Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans; Episode 186 – Origin Stories, which is also episode 1 of our new series, the empire in the 15th century.
This week we are setting off on our tour of the empire for real. And where better to start than with the most senior, most august of the seven prince Electors, the archbishop of Mainz, archchancellor of the empire, and holder of the decisive vote in imperial elections.
We have already encountered a number of archbishops of Mainz in this podcast, from the treacherous Frederick who tried to overthrow Otto the Great, to Willigis, the eminence grise of the empire under Otto II, III and Henry II, Adalbert, first advisor and then adversary of Henry V, Peter von Aspelt, the man who put the Luxemburgs on the Bohemian throne and lots more.
But this series is not about grand imperial politics, but about the grimy territorial skullduggery inside the empire. And for Mainz this is a story that is deeply entangled with the history of Hessen.
Where Mainz is ancient, tracing its’ eminence back to a saint who had come across the water, Hessen was a new kid on the block amongst the imperial princes. But a very successful one. And at its beginning stood the 24 year-old daughter of a saint holding up her baby son to be acclaimed lord by the people, or some such thing.
But before we start just a quick reminder that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week our special thanks go to Tom B., Christopher P., Jocelyn, Cristy Z, Jakub P., Sean Ryder and Jeff B.
Last thing, I have given an interview on the History Flakes Podcast that came out yesterday. History Flakes is a great show presented by Pip and Jonny, two comedians, historians and tour guides from Berlin. I have been listening to their show for a while and really enjoy it. So tune in, either to hear me hurtling through the history of Brandenburg from the fall of the roman empire to Frederick of Hohenzollern in just about 60 minutes or to one of their other episodes, on the Karl Marx Allee, on Christmas in Berlin or Josephine Baker. The show is called History Flakes, a Berlin History Podcast.
And with that, back to the show.
Let’s start at the beginning. The city of Mainz was founded by the Roman general Drusus, stepson of Augustus, father of emperor Claudius as well as the grandfather of the emperor Caligula. A most ancient and most august provenance at least by German standards. In the 1st century CE, Mainz became the military and administrative center of the Province of Upper Germany.
Mainz, like the other important roman cities of Cologne and Trier probably had bishops since the second century, though records and names were lost due to the persecutions and the simple passage of time. Once Christianity became first recognized by the emperor Constantine in 313 and was then made the state religion by Theodosius in 380 AD the bishops of Mainz became more tangible.
These bishops of the 4th to the 8th century were occupied with acquiring martyr’s bones, building churches and dabbling in the violent politics of the Merovingian and Carolingian courts. We know very little about their background, but is likely that as in other parts of the former Roman Empire the bishops were recruited from the ancient imperial elite, who spoke and wrote in Latin as opposed to the political elite who were descendants of Germanic tribesmen. Gregory of Tours, patron saint of this podcasts, kept going on about the senatorial rank of his family and sneered at the uncouth habits of his political overlords. But sneering from the sidelines gets you only so far.
The turning point for the bishopric of Mainz came with the arrival of a man called Wynfreth. Wynfreth was born around the year 675 somewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. He had received his education in benedictine monasteries, potentially in Exeter and Winchester. This is the time when England and even more so, Ireland were the great repository of knowledge in western Europe.
In 716 he joined a number of Anglo-Saxon and Irish missionaries going into the wilds of Frisia. And that is the time he took on the name he became best known by, Boniface, or Saint Boniface to you and me.
That Friesian project collapsed when Karl Martell wielded his hammer to close to the intended converts, but Boniface had found his calling. Other than his colleagues, Boniface realized that to be successful on a truly continental scale, he needed the endorsement of both spiritual and temporal authorities. His genius was in forging an alliance between the papacy and the mayors of the palace, the de facto rulers of the Merovingian empire. These mayors of the palace were looking for a way to remove the Merovingian kings, who had turned into purely ceremonial figures, whilst the popes needed both military protection against the Lombards in Italy and a way to get a better handle on the church organization in the Frankish empire.
Boniface became the go-between for the two sides and in the process acquired more and more influence. Part of this political capital was invested in reforming the church, making it less dependent on the Frankish aristocracy and more oriented towards Rome. But his other great task he set himself was to convert “the Germans”. Though we know that such a term did not really exist in the 8th century, apart from the name of the now defunct Roman provinces, what was meant was all of the territory east of the Rhine river. For this task Boniface was given the title of Archbishop which came with the right to create dioceses and appoint bishops.
And creating dioceses and appointing bishops was what he did. Some, like Büraburg, Erfurt, Eichstätt und Würzburg, he created anew, others, like Regensburg, Passau, Salzburg and Freising he reorganised. He also founded monasteries, the most significant of them was Fulda, where he was also buried.
But he did not get everything the way he wanted. His original plan was to have one unified German missionary church structure, led by an archbishop based in Cologne. But that ran into opposition from the political forces so that he had to settle for Mainz as the seat of his archbishopric. Boniface never really warmed to the place, which is why he spent more time in Fulda, deeper in the pagan heartlands. He died in 754, murdered whilst again attempting to convert the Frisians.
Though Mainz harped on about St. Boniface for centuries after this, the true founder of the Archbishopric of Mainz was his successor, Lullus the Great. Silly name, impressive politician. He wrangled the notion that Mainz was the primate of Germany, though there never was a shred of paper that awarded this title. And he did expand the number of suffragan bishoprics, that is bishops who were under the supervision of the archbishop of Mainz. It did not all happen in one go, but over time the archbishopric of Mainz acquired 14 dependent bishoprics from Chur in modern day Switzerland to Hildesheim in Niedersachsen and from Mainz in the West to Prague in the east. It included such important seats as Speyer, Worms, Constance, Strasbourg, Augsburg and Paderborn. During the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical province of Mainz was the largest administrative entity in the catholic church after the papal states.
But this role as church administrator was only one of the three pillars of the power of the archbishops.
The second pillar was his political position in imperial politics. St. Boniface was widely and erroneously believed to have crowned Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian king, so that the archbishops of Mainz demanded the right to crown the king of East Francia. And that right was broadly recognised until Archbishop Aribo refused to crown the empress Gisela in 1024 on the grounds of her being too closely related to her husband the emperor Konrad II. The archbishop of Cologne was less tied up with canonical red tape, crowned Gisela, and from that point forward the archbishop of Cologne became the sole legitimate coronator of kings.
What Mainz retained however, was the role as imperial arch chancellor. Though the chancellery travelled with the emperor and the emperor would appoint whoever he wanted as chancellor, the ceremonial responsibility for the Chancellery resided with the archbishop of Mainz. That unfortunately did not include the obligation to maintain complete and accurate archives, which would have done a whole lot of good to the organisational effectiveness of the empire and the accuracy of the historical record. But what it meant was that Mainz was crucial in all imperial elections and imperial diets. When the elections had been unanimous as they were until the 13th century, Mainz was the first to vote, which made this vote the deciding one. How impactful that can be, check out episode 43, All Change, All Change where the archbishop dramatically tilts the wheel of history. When elections became contestable Mainz voted last of the seven electors, giving it again the deciding vote. Mainz did not only take the lead in deciding who should be next in line for the throne, but also when it came to removing kings deemed unsuitable, like Adolf of Nassau, episode 142 and Wenceslaus the Lazy episode 165. The attempt to depose Sigismund after his blunders in Bohemia we discussed in episode 179 were also led by the archbishop of Mainz.
And then we have a third pillar of the power of the archbishop of Mainz the bit we focus on today. If you remember way back when we discussed the Ottonian and Salian emperors, we talked about the Reichskirchensystem, the organisational structure unique to the empire. The early medieval emperors had granted the bishops and sometimes the abbots temporal lordships. The idea was that the bishop, who was appointed by the emperor would administer these lordships on the emperor’s behalf and would send money, food or soldiers as required to support the ruler. This system, though never working in exactly this neat way, was pursued for roughly a hundred years, from Otto the Great to Henry IV, and even after the emperors were no longer free to appoint bishops at will, emperors would still prefer to grant a vacant county or lordship to a bishop rather than to a great aristocratic rival.
As a consequence bishops in the empire became prince bishops who not only administered their diocese or ecclesiastical province, but also lands and rights they had received as vassals of the emperor. These lands could be and often were rich and extensive. Just take a look at the baroque palaces of Würzburg, Brühl, Bruchsal, Münster and Aschaffenburg and compare these to say the Palais du Tau, home of the archbishop of Reims, the primate of the French church.
Normally the bishoprics had received lands and rights fairly close to their seats. The emperor had no reason to give a county in say Thuringia to a bishop in Bavaria. There was always a bishop nearby who would be much better at administrating this entity than one hundreds of miles away.
But Mainz was different. And that goes back to good old Boniface. As I mentioned, Boniface had founded a number of bishoprics when he set out on his mission. Two of these, Erfurt and Büraburg were not given a new bishop after 755 and instead fully integrated into Mainz. And with them came all their territory.
The next important gain came with the Veronese Donation in 983. This came about after emperor Otto II was defeated at the battle of Capo Colonna in 982. Episode 10 if you want to check back. Otto II needed support from his bishops and so he granted Willigis, the most powerful archbishop at the time, a huge amount of territory south of Frankfurt as well as the Rheingau up to Bingen.
Another territory they acquired much later, in 1230 was the former imperial monastery of Lorsch, between Heidelberg and Darmstadt.
At which point we come to the limitations of audio podcasts. What we now need is a map. I will link one in the show notes, so if you are in a position to do so, click the link and take a look. But the basic problem was that the easternmost possession, the city of Erfurt, is about 300km from Mainz. And hence to create a contiguous territory, the archbishops of Mainz needed to build a land bridge from the western shore of the Rhine all the way to Erfurt in Thuringia.
That was an enormously ambitious undertaking, but not entirely impossible. The territorial entities that dominated the land between Mainz and Erfurt were the counts of Nassau, the Landgraves of Thuringia and the abbey of Fulda as well as dozens and dozens of counts, knights, free cities and the like.
The initial idea was to incorporate Fulda into Mainz. The 8th century archbishop Lullus had already tried this on the back of Fulda’s link to St. Boniface, but was ultimately rebuffed. In the centuries that followed the emperors kept supporting Fulda against the incursions of Mainz, largely because Fulda kept sending money and soldiers to the emperor. And whilst many other royal monasteries found themselves incorporated into bishoprics or territorial principalities, Fulda kept going and in 1220 the abbot of Fulda was made an imperial prince.
A great opportunity to turn this around came in 1247. To explain, we need a bit of context.
We are back in the final years of the last Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, episode 89 to 91. Pope and emperor have entered their final battle and the pope was winning.
The archbishop of Mainz was Siegfried III of Eppstein. He was the most significant of the four members of the Eppstein family who occupied the archepiscopal seat of Mainz for 77 years in the period from 1200 to 1305. He had taken over from his uncle in 1230. Though the Eppsteins had risen to power in Mainz with the support of the Welf Otto IV, they had quickly switched sides when Frederick II appeared on the scene and had been supporters of the Hohenstaufen for almost 3 decades. But when Frederick II was excommunicated in 1241, they switched sides again and joined the pope against the emperor.
The pope was grateful and declared the abbot of Fulda incapacitated and made Siegried III the administrator of the Abbey and its huge territory. So step one in gaining the land-bridge to Erfurt was achieved.
The next step was to crown Heinrich Raspe, the landgrave of Thuringia as king and future emperor. In part this was on Pope Innocent IV’s behalf, but there might have been a territorial calculus at play. If Heinrich Raspe succeeded and Frederick II and his sons were defeated, the new king might give his benefactor in Mainz some of the land he controlled between Mainz and Erfurt.
All seemed to be going swimmingly for our ambitious archbishop, until Heinrich Raspe died from wounds received in a battle against the Hohenstaufen in 1247, just a year after his coronation.
Heinrich Raspe was the last of the Ludowigers, the landgraves of Thuringia. The landgraves controlled a large territory stretching from Naumburg to Wetzlar, effectively a large part of modern day Thuringia and the northern part of the Bundesland Hessen.
Now that the landgrave was dead, all this territory was up for grabs.
Even though we are in the allegedly lawless Middle Ages, the idea that someone could just go and take some land without any justification, be it a contract or inheritance or imperial charter, was simply not possible. Some of the claims were flimsy, but everyone had the decency of at least making something up.
As for Siegfried of Mainz, his claim was that much of the lands in Northern Hesse and Thuringia had been in the ownership of his archbishopric since the day of saintly Boniface. The only reason the landgraves controlled it was down to the Vogt or advocacy rights granted to the landgraves in the past. But now that the landgraves had died out, the advocacy rights should revert back to the archbishopric.
Then there were other contenders for the inheritance of the great landgraves., first amongst them Heinrich der Erlauchte, Henry the Venerable, margrave of Meissen, member of the house of Wettin (episode 107 if you are interested). Heinrich der Erlauchte had an awful lot going for him. First up, his mother was the daughter of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia and the sister of the last landgrave, Heinrich Raspe. He was also the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa and a faithful supporter of the Hohenstaufen. Hence the emperor Frederick II had already enfeoffed him with the landgraviate of Thuringia should Heinrich Raspe die without heir.
But Frederick II was excommunicated, so what does it matter that he had already made a decision. Enter stage left the third set of contenders, Sophie of Brabant and her son Heinrich.
Sophie of Brabant had been born Sophie of Thuringia. And not only was her father the older brother of Heinrich Raspe and his predecessor as landgrave, her mother was even more significant, her mother was a saint, and not any odd saint, but Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia or Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, one of the most revered saints of the 13th century. And whatever you think about saints, in the 13th century that can go a long way.
I produced an entire bonus episode on Elisabeth you can listen to if you have signed up on Patreon or on my website.
But in broad brushes. Elizabeth was the daughter of king Andreas of Hungary and at the age of 4 was betrothed to Ludwig, the future landgrave of Thuringia. As was customary, she grew up in her future husband’s household, which was one of the greatest chivalric courts in the empire, full of tournaments, dances and Minnesänger. Wagner created a whole opera about that court. When Elisabeth was seven, her mother, who had organised her marriage, was brutally murdered. That made her politically worthless as a bride.
Still living on the Wartburg, she was subjected to all sorts of abuse and bullying by courtiers and members of her intended husband’s family who were trying to get rid of her. At which point all that chivalry rang a bit hollow to her. She avoided going to the grand festivities, and instead focused on charitable work. This made her even less suitable as a bride for one of the great princes of the realm, but Ludwig did the decent thing and married her anyway.
They had three children, a boy and two daughters. Sophie was the middle child. As time progressed, Elisabeth’s focus on helping the poor became her preoccupation. She admired Saint Francis of Assisi and his commitment to poverty and charity. When her husband set out for a crusade and died at Brindisi (episode 77), she fell under the spell of a new spiritual rector, who turned out to be a religious sadist, Konrad of Marburg. He made her swear off the world and give away her entire property to the building of hospitals and to feed the hungry. Stripped of their income, Elizabeth and her children lived more and more like beggars, suffering hunger and depravation. The great countess of Thuringia worked as a mere nurse in the great hospital she had built in Marburg, going around in the simplest of clothes, doing good works. And she underwent extreme religious exercises and possibly beatings by Konrad of Marburg.
Having not only the dowager countess living like a peasant but also her children, including the heir to the landgraviate living in a pigsty was a political impossibility. That is why the aforementioned Heinrich Raspe, Elisabeth’s brother in law, had her children, including the heir to the landgraviate, removed from her care. Heinrich Raspe sidelined Sophie’s brother, the true heir to the landgraviate, and officially succeeded him when the young man died in 1241.
Elisabeth died aged just 24 when Sophie was 7. Even during her lifetime the fame of Elisabeth as a holy woman was spreading far and wide. She died in 1231 and already by 1235 she was declared a saint. In 1236, in one of the great displays of medieval faith, her body was laid to rest in a specifically built chapel in Marburg. Her pallbearers were the greatest princes of the realm, led by the emperor Frederick II himself.
As for Sophie, she was shipped off to marry Duke Henry of Brabant when she was 17 years of age, the same year her brother had died. That was not an advantageous marriage as the duke of Brabant already had six children and an heir.
What I want to say is that Sophie’s upbringing had been tough, more than tough. Suffering hunger and poverty, watching your mother living in a deeply toxic relationship with a religious fanatic, being taken away by an evil uncle and shunted out of the way after her brother had suddenly died was a lot to take in. And on top of that seeing all this extreme adoration for her mother who probably had little time for Sophie and was by all accounts the reason for her difficult life. God knows what that does to a person. And nobody at the time wrote it down.
What the chroniclers did mention however was her toughness and determination, and specifically her key determination was to provide for her only son, Henry. The death of her uncle Heinrich Raspe in 1247, when little Henry was just 3 years old was the one great chance she had to secure him a principality.
Did she have a legal claim to the landgraviate of Thuringia? Well, sort of. She was the daughter of one of the pervious landgraves, which was on par with Henry the Venerable’s claim that derived from Heinrich Raspe’s sister.
Under the Mainzer Landfrieden, this conflict should have been brought before the imperial court to decide or arbitrate. But in 1247 there were two imperial courts, one of an excommunicated emperor and another by an anti-king only some of the princes recognised. So there may as well have been none.
So we have three claimants to the landgraviate, the archbishop of Mainz, Heinrich der Erlauchte, the margrave of Meissen, and Sophie of Brabant on behalf of her son also Heinrich. And with no court to file for probate, it was first come, first served.
The previous landgrave had died on February 16th, 1247. By March 1247 the archbishop Siegfried Eppstein of Mainz in up in Fritzlar and appoints episcopal administrators for various bits of the landgravial territories.
In May 1247 Sophie of Brabant shows up in Marburg together with her husband and takes control of the lands between Kassel and Wetzlar, an area that at this point was already called the county of Hesse. She might have progressed up to the Wartburg, the main residence of the Landgraves and tried to take possession of the whole of the landgraviate, though this is unclear.
There are two stories about how she took control. One is that she simply appeared in Marburg with her little boy, went to the market square, held him up and declared that he, the grandson of Saint Elisabeth and the benign landgrave Ludwig, should be acclaimed as the new landgrave and count of Hesse. Everybody clapped and then the estates of Hesse, the nobles and cities of the land approved the young man in his title. In 1989 the city of Marburg set up a statue that depicted exactly this event.
That story is likely a fabrication, since there were no estates of Hesse at the time. However, there is an element of truth to it in as much as the local powers approved the takeover by the Brabanters.
Let’s consider what these territorial lordships actually were. At this stage they consisted in a bundle of rights. There were manors and estates the lord owned outright. Then there were fiefs he held from the emperor as well as advocacies from bishoprics and monasteries. Cities that recognised an overlord on the basis that one of his predecessors had founded them. And then there were the regalia, the imperial rights to mint coins, collect tolls and taxes, build castles and so forth that had gradually transferred to a territorial lord. All these rights were interwoven, shared and dispersed between various other holders of power, local nobles, monasteries, neighbouring princes etc.. So when we look at these neat maps that delineate one princely territory from the next, they are pretty much all inaccurate before the 18th century. Every piece of land was subject to particular rights and privileges of this guy or that guy. All these colour shading means is that prince x held more rights in this place than anyone else.
One can imagine what happens when the princely family dies out. All these various partial rights holders will at a minimum demand confirmation of their existing rights or scramble to extend them. They will produce all sorts of documents confirming this or that, some true, others false or superseded. For the incoming claimant to the inheritance the question is then whether to accept or challenge these claims. If you accept you end up with a thinner bundle of rights than your predecessors, if you challenge, you end up with a feud, or worst case, nothing at all because another contender is happy to sign the papers and beats you.
Which means that to gain control of a territory depends very much on finding an equitable settlement with the powers that be, the nobles, cities, monasteries and other power brokers.
Sophie seemed to have been very successful at this kind of diplomacy. Because her takeover of Hesse was exceptionally smooth. She did grant a wide range of privileges to the various counts and knights in the territory, guaranteed the city of Kassel its privileges and so forth.
And she had another ace up her sleeve, her mother. It would simply be anachronistic to brush over the fact that she was the daughter of a saint and the proposed heir the grandson of the great benefactor of the poor. And that descendance from Saint Elisabeth resonated particularly well with a very special group of people inside the city of Marburg, the Teutonic Knights.
The Teutonic Knights were deeply interwoven with Elisabeth of Hungary and her family. Elisabeth was made a patron saint of the order alongside the Virgin and St. George. The church of Saint Elizabeth in Marburg, where the saint is buried was built and run by the Teutonic Order. Elisbeth’s brother in law, Conrad had joined the Teutonic Knights and had given them land in Marburg where they built their headquarters, which remained the overall headquarters until they transferred to the Marienburg in Prussia almost 100 years later.
As far as the Teutonic Knights were concerned it was clear that no one, but the grandson of their patron saint should be master of the city of Marburg and lord of Hessen.
Meanwhile Sophie’s cousin, Heinrich der Erlauchte of Meissen had a more difficult time to assert his position in the heartlands of Thuringia around Eisenach, Gotha and Naumburg. He went down the route of challenging the claims of his new vassals rather than accept them. Hence he had to fight for about three years before he could take control of the eastern part of the landgraviate. But in the end he did.
So by 1250 it looked as if things were settled. The archbishop had picked up a bunch of territories between Fritzlar and Hersfeld. Sophie of Brabant on behalf of little Heinrich had taken the western part, the county of Hesse between Marburg and Kassel. And Heinrich der Erlauchte had taken the eastern half, the Thuringian bit.
But it only looks like that. All three parties still maintained their claims on the whole. It is another three body problem.
Sophie has now two options. Her position was very stable. She could go after the whole of the landgraviate, try to remove Heinrich der Erlauchte first from the Wartburg and then the rest of the lands, or she could go after the lands the archbishop of Mainz had occupied. But she could not do both. And if she wanted to achieve either, she was best served to team up with one of the others.
Sophie chose to team up with her cousin Heinrich der Erlauchte against Mainz. The two parties made an agreement whereby the margrave of Meissen recognised the little boy Heinrich as count of Hesse and in return Sophie made Heinrich der Erlauchte the little boy’s guardian and regent. Together they then decided to push back against Mainz which had taken lands and territories not only in Hesse, but in Thuringia as well.
Part of this effort was military. Heinrich der Erlauchte forced the Mainz administrators out and devastated the lands of the archbishop around Erfurt and Fritzlar. These destructive raids were a classic element of aristocratic feuds. The purpose was to reduce the opponent’s resources and force him to the negotiation table.
The other leg was political.
These prince bishoprics had a fundamental vulnerability in particular during the 13th, 14th and 15th century. The procedure to appoint a new archbishop was not settled. Traditionally bishops, including the bishop of Rome were chosen by the whole congregation. During the early Middle Ages that right transitioned to the cathedral chapters and the college of cardinals. And finally, during the imperial and the Avignon papacy, the pope claimed the exclusive right to appoint bishops and archbishops. Plus the pope demanded huge payments upon election, usually the first full year income of the bishopric.
We talked about the opposition in the German church against the papacy and its impact on imperial policy when we discussed the reign of Ludwig the Bavarian. But it also had a major impact on the way the ecclesiastical territories developed.
Given there were two legitimate ways to become archbishop, either election by the cathedral chapter or papal appointment, interested parties could intervene on either side to place a candidate of their liking on to a vacant seat. What we find throughout this period is that strong bishops and archbishops are followed by either weak ones or a schism between two competing contenders. And these periods of weakness is when the territorial princes pounce.
That is what happened here. When the aggressive and competent Siegfried II of Eppstein died in 1249, his successor as archbishop, Christian of Weisenau was a weak man. And he lasted barely two years before he was made to resign. His successor, Gerhard, Wildgraf von Daun got into big trouble right from the start and was excommunicated twice, once for blackmail and then for being disobedient. Then he was captured by some other enemies, twice, spending much of his reign in various prison cells.
Heinrich der Erlauchte ruthlessly exploited the situation and forced Mainz to return all the advocacies and right in Thuringia. But what he did not do was force Mainz to return these rights in Hesse as well.
This was very much a breach of the alliance between Sophie and Heinrich der Erlauchte. And what made things worse for the budding land of Hesse was that there was now a new archbishop, Werner of Eppstein, nephew of Siegfried and a much more forceful character than his predecessors.
Sophie now stood alone against Mainz and Heinrich der Erlauchte. So she sought a new ally, a neighbour to the north, the duke of Brunswick, who also happened to be her son-in-law. Sophie and the duke decided to go after her cousin’s lands in Thuringia. They occupied the Wartburg and Eisenach. But the two sons of Heinrich der Erlauchte, Albrecht and Dietrich hit back hard. They took the Wartburg back and entered Eisenach where they massacred Sophie’s garrison and supporters.
Sophie returned back to Marburg tail between legs. At which point the archbishop Werner of Eppstein though it was his time to have a go. He excommunicated the daughter of Saint Elisabeth and put the whole county under interdict. And then hostilities began that lasted 2 years.
Sophie had built various fortifications for exactly this eventuality. One of the them, the Frauenberg or women’s mountain near Marburg became the key to the war. Sophie and her now adult son held the castle throughout that time, whilst the land of Hesse went up in flames. In the end, neither side could win militarily.
The war concluded thanks to the diplomatic skills the young count Heinrich von Hessen had inherited some of his mother. He brought more and more allies of the archbishop over to his side.
In 1264 the three parties were exhausted and settled their differences. Everybody recognised young Heinrich as Lord of Hesse, the archbishop gave up his rights in both Hesse and Thuringia and Heinrich der Erlauchte handed over a couple of cities to the newly created state of Hesse.
Heinrich von Hessen continued with his combination of military force and diplomacy, expanding his territory more and more. In 1292 king Adolf of Nassau did the deed and elevated the Landgraves of Hesse to imperial princes.
Over the next 200 years these two entities, the archbishop of Mainz and the Landgrave of Hesse would clash again and again. Mainz kept acquiring castles and villages across Hesse in their attempts to build a land bridge to Erfurt and the Landgraves of Hessen expanded their territory westwards. Ultimately the landgraves were more successful, coming as far south West as Darmstadt.
And this is a story that repeated itself again and again across the empire. The bishops and abbots lost more and more rights and lands to the territorial rulers, and many were mediated, meaning they lost their independence and were subsumed into the princely territories.
And that happened even before the Reformation when many of the prince bishoprics became temporal principalities, like famously the land of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia.
As we have seen in the case of Mainz versus Hessen, there are a number of reasons for that.
One was that the bishops and the archbishop of Mainz were tied into wide ranging political conflicts across the empire and within the church, which, to use a modern term, led to management overstretch.
But the biggest problem was the competition between cathedral chapter and papacy over the right to choose the bishops. The cathedral chapter was staffed with the sons of the local powerful families who were trying to put candidates up who would help their relatives. The papacy was trying to preserve the power of the archbishops but did not know enough about the candidates and local politics. That resulted in either the selection of the lowest common denominator or the selection of two rival candidates. For almost the entire period 1328 and 1419, there were two contenders for the see of the primate of Germany fighting it out. And these conflicts were a perfect time for the greedy neighbours, the landgraves of Hessen, the counts of Nassau and the counts Palatinate on the Rhine to expand their territory at the expense of the archbishops.
All this culminates in the Mainzer Stiftsfehde of 1461/62 which we will discuss towards the end of this series.
But next week we will move to more uplifting topics. And since we were in Mainz, we will talk about the greatest gift the city had made to the world, the printing press. We will talk about who Gutenberg was, how he developed his great invention, how it spread, and how it changed the world. I hope you will join us again.