The Medieval Empire by Herbert Fisher

Author:Herbert Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

A fragment of a constitution has survived to us affixing the penalty of death to those who contemn the imperial presence. But the constitution was probably issued at an assembly of Italian magnates held at Zurich in 1052, the sources from which we derive the best text are Italian, and it is doubtful whether it was actually applied to Germany.

It might have been expected that Henry’s Italian experience would have reacted upon his German policy, for in Italy he found written law and an exalted view of the imperial prerogative. The Italian people expected constitutions based upon the Code and the Canons, and Henry, meeting their wishes, promulgated laws in the old imperial style. A Burgundian chaplain exhorted the monarch to issue an edict through Germany, making it compulsory for the rich to instruct their children in written law after the Italian manner. But there is no evidence to show that he ever acted upon this advice, or that the Roman emperor in Henry ever expelled the German king. That he succeeded, on the whole, in keeping the peace of Germany we know, for his death was followed by a marked outburst of anarchy. But we have not a particle of testimony that he ever made a Landpeace or issued a written ordinance for his Teuton subjects.

Henry was zealous and energetic, but he was not able alone to maintain the fabric of the public peace. In the outlying parts of the empire society had to protect itself. In Flanders there is a voluntary peace-union in 1030. In the province of Arles the Church accepts the Truce of God. It protects four days of the week by a special peace; it proclaims that homicide, committed within those days, is to be punished by a long exile to Jerusalem; it exhorts its members to expel robbers. The Alsatian union is not merely a truce of God, protecting certain days of the week and holy seasons of the year; it also attempts to discharge obligations which belonged to the primitive conception of the office of the German king. Then the truce spreads to Lombardy, to be enforced by methods which are specially Italian. The act of episcopal autonomy in the Burgundian and Lombard kingdoms is quickly copied in Germany. Accepted at Liège in 1082, at Cologne in 1083, at Bamberg in 1085, adopted by the emperor in a synod at Mainz in 1085, this bishop-made truce is in fact an elaborate penal code for the protection of special days and seasons. If a freeman violates the peace at Liège, he loses his inheritance, is deprived of his benefice, is expelled from the bishopric. A serf or clerk loses all that he has and his right hand. At Cologne the freeman who offends is expelled from his property and loses his estates and benefices. The offending slave is beheaded, condemned to lose his hand or his hair, according to the measure of his offending. Where the layman is beheaded the clerk is degraded, and where the layman is mutilated the clerk is hanged.

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