The empire after the Hohenstaufen catastrophe

Frederick II died in 1250, in the midst of his struggle against Pope Innocent IV. His son Conrad IV left the north the next year to fight for his father’s Italian possessions. William of Holland, antiking from 1247 to 1256, was thus without a rival in an indifferent Germany that had lost interest in its rulers. The bishops’ cities and the towns, many of them founded on royal demesne, could not be subjugated. Their economic power challenged the age-old aristocratic order in German society, and, deprived of royal protection, they banded together to defend their autonomy. Within the nobility each rank tended to acquire some of the personal rights of its betters. The Hohenstaufen breakdown after 1250 left a gap in Swabia that no rising territorial power was able to fill. Countless petty lords and imperial ministeriales of the southwest succeeded in holding their seigniories as immediate vassals of the empire. Their independent territories often survived for centuries.

The ministeriales elsewhere, too, ceased to be the dependable servants that they once had been. Many free nobles voluntarily joined their ranks, and the knights thus assimilated the rights of the free aristocracy. They became the governing class of the territorial principalities, the standing councillors of their masters, whose household offices and local justice they monopolized and held in fee for many generations. Without the consent of this territorial nobility, the princes could neither tax nor legislate. Even the less important ministeriales, who only administered manors for their lords, became entrenched as hereditary bailiffs, keeping surplus produce for themselves and usurping seignorial dues, so that it paid the owners to commute the labour services of their villeins into money rents and to lease out those portions of the demesne that the unfree peasants had cultivated for them. Even then, however, the hereditary officials could not be easily dislodged. Finally, the ambitions of the princes themselves did not aim above the patrimonial policies of the past. They were acquisitive and attempted to build up their territories by usurpation, inheritance, marriage treaties, and escheats. They also tried, where possible, to administer their lands with officials whom they could depose at will. Yet they did so not to found sovereign states but chiefly to provide for their families. Again and again, they divided their dominions among sons, who, in turn, founded cadet lines and set them up on a fraction of the principality.

By 1250 there was thus no really effective central authority left in Germany. The prince-bishoprics had become fiercely contested prizes between neighbouring dynasties, themselves often vassals of the bishopric. But constant feuds, disorder, and insecurity did not, by any means, frustrate the immense energies of the Germans in the 13th century. Eastward expansion continued under the leadership of the princes and, above all, of the Knights of the Teutonic Order. Their advance into Prussia went hand in hand with the opening up of the Baltic by the merchants of Lübeck. It is possible that three centuries of complete security from foreign invasion made it unnecessary for the German aristocracy to learn the virtues of political self-discipline and subordination. Still, it would be a great mistake to judge Hohenstaufen Germany solely by its failure to achieve political and administrative unity.

The extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty

The death of Frederick II in 1250 and of his son Conrad IV in 1254 heralded the irreversible decline of Hohenstaufen power in Germany and in the conjoint kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Conrad’s infant son Conradin, heir to Naples and Sicily, remained in Germany under the guardianship of his Bavarian mother. His uncle Manfred seized the reins of government in both Italian kingdoms and in 1258 formally supplanted Conradin by engineering his own coronation in Palermo. Manfred’s defiance of papal claims to suzerainty over the kingdoms impelled the French-born Pope Urban IV to grant them to Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France. Papal taxation of the French clergy and loans from Florentine bankers enabled Charles to raise a large mercenary army for an expedition to Italy. Manfred, deserted by his barons, was defeated and slain near Benevento in 1266. Conradin then rallied his German supporters and led them across the Alps. But Conradin’s financial resources were inadequate; unpaid troops deserted, and his depleted following was routed by Charles near Tagliacozzo (1268). Conradin was captured as he fled toward Rome, convicted of lèse-majesté (a form of treason), and beheaded in the public square at Naples.