A Saxon Mirror

It was in the Empire ¹ that the tactic of using sworn peaces to legitimate royal and princely control of violence developed the furthest. peace and truce councils had been held east of the Rhine as well as west from the eleventh century onwards. ² Their political character in the east was boosted by the struggle for supremacy between the German emperors and the Roman popes that broke out in the 1070s. As Germany’s political landscape fragmented in response to the conflict, and different interest groups formed to take advantage of the struggle for their own purposes, some of these groups resorted to sworn peaces to unify themselves and regulate the relationships of their members with each other. In response to these local and regional peaces, the Emperor Henry IV and the princes of the Empire in 1103 swore a peace that Henry declared to be valid throughout his realm and that was to last for four years. This was the first time that such a peace had been extended to cover the entire Empire. Henry IV’s peace of 1103 therefore stands at the head of the list of what scholars have come to call the Reichslandfrieden or “Imperial Land-peaces”. ³