring.63 The financial success of this book, as well as the contributions from about 20 friends of NH who donated money, enabled the editorial board of NH to buy a house in London which provided a new home for the editorial office. According to Kušan, it was the best investment in the history of NH.64

Kušan and NH constantly reported on fabricated lawsuits against Croatian intellectuals who were tried after the collapse of the Croatian Spring. NH tried to make news of these people’s fates reach the Western public and the Croatian émigré communities. In this regard, they also worked closely with Amnesty International, which they provided information and from which they also received information.65 Kušan also maintained contacts with and published articles and books by Croatian dissidents and oppositionists who could not publish in their homeland. UDBA informants reported that Kušan said that this way a “Croatian Solzhenitsyn could be created.”66 Kušan may have seen some kind of Croatian Solzhenitsyn in Franjo Tuđman, a Croatian historian and communist dissident who was expelled from the party in 1967. Kušan was involved in the publication of Tuđman’s book The National Question in Contemporary Europe in 1981,67 and Kušan’s wife Zdenka translated into English the court documents from Tudjman’s trial, which were also published in London in 1981.68 For the promotion of Croatian dissident writers, Kušan did the most, working together with Vinko Nikolić, when they decided to exhibit together at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Nikolić was the editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Hrvatska revija (Croatian Review) and the head of the publishing house that bore the same name. Since 1973, they had been exhibiting in Frankfurt every year, and their exhibition stand was always well attended, although they knew that UDBA agents and informants were among the visitors.69 Yugoslav authorities even used the diplomatic apparatus in their attempts to ban Kušan’s participation in the Fair,70 but they did not succeed. Moreover, Kušan and Nikolić expanded their exhibition stand every year.

In addition to his connections with Croatian dissidents, UDBA’s informants also talked about Kušan’s connections with dissidents of other nationalities, such as the famous Milovan Đilas.71 Because he cooperated with Đilas, other Croatian émigrés criticized Kušan.72 In his work against the communist government in Yugoslavia, Kušan also collaborated with Serbian and Albanian dissidents and émigrés, and he took part in some anti-Yugoslav demonstrations organized in European cities.73

The collapse of the Croatian Spring and police clashes with the liberal and national currents in Croatia gave additional impetus to those in exile who believed that Croatian national goals could only be achieved by violent means.74 To acquaint the Western public with the position of Croats in Yugoslavia and to gain international support for the overthrow of the communist regime in Yugoslavia, a small number of Croatian émigré organizations advocated terrorism and were particularly active in the 1970s.75 Kušan believed that the terrorist actions did more harm than good to the Croatian struggle for independence, and in that sense, he also commented on the terrorist actions that some Croatian emigrants carried out in Germany and other European countries.76 He had no sympathies for the action of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (Hrvatsko revolucionarno bratstvo, or HRB), a Croatian revolutionary organization founded in 1961 in Australia that used terrorist methods, and their guerrilla incursion into Yugoslavia in June 1972. He believed that such actions were doomed to failure and would lead to unnecessary bloodshed, and he felt that the Croatian émigré communities would thus get a bad reputation in the world.77 The Croatian terrorist actions worked in favor of the Yugoslav government. The Yugoslav missions abroad and the secret services worked continuously to create a negative image of Croatian émigrés, trying to portray them as fascists and terrorists. The Yugoslav security and intelligence apparatus occasionally encouraged the radicalism of Croatian extremists in exile to discredit the political émigré community as a whole.78

The collapse of the Croatian Spring also affected numerous Croatian émigré organizations and individuals who were increasingly convinced that they had an obligation to take up the fight for Croatian interests and unite for this cause. In this sense, there were more attempts to unite all Croatian émigré organizations, which was accomplished with the establishment of the Croatian National Council (Hrvatsko narodno vijeće, or HNV) in 1974 in Toronto. It was an umbrella association of the Croatian diaspora which coordinated various émigré organizations that sought to present the case for Croat independence to the international community.79 In 1975, some of the most prominent magazines published by members of the Croatian émigré community, such as Hrvatska revija, Nova Hrvatska, and Studia Croatica joined the HNV. In 1975, Kušan also became a member of the HNV’s Congress and the Head of its Press and Advertising Department (1975–1977, 1979–1983).80 During the preparations for the elections for the Third Congress of the HNV, which were to be held in Australia in 1979,81 Kušan visited Australia and gave an interview for the national television there in which he spoke about the current case of the so-called Croatian six, who were six Australian citizens of Croatian descent who had been accused of attempting to carry out several terrorist attacks in Sydney in early 1979, which involved putting poison in the city’s water supply and planting a bomb in a theater. After a long trial, six Croatian-Australian men were sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1981 for a conspiracy to conduct terrorist attacks. The whole case was the result of the operation organized by the Yugoslav state security service to portray the Croatian-Australian community as extremists using Australian intelligence and police services as its tools.82 It was one of the methods of operation of the Yugoslav secret services, which sought to discredit the Croatian political émigré community. Before the trial was over and many years before the setup was revealed, Kušan told Australian television that it was a setup by the Yugoslav secret services.83

Since the late 1970s, Croatian émigrés had increasingly focused on calling attention to human rights violations in Yugoslavia.84 After the Helsinki Final Act was signed in 1975 at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), in which the communist countries pledged to respect human and civil rights, the issue of violation of these rights became one of the main means with which to exert pressure on the communist regimes in Europe. Croatian émigré organizations had increasingly warned Western institutions and the public about the position of political prisoners in Yugoslavia, and they had emphasized the right of Croats to national self-determination. In this sense, they were especially active during the CSCE in Belgrade (June 1977–March 1978) and Madrid (November 1980–September 1983). The UDBA noted Kušan’s particularly strong anti-Yugoslav activity during these conferences.85 Kušan always sought to portray the issue of human rights violations against Croats within the Yugoslav communist regime as an integral part of a transnational problem.

Return to the Homeland and Displacement to the Margins

After the fall of communism in Croatia in 1990, the editorial board of NH felt that there is no reason to publish the journal abroad. They planned to transfer the journal to Croatia and publish it from there. However, by returning to Croatia, Kušan became aware of the numerous problems in a society that suffered the consequences of almost half a century of communist rule. The prevailing spirit of materialism and the lack of idealism stunned Kušan. In his memoirs, he spoke about the atmosphere in which inherited habits and the mentality of censored journalism prevailed.86 In the newspaper business, he faced theft, corruption, and embezzlement, and he soon gave up publishing his journal.87 The Serbian uprising and open aggression against the Republic of Croatia in 1991 had an additional negative impact on the development of the media in Croatia at the time.

Nevertheless, in late 1990, Kušan decided to return to his homeland permanently and continue his struggle for a better society. In 1993, he became a chairperson of the board of directors of the Open Society Institute of Croatia. Given that the society was funded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, Kušan was criticized by the Croatian right and the conservatives. However, Kušan responded to his critics, saying that Soros gave more money for humanitarian purposes than for political purposes.88 In 1995, Kušan was a co-founder of the Association of the Homeland and Diaspora for a Democratic Society. This association was renamed the Association for a Democratic Society, and Kušan was its president in 2004.89

In the 1990s, Kušan was disappointed by political developments in modern Croatia. He did not participate actively in political life. Moreover, in the public sphere, he was largely marginalized and has practically been forgotten in today’s Croatia. One of the main questions this paper raises is why he was marginalized. It is difficult to give a precise and clear answer to this question. Relevant historical sources, such as archival documents from the period after 1990, are still unavailable, so I can only venture tentative answers based on data concerning his political views until 1990, his memoirs published in 2000, and statements made by some of his close contemporaries.

Historian Wollfy Krašić considers Jakša Kušan the first Croatian intellectual to sketch the idea of so-called Croatian reconciliation or the all-Croatian peace.90 It is the idea of the necessity of cooperation among former enemy sides from World War II, Ustashas and Croatian partisans, and their descendants in the creation of an independent Croatian state. At the time of the fall of communism, the aforementioned former communist dissident Franjo Tuđman achieved great political success and won the first multi-party elections in Croatia in 1990. Although Tudjman’s idea of reconciliation generally coincided with Kušan’s vision, after the independence of Croatia, the two of them had practically no mutual relations. Perhaps the relationship between Kušan and Tuđman was a crucial factor in the process of Kušan’s marginalization in Croatian public life. After the death of Kušan in 2019, Vladimir Pavlinić, his long-time close associate and also one of the editors of Nova Hrvatska, said that Tuđman was the one to blame. He claimed that Tuđman had begun to establish secret contacts with Kušan’s circle in the mid-1970s. Tuđman had sent documents concerning his trials and his new books to the editorial board of Nova Hrvatska, and they had published and translated them into English so that the global public would be able to read about him and his case.91 However, Pavlinić believes Tuđman shifted his circle of confidants in exile to Canadian-Australian radical organizations in the late 1980s. According to Pavlinić, Tuđman discarded the once very useful Kušan even before Kušan returned to Croatia. Pavlinić says that Tuđman invited Kušan from London to Zagreb in June 1990 to talk about founding a Croatian news agency and that at one point he had asked Kušan why he was writing hostilely about him and his political party, Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, or HDZ).92 Tuđman referred to an article Kušan had published in Nova Hrvatska in March 1990. Kušan had commented extensively in the article on the First General Assembly of the HDZ, which had just been held. Kušan had claimed that the assembly had not touched on real political issues and that the gathering had resembled communist congresses, where it was not important what was said but only who was speaking.93 Kušan had been critical in the article of the HDZ, perhaps even more so because he advocated that the anti-communist opposition in Croatia act together as a united coalition. As the HDZ decided to run in the elections on its own, Kušan sympathized with its rival, the Coalition of People’s Accord (Koalicija narodnog sporazuma, or KNS). Pavlinić believed that Kušan’s libertarian thinking was enough for Tuđman to label Kušan an enemy of the people and that this had been a stigma that Kušan had carried until his death.94 Another one of Kušan’s former associates, Gojko Borić, had a similar view. He believed that any members of the émigré communities who had not been close to Tuđman had suffered great disappointment and failed in anything they had undertaken after the collapse of communism in Croatia.95

A few years before his death, Kušan mentioned that the change in his relations with Tuđman took place after the founding of the HDZ in June 1989.96 It is difficult to say what disrupted the relationship between the two. Perhaps the answer to that question lies in another question: why did Tuđman turn to Canadian-Australian circles of the Croatian émigré world?

If we observe the development of Kušan’s attitudes regarding the struggle for Croatian independence, a certain evolution of attitudes is noticeable. Although Kušan advocated the necessity of Croatia’s exit from communist Yugoslavia, in the 1980s his attitudes softened, and on several occasions, he said that Croatia could remain in Yugoslavia if Yugoslavia were to become a real liberal democracy. One of the reasons why Kušan was marginalized in the 1990s may be that, while supporting the struggle of all dissidents in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, he insisted less on Croatian independence and more on the democratization of Yugoslavia. Perhaps this shift, the milder approach of Kušan’s circle to the question of the existence of Yugoslavia, was why Tuđman turned to the Canadian and Australian part of the Croatian émigré world, which was more nationalistic and hardline. Perhaps Tuđman turned to the émigrés in Canada and Australia because they were also wealthier than those from Kušan’s circle, and he hoped to get stronger financial support from them for his political activities.

On the other hand, Kušan was disappointed with the achievements of democratic Croatia in the first decade of its existence. He believed that the ideals that he and other émigrés gathered around Nova Hrvatska had fought for had not been realized.97 Kušan was also disappointed with the new government’s attitude towards the Croatian émigré communities. He believed that the government had embraced members of these communities who had never had much influence and who, in his assessment, had no real grasp of the true values of freedom and democracy.98 He believed that the HDZ’s policy was guided by short-term goals and that the émigré communities were important to the party only as a source of financial and material resources with which the party would be better positioned to win elections and resist Serbian aggression. He believed that the UDBA in Croatia had changed sides overnight and joined the new government. In his memoirs, he expressed these concerns:

In this way, human rights violators from the previous regime, including notorious criminals, were not brought to justice. In return, and for balance, mostly extreme elements from the émigré world were brought home, and they were given high political, military, and police duties. The former UDBA agents and “the greatest Croats” found themselves side by side in many places... Essentially, this only confirms what we often emphasized, namely that there was never a significant difference between totalitarian communists and national extremists.99

Kušan believed that this was why many respectable Croatian émigrés distanced themselves from the new government. He believed that the HDZ had chosen this path to facilitate its consolidation and because of a lack of democratic sense at the top of the party. Furthermore, the political inexperience of voters and the apparent weakness of the domestic media, both as a direct consequence of the half-century one-party system and the war that soon followed, facilitated the undemocratic practice and delayed democratization processes.100 According to Kušan, these negative developments had psychological causes. The high degree of materialism which prevailed in all post-communist societies had further accelerated the spread of corruption and the overwhelming alliance between tycoons and politicians.101

This hypothesis requires further study, which will only be possible when archival sources from the 1990s are fully available. In this sense, it is worth mentioning the personal archive of Franjo Tuđman, which is still inaccessible to the public. It would also be useful to see and research the editorial archive and correspondence of the magazine Nova Hrvatska, which Kušan handed over to the National and University Library in Zagreb. Unfortunately, although more than a quarter of a century has passed since Kušan turned these documents over, they are still inaccessible to the public. This can also be seen as an indication that Kušan is a forgotten figure in Croatian political and cultural history. On the other hand, Kušan’s private collection, which he kept in his apartment in Zagreb, is also important for future research. According to his wishes, his private collection will be handed over to the Franciscan monastery in Visoko in Bosnia and Herzegovina.102

Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that only after Tuđman’s death did Kušan become more present in public life, and he also performed some public duties. This was the time of the new left-liberal coalition government, which ruled Croatia for several years after the death of Tuđman. From 2000 to 2004, Kušan was a chairperson on the board of directors of the Croatian Heritage Foundation, and from 2001 to 2002, he was a member of the Council of the Croatian Radio and Television.103

Conclusion

Although most of the East European diasporas which originated from areas that were subjected to communist rule were antagonistic towards communism and were preoccupied with the question of national identity and national independence,104 within these diasporas, there was a diversity of ideas and political views. One of the atypical representatives of the Croatian political diaspora was journalist and publicist Jakša Kušan.

Kušan distinguished himself from the majority of Croatian political emigrants through his persistent endeavors to broaden his network of resistance. Already as a student at the Free Europe University in Exile, he encountered and connected with various intellectuals, including the renowned writer Czesław Miłosz.105 He maintained a long-standing collaboration with the distinguished journalist Viktor Zorza, and through his journalistic and editorial work, he established connections with various democratically oriented intellectuals and organizations, such as Amnesty International. In building his network of resistance, he collaborated with other ethnic and national groups, not only those originating from the Yugoslav region but also with Poles and Estonians, for instance.106 Through years of participation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, he emphasized the importance of culture as a primary form of resistance against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Alongside democracy and freedom, he regarded culture as one of the main pillars of the new democratic Croatia.

This article presented the most important of Kušan’s activities during the period of communist rule in Yugoslavia, bringing to light new information concerning his life and work. The archives of the Yugoslav secret services are a fascinating source of data which can fill numerous lacunae in our knowledge of Kušan’s oppositional activities. This article shows that Kušan was a ubiquitous figure in the Croatian émigré world who was involved in many of most important events and organizations in Croatian diaspora, such as the Croatian National Council, and who was also important transnationally. In the diaspora, he stood out because of his constant struggle for democratic principles and pluralism, as well as the idea of reconciling the Croatian right and left, which, he felt, was a prerequisite for the creation of a modern democratic and pluralistic Croatia. In that sense, he had a significant influence on numerous actors in the émigré world and among dissidents and oppositional figures in Yugoslavia. Recent historiography has already noted that the idea of all-Croatian reconciliation, first outlined in the mid-1950s by Kušan, was eventually advocated by communist dissident Franjo Tuđman, who in the late 1980s became one of the main representatives of the opposition to communism in Croatia and won the first democratic multi-party elections in 1990 and became the first president of the newly independent Croatia. Kušan may have been somewhat surprisingly marginalized after his return to Croatia in the early 1990s in part because of his relationship with Tuđman. It is possible that in the context of the struggle for political power in Croatia, Kušan, who had been a long-term supporter and promoter of Tuđman, became a political enemy. Although this hypothesis requires further study and substantiation with sources which remain inaccessible, it certainly does not seem implausible. In the 1990s, Kušan was close to Tuđman’s political opponents, and he wrote critically about the new democratically elected government.

Kušan was thus not simply an archetypal representative of the transnational struggle against communist dictatorships but also a non-conformist who persisted in the fight for democracy and human rights even after the communist dictatorship had fallen. He continued his “Battle for a New Croatia,” which was also the title of his memoirs published in 2000.107

Archival Sources

Hrvatski državni arhiv, Zagreb [Croatian State Archives] (HDA)

HR-HDA-1561, SDS RSUP SRH The State Security Service of the Republic Internal Affairs Secretariat of the Socialist Republic of Croatia

Intelligence Files, 229528 Kušan Jakša

Oral history (interviews)

Bing, Albert, and Josip Mihaljević. Interview with Jakša Kušan, May 26, 2016. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection.

Mihaljević, Josip. Interview with Jakša Kušan, April 05, 2018. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection.

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Pavlinić, Vladimir. “Jakša Kušan – čovjek kojemu je u slobodi oduzeta slobodna riječ” [Jakša Kušan - a man who was deprived of free speech in freedom]. Autograf.hr, July 31, 2019. Accessed September 7, 2021. https://www.autograf.hr/jaksa-kusan-covjek-kojemu-je-u-slobodi-oduzeta-slobodna-rijec/.

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* The research is conducted within the project “Exploring emotions in the (re)construction of diaspora identity: Croats in Australia and New Zealand (1945–1991),“ funded by the Croatian Science Foundation.

Concepts of Diversity in the Time of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437): Introductory Remarks and Conceptual Approaches*

Julia Burkhardt

Faculty of History and the Arts, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

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Paul Schweitzer-Martin

Faculty of History and the Arts, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2  (2024):153-171 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.153

On January 20, 1438, a memorial service for Sigismund of Luxembourg was held in the cathedral of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik). Sigismund, who had been king and emperor of many realms, had died a few weeks earlier, and in many regions of Europe, he was commemorated with church services, the ringing of bells, and solemn speeches.1 Ragusa was no exception: here, in front of an exclusive audience, the Italian scholar Philip Diversi († 1452) spoke in memory of the deceased.2 Philip first referred to his unworthiness and then outlined Sigismund’s connection to Ragusa before moving on to the emperor’s greatest achievement: Sigismund’s commitment to unity in the Church, evident in his efforts against the Ottomans and Hussites. Whole countries, including “Italy, Germany, Spain, Gaul, England, all the transalpine regions, all peoples and nations” even the very “earth and all the seas [...], the rivers, mountains, valleys, and finally all elements”3 had born witness to Sigismund’s achievements. The emperor had traveled to all “places, coasts, the most remote regions and the whole world, as well as to kings, leaders, princes, and Christian peoples”4 with tireless commitment and prudence. If this picture of imperial omnipresence did not convince the members of Philip’s audience, they should compare their own deeds with those of Sigismund. They would then clearly see that their achievements hardly bore any comparison with his, “neither with regard to the variety of regions, nor the effort to travel all over the world, nor the speed of their execution, the dexterity of warfare, the number or size of battles, or the conclusion of peace and alliances.”5 Thus all the peoples of all the many languages of Europe should commemorate the great emperor’s passing.

Similarly, almost four years earlier, Isidore of Kiev († 1462) had commented on Sigismund’s praiseworthy character and accomplishments. Isidore had traveled to the Council of Basel as a delegate of the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos to negotiate the union of the Latin and Greek churches.6 En route, he stopped at the Imperial Diet in Ulm, where he held a panegyric speech and managed to persuade Sigismund of the importance of future cooperation. Isidore also praised Sigismund’s commitment to the unity of Christendom throughout Europe (only logical in view of his efforts to bring about Church union). Sigismund, Isidore insisted, was well equipped to do this. He was, after all, fluent in Latin, German, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.7 In addition, Isidore claimed, Sigismund had shown a sense of justice and foresight. He had stayed awake “through whole nights in concern for the state [... and had taken care] with foresight of peoples, cities and people, and everything that concerned them!” Isidore also noted that if the emperor’s presence was necessary somewhere, “then [he did] not allow [himself] any rest, without thinking even in the least about postponement or rest for the body. As if on wings, [he seemed] to fly here and [was] always on the move [...].”8 Isidore expressed his astonishment at the emperor’s devotion and accomplishments with an exclamation rich with pathos: “Who has as much power and rulership and who commands as many vast peoples [...] as you, Your Majesty?”9

Ruling Diverse Realms and Territories: The Case of
Sigismund of Luxembourg

Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437) not only ruled over an impressive array of territories but also reigned for a long period of time. From the perspective of diversity, Sigismund of Luxembourg’s reign represents a fortunate but also challenging case study. Fortunate because immensely rich and varied sources have survived from Sigismund’s long reign in Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, and Bohemia. These sources provide detailed insights into the significance and roles of categories of difference, social affiliations, group identities, and negotiation processes. The two examples introduced above only give a small glimpse of these kinds of bonds and processes. Challenging, however, because Sigismund was confronted with very different cultural and political conditions in each of his kingdoms. The reality of a personal union across several kingdoms therefore consisted less of a centrally organized power structure and more of different spheres of influence with their own structures and methods of exerting influence. The rule of Sigismund as a cosmopolitan figure who governed vast territories led to a multiplication and differentiation of monarchical centers.10 Resilient alliances, effective communicative strategies, and a considerable degree of everyday political pragmatism were constitutive for the period of Sigismund’s rule. Depending on the situation and the local balance of power, Sigismund, his allies, and his opponents alike had to renegotiate or reconfirm interests, power relations, and coalitions in different regions, depending on the temporal, spatial, and social contexts.

The territories ruled by Sigismund and the neighboring regions significantly influenced by him served as the framework and the focal points of case studies for the international and interdisciplinary conference “DIVERSITAS (Sigis)MUNDI – Politische, soziale, religiöse und kulturelle Vielfalt in der Zeit Sigismunds von Luxemburg (1368–1437)“ [DIVERSITAS (Sigis-)MUNDI. Political, social, religious, and cultural diversity in the time of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437)], which took place in Munich in February 2023.11 The conference aimed to reveal dynamics, conflicts, regional peculiarities, and the significance of various affiliations in the time of Sigismund of Luxembourg by focusing on a range of case studies. In addition to questions of political history, issues involving social and economic history, migration history, gender history, religious history, object and art history, personal history, and spatial history were considered. Presentations and joint debates were dedicated to the question of how religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity influenced local practices of rule and governance. Furthermore, we considered the extent to which categories of difference (such as religion, social status, gender, and ethnicity) established politically relevant group constellations. We also discussed whether specific practices and semantics were developed to cope with diversity. Finally, we considered the ways in which the various categories of difference overlapped or reinforced one another.

In order to provide a forum for discussion of these questions, the conference focused on the period of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368–1437). But more importantly, it considered the meanings and applicability of diversity as an analytical term for Medieval Studies. The conference panels were structured around four fields: political, social, religious, and cultural diversity. These fields enabled the participants to focus on a variety of types of diversity, e.g. religious practices, concepts of the unity both of the Church and of empires. Other issues were discussed, including multilingualism, the roles of learned men and women, multiple cities, and propaganda and conflicts.

This special issue of the Hungarian Historical Review presents selected case studies from the 2023 conference. Instead of providing a summary of the papers or retracing the four conference sessions, our introduction focuses on the various possible meanings of the term diversity, methodological approaches to the study of diversity, and the relevance or applicability of these approaches to the field of Medieval Studies.12 We discuss ways in which we can study political, social, religious, and cultural differences in the Middle Ages through the prism of diversity and the terminological and methodological challenges this presents.

Modern and Historic Meanings of “Diversity”: Approaching
a Challenging Term and Its Usages in Medieval Studies

The term diversity can be understood in a variety of ways, as current debates concerning social/gender/class equality and sociological discussions about social orders aptly demonstrate.13 In historical research, however, there seems to be no fixed definition. For this reason, the conference concept used a broad understanding of this term, defining diversity simply as any potential system of differentiation.14 Some conference papers noted that diversity is not merely an analytical term, as one does indeed find the Latin term diversitas in numerous medieval sources.15 However, more than once it became clear that this term does not translate to a modern concept of diversity, especially not to diversity as “celebration of difference.”16 This first impression, if perhaps vague, is confirmed by the definition of diversitas provided by the Oxford Latin Dictionary:

dīuersitās, -ātis f.

1. A state of being apart, separateness, distance.

2. The condition or fact of being different, diversity, difference; difference

of method.

3a. Difference of opinion, disagreement (between).

3b. a contradictory state, inconsistency.17

These observations lead us to two questions. First, is it misleading to use the term diversity in studies on the Middle Ages despite the fact that it may well have meant something else in the sources? Second, is diversity a useful neutral and methodologically convincing term?18 Numerous papers of this special issue highlight that the term could have an ambiguous or even negative nuance in the Middle Ages.19 Does that mean we should draw distinctions between positive and negative connotations of diversity in historical research?

To provide some idea of how these two questions can be handled, we should first discuss conceptual and terminological aspects regarding diversity. Today, the concept of diversity is of growing importance and finds itself at the center of political and social debates (e.g. political/religious/social/ethnic/gender diversity, diversity management in work environment, biodiversity, etc.).20 For the most part, the term is used to refer to issues of race, class, and gender, but it is not limited to these aspects.21 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides recent examples on the web for each dictionary entry.22 These examples suggest that American newspapers and magazines tend to use the term diversity together with the word inclusion, so the term indeed leans towards aspects of race, class, and gender.23

This certainly is not the way Sigismund of Luxembourg or his contemporaries (the case study for this special issue) would have understood diversity. However, recent trends and debates have clearly reflected on academic research and on study programs taught at history departments and other university institutes.24 In January 2023, for example, the History Department at the University of Münster advertised a permanent position (open to historians of all historical periods) as lecturer with a focus on diversity.25 They were seeking someone who could teach “in the field of ‘diversity’ (including culture, religion, ideology, ethnic or social origin, gender, age, disability),” understood as “a social phenomenon as well as a key concept and field of research in historical studies.”26 According to this text, the department’s concept of diversity is quite broad. Compared to the focus fields of our conference, it additionally comprises ideology, ethnic origin, gender, age, and disability.27 Overall, this advertisement testifies to a growing academic interest in this field, independent of specific periods, as much as it shows how extensive and vague the very concept of diversity is.

Drawing on this example, we pondered the extent to which the term is relevant (or increasingly relevant) to the field of Medieval Studies in particular. Without claiming completeness, we tried to establish a first impression based on findings generated by searches in the bibliographical databases RI-Opac (Regesta Imperii-Opac) and IMB (International Medieval Bibliography). According to our statistical analysis, the term diversity (or “Diversität” in German) has only come into use for publications by medievalists since the late 1990s. If one counts all entries using the term “Diversität” or “diversity” in the title of a book or article without, however, counting titles that were indexed with the term diversity, the number of results is limited: about 90 in the IMB and about 30 in the RI-Opac. Compared to many other key words of medieval studies, these are fairly low numbers. As is so often the case, there are various explanations. Mostly, this topic has a lot to do with labels. There has been considerable research and scholarship on social and religious difference in the Middle Ages, but often this scholarship is part of studies focused mostly on other topics and therefore does not show in the databases if one considers only the titles of publications. Examples include studies focused on the crusaders or on pluri-religious cultural contact zones.28

What, however, do authors mean when they use the label diversity for their publications? Diversity is often used as a synonym for “variety” or “plurality,” and vice versa.29 These terms are not quite the same in English and German, but they have clear overlaps. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes diversity as “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements (especially the inclusion of people of different races, cultures, etc. in a group or organization).”30 Plurality is defined as “a) the state of being plural, b) the state of being numerous, c) a large number or quantity,”31 while variety is “the quality or state of having different forms or types.”32 While we cannot discuss the manifold studies on plurality in the Middle Ages here,33 we would like to suggest the use of diversity as an analytical tool for Medieval Studies. This is not a political agenda that seeks to highlight or promote diversity in history. Rather, compared to terms such as plurality and variety, diversity as a concept seems to offer the clearest focus on individuals and groups, and this makes it an attractive concept for the study of social groups and their structures and forms of identity.

Diversity as an Analytical Tool for Medieval Studies?
Conceptual and Terminological Suggestions

Accordingly, the levels of meaning and areas of application of this term vary considerably. Diversity is often used to describe very different areas, ideas, and social practices. Cultural scientist Margit E. Kaufmann even characterizes diversity as a “tense dispositive of the Zeitgeist.”34 According to Kaufmann, the widespread use of the term diversity can be understood as a reaction to tensions within Western societies. Cultural anthropologist Steven Vertovec even states that our time is not necessarily “characterized by a higher degree of social difference than earlier times, but […] discourses about diversity are ubiquitous in the contemporary era.”35

From a historical perspective, on the other hand, Thomas Bauer, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies, recently noted a significant loss of diversity and ambiguity in modern times under the catchphrase of the “disambiguation of the world” (“Vereindeutigung der Welt”). Bauer suspects that this development is a trait of modernity, which is characterized by a trend toward the annihilation of diversity and the rejection of ambiguity. In contrast, Bauer attests to the exemplary character (from the perspective of diversity) of pre-modern societies, because they were “tolerant of ambiguity” (“ambiguitätstolerant”) and thus well versed in modes of dealing with social, cultural, and religious differences. In contrast to countries in Africa, the Near East, or Asia, which he contends offer examples of “real multiculturalism” (“wirkliche Multikulturalität”), Bauer considers pre-modern Europe monocultural due to the homogenizing effect of Christianity: “In the pre-modern era, no continent was as religiously and culturally uniform as Europe.”36

A medieval monarch like Sigismund of Luxembourg or his contemporary observers like Philip Diversi and Isidore of Kiev would probably have been surprised by this assessment. After all, Sigismund ruled and influenced large parts of Europe. Sigismund was always confronted with diverse day-to-day political disputes, different groups, differing concepts of belonging, and a differentiation of participatory structures, whether these differences were consequences of the “Great Western Schism,” the war against the Hussites, debates concerning the power of disposition in his kingdoms, efforts to unify Christendom, or defense measures against the Ottomans.

But do we need the concept of diversity for research on Sigismund and his time? Does the study of historical constellations through the prism of diversity really yield new or different findings? Or is diversity just a buzzword synonymous with variety, plurality, or multiculturalism? And does the term, which is used today primarily in reference to race, class, and gender, possibly direct our gaze away from forms of alterity in medieval societies? The aim of this special issue is not to impose modern notions of diversity on medieval societies. Nevertheless, it seems that a term that is primarily used with political and social connotations and implications has great potential for academic discussions, less as an empirical than as an analytical category.

At the heart of diversity lie “different conceptions of social difference.” It is thus a relational concept which highlights differences in terms of social categories and can be applied to relational structures within a social space. Consequently, as Steven Vertovec suggests, an important basic assumption is “the recognition of social difference,”37 regardless of which aspects are brought into focus. This is also where Moritz Florin, Victoria Gutsche, and Natalie Krentz started in 2018 when they made the first systematic attempt to make diversity applicable to historical case studies. They understand diversity as a “system of differentiations”38 that could be pronounced and asserted differently depending on historical constellations. First, a broad reservoir of categories of difference is to be assumed (e.g. religion, language, gender, social position, etc.), which can become visible and effective in different ways. Then, we must ask for forms of dealing with these social differences. In addition to the marking of otherness, the resulting options for perception and action are crucial. These include both observable positioning by means of clothing, symbolic external presentation, and use of language or religious practice and discursive positioning within a social hierarchy.39

Depending on the context, differentiated categories can lead to social inequalities, disparate distribution of resources, and different opportunities for participation. They can but do not necessarily have to contribute to the consolidation of social hierarchies. At the same time, the categories that are used to define and legitimize differences are variable in terms of their content or use, and thus the practices and semantics of differentiation are similarly variable. Categories of difference can be used to legitimize or negate claims to resources or to create new normative orders.40

Diversity as a historical category of analysis thus does not serve as a means of tracing static forms of inclusion or exclusion.41 Rather, according to our hypothesis, it can further more nuanced contextualization of political, social, cultural, and religious differences and hierarchies historically in their relevance to processes of social negotiation and also reveal semantic or narrative changes in the ways in which these differences were reified, challenged, or exploited.42 Whether “plurality” (“Vielfalt”) is an adequate synonym for diversity or whether, as in recent migration research, terms such as “multiplicity” (“Vielheit”)43 or alternatives are more appropriate remains a matter for discussion.

The papers in this special issue consider which sources reveal information about social differences and hierarchies. They thereby show that a variety of sources and phenomena can provide knowledge about forms of social dif­fe­rentiation. One can easily state that it is possible to study diversity in the Middle Ages and that this study of diversity is fruitful. However, not everything we can study has to be studied or has the same importance. Without any doubt, the concept of diversity offers new perspectives on social groups and phenomena that have not been given the attention they deserve. At the same time, we need to discuss whether and how the modern concept of diversity is applicable to the Middle Ages. The easy answer would be yes, it is applicable, but we have to be cautious and precise. It is important to understand the study of diversity not solely as analysis of markers of difference, such as race, class, and gender, but also as the study of concepts, definitions, and uses of variety, understanding contemporary assessments of such variety and its social functions and contexts.

Baring this in mind and based on the papers of the conference and the articles in this special issue, we would like to highlight four aspects that struck us as good reference points to show why it is important to focus on diversity as a concept. First, when applying the concept of diversity, many case studies also found notions of unity and uniformity. These concepts are certainly essential to any understanding of groups and societies, and thus they are of great importance to the field of medieval studies. In some cases, unity and uniformity seem to be opposed to social differentiations. In other cases, these differentiations can be part of unity. Thus, as an analytical tool, diversity can further a more nuanced understanding of how various forms of unity were understood and how they functioned.44

Second, differences and hierarchies typically can be found in processes of inclusion and exclusion used by self-fashioning social groups. This becomes visible in the cases of numerous religious groups and subgroups but also in uses of language (understood broadly also as discursive styles), forms of symbolic expression, and communication strategies.45 At the same time, the papers discuss how social groups were imagined, for instance in the case of individual cities, knights, the nobility, and possibly even heretics.46 If we analyze these constellations through the prism of diversity (within a realm or outside it), we can arrive at a richer grasp of how these groups were constructed and how they functioned.47

Third, we can ask whether positive and negative conceptions of diversity can be handled analytically the same way. Negative and positive connotations of diversity certainly are closely linked to processes of inclusion and exclusion and can even be used as tools in these processes. As a term, diversity has a number of meanings, ranging from separateness and the condition of being different to a difference of opinion. And scenarios of diversity are conceived in multiple ways. If possible, in our analysis we should make clear how diversity was assessed at the time in its specific context to preclude misconceptions by modern readers.48

And last, what role do differences and imaginations play in learning and imitating in art and scholarship, in connecting people, and in establishing opportunities for cultural exchange? Contact zones (understood both spatially and socially) seem to be especially fruitful for these questions.49 These contact zones can include regions such as the Adriatic or the Mediterranean,50 assemblies such as councils or parliaments,51 and cities and even courts.52 We can study both the intellectual works and artifacts produced in these milieus and contact zones and we can focus on individual people and their motives and interests.

These four spotlights highlight only some aspects and debates of this special issue. In many cases, the focus on diversity puts social groups, social practices, social discourses, and forms of identity building or interactions with these forms of identity into focus. This seems to be a promising way of broadening our perspective on the period of Sigismund of Luxembourg beyond the emperor and the nobility surrounding him. Analyzing modes of differentiation in the Middle Ages thus means applying the analytical category of diversity, which furthers a more nuanced understanding of social groups, their practices, and how they interacted with and conceived of one another.

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Yannis, Stouraitis, ed. War and Collective Identities in the Middle Ages: East, West, and Beyond. War and Conflict in Premodern Societies. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2023.

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Online sources

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diversity

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plurality

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/variety.

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Universität Bonn “Gender- und Diversityvorlesungsverzeichnis.” Last accessed on Octo­ber 18, 2023. https://www.gleichstellung.uni-bonn.de/de/universitaetskultur/gender-diver­si­ty­­vorlesungsverzeichnis

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* We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their remarks, which helped clarify our argu­menta­tion.

Unitas and Diversitas: Sigismund’s Empire as
a Model of Late Medieval Rulership

Bernd Schneidmüller

Heidelberg University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2  (2024):172-194 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.172

This article analyzes the emperorship of Sigismund (1368–1437) as a particular configuration of rule in the fifteenth century. Research on the medieval Holy Roman Empire in the Latin West has traditionally focused on the great emperors from the ninth century to the thirteenth. In contrast, imperial coronations and imperial rule in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have received much less attention. The article first presents the structural features of the Holy Roman Empire and then focuses on the significant changes to this structure in the late Middle Ages. Discontinuities made imperial rule the exception rather than the rule. Long intervals between imperial coronations always required reinventions of traditions, which led to situational negotiations among popes, authorized cardinals, and emperors. In 1433, Sigismund was the first emperor since 1220 to receive his coronation from the pope himself in Rome. The article makes it clear that Sigismund was a master in the creation of new rituals and symbols. During his reign, the imagery of the empire expanded significantly. Alongside unity (unitas) came diversity (diversitas). The article shows how differently the imperial coronation of 1433 was perceived and narrated by contemporaries in Italy and Germany.

Keywords: Holy Roman Empire, emperorship in the late Middle Ages, coronation, Emperor Sigismund, Roman popes, perceptions of power

Through his imperial coronation on May 31, 1433, Sigismund (1410–1437) aligned himself with the long-established traditions of papal elevation ceremonies in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.1 In the Middle Ages, the concept of Latin emperorship elevated kingship to a heightened status and gave it a unique and universal dignity. This was deeply rooted in salvation history, yet it did not necessarily translate to a practical increase in power. This article outlines the overarching framework encompassing the images, assertions, and actualities of emperorship in the late Middle Ages.2 It then delves into Sigismund’s emperorship, exploring four lines of inquiry: (1) the novel notions of parallels between Roman emperorship and kingship in the context of Sigismund’s dual kingship in 1410–11; (2) the reasons behind the absence of Sigismund’s imperial coronation during the Council of Constance despite his role as a patron of the Holy Roman Church; (3) the question as to whether the Roman king truly needed a ceremonial elevation to emperor in Rome; and (4) the motivations behind the late achievement of Sigismund’s imperial coronation. Was it merely a matter of preference or was it a belated pursuit of a missed opportunity?

The essay begins with an introduction of depictions of an emperor, laying the groundwork for a comprehensive analysis of sources that have been acknowledged but not yet systematically contextualized. Sigismund emerges as a ruler around whom there was a rich array of imagery and who was skilled in grand presentations and a creator of rituals and symbols of authority. The work on monuments of German kings and emperors by Schramm and Fillitz fail to capture this abundance.3 Only the exhibitions in 2006 in Budapest and Luxembourg made an earnest attempt to amass these images.4 Claudia Märtl has recently highlighted the disparity in research attention to emperorship between the early and high Middle Ages compared to the fifteenth century, which has led to an uneven focus on written and visual sources.5

Proceeding with a focus on Emperor Sigismund, the essay first offers three illustrative examples. Firstly, “the man with the fur cap,” a parchment on wood housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, garners attention for its quality and uniqueness. Its creation is dated to around 1420 or 1436–37.6 Multiple representations of Sigismund wearing a fur cap suggest its significance to the king and emperor. The depiction reveals a diadem atop the fur cap and the opulence of his robe.

Secondly, the image of Sigismund’s Roman imperial coronation by Pope Eugene IV (1431–1447) in 1433 endures visually. Bronze reliefs by Filarete, commissioned by Eugene between 1433 and 1445, adorn the central portal of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. These reliefs portray significant scenes, including Sigismund’s coronation and his journey with the pope to the Ponte Sant’Angelo. The images symbolize the submission of the Christian emperor to the authority of the pope.7

A third image is sketched in the words of the Mainz merchant Eberhard Windeck. He wrote his “Book of Emperor Sigismund” soon after Sigismund’s death. It has survived in several text manuscripts and in two illuminated manuscripts. Windeck tells a scandalous story denouncing the negligent treatment of the Germans at the Roman Curia. It is said that Sigismund’s imperial crown was placed crookedly on his head during the coronation: “So the emperor knelt before the pope. Then the pope lifted his right foot and placed the crown straight on the emperor’s head, as is right and customary.” In his narrative of the presentation of the sword, Windeck amplified the scandal of the “foot-crowning.” Allegedly, during the reading of the Gospels, the pope gave the emperor the bare sword “with the top to his hand. The emperor’s marshal reversed it and placed it correctly in the emperor’s hand. And then the emperor finished singing the gospel.”8 The narrative presentation of this double affront was intended to scandalize and provoke German sentiment against the Curia. This tale, while probably not historically accurate, provides insight into the contemporary perspective on imperial coronations.

These images present emperorship characterized by humility and humiliation. Eberhard Windeck’s chronicle defines Sigismund as the “Light of the World,” emphasizing his role as both Roman king and emperor.9 In his account of the emperor’s death, Sigismund’s flair for drama in his presentation of himself is evident, as he dons ecclesiastical vestments and the imperial crown before passing. Windeck describes Sigismund’s desire for his corpse to put on display for days to show that the ruler of the world had died.10

The juxtaposition of the titles “Light of the world” and “Lord of the world” raises questions about the essence of emperorship in the fifteenth century. This assertion of universal primacy contrasts with the submissiveness Sigismund displayed before the pope. These observations prompt an exploration of the evolving nature of late medieval emperorship in Latin Christianity, leading back to a deeper examination of Sigismund’s role as emperor.

Emperorship as a Figure of Order

Emperorship represented an elevated form of kingship, but what contributed to this elevation? Who played a role in shaping it? Who embraced it? It is worth examining the foundational principles of emperorship within the Holy Roman Empire.11 Below, I present nine key aspects in a simplified breakdown.12

(1) Emperorship drew its inspiration from ancient models of order. It em­bodied both a sense of exceptional universality and the ability to accept ex­ternal rulers, without making this apparent contradiction a central challenge. The concept of earthly superiority was developed to boost the legitimacy and authority of the emperor, although this concept did not necessarily extend beyond the empire’s borders. A strict hierarchical structure was not theoretically established. The distinction between higher-level emperorship and subordinate kingship was context-dependent and pragmatic. An early medieval doctrinal text offered the following formulation: “King is he who rules over one people or more. Emperor is he who rules over the whole world or takes precedence in it.”13 While some sources did describe emperorship as dominion over the entire world, these memorable phrases did not align with the reality of diverse rule on earth. Despite being perceived as universal during the Latin Middle Ages, emperorship functioned within the plurality of monarchies.

(2) The restoration of the Roman Empire in the West by Charlemagne in 800 endowed the notion of emperorship of the Latin Middle Ages with a new dimension. After initial experimentation with rituals in the early nineth century, emperorship formed a liturgical partnership with the papacy as the second universal authority that claimed unique dominion on Earth. The “ordines” of crowning and anointing in St. Peter’s Basilica integrated the spiritual agency of the popes and the religious devotion of the emperors. The historical primacy of the Roman Empire, established in ancient times, shifted to emphasize collective responsibility for Latin Christianity. This conferred a sacred grandeur and distinct Christian charisma on the emperorship, rooted in its foundation at the tomb of Peter, prince of the apostles. This evolved into the idea that Augustus’ empire preceded the Christian church and laid the groundwork for the Savior’s birth. However, imbuing secular rule with spiritual significance led to functional dependencies and personal considerations, preventing a comprehensive political embodiment of imperial dignity throughout the Middle Ages. This complexity should not be seen as a missed opportunity of the imperial state or as capitulation to papal precedence, as once argued by German scholarship. On a pragmatic level, the Frankish and later East Frankish kings’ patronage of the Holy Roman Church offered a significant opportunity for participation in the imperial traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world.

(3) The unity of the Mediterranean region as a whole was disrupted in the seventh century. First, the Arab expansion and the formation of the Muslim empire fractured this unity. Subsequently, in the eighth century, the Franks gained political ascendancy in the West. This prompted the Roman papacy to shift its allegiance from Constantinople to rulers in Gaul and Italy, resulting in the coexistence of two Roman and Christian empires. Thus, the once unified ancient world empire gave way to three separate empires. From Charlemagne’s re-establishment of the western imperium Romanum in 800 until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Christendom navigated the presence or contestation of two Christian emperors. During Sigismund’s reign, genuine attempts were made to reconcile Eastern and Western Christianities, yet the competition between Christian and Muslim universal claims persisted beyond the Middle Ages. Between 800 and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, the emperorship of Frankish, East Frankish, and German kings played a significant role in shaping the history of Latin Europe. Additionally, variations of imperial concepts emerged at times in regions such as the British Isles, Iberian Peninsula, and France.

(4) The notion of the shared responsibilities of emperors and popes en­countered challenges during the Investiture Controversy, during which the popes asserted their authority more forcefully than the emperors. This period marked the onset of conflicts over primacy and the nature of their mutual relationship. These disputes often revolved around ritual actions during personal encounters, with both pope and emperor demanding obedience from each other.

(5) Around the year 1200, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) heightened the papal claim to examine the eligibility and qualification of the future Roman kings. This pretense was grounded in the earlier papal transfers of the emperorship from the Greeks to the Franks and then to the Germans (translatio imperii). According to Innocent III, this historical transfer granted the popes authority over the empire’s destiny from its inception. Since only the Roman king would later be crowned as the Roman emperor by the pope, it was deemed essential for the pope to assess the king’s suitability at the time of election. While the Roman kings never fully acknowledged this approbation claim, they had to contend with it consistently. In 1338, the prince electors in the “Rhenser Weistum” and Emperor Louis IV (1314–1347) in the “Licet iuris” imperial law codified their interpretations of the election of kings and emperorship. According to this perspective, a person elected by a majority of electors would automatically become a Roman king without requiring papal approval. Going one step further, Emperor Louis IV even linked the Roman emperorship directly to the electors’ election. This pragmatic understanding, which dispensed with the papal coronation, gained acceptance in the sixteenth century. Until that point, a few more emperors negotiated situational compromises during their coronations. Charles IV, Sigismund, and Frederick III each made adjustments during their respective coronations to accommodate the shifting dynamics of their time.

(6) The most significant impact of emperorship on Latin Europe emerged indirectly. The very notion of universality and supremacy fostered a heightened sense of dignity and independence among neighboring realms. In personal encounters, the primacy of the empire was acknowledged only as a matter of ceremony, if at all. Within their own domains, rulers like the French king perceived no higher authority than themselves. This perspective was shared by Roman popes, as well as legal scholars in Italy and France. This political parity between emperor and king laid the groundwork for the principles of state sovereignty that took shape in the sixteenth century, influencing the global political landscape of the time. Consequently, the diverse characteristics of different realms took precedence over the concept of imperial unity.14

(7) A chronological overview reveals a lack of consistent theoretical continuity in the concepts of empire and imperial ideals during the Latin Middle Ages. Despite established “ordines” for imperial coronations, the institution of emperorship required reinvention and redefinition with each succession. The temporal disparity between kings’ elections north of the Alps and their subsequent papal coronations in Rome hindered any continuous imperial narrative. Between 800, the year of Charlemagne’s coronation, and 1519, when Maximilian I passed away, 30 emperors ruled in Latin Christianity. For 413 of these 720 years, a Roman emperor ruled. After Otto the Great revived the Roman emperorship in 962 and linked it to the East Frankish or German kingship, his eight successors held the title of emperor in continuity until 1137. In contrast, from 1138 to 1519, most Roman kings did not proceed to the Roman imperial coronation. Within the 300 late medieval years spanning Frederick II’s imperial coronation in 1220 to Maximilian I’s death in 1519, periods of active emperorship were exceptions rather than the norm. Between Frederick II’s coronation in 1220 and the subsequent coronation in Rome in 1312 of Henry VII, 92 years passed without an imperial coronation. Henry VII’s elevation marked the next imperial coronation, achieved without the participation of the reigning pope based in Avignon at the time. Authorized cardinals conducted the coronation of two Luxembourg dynasty rulers, Henry VII in 1312 and Charles IV in 1355. The coronation of Louis IV from the Wittelsbach dynasty in 1328 was carried out by opposing bishops or an antipope. This increasing temporal and personal detachment led to a divergence between the election of the Roman king and the emperorship in the fourteenth century. Sigismund, in 1433, became the first emperor since Frederick II in 1220 to receive his imperial crown from a legitimate pope, a span of 213 years. This period encompassed 55 years since the passing of Sigismund’s father, Charles IV, in 1378. Thus, the concept of imperial continuity or living memory is not applicable. After Sigismund, Frederick III from the Habsburg dynasty was the final emperor to be crowned at the Roman apostle’s tomb in 1452. Subsequent rulers often retained the title “Elected Roman Emperor” without undergoing a papal coronation. Only one more instance of the liturgical collaboration between pope and emperor occurred for Charles V in Bologna in 1530. The three-century span from 1220 to 1519 underscores that a reigning emperor was the exception rather than the rule. While the royal throne in the Roman-German Empire was rarely vacant, and sometimes multiple contenders vied for the crown, there were 118 years of emperorship contrasted with 181 years without an emperor. The lengthy reigns of Frederick II (30 years) and Frederick III (41 years) accounted for 71 of those 118 years. The remaining four emperors – Henry VII, Louis IV, Charles IV, and Sigismund – reigned for periods ranging from one to 23 years.

(8) While contemporary encomiums praised the emperor as “Lord of the World,” rulers themselves were cautious when making assertions about their global primacy or dominion over the entire world. The chancellery and court focused primarily on the emperor’s protective role over the Holy Roman Church and Christianity. Few exceptions saw imperial claims encroach upon neighboring kingdoms. Notably, in 1240, Emperor Frederick II and the pope engaged in heightened disputes that briefly rose to the level of claims to imperial supremacy. Even then, the Hohenstaufen chancellery made clear distinctions between recipients within the Holy Roman Empire and other kings. A circular letter sent in 1240 to King Henry III of England requested solidarity, while a similar version for the Archbishop of Trier invoked the Germanic peoples’ defense of the empire and world dominion.15 This was a critical moment of imperial superiority propaganda. However, instances of such explicit claims diminished in the subsequent years. During Henry VII’s reign, particularly on the day of his imperial coronation in 1312, he disseminated circular letters throughout the Latin Christian world, conveying his vision of a universal monarchy on Earth.16 This rhetoric surprised both his contemporaries and later historians, with its emphasis on his unique authority. Malte Heidemann’s analysis of these texts and their reception demonstrated how exceptional these expectations of universal subjugation under his rule were. The reactions to this rhetoric were equally telling: the French king impetuosly defended the independence of France, while the king of Naples vehemently rejected any notion of imperium or unitas.17 It is significant that Henry VII’s grandson Charles IV and his great-grandson Sigismund chose to distance themselves from their ancestor’s claim to world dominion. In his election proclamations in 1433, Sigismund expressed joy at being raised to the rank of emperor of the Romans, without delving into sweeping claims.

(9) While the emperors themselves exercised restraint in their assertions, fifteenth-century scholars exhibited a greater degree of ambition. They articulated imperial hopes and claims, deriving these visions from the continuation of the imperium Romanum and its role in Christian salvation history. Soon after Sigismund’s passing, the “Reformation of Emperor Sigismund” emerged as a manifesto for empire reform. In this document, Sigismund only serves as a precursor to the prophesied future peace emperor, Friderich von Lantnewen. This imagined emperor would usher in an era of peace and rule as a priest-king in the tradition of the Old Testament figure Melchizedek, thereby fulfilling God’s order on Earth. This harmonization of divine and worldly realms would be symbolized by the eagle on a golden background, representing the empire and God.18 Nine years after Sigismund’s death, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini wrote a letter to King Frederick III (1440–1493) exploring the origins and authority of the imperium Romanum. This letter positioned the empire as a divine creation, with the author dissociating it from any dualism with the papacy. Aeneas Silvius then emphasized the empire’s specific political mission for the present and future. The core ideas of this letter revolved around the necessity of monarchy to curb individual excesses and ensure peace. This political unity could only be realized under a unique ruler, appointed by God, who could bring about universal peace (pax universalis).19 The imperium Romanum, from this perspective, was God’s creation, initially ruled by kings or magistrates and later by an emperor. The empire’s legitimacy stemmed from both the power of nature and the recognition of Jesus Christ, born during the reign of Emperor Augustus. Christ’s acknowledgment of the imperium solidified its status as a temporal power, coexisting alongside the papacy as two distinct powers. This notion surfaced in humanist discussions about Sigismund’s coronation as well. Some even suggested that the existence of the imperium Romanum would prevent the advent of the Antichrist. The Roman people, as the originators of the empire and world monarchy (monarchia orbis), proclaimed Charlemagne as Patricius and later as Augustus. This lineage extended to the Teutons and culminated in Frederick III. To King Frederick III, Aeneas proclaimed the highest earthly authority, emphasizing his role as the guardian of secular concern.20 Aeneas’s words, while suggestive and subject to qualification, highlighted the evolving perceptions of imperialism in the mid-fifteenth century.

Profiles of Sigismund’s Empire

For an extended period, Sigismund’s tenure as emperor remained a lesser explored topic among medievalists. This could be attributed to waning interest in late medieval emperorship compared to earlier periods, coupled with Sigismund’s relatively belated ascendancy to imperial status, which lasted only four years. During his lengthy term as Roman king from 1410–11 to 1433, an imperial coronation could have followed the Council of Constance’s conclusion in 1417–18. Such an event was indeed on the horizon and had been contemplated by the court. However, Sigismund’s engagement with the ill-fated Council of Basel and the ultimate failure of the conciliar approach cast a shadow over the emperorship of the last of the Luxembourger emperors.

Hönsch’s comprehensive biography adeptly amalgamated the components of imperial action. However, the focus here is more pointedly directed towards the councils and imperial reform.21 Regarding Sigismund’s imperial coronation, Hermann Herre’s compilation found in the volume of the Reichstag records22 held sway for an extended period. Nonetheless, the attempt to reconstruct the reality of the day of Pentecost 1433, as undertaken there, was hampered by the favored analysis of the late medieval coronation ordo. We do not know for certain whether this text was indeed utilized for the imperial coronation. The epistolary and historiographical sources do not confirm this with any conclusiveness.

Only recently have the Italian campaign and imperial coronation of Sigismund garnered the requisite scrutiny in in-depth examinations by Péter Kovács23 and Veronika Proske.24 Kovács and Proske dispel the notion of a seemingly unequivocal reality of the event through successful individual analyses of the numerous and highly diverse written, visual, and musical sources. These documents unveil a vibrant panorama or a polyphonic symphony, thus providing a varied foundation for an understanding of the events of 1431 to 1433. In contrast, Duncan Hardy’s essay on Sigismund’s emperorship is notably concise.25

In six points, I explore the theme of “emperorship as a figure of order” for Sigismund. In doing so, I must extend my temporal scope beyond the recently extensively researched final six years of Sigismund’s life.

(1) Responsibility and Imperial Kingship: In the 1390s, as king of Hungary, Sigismund called upon the Christian community to organize defenses against the Ottomans. The Hungarian army, however, joined by crusaders mainly from Burgundy, suffered a crushing defeat at Nicopolis in 1396. Sigismund narrowly escaped capture. He upheld his commitment to the crusade until the end of his life. Even in his last year, while fatally ill, he supposedly expressed his intention not to pass away before embarking on a crusade to the Holy Land.26 Following his election and subsequent establishment as Roman king in 1410–1411, Sigismund renewed his dedication to Latin Christianity. Despite limited means, he engaged with personal charisma in preparing for the Council of Constance. Martin Kintzinger and other researchers have meticulously studied Sigismund’s extensive travels in Western Europe, as well as his active involvement in the Council.27 Until 1414, Sigismund effectively pursued the Roman king’s responsibility to reform the Holy Roman Church. He consistently motivated monarchs, nobles, and clergy from different regions of Latin Christianity to participate in the Council. Rarely in the late Middle Ages was the will of a Roman king asserted so forcefully beyond his imperial borders. Sigismund subsequently augmented his Hungarian kingship with the Roman kingship and later the Roman emperorship. This dominion over multiple realms established a composite and even imperial kingship. The official title emphasized the superior authority of the Roman king and emperor preceding the Hungarian royal title, symbolizing kingship over various realms. His documents’ intitulationes, following the dignity of Roman king or emperor (Latin with plural genitive: rex / imperator Romanorum), presented his kingship over Hungary, Dalmatia, and Croatia, followed by “etc.” (in the singular genitive for the names of countries). After Sigismund had attained the Bohemian kingship, the chancery appended the kingship of Bohemia following Hungary and preceding Dalmatia and Croatia. Sigismund’s second significant Hungarian seal specified the scope of his kingship as Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia with Herzegovina (Latin: Rama), Serbia, Galicia, Volhynia (Latin: Lodomeria), Cumania, and Bulgaria.28

(2) Familial Bonds: Sigismund’s ascent to the Hungarian throne and his entry into the politics of the Holy Roman Empire were initially shaped by family negotiations and considerations concerning his elder half-brother Wenceslas and his nephews Jobst and Prokop. Wenceslas, as the heir to Emperor Charles IV’s throne, had assumed kingship over both the Holy Roman Empire and Bohemia. Even after having been deposed as Roman king by the prince electors in 1400, he continued to assert his claim to the Roman kingship. From Sigismund’s election as Roman king in 1410 until Wenceslas’ death in 1419, this resulted in an unprecedented and delicate duality. Sigismund demonstrated a flexible disposition, adhering to or diverging from binding agreements depending on circumstances. Early agreements between Wenceslas and Sigismund, opposing King Ruprecht, attest to this. In 1402, as king of Hungary and Vicar General of the Roman Empire, Sigismund informed Giangaleazzo Visconti of the settlement among the four Luxembourg princes and the impending campaign in Italy, wherein Wenceslas would participate as rex Romanorum.29 The division of the Roman emperorship and Roman kingship was repeatedly contemplated within the Luxembourg family. Initially, in 1410, between Wenceslas and Jobst,30 and subsequently in 1411, between Wenceslas and Sigismund. While distinctions between father and son existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (such as between Emperor Frederick II and King Henry (VII) and between Emperor Charles IV and King Wenceslas), the functional partition among brothers was novel. The plan was for Wenceslas to retain the Roman imperial dignity, the imperial regalia, and his kingship over Bohemia. Sigismund upheld his promise not to seek the imperial crown during Wenceslas’ lifetime.31 Noteworthy was the agreed separation of the Roman emperorship and Roman kingship. This evolution would have rendered the imperial dignity a mere ornamental distinction for a Bohemian king, lacking imperial agency within the empire and Christianity.

(3) Defensor et protector: Sigismund asserted this agency as Roman king. Throughout the preparations for and course of the Council of Constance, he functioned as protector and defender of the Church, as well as of the Council itself. During the Council’s rituals, the Roman king presented himself adorned in imperial regalia (in habitu imperiali) and seated prominently at the southern crossing pillar of Constance’s cathedral. In terms of rank, Sigismund held a position above the nations, though he was de facto limited to the German nation. For the council, he adopted a distinctive visual depiction, wherein a prince aims the tip of a bare sword at the king’s head or crown. Werner Paravicini referred to this depiction, observed during the royal Christmas service or princely enfeoffments, as the “Constance gesture.”32 Sigismund embraced a ritual that had been pioneered by his father Charles IV. During the Christmas service, the ruler read the Gospel of Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth with an unsheathed sword, akin to Augustus, whose decree marked the inception of Christian salvation history.33 Sigismund’s dramatic entrance at the beginning of the Council of Constance was of such significance that he endured considerable hardships during the hastened procession to Constance, and he instructed Pope John (XXIII), present at the event, to await his arrival. Achim Thomas Hack characterized the grand entrance before the Council in the following words: “At the seventh reading during Matins and the first Mass, Sigismund, donning the liturgical attire of a deacon and accompanied by candle bearers, ascended the cathedral pulpit and, with his sword unsheathed, recited the Gospel Exiit edictum a Caesare Augusto.”34 Thus, Roman royalty laid the groundwork for the Council to reunify Latin Christianity. While the council did not address all the formidable challenges, the election of Martin V (1417–1431) in 1417 marked the end of the papal schism and a return to the papal office’s singular authority. It is perplexing that Martin’s return to Rome in 1420 did not lead to Sigismund’s elevation as Roman emperor after Sigismund’s endorsement by the new pope. While the chancellery was already planning to give the emperor a novel emblematic, the opportunity was ripe after Wenceslas’ demise in 1419.

(4) Ritual Dynamics: The previously mentioned “Constance gesture” exemplifies Sigismund’s mastery of ritual. His flair for attire and ceremony is evident in various contexts. Yet, Sigismund also fostered the creation of new symbols and signs for the imperial imagery.35 In 1415, he commissioned a mural fresco in Frankfurt, the place of the royal elections, to depict the new quaternion system.36 Post the emperor, empire, and prince electors, this fresco integrated dukes, margraves, landgraves, burgraves, counts, nobles, knights, towns, villages, and peasants as representatives of the empire in groups of four. While the rationale behind selecting and combining these 40 members remains enigmatic, this societal hierarchy illustrates a noteworthy innovation. It intertwined the responsibilities of the king and elector, as formulated in the Golden Bull of 1356, with the medieval community of princes, forming an elite action group of the empire. Numerous depictions since the fifteenth century underscore the integrative power of this model, linking its constituents to the emperor and empire’s distinctive position within salvation history. Sigismund’s influence extended beyond the structure of quaternions. The double-headed eagle with a halo, symbolizing emperorship, also traces back to him. Its significance is evident from an entry in the “Hauskanzleiregistraturbuch.” In November 5, 1417, six days prior to Martin V’s papal election, the protonotary Johannes Kirchen ordered two imperial majesty seals (sigilla imperialis majestatis) from a goldsmith, specifying the double-headed eagle as the seal’s image.37 In Sigismund’s imperial seal since 1433, the intricate idea of the double-headed eagle is codified into an enduring iconographic order. On the obverse, Sigismund presents himself with five coats of arms: the haloed double-headed eagle representing the Holy Roman Empire and the coats of arms of Luxembourg, Bohemia, Hungary, and Upper Hungary (patriarchal cross). The reverse bears only the haloed double eagle, accompanied by a programmatic inscription referencing the eagle of the pro­phet Ezekiel, symbolizing the sanctity of the imperium Romanum and the inter­weaving of the spiritual and temporal realms. The inscription reads “The eagle of Ezekiel has been sent to the bride from heaven. Higher than the eagle flies no seer and no prophet.” (Aquila Ezechielis sponse missa est de celis. Volat ipsa sine meta, quo nec vates nec propheta evolabit alcius).38 Bettina Pferschy-Maleczek delves into the mystical and allegorical dimensions of this symbolism in an extensive article. Based on the vision of Ezekiel (Ezek 1:4–28), the eagle signifies both the fourth gospel and the fourth and final world empire, the imperium Romanum.39

(5) Union of the two greatest lights: Using these words, the papal secretary Cencio Rustici extolled the liturgical harmony between the pope and the emperor in his celebratory oration during Sigismund’s coronation as emperor. As was customary for this genre, the accolades for the new Rome and for Pope Eugene IV as a “celestial man and earthly deity” (celestis homo et terrenus deus) resonated with grandeur.40 With great ceremony, Sigismund, 65 years of age at the time, made his entry into Rome on Ascension Day in 1433 and encountered the pope there. A few days later, the imperial coronation took place in St. Peter’s Basilica during Pentecost. The recent works by Kovács and Proske provide detailed accounts from eyewitnesses and distant chroniclers, offering insights into an imperial coronation that shared essential elements with the models of the fourteenth century. Noteworthy is the repeated mention by Gimignano Inghirami, dean of the Sacra Rota and a man who was deeply involved in the ceremony, of the new emperor’s struggle with gout. Due to this ailment, Sigismund needed assistance and was provided a small seat near the altar.41 Why did Sigismund, a Luxembourger, subject himself to over two years of challenging and at times degrading travel through Italy? A little more than a decade earlier, after the successful conclusion of the Council of Constance, he could have celebrated his journey to the Roman tomb of the Apostles as the successful protector of the new elected pope. The motivation to travel to Rome was evidently driven by the changes in the papal office in 1431 and the threat to the established principle of recurring councils of the Roman Church, as outlined in the Constance Council decree “Frequens.” The rejection of the Council of Basel by Pope Eugene IV and the Council Fathers’ plans to depose him led Sigismund to resume his dip­lomatic endeavors from before the Council of Constance. His aim was now to secure the imperial crown, which would grant him greater influence over the council proceedings. The well-documented negotiation process sheds light on the extensive efforts Sigismund undertook to maintain his authority over the church and council. The initial period from the start of the Italian campaign on April 1, 1431 to the acquisition of the Iron Crown in Milan on November 25, 1431 was relatively brief. In contrast, the time leading up to the Roman imperial coronation dragged on tediously. The succinct account by the Liège chronicler Cornelius Menghers of Zantfliet, who described Sigismund’s move to Rome to obtain the third crown as the holder of already two crowns, presents the extended duration as part of the lawful progression from Italian king to Roman emperor.42 However, the reality was far more demanding. In the end, the mutual benefits for the emperor and the pope prevailed, as Eugene IV’s rule remained tenuous. By accepting Eugene as the person to crown him, Sigismund reinforced Eugene’s authority. Thus, Sigismund’s entry into Rome and the imperial coronation were staged as a continuous display of harmonious agreement. In an encomium of Sigismund, possibly delivered at the Council of Basel, a Bolognese orator recalled the closeness between the pope and emperor, characterized by kisses, tears of joy, and overwhelming ardor. The bond was so strong that onlookers perceived their distinct bodies as a singular entity, “marvelous in our eyes.”43 The musical composition “Supremum est mortalibus bonum,” a motet by Guillaume Dufay, a member of the papal chapel, praised the pope and king as peacemakers and celebrated the long-awaited peace as the ultimate good for humanity and a divine gift.44 However, amidst the abundant praise, it is important not to overlook the fact that Italian humanists also subjected Emperor Sigismund to ridicule. A mere four days after the imperial coronation, Poggio Bracciolini wrote a letter to Niccolò Niccoli in which he gave an eyewitness account of Sigismund’s time in Rome. The letter compared the medieval imperial coronation tradition, stemming from Charlemagne, to the Roman empire of antiquity. Poggio’s disdain was directed at the term “king of the Romans,” which the present emperors adopted even before their consecration and coronation. He perceived this term as perverse and believed it originated from barbarians unfamiliar with ancient history and the power of words. In this manner, Poggio derogated Emperor Sigismund as an uninformed individual. This remark from the scholar dismissed the four-century-long self-assuredness of Roman royalty as a privileged monarchy within Latin Christianity. The glory of Roman antiquity now became the benchmark for a late medieval period that highly valued the legitimizing “power of words” (vis verborum).45

(6) Recollected emotions: Prior to his coronation, Sigismund had been accepted into the community of the canons at St. Peter’s in the church of Santa Maria in Turri. Following the imperial coronation, on the Tiber bridge, he elevated numerous followers to knighthood in the traditional manner. A letter documents as many as 180 honors.46 After the knighting at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, this elevation during the imperial coronation held the highest distinction for a Christian knight. This triumph might still have been rooted in the belief articulated by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1155 that he possessed the right to rule over Italy and be crowned emperor as a conqueror. Notably, no German princes or Hungarian magnates were present at Sigismund’s imperial coronation. Consequently, numerous knightly and patrician attendants carried their knightly pride back to the land north of the Alps, enhancing the memory of the 1433 imperial coronation. This was accompanied by numerous imperial confirmations of privileges, noble grants, coat of arms enhancements, favors, and legitimizations of illegitimate birth.47 The news of the imperial coronation prompted celebrations in German cities, with bells ringing, bonfires blazing, and grand processions taking place in imperial cities.48 The response in Nuremberg is meticulously documented, where accounts detailed the costs and benefits of the im­perial coronation for the city. A decade earlier, Sigismund had entrusted the imperial regalia to Nuremberg’s Holy Spirit Hospital in perpetuity. They arrived in 1424. The Nuremberg City Council sent a legation to Rome for the imperial coronation, led by Erhard Haller and city clerk Ulrich Truchsess. The city’s records chronicled expenses of 2296 ¼ florins and 8 pounds of Nuremberg Heller for the legation’s 14-week absence.49 In return, the envoys secured 23 imperial privileges, including nine with a Golden Bull. One of these documents confirmed the perpetual residence of the imperial regalia in Nuremberg. This golden-bull document from the new emperor upheld the king’s privilege from 1423, which had previously only been confirmed with a wax seal. In total, the imperial city of Nuremberg held 27 rulers’ charters with golden bulls issued between 1313 and 1717. Remarkably, a third of these charters dated back to the day of Sigismund’s coronation as emperor alone.50 The expenses associated with issuing eight golden bulls and 14 charters under majesty’s seal on coronation day were meticulously recorded: 600 ducats for the imperial chancery, 200 ducats for the gold used in the bulls, 40 ducats for the goldsmith, and 50 ducats in gratuities for the chancery clerks.51 With this extraordinary abundance of costly gold bulls, Nuremberg compensated for not having received the renowned “Golden Bull” of Emperor Charles IV and the Electors in the fourteenth century. Of the seven originals of this pivotal document, six were reaffirmed at the time with the imperial gold bull, while only Nuremberg relied on the more affordable wax seal version. Five members of the Nuremberg delegation, identified by name, were among the newly knighted individuals in 1433. Ulrich Truchsess and Erhard and Paul Haller, were granted an imperial confirmation and augmentation of their coat of arms.52 The benefits of Sigismund’s reign for Nuremberg were commemorated in the renowned artworks by Albrecht Dürer in the early six­teenth century, dedicated to the shrines of relics kept in the city. Alongside the portrait of Charlemagne, credited as the originator of the regalia, stood Sigismund, to whom Nuremberg owed the preservation of these cherished artifacts.53 Nonetheless, the jubilation over the imperial triumph in Germany was coupled with a disconcerting sentiment that the Curia had treated the emperor with disrespect. Eberhard Windeck presented a thought-provoking anecdote that likely was not considered in the historical reconstruction of the events within the Roman St. Peter’s church. Windeck’s intention was to evoke emotions through his narrative. Allegedly, the cardinal designated for the coronation had questioned the emperor in advance about his legitimacy of birth and piety. Sigismund affirmed his legitimacy but then added that the cardinal himself was neither pious nor fit for coronation due to his alleged act of mutilating a woman’s breasts. According to this story, the cardinal in charge then carelessly placed the crown on the emperor’s head during the coronation, causing it to tilt to the right side. In response, as mentioned earlier, the pope straightened the crown with his right foot, adhering to custom.54 This tale of the papal foot-adjustment roused sentiments in Germany. The story contrasted moral righteousness and concern for Christianity with the perceived moral decay within the Curia and the popes’ perceived arrogance. This account, passed down even during the Reformation, fueled the grievances (gravamina) of the German nation during the late Middle Ages. Consequently, the image emerged of the virtuous emperor humiliated by a cunning pope.

Conclusion

In her analysis of Sigismund’s political system, Sabine Wefers evaluates the role of the emperorship as follows: While the emperorship was undoubtedly a form of “elevated kingship,” its practical function was essentially equivalent to regular kingship.55 This assessment seems accurate, but it underestimates the legitimizing significance of imperial dignity for the emperors of the late Middle Ages. Hence, the approach taken in this article diverges from examining the utilitarian aspect of the emperorship and instead proceeds from the perspective of the emperorship as a splendid symbol of order. Consequently, alongside modes of action, there arises a focus on interpretations, perceptions, rituals, and their impacts. In terms of functionality, the limitations of imperial authority were repeatedly demonstrated during the later Middle Ages. Nonetheless, no other monarch would have undertaken Sigismund’s ambitious efforts to organize Latin Christianity and enable the Council of Constance. The institution of emperorship provided a framework for a vision of unity even amid enduring diversity.

In this paper, I have outlined three conceptions of emperorship, delineated nine characteristics typical of emperors, and presented six distinct profiles of Emperor Sigismund. A key argument of this article centered on the fluidity in the conception and structure of empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This openness was largely attributed to the frequent interruptions in the reigns of emperors. Only the Roman kingship succeeded in establishing lasting continuity. A detailed comparison of the reigns of Roman kings and emperors reveals that imperial rule between 1250 and 1519 was more of an exception than the norm. Consequently, each late medieval imperial coronation should be seen in its exclusivity rather than as a recurring pattern. This perspective lends significance to Sigismund’s delayed decision to seek coronation as emperor from the pope, underscoring his understanding and vision of himself as the defender of the Roman Church as well as the protector of the Council. Thus, Sigismund’s stance is revealed within a comprehensive framework of emperorship, allocating roles to the participants in the reenactment of crowning and sacring as established rituals. Nevertheless, the significant interruptions in late medieval imperial coronations led many of Sigismund’s contemporaries to perceive and portray imperial authority in varying ways.56

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Alterity and Self-Understanding: Inclusion and Exclusion Strategies of Southern German Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Markus Christopher Müller

Institute of Bavarian History at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2  (2024):195-212 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.195

This article analyses diversification strategies in the politics of Sigismund I as king and emperor. Three examples (Swabia, Bavaria, and Tyrol) show different aspects of this diversity. In Swabia, Sigismund attempted to mediate alliances between the knightly societies and the city federations in order to create a counterweight to the imperial princes. In Bavaria, he privileged the knighthood and thus created a dynamic that led to the formation of the land estates with their own identity. Sigismund also supported rebellious nobles in Tyrol against their prince. All interventions can be better contextualised against the backdrop of his imperial policy. At first glance, he was not successful anywhere, but the imperial privileges he granted had an impact on the conflicts between the knighthood/nobility and princes in the fifteenth century and thus diversified late medieval constitutional practice.

Keywords: nobility, empire, constitution, knighthood, Swabia, Bavaria, Tyrol, estates

When King Sigismund was in Nuremberg in September 1422, he had difficult months behind him which had born witness to his coronation as king of Bohemia, victories and defeats against the Hussites, and a hasty flight. Furthermore, he was not in Nuremberg entirely voluntarily, for after he himself had let an invitation to a possible court day in Regensburg lapse, the electors had summoned him to appear in Nuremberg on July 15, 1422.1 Historian Sabine Wefers speaks of the self-organisation of the empire.2 Sigismund arrived on July 26 and tried to make the day called by the electors his own after all.3

On September 13, 1422, the Sunday before the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, he allowed the knighthood in the empire (it remains unclear whether at this point he was only addressing the estate of imperial knights, which was also not yet clearly definable) to unite for the protection of their rights and to admit imperial cities to their union. In the corresponding charter, at least one of which is preserved in the original in Munich, the king emphasises his concern for safeguarding the rights of the knighthood of his realm.4 His aim was for the nobility to be happy and blessed.5 Sigismund had to intervene, as he had heard that the knighthood in Germany was suffering much coercion and that many of its rights were being challenged.6 This is followed in the corresponding charter by the cities, to which he grants the full right to join the associations of the nobility.7 For himself and all his successors, Sigismund confirmed the right of association for the knighthood and cities in his realm.

The charter from September 13, 1422 has so far received attention as King Sigmund’s “privilege,” especially in research on the Swabian nobility. Hermann Mau even regarded it as the “Magna Carta der deutschen Reichsritterschaft.”8 The aim of this royal privileging of Sigismund was, in my view, to diversify the political constellations of actors in the Holy Roman Empire so that Sigismund himself would be able to intervene as the ordering head of this empire and thus to create counterweights to the Electoral College. Sigismund’s approach can be seen as innovative against the backdrop of his father’s legislation (the Golden Bull) and the denigration by towns and princes of previous associations of lesser nobles as “evil societies” (böse Gesellschaften, e.g. in the early 1380s).

If we understand diversity as a system of differentiations9 that could be developed and asserted in different ways depending on historical constellations, this can be seen as Sigismund’s attempt to create diversity in order to secure and expand his rule. In the following, I will examine how realistic this attempt proved. I draw on three concrete examples: the Swabian noble alliances, the estates of the Duchy of Bavaria, and rebellious nobles in the County of Tyrol. I conclude with an admittedly incomplete attempt to assess the exemplary results to Sigismund’s imperial policy and his understanding of rule. A quick glance at the secondary literature suffices to show that the relationship between King and Emperor Sigismund to the non-princely nobles has hardly been studied. Historians have tended focus on his relations with the princes of the Holy Roman Empire and the political actors who enjoyed “imperial immediacy” (reichsunmittelbar).10 From a broader perspective, the preliminary findings of this paper can further a more nuanced understanding of the associative political culture of the late medieval empire, as recently emphasised by Duncan Hardy, for example:11 “The Empire therefore consisted of a shifting kaleidoscope of intertwined jurisdictions and networks.”12 The functioning of these networks within the empire in its parallel and mutually overlapping constitutional structures and constellations, especially below the level of the imperial princes, has not yet been sufficiently studied.13 In this article, I attempt to do this from the perspective of diversity.

The Swabian Noble Alliances

On April 25, 1413, the regional Swabian knightly confederations under the banner of St. George concluded the Bund der Gemeinen Gesellschaft, the so-called Jörgenbund.14 A few days later, 19 imperial cities entered a union among themselves with a protective relationship with Count Palatine Ludwig and Count Eberhard of Württemberg.15 More than a year later, at Christmas 1414, Sigismund came to the empire as the elected Roman king. At this time, he could only rely on the support of the electors to a limited extent. Accordingly, Sigismund quickly sought to harness the political potential of the lower nobility and the cities. He built on the origins of the Society of St. George’s Shield in the suppression of the Appenzell rural communes and the League above the Lake in 1407–1408, which surely played a major role in making the Society and other associations of lesser nobles potential partners of kings and emperors.16 At the Diet of Constance in February 1415, Sigismund reminded the city delegates of the great city alliances of the fourteenth century, and he explained to them that the princes were increasing their rights at the expense of the empire, while the empire only had the cities to support it. However, his attempts at motivation were unsuccessful. The cities refused to accept the royal alliance policy proposed.17

All the more surprising is the reason Sigismund gives in his Nuremberg charter of September 13, 1422 for not only allowing an alliance between the nobility and the cities but even having called for it. In the charter, he states that all the cities represented in Nuremberg had a great desire to achieve unity and friendship among themselves.18 He, the king, could therefore only welcome the fact that the cities stuck together when the princes joined forces.19 However, it is doubtful whether Sigismund acted as reactively as scholars have often believed him to have done. Rather, the charter should be understood merely as a rhetorical attempt to realise a project that had been running since 1414 at the latest, albeit unsuccessfully in this case as well.

This corresponds to an assumption expressed by Heinz Angermeier that it was not the intention of the imperial cities to engage in a new imperial policy. Rather, it was the king who based on his Hungarian experiences, believed that he could also only develop a monarchical policy in Germany with the help of the cities.20 After Sigismund’s initial conflicts with the Hungarian estates, he was able to come to terms with them in the following years. The model for his attempts to establish city alliances in the empire was certainly the great city privileges of the Hungarian diet of 1405. He probably assumed that this would also enable him to govern successfully in the empire.

This attempt to encourage and favour alliances of the lower nobility, the knighthood, and the cities was supplemented by a clear policy of prohibition, which can be seen as two sides of the same coin. For example, Sigismund forbade the Elector of Mainz and the Rhenish imperial cities of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer to form alliances, with a clear justification addressed to the Elector of Mainz: Since Emperor Charles IV had forbidden such association, he too, Sigismund, thought it was forbidden. He therefore did not want the Elector to approach the aforementioned cities. Instead, he should show consideration for the king and the Empire. In this case, Sigismund clearly argued with the prohibition of alliances formulated in the Golden Bull,21 which the king knew how to interpret differently for himself than for the imperial princes: an alliance could only be established with the knowledge and will of the imperial power. Sigismund wanted to secure a monopoly on it, so to speak.22 Mark Whelan has identified several factors of the communication between the Princely Abbey of Ellwangen and Sigismund’s court which can probably be cited as an additional difficulty in achieving this goal: “the obstacles associated with traversing the vast Luxembourg realms and the costs involved in treating with an often distant sovereign.”23 As Whelan points out, this did not mean that these problems diminished Sigismund’s “significance to contemporaries,”24 but they perhaps did make some of his policies more difficult to implement in practice.

Nevertheless, some of the electors also tried to apply Sigismund’s strategy and organise alliances under their leadership. However, the cities and the St. Jörgen Society refused such electoral association plans at the end of 1427. In May of the following year, the electors again tried to establish such an alliance under their aegis, but we know of no reaction to their efforts.25

At the Diet of Pressburg in 1429, Sigismund himself again called on the cities and knights in the Roman-German Empire to form an alliance, but again without any discernible result.26 Here too, the situation in Swabia nevertheless served as a model illustrating the merits of his argumentation. He sent the knight Konrad von Flörsheim to the knighthood in the Gau and Westerreich, west of the Vogesen, who was to call on them to unite in the name of the king. They need only examine and recognize the benefits such an association, which Sigismund had helped them to achieve, had brought to the Knighthood of Jörgenschild.27 Hermann Mau saw this as Sigismund’s ultimately failed attempt to create a “new basis of power”28 for himself and the empire.

So what remains of the intended diversification? Probably more than contemporaries were aware of. In his work on the Schwäbische Bund, the Swabian Confederation, Horst Carl describes the period under Sigismund as an important phase in the cooperative socialisation of the nobility in the German southwest.29 However, the privilege of 1422 by no means belongs only to the prehistory of the Swabian imperial knighthood, because the hypothesis that Sigismund only addressed knights and towns that were impartial to the empire is not persuasive, as the following example clearly illustrates.30

The Land Estates in the Duchy of Bavaria

The Bavarian estates (Landstände or Landschaft) existed in 1422 in the four partial duchies that had been created in the late fourteenth century after the death of Emperor Ludwig IV under his sons and grandsons.31 There they formed their own political entities without giving up the idea of an existing Duchy of Bavaria.32 Whether they were the addressees of Sigismund’s Nuremberg charter is difficult to say, but probably not. Nevertheless, the Bavarian estates took this royal charter very much for granted and included it as the thirtieth letter of freedom in their collection of rights and privileges created in 1508.33

It was obviously easy for them to integrate this royal document into their perception of themselves and their status, because this right of the nobility and the knighthood to unite with the towns had long been a reality in the Duchy of Bavaria. The institutionalised inclusion mechanisms, which we know as the right of the nobility to unite, were at the same time countered, however, by equally (and I would say causally) necessary exclusion mechanisms, which first and foremost slowly contoured the group that wanted and was supposed to unite. These exclusion mechanisms were also strongly developed in the Duchy of Bavaria at the beginning of the fifteenth century.34

The treatment of guests (Gäste), i.e. of foreigners, or non-Bavarians in this specific case, was regularly a topic of discussion, as was their role in the ducal administration, the council bodies, and the affiliation with the Landschaft.

The three Bavarian dukes Stefan, Friedrich, and Johann had to make several concessions to the nobility at a Diet in Munich in 1392: For themselves and their descendants, they promised not to issue any charter to guests, i.e. foreigners, which could call into question the rights of the “land und leut,”35 a term that the estates liked to use, in Bavaria. If they did, these documents would be pronounced invalid. Likewise, the dukes vowed for both Upper and Lower Bavaria that they would not take guests into consideration when appointing councilors (Räte), guardians (Pfleger), and other court offices, and that they would not appoint anyone who did not come from Bavaria, i.e. that they would only take Bavarian compatriots into their service.36 As a reaction to this, on the same day the “graven, freien, dinstleut, ritter und knecht, stet und mergkt gemaingklich wie die genant sein die zu den landen obern und nidern Bairn gehörent,”37 so counts and nobility, towns and markets in Upper and Lower Bavaria declared that they wanted to unite, also to resist, but in a way that the dukes should always remain with the rule in Bavaria, for the unity of the country, one could well say.

The two charters of the Tuesday before St. Catherine’s Day 1392, one issued and sealed by the princes (Landesfürsten) and one issued and sealed by the estates, reflect the reciprocal relationship. The assurance of exclusivity necessarily went hand in hand with the right to exclusivity for a privileged group. The following year, Duke Johann and Duke Ernst of Bavaria-Munich promised at a diet in Munich that they would only staff their council as well as their castles and fortresses with locals.38 This exclusion was also linked to inclusion, for in the same charter, the two dukes granted the counts, knights and nobles, the towns and markets, or in other words, the “land und leute” of their partial duchy, the right to assemble at any time as soon as necessary.39 On the eve of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in 1396, the dukes Stefan and Johann confirmed in Munich that they would only fill their council positions and all offices with persons who had been born in Bavaria or who were residents there, i.e. who had landed property and thus belong to the “land.”40

At this point, one could mention numerous other letters of alliances, privileges, and their confirmations which were written with particular frequency around 1400. They all move within the range of exclusivity and inclusivity that has been described, and it is only by thinking about them together that we can understand the diversity of political actors and structures. If we think further about Patrick Lantschner’s observation for the late Middle Ages that “the logic of conflict is the logic of political order itself,”41 the dynamic between inclusion and exclusion can also be interpreted not only as a conflict between prince and estates, but as a principle of political order, as Christina Lutter also points out for Vienna.42

The question of exclusivity is by no means confined to Bavaria, especially on Sigismund’s side, but is also encountered in the monarch’s immediate environment. The question of the national composition of his council became particularly intense after the death of his chancellor Georg von Passau in early August 1423. The number of Hungarian magnates, for example, in the witness lists and the strong participation of Italian scholars of jurisprudence were repeatedly criticised in the empire, but so was the prominent role of some members of the Swabian noble alliances in Sigismund’s close environment.43

In addition, Sigismund’s efforts concerning the “Landfrieden,” which Heinz Angermeier has clearly elaborated,44 are also reflected in a charter of the Bavarian Landschaft. According to a charter from a diet in Augsburg on the Mon­day after Palm Sunday 1429, one of the reasons for the association of the estates was that Sigismund had seen the unchristian work and the many sufferings that war and conflict had brought both for the rich and for the poor.45 The estates of the Duchy of Bavaria also included this charter, which originated in a different context, in their collections, rights, and privileges and thus also used it in later centuries to legitimise their claims to imperial authority.46 In 1434, the Bavarian knighthood had all its rights, freedoms, and privileges explicitly confirmed by Emperor Sigismund. The document was later included in the collection as the thirty-sixth letter.47 Under threat of a fine of 100 gold marks for violation of the chartered rights, Sigismund placed the knighthood under special imperial protection. This possibility of sanctions was also explicitly directed against the princes of the empire, i.e. also (although not mentioned by name) against the Bavarian dukes, and it sanctions harmonised well with Sigismund’s strategy of forming alliances at the level of the regional nobility, as shown by the example of Swabia. Thus in Bavaria and throughout the empire, sensitivity concerning the exclusivity of one’s own rights and privileges seems to have been part of the actors’ mindset and certainly played a central role in the question of diversity in the constitutional structure of the late medieval empire. The aforementioned imperial privileges for the Bavarian knighthood also contributed significantly to the formation of the estates, which were later able to invoke precisely these documents – a dynamic that has never been studied before.

Older traditions involving these kinds of demands for exclusivity can be found here. If we look at Tyrol, for example, Margrave Ludwig had also stipulated in the so-called “Großer Freiheitsbrief” (Great Charter of Freedom) of January 28, 1342, which his father, Emperor Ludwig IV, had confirmed, that no important position in Tyrol would be filled by a foreigner.48 This observation leads to the third example.

The Nobility of the County of Tyrol

In the county of Tyrol, Sigismund’s strategy of diversifying political actors fell on ground that was every bit as fertile as in Bavaria, since there is also evidence of a long tradition of corporative political participation in Tyrol. Sigismund wanted to take advantage of this to weaken the Habsburgs, who ruled Tyrol at the time.49

During his reign, the feud between Duke Ernst and Duke Friedrich in Tyrol ended (specifically, in 1417). After that, the struggle for territorial power, which the noble families of Rottenburg, Wolkenstein, Spaur, and Starkenberg in particular wanted to dispute with the ruler, continued for almost a decade. For this period, Werner Köfler assumes that the influence of the nobility in Tyrol reached a highpoint.50 The Tyrolean Landschaft repeatedly acted as a mediating authority. In 1420, Friedrich IV, who wanted and needed to expand his position of power, demanded that the richest nobles of Tyrol return the pledged offices and courts of the prince, though he did offer as a sum in return. However, the nobles refused to return them and sought help not only from other nobles in Tyrol but directly from King Sigismund. There they quickly found support.

As late as December 18, 1422, Sigismund from Pressburg encouraged the support of Ulrich von Starkenberg and Oswald von Wolkenstein. The brothers Michael and Lienhart von Wolkenstein were to support them against Duke Friedrich of Tyrol, who was attacking them. On December 29, Sigismund ordered Duke Friedrich to cease his hostilities against “his servant” Wilhelm von Starkenberg and his brother Ulrich. They would not violate Tyrolean land law, and thus Friedrich had no right to take action against them. If Friedrich, called the duke “with the empty purse,”51 wanted to assert his claims, he should do so before the king or before Dukes Ernst and Albrecht of Austria. Sigismund thus intervened relatively quickly in the Tyrolean disputes by strengthening the opposition among the nobles.

At a meeting in Merano at Pentecost 1423, Duke Friedrich confirmed the rights and freedoms of the assembled estates in order to quickly achieve an association of the country against the opposition of the nobility. With Sigismund’s support, however, the latter wanted to prevent such an agreement at all costs. When the king was in Altsohl (today Zvolen, Slovakia) in July, he once again increased his support for the rebelling nobles. Since Friedrich IV had not fulfilled his obligations to him as king and to the entire Roman-German Empire, in July 16, he was deprived of all fiefs in the county of Tyrol, the land on the Adige and in the Inn valley, as well as other courts. Sigismund announced his intention to return them to the empire and to grant the County of Tyrol to the brothers Ulrich and Wilhelm von Starkenberg as a fief for their loyal service. At the same time, at the request of the two brothers, Sigismund confirmed the rights and privileges of the estates on the Adige and in the Inn valley. Here we encounter a phenomenon that can be observed regularly throughout the fifteenth century: emperors and kings used their power to grant privileges to provincial estates to strengthen them against sovereigns. This constituted a diversification of the constitutional structure of the Roman-German Empire. On the following day, July 17, Sigismund ordered the Imperial Marshal Haupt von Pappenheim to lead the imperial panoply against Duke Friedrich, the disturber of the peace. Sigismund also called on the nobility of neighboring Tyrol, namely Counts Hans von Lupfen and Friedrich von Toggenburg, to take up arms against the disobedient Friedrich and to support Ulrich and Wilhelm von Starkenberg and to march into the Inn and Etsch valleys. One day later, on July 18, 1423, the Tyrolean nobility (we can see how well coordinated the king and the nobility were at this point) formed an alliance on behalf of the entire Tyrolean countryside to protect its freedoms and rights vis-à-vis the prince. At this moment, Sigismund seemed to have been successful with his strategy of playing the Tyrolean nobility off against the disagreeable prince. Friedrich, however, remained unimpressed with the day convened for August 5. In the forefront, he had so-called cedulas (“Zedeln”) sent to the courts of the country, which Friedrich thus gave more political significance than before, informing them about grievances in the country that needed to be remedied and the evil activities of the rebellious nobility. The “Zedeln” also contained the explicit prohibition against entering into any alliance without the consent of the prince, and they were thus clearly directed against alliances of the nobility, such as the alliance that King Sigismund had deliberately permitted in Nuremberg the previous year.52

Friedrich’s only problem was that hardly any nobles appeared in Brixen on August 5. The few who were present therefore asked for the date to be postponed, and a committee was formed to solve the problem later. The rebellious nobles, however, did not succeed in getting the estates on their side. On the next day, probably a committee meeting, on November 18, 1423, the bishop of Brixen and representatives of the estates appeared alongside the ruler and some of his councillors, who distanced themselves from the alliance that had been formed by the nobles. Finally, the council condemned the alliance of the nobility as an affliction of Tyrol.

Over the course of the year, Duke Friedrich succeeded in settling with a large part of the Tyrolean nobility, which is why de facto the alliance only lasted a few weeks. The sources, however, are silent about King Sigismund, who had wanted to intervene in the conflict a few months earlier. Friedrich’s fight against the Starkenbergs, who were particularly supported by Sigismund, continued. On May 10, 1424, a meeting in Innsbruck decided to send a delegation of representatives of the land estates to Greifenstein, the main castle of the Starkenbergs. This delegation failed, however, whereupon the Landschaft agreed to support the ruler by force of arms. Friedrich had thus decided the conflict de facto in his favour.

This enabled him to consolidate his rule, not quickly, but steadily, against the few remaining opposition families. In 1426, the Landschaft successfully mediated between him and the Spaur. Wilhelm von Starkenberg gave up the fight against the duke in November of the same year. Only Oswald von Wolken­stein53 remained, whom we know well from other contexts around Sigismund. Isolated as the last resister from the noble group, he wrote his depressed song “Durch Barbarei, Arabia” in the winter of 1426–1427, which ended with the following words: “Mein freund, die hassen mich überain / an schuld, des müss ich greisen. / das klag ich aller werlt gemain, / den frummen und den weisen, / darzü vil hohen fürsten rain, / die sich ir er land preisen, / das si mich armen Wolckenstein / die wolf nicht lan erzaisen, / gar verwaisen.”54 In 1427, he was summoned to the Diet in Bolzano, secretly left the country, was captured and brought to Innsbruck. Already on December 15, 1424, more than two years earlier, King Sigismund had promised him that he would comply with his request and intercede with Duke Friedrich IV on the rebel’s behalf. Here too, Sigismund did little apart from make announcements from afar. Nevertheless, Oswald von Wolkenstein was admitted to the Order of the Drake (Drachenorden) by Sigismund at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1431, which presumably gave him a belated sense of satisfaction.

Thus, in Tyrol, Sigismund made significant attempts in the initial conflict to oust the unpopular Habsburgs by diversifying the power structures within the county. The fact that all the relevant charters were issued far from Tyrol, not even in southern Germany, points to another problem. Sigismund seems to have had neither time nor energy to enforce his attempts. In the end, he failed in Tyrol in his fight against the establishment of a strong principality in the south of the empire. But here too, over the long term, an enduring image emerged of Sigismund as a leader who could dynamize the people emerged.

An Attempt at Synthesis

Now it is worth taking a final look at Sigismund’s attempts to diversify the political landscape of the Holy Roman Empire in his favour. Although the knight­hoods of Swabia, Franconia, and Bavaria had formed a defensive alliance against the Hussites in Ellingen on July 10, 1430, this alliance expired again after three years on St. George’s Day 1433. After Sigismund’s return from the imperial coronation in Rome at the end of 1433, further efforts of his failed at the imperial diets in Basel and Ulm in 1434 and at the imperial diet in Regensburg. In March of the same year, the negotiations between the St. Jörgenschild Society and the Swabian League of Towns failed in Kirchheim unter Teck.55 In mid-October 1434, Sigismund left the Empire for good, and with his departure, the negotiations on the Swabian association were broken off and never resumed.

But why did Sigismund’s sometimes very ambitious efforts fail at first sight?

Perhaps it can be said quite simply at first: Sigismund’s efforts towards diversification failed because of the diversity of the actors and the unwillingness of the cities to cooperate with the nobility and the knighthood, as a Nördlingen city scribe reported from Kirchheim in 1434: “aber es wart keine ainung troffen, quia displicuit civitatibus, et semper, in quantum licite potuerunt, quesiverunt vias exeundi.”56 The efforts to achieve peace (Landfrieden) at the end of the fourteenth century had already failed due to the differing interests of the cities and knights.57 Sigismund’s renewed attempts were equally unsuccessful.

Thinking further about an idea of Heinz Angermeier’s concerning the land peace order (Landfriedensordnung): Sigismund, with his numerous territories outside the empire, tended to be less affected by his own policy of diversification within the empire. He never had a direct view of his efforts to further associations and alliances and quickly lost sight of them.

The system of diversification can also be seen in Sigismund’s role as King of Bohemia. In the fight against the Hussites, he generously endowed the “Catholic” cities with privileges, as Alexandra Kaar has shown, but he re­peatedly fell short of his promises to them as well.58 Ultimately, the mutual securing of advantages functioned there in a way that did not work in such a direct manner vis-à-vis imperial cities, especially in the German southwest. The goal of creating “a world of personal relationship framed and maintained by symbolic communication and conventional and negotiatory institutions and associations”59 ultimately failed.

The royal charters were gratefully received in the regions of the empire in which a certain level of political participation had already been established, but without always having the effect intended by Sigismund. The question of failure thus ultimately remains one of perspectivation. If we look at the long-term consequences of the policy of diversification, it will certainly not be easy to reconstruct concrete causal chains. Even his greatest critics will not be able to deny that Sigismund’s attempts, which were considered a failure by his contemporaries, certainly had a dynamizing effect on the establishment of the estates in the territories of the empire and that he thereby enabled more differentiated actor structures to emerge in the constitutional structure of the empire.

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Köfler, Werner. Land, Landschaft, Landtag: Geschichte der Tiroler Landtage von den Anfängen bis zur Aufhebung der landständischen Verfassung von 1808. Veröffentlichungen des Tiroler Landesarchivs 3. Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 1985.

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The League of Lords between Feudalism and the Modern State: Diversity of State Models, Political Agency, and Opposition in Late-Medieval Bohemia (1394–1405)*

 Éloïse Adde

Medieval Studies Department, Central European University

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2  (2024):213-234 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.213

Traditionally, the League of the Lords (Panska jednota) is perceived as having been in opposition to the development of the modern state and as an embodiment of feudalism, which stood in stark opposition to rational modernization. In this paper, in line with the anarchist anthropology of David Graeber and James C. Scott, I would like to show that the nobles were not necessarily conservatives hostile to modernity but rather were political actors who were aware of their choices and who rejected changes not out of a mechanical conservatism but out of a motivated hostility to the modern state. Without losing sight of the pragmatic character of political events and alliances, I am therefore interested in this opposition group and, in particular, in the ways in which it justified its positions and sought to depict itself. Through an analysis of concrete events that occurred in Bohemia, this paper aims to challenge the linear doctrine on the development of the modern state as an unquestioned evolutionary development and thus reassess the possibility of (real) opposition and alternatives to the dominant model.

Keywords: state, revolt, league, Bohemia, agency

Traditionally, revolts in the Middle Ages are perceived as having been in opposition to the development of the modern state and are seen as moments in which the feudal mentality rose up against processes of modernization.1 This assessment is also applied to noble and patrician revolts. These revolts are considered comparatively fleeting events fueled by lingering elements of an already outdated worldview and are generally criticized for not having had clear political aims and for having served only the interests of those who instigated them without considering or embracing any ambition to change the system.2 Or rather, the fact that the leaders of these revolts did not seek to overthrow the monarchy and establish another political regime is taken as clear proof that their acts had no political significance. I would object to this assessment first merely by sharing the observation that the politicians of today are rarely tempted to introduce new social models and are often just as driven by personal motivations as medieval nobles and patricians allegedly were, but this does not prevent us from considering them as serious political players. In this paper, I would like to move away from these kinds of value judgments and propose a reinterpretation of medieval revolts by exploring the campaign of the Bohemian League of Lords against their king, Wenceslas IV (r. 1378–1419).

To briefly summarize the events, Wenceslas IV had been crowned at the initiative of his father Charles IV in 1363, when he was only two years old. He became full king upon his father’s death in 1378. This means that Charles had feared that the succession would be contested. Problems arose quite quickly during Wenceslas’ reign. There were continuous conflicts among members of the Luxembourg family (which explains the precaution taken by Charles in 1363). Jobst of Moravia (r. 1375–1411) and Sigismund of Hungary (from 1387) could not bear to submit to the authority of their close relative,3 and the high nobility complained of having been bypassed by the lower nobility, which enjoyed the favor of the court. When the always ambitious Jobst attacked his brother Prokop, with whom he cogoverned Moravia, Wenceslas had not deigned to intervene, perhaps preferring to see his relatives disunited, as Jiří Spěváček has suggested.4 In addition, Wenceslas was criticized in the Empire, and he was on bad terms with the bishop of Prague, Jan of Jenštejn. In December 1393, the king was even poisoned, maybe by Sigismund, Jobst, and Rupert III of the Palatinate.5

It is in this context of the troubles and isolation of the king that the League of Lords was formed in May 1394, which led to the first imprisonment of Wenceslas in May–August 1394.6 As Wenceslas continued to fail to respect his promises, he was imprisoned a second time by his brother Sigismund, who took him to Vienna, in 1402–1403.7 After the king’s release, an agreement was reached between him and the nobles in 1405 that put an end to the league, even though the lords had not managed to achieve all their objectives. As a result of this imprisonment, members of the high nobility were entrusted by the king with the supervision of the observance of law in the regions, and they were able to impose their choices for appointments to royal offices. However, the composition of the council remained the prerogative of the king.8

The idea is commonly accepted that the league belonged to the past, while the king’s government was a step in the direction of the development of the modern state (for instance, the use of competent servants from lower social backgrounds, beyond the figure of the favorite). In this paper, I would like to consider the two models as two competing worldviews. In line with “anarchist anthropology,” I intend to show that the lords of the league were political actors who were aware of their choices and who rejected some practices not out of reflex conservatism but out of a motivated hostility to the king’s conception of the state. “Anarchist anthropology” is a means of understanding and of­fering a critical reading of social processes in the world and history based on the choice of objects and an analysis of domination processes, including their adoption or deconstruction. From a retrospective and teleological perspective, “anarchist anthropology” attempts to deconstruct the great narratives of human history, and particularly the earliest chapters of this history (the emergence of the state, domination, coercion), to point towards our unconscious and ideological preconceptions as modern. It was developed in the 1970s, when Pierre Clastres brought to light the existence of a non-coercive power in so-called primitive societies, inviting anthropologists to abandon their prejudices and ethnocentrism.9 More recently, James C. Scott has challenged the idea that the state was the natural consequence of the appearance of agriculture and the adoption of more sedentary lifestyles. Indeed, Scott has highlighted resistance to the development and imposition of the state.10 Some medievalists have taken an interest in this development and the tools it provides better to define certain phenomena of modernity that have their roots in the Middle Ages and differ in their medieval phase from what they would later become.11

Without losing sight of the pragmatic character of political events and al­lianc­es, I am therefore interested (I) in this opposition group and, in particular, in the ways in which it justified its positions and sought to depict itself. I (II) situ­ate it in a tradition of revolts and claims and in a strong ideology developed by the nobility in Bohemia and (III) underline the strategy of the league. My intention is to call attention to a diversity of state models in the Middle Ages and thus go against an essentially canonical interpretation, which had embraced a linear model according to which the modern state (inevitably and evolutionarily) overcame the medieval state.

The League of Lords

At the end of the fourteenth century, the League of Lords emerged as an oppositional group of noblemen dissatisfied with the rule of King Wenceslas. The movement was characterized by a strong group identity. To formalize their action and their mission statement, they published a letter on May 5, 1394:

In Prague, May 5, 1394. We Jošt, Margrave and Lord of Moravia, Henry of Rožmberk and Lord of Krumlov, Henry the Elder of Hradec, Břenek of Skála, Bergow of Bílina, Berka of Hohenstein in Saxony, Wilém of Landštejn, Jan Michalec of Michalovice, Boreš the Younger of Bečov and Rýzmberk, Boček of Kunštátu, otherwise known as Poděbrad, the lords of Bohemia, all confess by this letter, unanimously and manifestly, that we have entered into such a covenant and such a promise between ourselves, and that we all have entered into and are entering into such a covenant, and that we promise to hold one another faithfully without guile under our good faith and honor: that we all will and ought to be in unity, and to seek the good of the land, and to bring forth and do the truth in the land, and so to stand together always, that we may lead all the good of the land before us, faithfully helping one another without guile, according to all our faith and according to our honor, each of us and all of us together, with all the power that we each have without guile. And whosoever any of us or any of ours by any act whatsoever shall by any means press him out of the course of the land, or out of the finding of the manor, he is one of us and we promise faithfully to help and to stand by him, that it may not be done to him, but that it may be done to every man.12

This letter begins with the names of the founding members of the League followed by the “lords of Bohemia,” the few nobles mentioned claiming to embody the interests of the whole group and even of the whole country (the word “land” / zemský – země appears four times in this short excerpt), although they of course spoke only for themselves. This claim to represent all is a typical illustration of repraesentatio identatis (representation-identity), which postulates that the part that represents is totally identical to the whole represented (pars pro toto) and which was formalized during the great councils of the fifteenth century (although this does not rule out its earlier existence).13 Considerable emphasis is put on consensus: “we all acknowledge by this letter, unanimously and manifestly.” This is typical of the medieval nobility: against the power of one monarch, the lords emphasized their communal organization as more valuable because it was more just.14 The action was intended to be in the name of all the Czech lords (the adjective “all” appears seven times), and the vocabulary insists on a promise, communal action, and mutual support within the group. This is called jednota, union, or the pásnká jednota in Czech, and it is usually translated as “league of lords” by scholars.

The lords’ action was given legitimacy by their association as a community and the contention that this community was acting for the common good. This conviction was embedded in the philosophy of Aristotle, who postulated that “any community was made for some good.”15 The “community” was eternal through the perpetual succession of its members (communitas non moritur), and thus it embodied stability. In the hierarchy of medieval values, the collegial structure of the community provided a permanent consensus, very much in contrast with a mortal individual, who was inconstant in action and motivated by his own interests.

The regular emphasis on concepts of “community” and “assistance” over­shadows the fact that the nobility was actually disunited. First, not all of them had joined the league. The loyalists included Prokop of Moravia and Jan Zhořelecký, the cousin and the brother of the king, respectively. On June 7, Jan Zhoře­lec­ký published a manifesto to fight the League. He gathered an army of the king’s loyalists and marched on Prague. The troops secretly took the king away from Prague. After a short stay at the Rosenberg castles of Příběnice, Český Krumlov and Vítkův Kámen, Wenceslas was interned at the Wildberg Castle of Stahremberk in Upper Austria. Jan Zhořelecký eventually obtained his release (August 1, 1394) in return for promises of impunity and certain concessions.16 Secondly, tensions also existed within the league.17

In the letter written by the League, the king was not explicitly addressed, even though the letter implicitly claimed to correct his errors. The Lords indicated that they wanted to protect “the good of the realm” and “increase the amount of truth” in the country, thus implying that “the good” and “the truth” were not respected anymore. The medieval king was bound to the political society under his rule. From the twelfth century on, the Paulinian (and theocratic) concept of power, which had dominated society until then, was replaced by a contractual one, which recognized political society as a partner of the ruler, who could not be the owner of all the property of his subjects anymore.18 With the transformations of the modalities of domination which had led to the increase of central power and, simultaneously, to the increased need for the ruler to be able to count on intermediaries (the nobility, the cities), the idea of representativeness, of adequacy between the policy of the sovereign and the expectations of the community of the land, the communitas regni (zemská obec or community of the land in Czech), had emerged distinctly in the collective imagination.19 Many sources and testimonies clearly show that the capacity to embody the interests of all and to respond as adequately as possible to them had become essential in power struggles, struggles that increasingly involved all subjects, whose appreciation was increasingly decisive because of the generalization of a contractual conception and practice of power.20 In Bohemia, the lords of the League claimed to be the only ones able to ensure the common good.

Appealing to this notion of the common good, the Czech lords attacked Wenceslas for his alleged failures. Their criticism aimed at the king’s purported neglect of political affairs and permanent recourse to members of lower nobility to govern with him. We find here again the topos of the bad adviser, a classic figure in medieval political thought.21 The common good was therefore respected only when the king ruled in concert with the lords, i.e. the high nobility, and took care of the country’s affairs, both being linked: when the king collaborated with the lords, he was taking care of the country.

In Nová rada (New Council), Smil Flaška of Pardubice clearly formulated these claims. Smil’s views capture the perceptions of the frustrated nobility. He had joined the Union in 1395. He was the nephew of Ernest of Pardubice (1344–1364), archbishop of Prague and close advisor to King Charles IV (1346–1378). Another of his uncles, Bohuš of Pardubice, also belonged to King Charles’ entourage. Together with his father William, who had become the sole heir to (and administrator of) the family’s possessions after the death of his brothers (Ernest, Bohuš, and Smil the Elder), our Smil (the Younger) personally experienced the king’s arbitrariness. On the death of Smil the Elder, the king had unjustifiably exercised the right of escheat and had seized the town of Pardubice from his family. Smil and his father had embarked on a legal battle (1384–1385) which had ended in defeat. In 1390, when they had appealed, the royal court (zemský soud) had rendered its verdict in favor of the king.22

In Nová rada, which became a major text in Czech literature, the new, inexperienced king summons the animals to give him advice “for the country’s order and peace” (line 50).23 44 animals give their advice. There are 54 in all, if we add those who are mentioned but do not speak. The lion is thus a good king, respectful of his collaborators and concerned with their advice for the common good. The calls to sleep soundly (made by the bear, 588), to eat and drink beyond measure (made by the bear, 587, the wolf, 702, 707, and the goose, 992), to follow one’s desires (made by the fox, 1398–1401), or to isolate oneself and shirk responsibility (made by the cockerel, 1330–1332) correspond to the vices attributed to Wenceslas IV, who did not hesitate to isolate himself in his residences in Křivoklát or Kunratice, in the middle of the forest, to escape the tumult and his responsibilities and to indulge in hunting.24 Along with the wolf, who is already looking forward to the feasts he will be able to have in exchange for services rendered to the king (730, 738–740), and the fox, who hopes to manipulate the king by flattering him (1382–1387), they all embody bad advisors of low social backgrounds, with whom Wenceslas allegedly had surrounded himself.

The leopard explicitly advises the king not to take commoners (488) but only “noble men” into his council, which should be small (491). He also enjoins him to respect the order and precedence of everyone (508) and not to neglect the prelates (510). The lesser nobility and merchants are openly scorned by the crane for their greed and their craving for social ascendancy via the purchase of offices (crane 645–675), a remark that directly echoes the criticisms of the League of Lords but is also a leitmotif of nobiliary literature.

In Smil’s text, the bad influence of these advisors is canceled out by the good advice given by the other animals and especially by the final prayer of the swan. Written by one of the members of the league, Nová rada delivered a powerful message in these troubled times. From its foundation, the League had a strong identity, inscribed in a century of vernacular literature, which founded Czech noble ideology.25

The Czech Nobility, a Tradition of Revolts and Claims and a Strong Ideology

Although they did not formulate any clear program in writing, the lords’ revolt and their demands were part of a long tradition. Written around 1310, the Chronicle of the so-called Dalimil represented the first formulation of the political program of the lords in the context of succession crises after the extinction of the Přemyslid dynasty in 1306. Such a crisis was an opportunity to reconfigure the political order. Dalimil (the alleged author, though it is worth noting that the chronicle contains information from other chronicles written in Latin) took advantage of the threat of the Habsburgs to point out the danger represented by all Germans, even those of Bohemia, and thus to cast suspicion on the burghers of the country who were mostly German. At the same time, he showed that a good king was a king who worked with the lords, calling on the latter to fulfill their mission, i.e. to watch over the king and intervene if he were to prove too abusive. Dalimil condemns dissent motivated by personal aspirations.26 Nevertheless, there are cases when revolt becomes necessary. Three great revolts (1247–1249, 1276–1277, and 1288–1290) were considered justified: the nobles opposed the pro-German policy of the kings Wenceslas I (1205–1253), Přemysl Ottokar II (1253–1278), and Wenceslas II (1278–1305) and their resulting exclusion from political affairs.27 Dalimil presents these revolts as having been a necessity for the common good.

Dalimil goes so far as to wish for a new type of political system in which the king would be elected by the community of the land, i.e. the lords, in accordance with the principle of representation-identity mentioned above, according to which the part that represents is absolutely identical to the whole represented. He claims to be concerned about the risks involved in the link between power and the person of the king in the context following the murder of King Wenceslas III, and he insists that the king is stronger if elected.28 In reality, if the king were to be elected, the nobility would be stronger as the main agent in the decision making process. Only through powerful noblemen could the state (and the ruler) enjoy greater stability. We have here an illustration of the theory of the king’s two bodies. The political (or mystical) body is embodied by the community of the kingdom, itself represented by the nobility, and is able by its nature to overcome all the misfortunes (disease, aging, unexpected death) which can befall the king.29

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the nobility had developed a strong political self-awareness thanks to texts presenting its views and claims and the repeated crises, which allowed its members to become active again regularly and thus consolidate and even expend their achievements. The first such crisis occurred just after the death of Přemysl Ottokar II (1278). His young son Wenceslas II was kidnaped by his regent, Otto of Brandebourg. During the king’s absence (1279–1283), the nobility ruled the country, convening the kingdom’s first general diet in 1281.30

The second crisis started after the death of Wenceslas III, which led to the extinction of the Přemyslid dynasty. Following the short reign of Rudolf of Habsburg on the Czech throne (1306–1307), the new king, Henry of Carinthia, failed to win unanimous support in the kingdom. The abbots and lords of Bohemia began to negotiate with their suzerain and the new king of the Romans, Henry of Luxembourg (1308–1313). Henry’s son Jean de Luxembourg became king (1310–1346). The newly elected King of Bohemia had to accept many demands from the nobility in the form of the Inaugural Diplomas. According to some stipulations, he could name only Czechs to principal offices and as members of his council. He also had to seek authorization from the lords to levy taxes.31 The Czech nobility managed to use the weakness of the king, a young foreigner, to impose itself as the embodiment of the nation and thus as the king’s indispensable partner.32

A new conflict between the lords and King John of Luxembourg which occurred in 1315–1318 confirmed the lords’ achievements of 1310. In 1313, the death of Henry of Luxembourg meant for John the loss of the support of his father and the title of imperial vicar, which had given him the right to have foreign advisors as an imperial vicar. The attacks of the Hungarian magnate Máté (III) Csák († 1321) and the lasting instability it created in Moravia further complicated the situation. The king needed the support of the Czech lords, whose military aid in the Moravian crisis came with the condition that the king would dismiss his foreign advisors and officers. In October 1315, Henry of Lipá, leader of this tumultuous nobility, was arrested under the pressure of the queen and accused of having plotted with John’s adversary Frederick of Habsburg. At the same time, John had to leave Bohemia to support Louis of Bavaria and to settle the equally complex situation in Luxembourg. The Czech lords intended to exploit the lack of a central authority. Henry of Lipá was released in April 1316 thanks to the pressure of his ever-growing camp. Ostracized, Queen Elizabeth had appealed to foreign mercenaries to assist her in her task, which further increased her political isolation. John came back to Bohemia in November 1317. At the same time, Henry of Lipá formed an official alliance with Frederick of Habsburg (December 27, 1317), which was joined by a great part of the nobility. Faced with this ever-stronger opposition, John called on Louis of Bavaria for help. Louis arrived at Cheb (Eger) on March 20, 1318. John wanted to organize a military expedition with the emperor against the treacherous barons, but the other players wanted to avoid such a risky conflict. The consequence was the signing of the Domažlice agreements on April 24, 1318. John had to confirm the commitments of the Inaugural diplomas.33

The nobility had also taken a stand against Charles IV and his project of bringing the nobility into line with the Maiestas carolina, a legal code written in 1350–1351 the aim of which was to increase royal power. Included among its provisions were sections granting the right to judge criminal cases solely to the king and other rights giving the king greater control over functionaries to increase royal revenues. In 1355, the nobility finally rejected the code at the General Diet. Rather than let the matter come to an open conflict with the nobility, Charles preferred in the end to abandon the whole project.34

By the end of the fourteenth century, the nobles had merged their stances during these episodes into a coherent synthesis, combining the political vision of the aforementioned Chronicle of the so-called Dalimil and a developed legal literature. The Romžberk Book (Kniha Romžberská)35 was a handbook intended for the noble land court or “šlechtický zemský soud.” It dates from the first half of the fourteenth century, but additions were regularly made to it during the fourteenth century, depending on the needs of the nobility. It is the oldest legal book written in Czech. The book systematically codifies the common law and includes contemporary regulations. It contains not only legal provisions, but also advice on how to use them in practice. The book was the initiated by Petr I of Rožmberk, “nejvyšší zemský sudí,” i.e. the High Court Judge of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Through his position and high office, Petr embodied the ideal of the great lord who worked with the king and was aware of and attached to the privileges of the nobility.36 He belonged to an important noble family and had married one of the daughters of the aforementioned Henry of Lipá.

Another particularity of the nobiliary culture at the time of the League was, paradoxically, its appropriation and assimilation of Charles IV’s legacy, despite its opposition to the Maiestas Carolina four decades earlier. In the time of John on Luxembourg (1310–1346), the nobility had similarly presented itself as the guarantor of the Přemyslid legacy against the so-called “foreign king.” This was despite its enduring conflict with the Přemyslid kings during the thirteenth century.37 Once dead and extinguished, the king and the dynasty no longer represented any threat. The dead king and the dynasty served as symbols of the state under the rule of a failed sovereign, as John of Luxembourg and Wenceslas IV were in the eyes of the Czech nobility. They also allowed the nobility to affirm itself as the defender of this state or statehood which was not attached to the ruling king but to a tradition, and thus depersonalized. An idealized vision of Charles IV was soon used to criticize Wenceslas IV, who was presented as his antithesis.38 The shadow of Charles IV is easily identifiable, for instance in the manuscripts possessed by the Romžberk family, a powerful family which had taken part in all campaigns and plots against the Bohemian kings from the thirteenth century to the time of the League.39 Of the 23 manuscripts of the Maiestas Carolina (twelve by Charles and eleven by his brother John-Henry, then heir to the Bohemian throne), two (one of each) were kept in the Romžberk Archives in Český Krumlov, while the others were kept in the Royal Archives.40 Only the Romžberk family possessed this text, testifying to their power and their interest in it. The manuscript ÖNB, cod. 619 [1396], held at the Austrian National Library and containing the Vita Caroli IV (Charles IV’s autobiography) and the Ordo ad coronandum Regem Boemorum (Coronation Order of the Bohemian kings, written by Charles IV), was also in possession of the Romžberk family before it became part of the collection of the Austrian National Library.41 The destiny of Ondřej of Dubá (circa 1320–1412/1413) is another example of this new interweaving of Charles’ legacy and the nobiliary ideology, emerging at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ondřej belonged to the high nobility of Bohemia (lords of Dubá, Benešovici). He joined the League after briefly supporting Wenceslas. In 1394–1395 and again in 1402, however, he wrote a legal book, Zemské právo, which quoted extensively from the Maiestas carolina.42 A convolute reconstituted by Naďa Štachová offers an illustrative example of this new and surprising synergy. This convolute contained three medieval manuscripts, Cerr. A, Cerr. B, and Cerr. C, named after the collector, Cerroni. This enormous set included both Dalimil’s nobiliary chronicle and the chronicle of Pulkava of Radenín, written for Charles IV, as well as Ondřej of Dubá’s legal book and the Book of Rožmberk.43 Despite his desire to bring the nobility into line, King Charles managed to symbolize the unity between the nobility and the state as St. Wenceslas had done for the nobility of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This does not mean that the nobility did not change over time (quite the contrary). But the group had succeeded in establishing a process of resistance to the ruler by systematically presenting itself as the protector of the common good and accumulating and synthesizing in its favor voices from many different horizons.

The Strategy of the League, Agency, and the Meaning of Revolt

The main grievance of the lords was the hegemony enjoyed at the court by the king’s favorites of low social background, to the detriment of the high nobility, especially the high positions occupied by Zikmund Huler, a burgher from the town of Prague, Jira of Roztoky, and Jan Čůcha of Zásada, both members of the low nobility.

However, as shown by Robert Novotný, Wenceslas’ court was, on the contrary, marked by an overrepresentation of the high nobility in comparison with his contemporaries, such Rupert of the Palatinate, Ludwig III of the Palatinate, or the Dukes of Bavaria,44 and also in comparison with his predecessor Charles IV, as shown by Peter Moraw.45 If we look at the list of the podkomoří (chamberlains) of Bohemia, the most important office of the kingdom, we can observe that the change had started already under Charles IV, the last member of the high nobility occupying this prestigious office having been Henry of Lipá under John of Luxembourg.

Robert Novotný found 160 speakers and advisors at Wenceslas’ Court. He could not identify the social origins of seven of them. 46 belonged to the clergy. 108 were lay people. Among the latter, seven were of burgher origin, 32 belonged to the lower nobility, and 61 belonged to the higher nobility.46 It was thus precisely when they were most favored and when they actually dominated Wenceslas’ court that the lords decided to rebel. Robert Novotný considered this a paradox which could only be explained by tensions and divisions within the nobility and competition among the main families of the kingdom, based on long-standing power-kinship ties, though he does not explain which ones were at play.47

If the lords were dominant in state structures, why were they complaining? This is a judgment that has traditionally been made about revolts. The actions of the nobles appear so unsuited to the context. But it would be a mistake to look for coherence in reactions, especially in the political sphere. It is a bias of the historian to expect more coherence from individuals of past societies than from his contemporaries. We are not surprised by the incoherence of the politicians of our time, and we should accept that people capable of similar incoherence in the Middle Ages. Moreover, it is a misconception to link revolts to injustice, oppression, or misery. If injustice and oppression were present in the discourse of medieval rebels, they were not necessarily realities. As Ernest Mandel has shown in his work on May 1968 and the contradictions of neo-capitalism, an economic boom and access to a more comfortable standard of living generated new needs, and this in turn allowed for a more accurate grasp of the existing inequalities, which increased resentment and frustration until these sentiments ultimately tore apart the social frameworks.48 Similarly, it was precisely the domination of the state apparatus by the Czech high nobility that allowed the lords to revolt at the end of the fourteenth century. The lords were not driven by injustice and demands made by the king. Rather, they merely intended to take advantage of the strong position they enjoyed, while gaining even more power and profiting of the weakness of Wenceslas’ rule in Bohemia and in the empire.

Studies of medieval revolt have almost invariably organized themselves around the concept of the state as the arena within which the revolts take place and take on meaning. Whether from a top-down perspective. as in the case of the histories written in the nineteenth century, or from a bottom-up Marxist perspective, as in many of the twentieth-century narratives, revolt is seen as an anomaly and a reaction against either arbitrariness or state excess. More recently, historians have increasingly shown that the “rise of the state” was a dialogic process in which the governed had considerable agency, often clamoring for more government rather than less.49 We have to interpret the acts of the lords from this perspective: the members of the League were protagonists in the political sphere with their own views, their own forms of agency, and their own expectations.

The League of Bohemian lords was neither the result of a moment of panic among desperate members of an old, frail nobility (as the traditional secondary literature has tended to claim)50 nor a disorderly and thoughtless attempt to preserve the feudal system or to satisfy the interests of the nobility (as the more recent literature has suggested). The creation of the League and the various steps it took were part of a political undertaken aimed at increasing the power of one clan over another in much the same way as the political parties of today clamor and scheme for power. No one would qualify the behavior of today’s political parties as immature or inconsistent, and we should be similarly cautious about applying these kinds of terms to political protagonists of the past. The Czech lords were merely playing the political game of their time.

Conclusion

Modern historiography has been dominated by the Weberian concept of the state’s “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”51 Violence exerted by “non-state” or “non-royal” actors is then logically considered inherently a disorderly usurpation of governmental prerogatives, which is also in line with the view expressed by the central authority. However, the state in the late Middle Ages was much more polycentric, multi-layered, and diffuse than modern governments.52 For this reason, some historians, such as John Watts, are hesitant to speak of a state and prefer to use the word “polity.”53 Even if the debate is open-ended,54 I still prefer to speak of a state insofar as medieval sources attest the existence of a central and sovereign authority that had developed during the Middle Ages, with its own bureaucracy and specific regalian rights.55 The action of the League should be situated in this multi-layered and fluid architecture.

To consider the members of the League real political protagonists is also to distance oneself from the traditional, teleological, and ideological narrative on the history of the state, as described by Ian Forrest:

Generally, state growth is treated as a “good” (without justification) because in most liberal historiography and social science writing modern states are considered as good, and all that stands in the way of this growth is discredited. We see this in the language used to describe change in the history of state power: the verbs “to grow” and “to decline” set the pattern of positive/negative binaries, while abstract nouns such as “consolidation” and “fragmentation,” and adjectives like “strong” and “weak” add to the normative discourse in which political history is habitually written.56

As a group that destabilized the king’s authority, the League was necessarily seen as an immature and thoughtless enterprise driven by the interests of a disunited nobility.

In reality, the League offered an alternative view on the state through a political culture synthetizing the traditional nobiliary expectations as presented in the Chronicle of the so-called Dalimil, Smil Flaška’s New Council, and the legal literature with Charles IV’s legacy. By using the same infrastructure and the same ideology as the ruler and the state apparatus, the League contributed to develop and consolidate the state and statehood. Generally, protest does not reflect unease with the growing reach of government, but dissatisfaction with its limitations.

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* With this contribution, I present one of my new research topics. This work therefore consists more of hypotheses and avenues for reflection than of tangible findings.

Diversity, Differences, and Divergence: Religion as a Criterion of Difference in the Empire in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century

Christine Reinle

University of Giessen

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2  (2024):261-286 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.261

The article examines the extent to which religious diversity was possible in the Roman-German Empire at the time of Sigismund. With a look back to the fourteenth century, it considers groups and practices that deviated from Church doctrine to varying degrees and in different ways: the Waldensians and the so-called “German Hussites” as heterodox Christian groups, the Jews as representatives of a religion that was tolerated but suspected of blasphemous and criminal practices, and people who used superstitious or even allegedly magical practices. The Heidelberg university professor and inquisitor Johannes of Frankfurt is used as a representative of the official position of the Church, whose positions provide a comparative foil. Although other religious doctrines were theoretically not accepted (with the exception of Judaism), it will be shown that the persecution of dissenters depended on infrastructural conditions. It was also crucial whether the authorities and the population were willing to take note of deviations and classify them as heretical. At times, the specific labels were used in an arbitrary manner. Particularly in the case of superstitious practices, the questions that arose were often addressed through open processes of negotiation.

Keywords: Waldensians, Hussitism, superstition, Jews, John of Frankfurt

Recogitabo omnes annos meos in amaritudine vite mee (Is. 38, 15). With these words of the Jewish king Hezekiah, the Heidelberg professor of divinity John Lagenator from Dieburg, better known as John of Frankfurt (ca. 1380–1440), began (after a dedicatory preface) his “meditatio devota” in 1409f. In this devotional text, he reflected on the miserabilis ingressus, the lamentabilis progressus, and the dolorosus egressus of his life.1 John chose a sentence often quoted in the literature on preaching and confession to reflect on his sinful life in light of the impending judgement but also of his hope in God’s grace. I have deliberately placed the “meditatio devota” at the beginning of my remarks, because we usually know John of Frankfurt better in a different role: not as a man aware of his sins and pondering his own need for redemption, but as an inquisitor.2 The tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between conform piety, in line with the doctrines, and non-conform piety, is thus embodied by one person. This leads us into the center of our topic: Late-medieval religion examined from the point of view of diversity.

General Remarks

The contributors to this volume were asked to focus on diversity as a concept, specifically as a “system of differentiations.”3 Understood in this way, diversity is, according to Florin, Gutsche, and Krentz, “socially and culturally constructed” and thus “subject to historical change.”4 In general, it can be assumed that there is a broad reservoir of possible criteria of difference and that it is subject to historical change which and how much significance is assigned to which criterion.5 By developing this assumption further, one can ask in general how diversity is dealt with and which particular forms of diversity are accepted in political, religious, and social terms. It can also be assumed that the acceptance of diversity is (partly) negotiated and that diversity can influence political, social, and religious negotiation processes.6 However, in premodern times, not all participants were able to influence this process to the same extent, and thus it has to be asked whether and to what extent the idea of negotiation works.

When attempting to apply these general considerations to the subject of religion, I started from a premise and two questions.

Religious affiliation in general and the specific dogmatic form of faith in particular were unquestionably criteria of difference at a time when the legal and social status of a person in the area of Latin Christendom depended on his or her affiliation with the Catholic Church. One need merely think of the special legal status of the Jewish population or the categorization of heresy as “crimen laesae maiestatis.” These categories of difference were based on normative ideas; they were therefore not arbitrarily negotiable. The non-negotiability of central religious criteria of difference concerns the core of difference, the essential differentness between the Christian and Jewish religions, but also dogmatic differences, e.g. between Catholics and Waldensians or Hussites, once certain divergent dogmatic statements had been established as the respective propria in a conflictual process. Within Christianity, orthodoxy and heterodoxy are separated by the readiness to recognize the doctrines of the Church and by engaging in or refraining from religious or superstitious practices.

However, it is necessary to ask about the scope for negotiation when dealing with religious difference. Was there any readiness to coexist and live with differentness if the difference was to be maintained? Was it possible to draw the theoretically given boundaries clearly in practice? Was there any willingness to ascribe or not ascribe the attribute of difference or deviation to specific persons? It should also be noted that it was not exclusively the majority that categorized a minority as deviant. In fact, we can also expect that minorities deliberately differentiated themselves from the majority in their internal communication without necessarily staging this differentiation externally. The forementioned three aspects do not affect the criteria of difference per se, but they draw attention to the possibility and the will of the participants to apply them, as well as to the scope for interpretation while applying them.

Negotiation processes also have to be examined from the perspective of the question as to where the fundamental boundaries of what was tolerable at the margins of religious practice were redefined. Here it was necessary to focus on grey zones between religion, superstition, and magic and to inculcate and amplify existing classifications and norms.

In view of space limitations, I cannot consider all possible varieties of religious practices, spiritual forms of expression, and theological controversies in the discussion below. I concentrate more narrowly on questions that had political implications, because the issue of how to deal with diversity and divergence is also connected to governance in the time of king Sigismund. For this reason, I deal with the ways in which the heresies of the Waldensians and the Hussites were dealt with. The treatment of the Jewish minority and the issue of superstition will only be briefly touched upon. My considerations will be limited to the German part of the Empire, not including Hungary or Bohemia. Occasional retrospectives to the fourteenth century will be indispensable for understanding. Conform piety, which, when viewed in terms of private devotion, did not have a direct political impact, will only be touched upon for comparative purposes. Considering the abundance of possible aspects and wishing not to proceed too cursorily or arbitrarily, I will tie my comments on Catholic positions and practices back to the aforementioned John of Frankfurt. John, a scholastically influenced theologian who also made contributions to the theology of piety with his “meditatio devota,” was of course only one voice among many, but his view may be meaningful precisely because of its averageness.

Disguised Differences: The Heterodoxy of the Waldensians

We begin with the diversity constellation that was at times the most inconspicuous, namely the “informal coexistence”7 between Waldensians and Catholics. It lasted for up to 200 years. Despite sporadic regional persecution, Waldensian communities survived during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and possibly beyond in the German part of the empire,8 whereas the Waldensians in Bohemia and Moravia were subjected to more consistent persecution.9 It was not until the persecutions of the 1390s that the German Waldensians were decisively weakened and decimated.10 Researchers have investigated the reasons behind their ability to survive for such a comparatively long period of time. It was argued, on the one hand, that the Waldensians did not distance themselves from the Church in their way of life. They received the sacraments of the Church, for example. On the other hand, however, they differed from the Catholics because they rejected the doctrine of purgatory, the veneration of saints and relics, pilgrimages, and sacramentals. They refused to take an oath and denied that killing could be justified. Spiritually, they were committed to lay itinerant preachers, who also took confession. Waldensians defined themselves inwardly as the künden (those who knew), thus distinguishing themselves from the Catholics as the frembden.11 In the case of Strasbourg, they lived in close proximity to one another and pursued similar trades.12 They were endogamous and passed on their faith to their children.13 Their strivings not to stand out and to network closely with one another were complementary. Above all, the originally distinguishing feature of the Waldensians, the ideal of poverty, had already receded into the background by the thirteenth century, as it had come, in the meantime, to be seen as applying only to the itinerant preachers, and no longer to the simple devouts or those who only sympathized with the Waldensians. This made it possible for the Waldensians to lead a lifestyle that outwardly hardly differed from that of their Catholic neighbors.14 There is evidence of good integration into the urban society in Strasbourg and in Fribourg in the Üchtland region, where there were Waldensians who were poor and Waldensians who were wealthy and well connected.15 There were also Waldensian families in rural areas with a long Waldensian tradition, even entire “heretic villages” (namely in the Mark Brandenburg).16 The readiness of Waldensians to renounce their heresy when they were discovered and thus save their own lives without denouncing others17 is as striking as the apparently effective disguises used by traveling Waldensian preachers, who pretended to be merchants.18

The Waldensians offer an instructive case study for the topic of diversity in many respects. We begin with the question of whether they actually stood out as diverse, and we continue by asking why they were apparently tolerated over long periods of time despite their doctrinal differences with the Catholic Church. We conclude with the question of the logic and dynamics of persecution, including the problem that the status of a heretic had to be ascribed to individuals (or not).

The answers that have been offered to the first question in the secondary literature are controversial. Generally speaking, the Waldensians’ readiness to dissimulate, their willingness to feign repentance and the assumption of the authorities that they were not particularily dangerous were and are considered important reasons behind their ability to externally adapt to their environment.19 Karl Ubl, however, has called into question this thesis concerning the Waldensians’ alleged tendency to try to “camouflage” themselves. Ubl notes that their refusal to take oaths was a clear factor which set them apart from those around them, thus suggesting that the Waldensians were visible after all. In his opinion, other reasons played a role in the low level and sporadic occurrence of persecution before the 1390s in the Duchy of Austria. First, the rulers and inquisitors lacked comprehensive information about the Waldensians, in part because there was comparatively little written institutional information about Waldensians who had already been discovered. Second, the inquisitors had been given few means of power by the central authority (with the kingdom of Bohemia as a significant exception). Third, the population had little interest in persecuting the Waldensians. There was also reasonable fear that the Waldensians, if threatened or persecuted, might take revenge on inquisitors, apostates, or collaborators. Therefore, Ubl writes pointedly of “tolerance as a result of ignorance in the centers, pragmatic and enforced tolerance on the ground.”20 Even after the beginning of a campaign of persecution in the first half of the 1390s, the city of Strasbourg was more interested in a clandestine mass abjuration than in public heretic trials so as not to gain a reputation as a heretic stronghold. A negative image like that would have jeopardized the city’s honor.21

As far as I know, historians have not yet offered a clear explanation as to why the comparatively peaceful coexistence between Waldensians and Catholics came to an end in the 1390s. The apostasy of so-called heresiarchs and the disclosure of the names of sect followers probably only partly explain the wave of persecution launched against the Waldensians.22 The persecutions in Sigismund’s time, such as the burning of John Grießer in 1411 or the persecution of the Waldensians in Fribourg in 1430, lagged behind the persecutions of the 1390s. While the persecutions in Bern and Fribourg in 1399 were linked by denunciations and the Strasbourg persecution of Waldensians of 1400 was initiated from outside and favored by a phase of good relations between the city council and the bishop, the Fribourg trial of 1430 was fueled by an external factor, namely the fear of the Hussites. Once the trial was set in motion, it could also be instrumentalized to lead neighborhood conflicts.23 For the witchcraft trials in 1429 and 1437–1442, Georg Modestin and Kathrin Utz Tremp also asserted that Fribourg was pursuing political interests, namely to establish itself as a sovereign in former Tierstein territories.24 Thus it was not only religious fervor but also political will that led to the persecution of the Waldensians. The desire of the ecclesiastical and especially the secular authorities to maintain sovereignty over the meanings and procedures of the campaign of persecution against the Waldensians is also evident in their increasing interference in the conduct of the trials.

The transition from the persecution of Waldensians to the persecution of witches in the Fribourg region also raises questions concerning the actual mean­ings of “Waldensianism” as a construct, i.e. as a label used to denote (heretical) difference. As Herbert Grundmann has persuasively shown, in­quisitors categorized heterodox statements by labeling them with the names of older sects.25 For this, in the fourteenth century, people who were probably Walden­sians were labeled Luciferians. Similarly, according to Hermann Haupt, Wal­densians in Griesbach and Waldkirchen were labeled Wyclifites in 1410.26 And, of course, it could be useful to label an opponent within the church as Waldensian to bring him under suspicion.27 At the turn of the fifteenth century, the original Waldensian name (vaudois[e]) also took on the meaning of sorcerer or witch because of the equation of vaudois with heretic per se and the association of heresy with magic.28

However, in the local context, the question of who was to be condemned as a Waldensian was also negotiated on a personal level in front of the Inquisition. In individual cases, Waldensians were able to refute the accusation of heresy.29 The ascriptions made at the time (i.e. the contention that someone was a Waldensian) are not the only uses of the term that may be problematic. As Ubl has shown in the case of John Grießer, there is also an inherent danger in the scholarship of making simplifications and working with classifications that do not stand up to scrutiny. Grießer, who was executed in 1411, was probably not the Hussite he was accused of being. He may have been a Waldensian. But it is also possible that he may simply have been a dissident whose concern was a social one.30

What applies to individuals also applies, under different circumstances, to the Waldensian group in the period under investigation. Their contours began to soften. Long-held biblical positions such as the absolute ban on killing and the consistent refusal to take oaths were abandoned. Some Waldensians moved closer to Marian devotion. Heresiarchs turned to the Catholic Church and even became priests. Lay people may also have begun to perceive the lay apostolate as misguided. From the 1390s onwards, the Waldensians were therefore a group that was at least in a crisis-ridden process of transformation, if not in decline.31 Some Waldensians thus may have been amenable to Hussite ideas, when Peter Payne (around 1418–1432) and Friedrich Reiser (from around 1450) made attempts to persuade Waldensians and Hussites to unite and to remodel Waldensian teachings and structures by adopting Hussite elements.32

Feared Difference: The Heresy of the Putative “German Hussites”

Let us now turn to individuals who were labeled “German Hussites” by scholars. Sometimes they were condemned at their own time after having been accused of spreading certain teachings of Jan Hus, but sometimes they were simply put in this category by historians (for instance in the case of the aforementioned John Grießer, as Ubl has shown). They could simply have been one of the people who, like John Drändorf, had dedicated themselves to the pura[.] pauperta[s] Christi33 or had explicitly Waldensian roots, like Friedrich Reiser, who was executed in 1458. In both cases, a Waldensian influence was mixed with the adoption of Hussite ideas. However, it was also possible that a wealthy priest who was presumably well connected in the city council’s circles, such as the chaplain of the Regensburg council chapel Ulrich Grünsleder, copied Jan Hus’ writings and promoted his ideas.34

The authorities were highly alert to the emergence of actual or supposed Hussites, as the Hussite movement had taken on violent and revolutionary traits in Bohemia after the execution of Jan Hus in Constance. The Taborite wing of the Hussites in particular (since 1420) took on revolutionary traits, which found expression in instances of verbal and real violence. Fueled by the active advertising that the Hussite side carried out for its positions, the endeavor to combat the Hussite threat externally, i.e. in Bohemia, was accompanied by the fear of a spillover of the Hussite movement into the German lands. To prevent this, the whole population was required to take an anti-Hussite oath.35 It is difficult to say how much sympathy the Hussites enjoyed in Germany, especially in the cities, and how well sympathizers were informed about the Hussite doctrines in general. Riots such as the one in Heidelberg in 1422, in which the townspeople and the electoral bodyguard alike organized a riot against the members of the university and in which the cry was heard that the attackers would rather kill students and clerics than Hussites,36 may have been a mixture of a diffuse expression of sympathy and provocation. For Austria, Werner Maleczek has questioned whether the Hussites, who were feared for their campaigns and acts of violence, were able to gain a relevant mass of followers.37 Christina Traxler notes that the elementary military difficulties faced by the Hussite movement in the early 1420s in Bohemia itself as well as the national and patriotic character of the movement made it unlikely that it would have spread to Austria during its early years. Instead, she assumes that after the condemnation of Wyclif’s teachings and the execution of Hus at the Council of Constance, heretical phenomena of any kind came “suddenly under the general suspicion” of being Hussite. For this reason, Traxler also warns against inferring “the existence and the spread of Hussite followers in Austria from anti-Hussite measures.”38 Nevertheless, it cannot be overlooked that the Hussites aggressively tried to defend and spread their positions. Their positions were also adopted or adapted and disseminated by others. The cases of the heretics John Drändorf and Peter Turnau, who were interrogated and condemned with the significant involvement of Heidelberg professors, including John von Frankfurt, offer two examples.39

After studying in Prague, Leipzig, Dresden, Zittau, and again in Prague and after being ordained as a priest in Prague in 1417, Drändorf, a nobleman from the Margraviate of Meissen, led his life as a preacher in Prague and Neuhaus. In 1424, he traveled via the Vogtland region to the Upper Rhine valley as far as Basel. He then moved to Brabant and finally to Speyer.40 There, he was reunited with Peter Turnau, a native of Prussia and a companion from his Zittau and second Prague years, who had only received a lower ordination in Prague and had left the city in 1414 to attend the Council of Constance. After studying law in Bologna and taking a long journey which led him to Crete, Turnau had come by detours to Speyer. When Drändorf arrived, Turnau was in charge of the Speyer cathedral school.41 In 1424, Drändorf and Turnau traveled to Heilbronn. Turnau intended to apply for a preaching prebend, and Drändorf probably wanted to preach and evangelize. Drändorf’s downfall was that he meddled in the dispute between the town of Weinsberg and the lords of Weinsberg. As a result of this dispute, the town found itself in the Ban of the Imperial Würzburg District Court, the Imperial ban and the reinforced outlawry of the empire (Acht und Aberacht), as well as under the ecclesiastical ban.42 Drändorf took Weinsberg’s excommunication as an opportunity to incite the town to resist the unjust ex­communication. He criticized what he found annoying about the church ban: the secular exercise of power by the clergy, which included the use of the ban in secular matters.43 This grievance was, as Drändorf suggested, made possible by the blind obedience of the laity.44 After Drändorf was arrested near Heilbronn, he was extradited to Heidelberg because Elector Ludwig III intervened with the Würzburg bishop who held jurisdiction; hence, Drändorf was subjected to a trial there. The Bishop of Worms and three Heidelberg professors, including John of Frankfurt, presided over the trial on the basis of a Würzburg commission.45

In the course of the interrogation, Drändorf revealed his convictions one by one. His radical refusal to take an oath before the interrogation was seen as clear proof of his heresy at the outset of the trial. Self-confident, even defiant, he insisted that the copy of the Gospels he was given on which to take the oath was only a human product and that he could lie with or without having taken an oath. Moreover, Drändorf answered questions about his own biography and his actions by criticizing the church. He claimed that only a few clerics wanted to live according to Christ’s regula, and he insisted that symonia, avaricia, luxuria, et pompa prevailed among the clergy.46 Emperor Constantine was only allowed to give the church bona temporalia, but not dominium, and the pope should not have accepted the latter. Not every excommunication was unjust because, he added derisively: For clerics who carried weapons and bishops who invaded towns and villages were excommunicated, just as prelates who exercised temporal power were heretics and in a state of damnation.47 All believers who professed the true faith were the Church, not the church hierarchy. 48 Drändorf also rejected indulgences. The Council of Constance did not stand for the whole Church, a statement that Hermann Heimpel has interpreted to mean that Drändorf did not consider all the articles condemned by Constantiense in fact to be condemned. Drändorf also agreed with the demand for communion sub utraque.49 On other topics, Drändorf mixed statements that were influenced by Waldensian, Wyclifite, or Hussite ideas with Catholic elements, or he distanced himself from the Hussites, for example by rejecting Hussite iconoclasm.50 All in all, the heretical positions of the three provenances converged in Drändorf’s views. During his short trial which lasted only four days, Drändorf was also tortured. In the end, Drändorf, who had occasionally gone on the offensive and repeatedly provoked his judges, was degraded, sentenced to death, and burned.

Unlike Drändorf, who, as Marie-Luise Bulst-Thiele has suggested, may have wanted to die51, Turnau did not seek martyrdom. Rather, the trained jurisprudent initially defended himself skillfully in Udenheim (a place belonging to the bishopric of Speyer), where Heidelberg professors also took part in the trial. Heimpel credited John of Frankfurt with having effectuated a turnaround in the trial. The inquisitors got hold of Turnau because of the doubts he had expressed about the “ecclesiastical doctrine and practice,” such as the relationship between the Bible, the Church fathers, younger church teachers, and ecclesiastical ministry.52 Turnau, who argued in a strictly Biblicist manner, argued that the church could err. Moreover, he was accused of Utraquism.53 To summarize, Kurt-Victor Selge describes Turnau as a “consistent dissident,” whereas he characterizes Drändorf as an “aggressively subversive missionary.”54

At this point, it is worth taking one more look at the other side. Hawicks described Drändorf’s judge John of Frankfurt as a “vehement opponent of Hussitism,”55 as he opposed the Hussites in various roles, including as an inquisitor, as a writer, and as a preacher. However, John differed from Drändorf not only in terms of church politics. Both came from different social classes. Drändorf was originally a well-off lower nobleman, while John was mentioned as a pauper at the University of Paris in 1396.56 As John owed his rise to the church and the university, Drändorf’s radical “rejection of university degrees”57 must have been alien to him. Drändorf’s apparently ambivalent attitude towards his ordination to the priesthood, which caused the court to doubt his ordained status,58 also hardly bore any affinities with the high esteem in which John of Frankfurt held the priesthood in his “meditatio.”59 Further comparisons are methodologically problematic, as Drändorf’s interrogation protocols and John’s “meditatio devota” belong to completely different genres. Nevertheless, with every methodological reservation, it should be noted that Drändorf primarily denounced the sins of others by harshly criticizing the Church, while John reflected on his own sinfulness. John of Frankfurt was therefore not only a church functionary acting in terms of power politics, but also a person whose work as an inquisitor was probably in part tied to a religious doctrine that he had personally espoused. However, Drändorf’s concern for the salvation of his soul, which underlay his desire for communion sub utraque, also suggests a spiritual dimension. Perhaps Turnau’s occasional appeals to his conscience60 can also be seen as an indication of internalized piety.

More can be learnt from the study of the Hussites and the trial against Drändorf and Turnau on the subject of diversity. The theological premises and ecclesiastical-political conclusions of Hussitism were considered antagonistic to Catholicity and were therefore no longer tolerable as an expression of diversity. This condemnation included people such as Drändorf and Turnau, who had designed their own heterodox faith with various Catholic, Waldensian, Wyclifite, and Hussite elements. Drändorf and Turnau were also tried as individuals, not as members of a community like many Waldensians.

Incidentally, this was also often the case for the German Hussites of the early period, who were frequently, but not always, clerics, with a Prague university background playing a role. There are no clear indications in the sources that distinct Hussite congregations formed at that time. The time was probably still too short for this and the endeavour too dangerous. The only exceptions were Flanders and Hainaut, where, according to Bart Spruyt, an “important, mostly hidden dissenting movement” existed, which apparently also absorbed Hussite elements early on. As early as the late 1410s and until 1430, a number of people there were detained. The fact that several people were arrested and meetings were held suggests that there were group structures.61 Elsewhere, despite the idea of Peter Payne to persuade the Waldensians to join the Hussites, there are only sporadic indications in the sources to suggest that they did, at least until the 1440s. Only then did the weakened Waldensian communities appear to have come so close to Hussite ideas that it would be possible to speak of a Hussite-influenced diaspora.62 In my opinion, widespread hatred of the clergy and general social unrest are not enough to suggest that we can speak of the existence of Hussite religious communities before the 1440s, even if anti-clericalism in particular would have provided a starting point for the infiltration of Hussite ideas. Concerning the so-called Hussites, the sovereigns, municipal authorities, and local church institutions took the initiative to inquire about and try people regarded as suspicious. In general, we recognize an overriding political will to persecute alleged heretics.

The universities were also involved in the persecution of alleged heretics to varying degrees. Individual Heidelberg professors were involved in the fight against Hussitism at an early stage, an activity that was evidently also linked to their activities as electoral councilors. In 1421, John of Frankfurt and Conrad von Soest each wrote an anti-Hussite treatise during a campaign against the Hussites. Job Vener also took up his pen against the Hussites in 1421. Furthermore, there is evidence of a relevant sermon by John of Frankfurt and a speech by Conrad von Soest.63 A later example of the anti-Hussite commitment by Heidelberg professors is the refutation of a Taborite manifesto in 1430 by Nicolas of Jawor.64At the University of Vienna, in contrast, scholars just respond to requests and demands until the end of the 1420s. They did not become involved in the fight against the Hussites at their own initiative.65

The negotiation of a tolerated status, coexistence, or even integration were not on the agenda for those labeled Hussites. The religiously motivated political upheavals in the Kingdom of Bohemia had shown clearly what Hussitism was capable of, but other events also revealed the influence and power of Hussite ideas. Drändorf, whose hybrid heresy has been outlined, also regretted in a letter to the town of Weinsberg that he and other like-minded priests were too weak to oppose iniquitati malorum clericorum, nisi communis populus et loca imperialia suos oculus aperirent.66 He thus formulated a barely veiled threat. The opposition between Hussitism and Catholicism was only bridged at a later date and outside the inner empire, with the Basel and Prague Compactata. They were concluded with the participation of the Council of Basel and also under the impact of many military defeats and massive political pressure from Emperor Sigismund. Furthermore, they only applied to the Kingdom of Bohemia. This was the only case in which negotiations were held with heretics.67 The willingness to accept difference in this case was forced by the circumstances.

Suspected and Persecuted Difference: The Jews

It is worth also taking a brief look at the Jews, a group the diversity of which had been dealt with for centuries. John of Frankfurt still held the classical position towards them, according to which the messiahship of Christ necessarily would be deduced from the Old Testament. He made no reference to the opinion that emerged in the thirteenth century according to which the Talmud, if understood correctly, also contained appropriate passages.68 John’s writing, apparently secondarily called Malleus Judeorum, was intended as an explanation of the former position to the theologically interested Elector Palatine Ludwig III. It was not written with any missionary intention.69 In another sermon, John emphasized that the Jews had forfeited their first calling by God. Nevertheless, the path to salvation was not closed to anyone, because God would work on anyone if he did not close himself off. This remark can be interpreted as an expression of hope of conversion of the Jews.70 Despite still moderate voices like his, the Jews faced an increasingly repressive atmosphere in the late Middle Ages, as they were accused not only of alleged ritual murders and desecration of the Host but also of anti-Christian blasphemies and heresy because their teachings had gone beyond the Old Testament in the Talmud.71 Anti-Jewish and anti-Hussite sermons were held one after the other in Fribourg.72 Presumably both activities reinforced each other as a means of characterizing both the Jews and the Hussites as different. As in the fourteenth century, expulsions of Jews also took place in Sigismund’s time, partly in territories and partly in towns.73 Karel Hruza has shown in an exemplary manner that, for fiscal reasons, Sigismund had no interest expelling Jews, but that he was careful to protect his rights and financial interests when he was unable to prevent their expulsion, and that he thereby abandoned them.74

Three patterns can by shown in which the criterion of religious difference was instrumentalized in order to justify the expulsion of a group considered to be different but tolerated so far. First, conspiracy theories were hatched concerning the supposed cooperation of internal and external enemies. Secondly, religious pretexts were used to conceil economically and politically motivated Jewish persecution. And third, anti-Jewish stereotypes were reinvigorated in the run-up to Jewish persecution. As an example of the first, a rumor emerged in Vienna in 1419 according to which Jews, Hussites, and Waldensians had allegedly formed a confederacio which was allegedly directed against the Christian majority society. The Vienna theological faculty was consulted about this, but it apparently did not consider the topic urgent, as the discussion about it was postponed. Of the three groups mentioned, it was the Jews in particular who were highlighted because of their multitud[o], their allegedly delicata vita, and their writings (allegedly) containing detestable calumnies and blasphemies (i.e. the Talmud and probably also the “Toldot Jeschu”).75 The danger scenario was exacerbated by the fact that the Jews, who were already branded as heretics, appeared here in association with other heretics. There was nothing to substantiate this conspiracy theory, of course, even if Jews demonstrably sympathized with the Hussites.76

Secondly, the reasons for the expulsions of Jews have to be scrutinized. Petr Elbel has found little support in the sources for the seemingly self-evident as­sumption that the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna and Austria in 1420–1421 was a consequence of fear of their alleged alliance with other enemies of Catholic Christianity. Rather, the expulsion was motivated by economic reasons. However, an alleged desecration of the Host in Enns served as a pretext.77 The final expulsion of the Jews from Vienna in 1421 was also accompanied by the fact that Jews who had already been baptized under the pressure of the authorities were forced to listen to conversion sermons held by none other than the Viennese professor Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl. These sermons differed significantly from those which Heinrich von Langenstein drafted at the end of the fourteenth century to convert Jews through good words, as they lacked any concession to the Jews.78 However, the sermons fitted into a time in which the Council of Basel in 1434 wanted to impose forced preaching on Jews and inculcated traditional segregation regulations (1434).79

Religious pretexts were also used in other places to dislodge Jewish com­munities. In 2012, Hruza called attention to the political and fiscal motives of the city of Cologne, which wanted to get rid of its Jews in 1423–24, as the respective competences and rights of disposal over the Jews were a constant point of contention with the Archbishop of Cologne.80 However, when the city justified its actions to the king in 1431, the danger that the Jews were trying to persuade Christians to apostatize was put forward. It was also argued that foreign crusaders (probably in 1421) had attempted to slay the Jews on their way to the Hussite war, which led to concerns that such events could occur again. Further arguments included the Jewish practice of lending at interest, the expulsion of Jews from neighboring territories, the sanctity of the city of Cologne (with its relics of numerous saints and martyrs), and the rumor of well poisoning due to increased mortality rates caused by an epidemic.81 Nine months after Sigismund’s death, in August 1438, the mayor and the town council of Heilbronn justified to the chancellor of king Albert II, Kaspar Schlick, and the Hereditary Marshal of the Empire Haupt II von Pappenheim their decision not to extend the Jews’ residency status because they (the mayor and the town council) had been warned by scholars openly in sermons and secretly in the confession of how seriously they acted badly because they permitted Jews to remain in their community and allowed them to practice usury. The scholars also contended that the mayor and the council debased themselves by making this concession.82 Consequently, this situation had to be rectified.

As a third point, the accusations of ritual murder (a recurring accusation that both fortified and relied on an anti-Jewish stereotype) merits consideration. These accusations were used to justify repressive measures against Jews and to establish a new martyr cult. In the case of Ravensburg, however, King Sigismund tried to prevent the rise of a cult concerning a pupil purportedly murdered ritually in 1429. Sigismund had the church which had been designated as a pilgrimage site razed to the ground, though he was unable to put a complete stop to the pilgrimages.83 As far as I know, however, this measure taken by Sigismund was exceptional. In complete contrast, the Palatinate Elector Ludwig III, together with the parish priest of Bacharach, Winand von Steeg, ensured the revival of the declining cult of the so-called “Good Werner of Oberwesel,” who had allegedly been ritually murdered in the thirteenth century.

Blurred Differences: Piety, Superstition, and Magic

The problem of superstition, on which John of Frankfurt, among others, com­mented twice (in 1405 and 1425–27),84 can only be touched upon in this paper. The first text, a “quodlibet” on the question of whether demons could be compelled and controlled through the use of amulets, signs, and words, still predates the period in which the concept of the vaudois was amalgamated with that of the sorcerer. However, since the fourteenth century, magic and heresy in general had been brought closer together. Nevertheless, in his “quaestio” of 1405, John argues against conjuring demons without referring to the concept of heresy. Although demons could perform healings, for example, due to their extensive knowledge of the secret powers of nature, it was forbidden and harmful to summon them. Demons, he explained, only pretended to be coerced and compelled by men in order to deceive people. Anyone who invoked them was committing idolatry. In addition to healing magic, John condemned all kinds of common divination practices. Still very much in the old church tradition, he rejected the reality of witches flights, the transformation of people into animals through demonic magic, and the visitation of goddesses of destiny at the birth of children. With those and similar superstitions John charged old women in particular. 85

Furthermore, especially interesting are the passages in which John critizised “wildly” erected little houses or huts in fields or woods, which were visited due to vows because simple-minded people told of fantastic apparitions and alleged that miracles had been performed. Believers would make gifts and votive offerings to these dubious locations, donations that the parish churches then were lacking. Quite obviously, John was opposing unlicensed spontaneous pilgrim­ages. He im­puted them to be short-lived and therefore unsustainable, and he presumed that they were initiated because of avarice anyway. John also recalled the Savior’s warning against false prophets, but without mentioning demonic influences. In a very pragmatic way, he also cautioned that such remote places would provide a good opportunity for fornication. Furthermore, the canons forbade the offering of sacrifices in places that had not been consecrated. Like Nicolas of Jawor before him, John also warned against dubious hermits and ignoramuses who, out of shameful greed, offered to foretell the future and bless animals and humans. This too was idolatry, he insisted. Unfortunately, local priests often remained silent out of ignorance when they learned of abuses which John considered to be the remnants of ancient idolatry. John distanced himself from ignorant and brutal exorcists of the devil, who were often personally dubious figures anyway, much as he also rejected the practice of blessings, therefore citing Matthew of Krakow. If blessings were effective, he asked ironically, why would there be no blessing contra superbiam, luxuriam vel avaritiam or against robbers and arsonists?86

These passages are partly set in a contemporary discursive context to which Nicolas of Jawor, among others, contributed a great deal. When dealing with spontaneous pilgrimages and blessings, they show above all how the boundaries of permissible diversity were discussed.87 Unfortunately, it is not possible to trace the arguments used by John of Frankfurt in his more theoretical text written in 1425–25, in which he labeled people who summonsed demons heretics, as the second treatise remains unedited. It is therefore also not possible to decide whether this was an adaptation to the increasingly aggravated discourse or whether the different focus is due to the chosen level of argumentation.

Conclusion

It is worth returning, in conclusion, to our original considerations. Religion was a criterion of difference which in itself hardly left much room for negotiation. The dogmatic dividing lines were drawn by inquisitorial manuals, but they could also be seen, for example, when arguments from the Franciscan poverty controversy were used to refute the Hussites’ Four Articles of Prague.88 The doctrinal discrepancies are therefore evident in theory. This also applies to methodological determinations. John of Frankfurt, for example, accused the Hussites of clinging to the literal sense of the Bible. This methodological error was otherwise attributed to Jews.

In practice, however, the boundaries were more difficult to draw. The difficulty is evident when it came to the categorizations used for heretics, regardless of whether they were individuals or groups, as they often held hybrid positions. “Deviants” did not necessarily adopt all the doctrines and practices of a denomination that was marginalized as heretical, but possibly only some of them. They could take up and merge different ideas and even keep some elements of Catholic doctrines. In addition, whether a distinction was made between Catholics and heretics depended crucially on the willingness to recognize the heresy of the other person. In the decision-making situation, situational or context-dependent and pragmatic logics therefore competed with normative precepts.

Nevertheless, diversity was undesirable when it moved outside the normative boundaries of orthodoxy. Alexander Patschovsky pointed out early on that the heterodox could not be tolerated where there was no pluralism of truth.89 Tolerance was only possible with the Jews as long as they were understood as “blind” bearers of Christian truth. More recently, Christoph Mandry added that pluralism could only be regarded as a value once religion had become a private matter and confession was no longer considered constitutive for the cohesion of the political order.90

Concerning magic, the period under review was a threshold period. Magic and heresy could be connected from the fourteenth century onwards, but they were not necessarily combined. Furthermore, certain forms of superstition, as well as unlicensed forms of religion, could still be rejected without immediately being branded as magical or heretical.

In the examples outlined above, the approaches used to deal with diversity can hardly be described as “negotiation.” Both with the Jews and where pragmatism prevailed over doctrine in dealings with heretics, the power constellations were quite asymmetrical. Only when it came to the Jews and maybe minor forms of superstition was it possible to admit diversity in principle. In the case of heretics, deviance led to the elimination of the deviant as soon as it was addressed. Only in the case of the Bohemian Hussites (not examined here) did the political and military circumstances make it necessary to tolerate religious diversity, and this diversity in turn influenced political negotiation processes. Hence, I suggest we should speak of “handling diversity” when the possibility of tolerating or integrating differentness was given, no matter how asymmetrical the framework conditions may have been. On the other hand, I prefer to describe differences that could lead to the elimination of the other not as diversity, but as divergence.

Religious diversity can be found when the plurality of religious forms of expression is considered, that characterized conform late medieval piety. One can think of the variety of ecclesiastical and sacramental practices in the parishes, the numerous brotherhoods or the foundation system, which were able to combine the striving for imitatio Christi and an internalized relationship with God. However, these forms of religiosity were not the subject of my article

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