Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's note
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editor's introduction
- PART I MODERN MENTALITIES: HISTORIOGRAPHIES, METHODOLOGIES, PRECONCEPTIONS
- PART II THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL ACTION
- PART III POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND INTENTIONS
- 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth
- 12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota
- 13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire
- 14 The end of Carolingian military expansion
- 15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition
- 16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference
- 17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
- 18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration
- 19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era
- 20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages
- 21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
- 22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
- Index
21 - Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's note
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editor's introduction
- PART I MODERN MENTALITIES: HISTORIOGRAPHIES, METHODOLOGIES, PRECONCEPTIONS
- PART II THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL ACTION
- PART III POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND INTENTIONS
- 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth
- 12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota
- 13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire
- 14 The end of Carolingian military expansion
- 15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition
- 16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference
- 17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period
- 18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration
- 19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era
- 20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages
- 21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa
- 22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages
- Index
Summary
The reflections that follow have grown out of my preoccupation with two sets of problems. First, I have been working for far too long on a new edition of the letter-collection of Wibald of Stablo, which as you will all know contains the major part of all surviving Staufer mandates as well a considerable number of papal mandates, and it therefore seems an obvious challenge to compare these two governmental systems and their methods. Second, not long ago, I tried to sketch for anglophone historians the basic features of the style of rulership in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum: now is the time to fill out that sketch a little further. What I am offering here is certainly not polished or complete. It is, rather, work in progress, which means that it is preliminary and has many gaps (I especially regret the omission of France and its high court) – but that can't be helped when I am trying to tackle mandate, privilege and court judgement in only an hour.
In my title, I have deliberately used the word ‘age’ rather than ‘reign’. As long ago as the 1920s and 1930s, leading German medievalists dealt with the period of Barbarossa in the framework of processes of modernisation that became evident in the twelfth century. To some extent, this was a new version of the old battle between historians of ‘Big Germany’ and those of ‘Small Germany’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities , pp. 413 - 431Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006