ABSTRACT
As we have seen in Chapter 5, this process most clearly occurred in the successor kingdoms of Charlemagne’s empire, because public offices became hereditary and royal power was too weak to oppose this tendency. Even before the year 1000 counts and dukes in both the East and West Frankish kingdom had turned into factually autonomous rulers. For instance, the duke of Bavaria and the count of Toulouse did recognise, respectively, the German king and the king of France as their liege, but ruled over Bavaria and Toulouse as if they were kings themselves. One could say that in this situation both the kingdoms of Germany and France, and the duchies and counties that made part of them had characteristics of a primitive state. Attempts by the German kings, in particular, at forcing back this tendency by appointing bishops and archbishops as counts or as dukes were to little avail. In the thirteenth century the kings formally accepted that the Holy Roman Empire was in fact a confederacy of territorial states; from that point on, the German kingship meant little more than the theoretical supreme authority enjoyed by the office-holder; the king’s real power rested on the resources which he had at his disposal as a territorial prince of his own, his Hausmacht or princely domain (for instance, the County of Luxemburg and the kingdom of Bohemia for the German kings from the House of Luxemburg). Meanwhile, the counts, dukes, margraves and prince-bishops in the Empire faced the same problem as their king/ emperor. Because their principalities were first and foremost feudal states, they left a substantial part of their public authority on the local level to be mediatised by their own (aristocratic) vassals.
