12 Estates and the Problem of Resistance in Theory

Winfried Schulze
12 Estates and the
Problem of Resistance
in Theory and Practice
in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
Winfried Schulze
From the modern perspective, Central and East-Central Europe at
the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
century seem to present a reasonably clear and unequivocal political
picture. 1 need describe it only briefly here since its essential
features were determined by the victory of the princes. As the
confessional territorial state developed, the princes' sphere of
responsibility expanded. The princely state gained control over
areas previously ruled autonomously by the nobility: it guaranteed
the uniformity of religion; organised and regulated new forms of
judicial proceedings; collected increasing tax revenues; appointed
university professors and the like; conducted ecclesiasticat visitations; and guaranteed the existing social order. All this fits into a
long-term pattern leading from the beginnings of the consolidation
of dynasties and secular rule in the Tate Middle Ages to the trend
towards bureaucratisation characteristic of the late eighteenth century. The years around 1600, which particularly interest us here, are
of special significance in this context. After the various crises of the
sixteenth century, the outlines of the early modern state emerged
and were consolidated at that time, a process which became
apparent first in the financial side of the state's activities, then in its
military, economic and administrative functions. Gerhard Oestreich
dates these developments specifically to the Tate sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.
This picture, which has been so shaped by historical evolution
that it now seems self-evident to us, can be contrasted with a
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different view of our period and of the significance of the estates
within it. If we adopt the perspective of the time itself and try to
reconstruct the openness of its political alternatives, we see, from
the point of view of the estates, a situation characterised by the
princes' increasing and threatening interference in the existing
system of privileges. Provincial nobilities saw themselves being
ousted from traditional administrative positions and replaced by
`landfremde Doktoren', foreign university-trained officials, who
were regarded, not unjustifiably, as the princes' witling henchmen in
weakening the rights of the noble estates. The implementation of
Counter-Reformation measures was seen as breaking valid agreements anas an attack on the organic religious and political culture
of the Landschaft. Regularly repeated tax demands were regarded
as a new, `outrageous' burden, whose imposition deviated from the
traditional practices of the princes' financial administration and
attempted to place the estates in thrall instead. From the princes'
point of view, by contrast, any estates' refusal to graut taxes looked
like an attack on the ruler's slowly developing sovereignty. Modest
attempts by the estates to achieve administrative autonomy were
regarded as emanating from dangerous centres of resistance; similar
disapproval was expressed of independence in religious policy. In
short, princes and estates observed Bach other with suspicion;
neither side could know that their confrontation was to be merely an
episode in the development of the modern state.
This was, then, a crucial turning-point in a situation where all the
options were still open, and therefore hotly-contested, and which
has since attracted the special interest of historians, as the present
essays demonstrate. 'Ehe tension revealed itself not only on those
occasions when nobility and princes, parliament and king, actually
came into conflict, thus showing that the struggle had not yet been
decided. It is evidenced also by a specific form of political theorising
which has been described, using a word that is undoubtedly
incorrect and was merely Born out of the polemics of the time, as
`monarchomachic'. The monarchomachs, or tyrannicides, concentrated on the conditions and forms of estates' resistance to the
princes. They were opposed by a broad stream of political literature
which attempted to demonstrate the legitimacy and diffusion of
princely authority, or of `sovereignty', to use the more modern word
that has spread through Europe since Bodin.
lt seems to me that our brief review of the situation is necessary
in order to justify looking again at the system of estates and its
Estates and the Problem of Resistance
Winfried Schulze
direct significance for this turning-point in central and east-central
European history. As we know, modern interest in the history of
the estates was to a largo extent aroused by the efforts of democratic
historians in Europe who wanted to offer a counterweight to the
fascist and anti-parliamentary movements whose influence grew
markedly between the wars. As these ideas could not then fall on
fruitful soil in Germany, the system of estates was not studied more
closely there until after the Second World War, when the authoritarian state was no longer the main focus of interest. Undoubtedly,
the research of the post-war period continued to absorb the initial
`democratic' impulse. However, it soon lost its political thrust, and
was diverted into a direction where the main concern was,
increasingly, to emphasise those aspects of European absolutism
which continued to be corporately organised and did not conform to
the discipline imposed by central governments. The result of these
efforts was a much more differentiated picture of European absolutism, and to that extent research on the estates has made a major
contribution to the historiography of the early modern period in
Europe. However, since the 1960s it has tended to lose sight of the
political issues involved altogether.
One of my intentions in looking again at the significance of
resistance by the estates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
is to assess and digest the empirical work that has been done in the
last few years. Beyond this, however, we also have to ask what
direction future research on the estates should take. Our picture
certainly contains gaps, and several specific questions are still
awaiting detailed work. But practice has long taught us that asking
major new questions is always the best way to stimulate empirical
studies. Although detailed historical research has shown that the
estates of the early modern period were not the predecessors of
modern democratic parliaments, at least not in a direct way, the
whole issue and the questions it raised concerning the significance of
autonomous elements within absolutism have proved to be
astonishingly persistent.
My point of departure in this essay is the consolidation of power
in the still fluid circumstances of the Tate sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. However, my analysis will pay more attention to the total constellation of political interests than has so far
been usual. 1 shall be looking at the various interests of princes,
estates and subject populations and at what factors intluenced those
interests. The question of resistance in theory and practice will be
seen against this background. What I hope to show is, above all,
that research on the estates must not work with an abstract model of
resistance such as is still commonly used in the literature of
constitutional law. At the level of both estates and associations of
subjects, resistance must be regarded as one possibility of action
that was inherent in the political system of the time. Resistance in
the early modern period was, to some extent, the complement of
the state's as yet incompletely formed system of authority. Its
enormous significance for our purposes is that in the second half of
the sixteenth century this traditional instrument for the regulation of
power collided with the princes' absolutist claims to take sole
responsibility for leadership. The issue of resistance can thus be
used as an effective test-case to establish the actual extent of the
consolidation of state authority. Given the proviso that the theory
and practice of resistance were an indispensable component of the
process by which the modern state emerged, then we may see
resistance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of that
universal struggle between freedom and order which underlies all its
specific historical manifestations.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, these questions were
still evaluated quite differently. In 1916 and 1918 German historians
were declaring that the problem of resistance now possessed only
historical significance. In 1916 Kurt Wolzendorff wondered why it
was 'that the question of the people's right to resist, posed by the
tyrannicides of the sixteenth century, retained its place in political
science for three hundred years, only to disappear from it then
suddenly and completely'. He did not doubt that the establishment
of the rule of law on a constitutional basis had `put paid' to the
doctrine of the right to resist. The legal historian Hans Fehr
believed that the right to resist was logically untenable in juridical
terms', and that it had become `institutionally superfluous': 'The
right to resist passed away with the corporative state itself'. I do not
think that the inappropriateness of this sort of eschatological
thinking in legal matters needs to be demonstrated. Today we lack
these certainties about the perfection of history, especially in our
own era. The experience of the Nazi dictatorship and European
fascism has shown us that the question of freedom and order
remains in essence an unsolved one. 'The history of European
absolutism contains so much of our own destiny that there is good
reason for us to go back to it again and again, and think about it
afresh.' Reinhard Wittram's insight of 1948 provided a motto for
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Estates and the Problem of Resistance recent work on absolutism and the estates. It is a motto that we can
still adopt today. Indeed, given the complacency and the seemingly
quite apolitical nature of much individual research, it sometimes
seems appropriate to recall such comments.
We shall now look at the framework of political power within which
the resistance of the estates of Central Europe must be placed. A
four-part scheme is most appropriate to the Holy Roman Empire,
taking into account the interests of the nobles, the subject populations, the princes and the emperor. Here I should like to draw upon
conclusions which I have already reached about each of these
interest groups in the context of my comparative research on
peasant resistance, and which, it seems to me, are also indispensable
to the problem that interests us here. Firstly, the landowning
nobility, given the growth of a money economy and the upward
demographic trend of the entire sixteenth century, had a fundamental interest in making the fullest possible use of peasants' obligations
to render them taxes and services. In each case, the given agrarian
structure determined the particular form of increased burden that
was preferred. In political terms, this economic priority meant that
the estates initially aimed to protect their own landed domains visä-vis the ruler as far as possible, or to limit princely intervention in
that area to what could be circumvented. In terms of financial
policy, their orientation could only mean as complete a rejection as
possible of all attempts by the central administration to appropriate
their subjects' income.
The landowning nobility's peasant subjects, in turn, had a strong
interest in securing as far as possible their individual and collective
titles to the land, as well as their right to inherit, and to use or sell
the products of their land under favourable conditions, since that
was the only way in which individual agrarian producers could prove
their worth and peasants could have a share in the agricultural
boom. Politically, this grass-roots interest meant that subjects
increasingly appealed to the prince's authority to settle disputes,
which signified a progressive weakening of the nobles' autonomy.
Thirdly, the governments of the territorial states, in their turn, had
a strong interest in an economically healthy population that could
pay its taxes. This was the only way in which their authority could
be stabilised at home and extencled abroad. A monopoly of civil
power, a legal system that applied to everyone, and a standing army
formed the basis for the state's ability to defend itself against
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aristocratic frondeurs and rebellious peasants, as well as against
external attack. Finally, the constellation of powers and interests
outlined so far remains, of course, incomplete as far as most of
Central Europe is concerned, where it would have to include the
emperor as guarantor of internal and external order. The emperor
was able to assert himself as a controlling authority mainly against
the smaller territorial powers. Given that the duality of emperor and
Empire served unmistakably to strengthen the position of the
princes between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries,
this factor must be taken into account in assessing the total
situation. Further, the relationship between the emperor and the
estates of the Reich in many cases provided the background for the
behaviour of princes and estates in the separate territories.
Certain fundamental kinds of conflict almost inevitably derived
from this constellation of forces. Moreover, it seems to me worth
stressing that the peasant revolts and estates' disputes to which it
gave rise—in other words, this epoch's massive disruptive potential—were a product not only of dynastic and national rivalry or of
religious struggles, but also of basic social tensions and shifts in
status. In my view, this Interpretation is more broadly based and
productive than the often polemical contention found, for example,
in the work of J.H. Elliott, that social conflicts were less relevant
than conflicts about the control and exercise of power. Abstract
recourse to political power struggles as explanatory factors seems to
me to be as unproductive as constant references to the exclusive
significance of social forces. More important, in my view, is to
identify the interests which underlay such power struggles, or to
analyse the catalytic function of religious factors in socio-political
conflicts. I hope that the brief breakdown of interests given above
takes us one step further towards this goal.
If I am right, then the often overlapping, but divergent interests
of peasants, nobles and princes were the characteristic feature of the
early modern period in Europe. In terms of domestic politics, we
can distinguish at first glance two distinct lines of conflict, namely
estates' disputes on the one hand and peasants' revolts on the other.
But from time to time these two levels of conflict wwwere sso closely
entwined that their connection becomes obvious. This phenomenon
is very clearly visible in the French power struggles of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, where royal authority had to assert itself
against peasant resistance as much as against aristocratic regionalism. In the Habsburg territories, which mainly concern us here,
Estates and the Problem of Resistance
Winfried Schulze
conflicts between princes and estates, rulers and subjects, mingled
to such an extent that they cannot be clearly separated.
Both lines of conflict can easily be derived from the power
structures outlined above. They are part of a large and coherent
historical process. At issue in the peasants' revolts were the extent
of taxation and the various forms of seigneurial obligation; while the
estates' disputes, in essence, were about the ruler's right to raise
taxes and quasi-parliamentary safeguards against abuse of this right.
More pointedly, one could say that, while the peasants' revolts were
about the Surplus which could be skimmed off peasant production,
the estates' disputes concentrated on the fundamental right to
exploit peasant production. Of course, I am aware that the struggles
of the estates can also be described in the terminology of the major
political conflicts of the time, but it seems important to establish
that they were not abstract disputes about sovereignty. On the
contrary, the main issue was access to Chose resources which were
the prerequisite for the position of power which, superficially,
always appeared to be the aim of the struggle.
largely unchallenged, in response to the demands of practical
politics and without any particular process of constitutional reflection. The catch-phrase `Quoll omnes tangit' was certainly known in
Central Europe. However, once it had beeil established in principle
that the diets would participate to some degree in .domestic political
decision-making, that phrase was more commonly used by the
imperial cities in order to justify their meetings.
The crucial breakthrough to theorising about the position of the
estates vis-ä-vis the princes was manifestly prompted by the religious
question. This issue confronted the estates concerned with the
problem of tyranny, known from medieval political theory. In other
words, we must assume that the question of religious resistance
aggravated a problem that was much older and fed upon feudal law
as well as upon the literature about the relationship between
emperor and pope. But it was not until the sixteenth century, when
the state's activities had expanded and the confessional issue exerted
a specific pressure, that theories of resistance were explicitly formulated. Of course, this was only part of a general and remarkable
movement towards theorisation which characterised the sixteenth
century in Europe as a whole: our question about theory and
practice makes no sense until then. The main factor in making the
question of resistance more radical and more acute was that the
impulse behind Reformation thinking opened up the possibility of
resistance to a much wider social group. So far, it had been
restricted to the nobility; now resistance could be expressed at a
communal and sometimes even at an individual level. The problem
of tyrannis exercitu only arose when the emperor and his imperial
estates, or the prince and his territorial estates, belonged to
different faiths. Until that time this variant of the medieval concept
of tyranny had been an exception in Europe; now it became the
norm where the exercise of power was at issue.
What is the particular significance of this phase of reflection about
confessional resistance? If we summarise what Zwingli, Luther and
Calvin had to say on the subject, it appears that it was the idea of a
lower authority' which became added at this stage to the Jong
intellectual tradition concerning potential agents of resistance. In
1958, Gerhard Oestreich, expanding upon Beza's tenet that the
authority of the king derived from the authority of the people,
proposed that the concepts of the sovereignty of the prince and of
the people should be supplemented by that of the sovereignty of the
magistrates. This, he suggested, would better `capture the reality of
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Turning now to the question of the right to resist in theory and
practice, we will not be examining earlier historical developments.
Our subject is not the protracted process by which the princes
established their position during the later Middle Ages, confirming
noble privileges merely from case to case in various treaties or
Herrschaftsverträge, a term which actually covers a multiplicity of
different kinds of agreement. What is important here is that
initially, on each occasion, the rights and duties of prince and nobles
were laid down without reference to general principles which would
allow us to speak meaningfully of resistance. This term, it seems to
me, becomes useful only as that phase in the relationship between
prince and estates was reached when the extension of the state's
activity at home and abroad gave the prince a specific kind of
authority—that is, when princes claimed responsibility for all political questions pertaining to their territories.
Historically, I would date this phase in Central Europe to about
the second half of the fifteenth century, when the decline of partible
inheritance within dynasties, growing tax demands, the enhanced
peacekeeping role of the prince as arbiter of the Landfrieden, and
the establishment of the territorium clausum as a legal and administrative unit made the princely court the natural focus of domestic
politics. Rulers achieved such a position of real predominance
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Winfried Schulze
the times and their aspirations'. Some years later J.H. Elliott
pointed to the significance of the various communities, corporations
and Landschaften which articulated the idea of political solidarity in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using the `magistrate
theory' to examine the impact which those bodies had on political
theories is in line with these Europe-wide `idealised notions',
emphasised by Elliott, of how political communities emerge. The
first significant expression of the idea that I can find is in Zwingli's
Predigt vom Hirten of 26 June 1524. In this sermon, he refers to
Spartan ephors, Roman tribunes and the chief wardens of urban
German guilds as examples of authorities who can exercise some
control over the ruler. Thence he draws the almost revolutionary
conclusion that preachers can fulfil the same function for their
congregations.
More detailed investigation of the rote of such magistratus
inferiores has, over the last twenty years, considerably modified our
picture of the history of the theory of resistance in the sixteenth
century. Above all, the view that St Bartholomew's Night in 1572
marked the decisive breakthrough to a qualitatively new theory of
resistance has had to be revised. Instead, interest has focused on the
Magdeburg Confession (Magdeburger Bekenntnis) of 1550, the first
systematic explication of the lower magistrates' right to resist. lt
arose out of the exigencies of the political situation faced by the
city, which opposed the Interim of Augsburg. Recent research has
shown this document to be an interesting meeting-point between
German and Anglo-French doctrines of resistance. The notion it
develops of resistance by lower authorities is of special interest not
only because it broadens the basis of the old theory of corporate
resistance, but also because it puts forward a division of political
authorities that extends downwards as far as the commune. The
progressive lowering of political and social credentials from the level
of Protestant princes of the Empire right down to the lower status
occupied by the magistratus inferiores of the Magdeburg Confession
and other texts is, undoubtedly, a remarkable process. lt remains to
be seen whether this lowering of the credentials for resistance was
not also used as an argument against resistance by the estates.
Looking at the question which has probably been most fully
researched, that of the justification offered for armed resistance to
the emperor after the imperial diet of 1530, we can distinguish two
lines of argument. First there is the theory, used by theologians, of
resistance being justified on the basis that all authorities, including
the lower ones, have a specific task. On this view, all authorities are
appointed by God; they all have the task of protecting their
subjects. Quentin Skinner has called this interpretation of the
possibility of resistance by lower authorities, even against higher
authorities, the `constitutionar theory of resistance, because in
essence it did no more than reformulate the possibility of vassals
offering resistance to the highest feudal lord, already contained in
the imperial constitution, and apply it to religious conflict.
The other line of argument relating to resistance was developed
by Saxon lawyers and derived from the general right of self-defence.
That right became operative when an authority acted unjustly and
thus forfeited its official standing. Skinner calls this argument the
theory of resistance under private law. However, we could also
speak of a natural-law theory because, to quote Melanchthon, it is
based on the idea that `vim vi repellere natura concedit'. lt is
obvious that the practical applications of these two theories of
resistance would be totally different, a point soon perceived by
contemporaries, as the Torgau discussions of October 1530 Show.
Martin Bucer, who in general approved of resisting the emperor,
pointed to the incalculable consequences of the natural-law theory
of resistance, emphasising the gravity of a failure to distinguish
between the authority of private individuals and that of the bearers
of public office. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bucer mainly
developed the `constitutionar variant of the right of resistance,
which thus found its way, presumably via Calvin and Beza, into
French Protestantism, where it formed the core of all varieties of
Huguenot theories of resistance. We should observe in passing that
we owe our knowledge of Bucer's significance for the development
of Calvinist thinking on resistance primarily to the work of Hans
Baron, who saw in him the bridge between the ius divinum of the
age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the ius naturale
of modern times. Above all, Bucer developed the fundamental idea
of merutn imperium as the criterion of authority: so long as it
possessed merum imperium, even the 'geringste und schwecheste
oberkait', the lowest and weakest authority, had the right to rule, to
pass laws and to punish offenders. The Magdeburg Confession of
1550, which we have already mentioned, articulated this basic rule
in its Statements on lower authority:
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Wenn die hohe Obrigkeit sich understehet, mit gewalt und
unrecht zu verfolgen, nicht so vast die Personen ihrer Untertanen
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Estates and the Problem of Resistance
als in ihnen das Göttliche und natürliche Recht, rechte lehre und
Gottesdienst aufzuheben und auszureuten, so ist die unter
Obrigkeit schuldig, aus kraft Göttlichs befehls wider solch der
Obern fürnehmen sich sampt den ihren, wie sie kon,
auffzuhalten.
In the present context, we cannot pursue the question, interesting
though it is, of how the Magdeburg Confession found its way into
the English and French world and was further developed there.
Instead, we shall turn our attention to the significance of this specific
theory for the resistance of the estates in Central Europe. lt seems
that the local estates of the various territories of the Empire had
much more difficulty in accepting this theory than did the Protestant
princes and cities vis-a-vis the emperor. This means that estates'
resistance within the territories remained much more strongly
orientated towards the traditional model of upholding privileges.
Even in the Habsburg territories, where conflict between princes
and estates was most acute, the Legitimation of resistance by the
estates initially remained fully within the framework of inherited
models of consensus. `Vertreuliches Miteinanderhandeln', confidential negotiation, between prince and diet was considered the
ideal of political life, disturbed only by the prince's jealous and, of
course, foreign advisers. Loyalty to the ancestral dynasty was
presented as historically tried and tute, and absolutely unswerving;
the traditional rights of the territories were regarded as the
guideline for all political action. If I am correct, and apart from a
few exceptions to be mentioned below, corporative resistance in the
Holy Roman Empire largely stayed within a traditional framework
of rule: the theoretical concepts being developed elsewhere at the
time were not accepted there.
lt seems rather that, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning
of the seventeenth century, the theory of `constitutional' resistance
was further invoked only at two particular points in the Empire's
system of estates. First, it cropped up in the discussions of the
imperial estates, held after the 1594 Reichstag, about the validity of
the resolutions passed by that body's Catholic majority. As I have
discussed this episode several times over the past few years, 1 shall
refer to it only briefly here; but it is worth mentioning because the
discussions took place at a conspicuously high level, which serves to
confute the preconception that the development of European political thought in the sixteenth century, as at other times, largely took
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place outside Germany. In fact, this discussion, sparked off by legal
measures implemented against those Protestant states which refused
to pay imperial taxes approved by the Catholic majority, provides
evidence of an interesting new usage of the axiom Quod omnes
tangit. In addition, the Protestant estates used the magistratus
inferiores argument, justifying their refusal to pay these taxes by
saying that in such dangerous times they had to look after their own
subjects instead of spending money on defending the far distant
border with Turkey. For the rest, there can be no doubt that the
group of Protestant princes who looked to the Palatinate based their
right to resist the emperor and the Catholic party of which he was
the leader on the same constitutional arguments that had been
developed in the first half of the century. Thus, for example,
participants in the Rothenburg assembly of the Protestant Union,
which met before the important imperial diet of 1613, were fully
agreed that, should this Reichstag fail, the Union `raust be ready for
the worst', and should look to some kind of alliance with other,
foreign powers, just as our opponents have done'. The magistratus
inferiores argument received further support when the Protestant
estates at that diet, again rejecting the majority resolution, referred
to the institutions always cited as historical examples of the ephor
theory, that is, the Roman tribunes and similar institutions in Sparta
and Athens, as well as to Persia, Poland and the Estates General.
The other area where we can discern the unequivocal effects of a
developed theory of magistrates is the Habsburg hereditary lands
during the Counter-Reformation. Since the 1560s and 1570s, the
Protestant estates there had managed successfully to safeguard their
position. Indeed, because the princes relied on them to grant money
for the Turkish war, the estates were able to consolidate themselves
politically and culturally. They ran their own schools and churches,
were involved in everything pertaining to warfare, and maintained
permanent, politically aware and efficient administrations. All this
meant that the Austrian hereditary lands were truly dualistic
corporative states, although naturally there were differences
between individual territories. Of some importance, finally, is the
fact that during the sixteenth century, a Sense of political community
among the estates of the various lands had already begun to
develop. This has led no less an authority than Hans Sturmberger to
suggest that in Austria the system of estates represented 'the other
variant of state development' beside the rule of the princes, a
judgement echoed by some of the other contributors to this volume.
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Winfried Schulze
For our purposes the crucial point is that the largely Protestant
estates in the Habsburg lands were able to reject the conditions of
the religious Peace of Augsburg and impose the Protestant faith in
their own domains. This clear deviation from the general confessional regulations laid down for the Empire provoked the Catholic
House of Habsburg to try to regain its lost position at the beginning
of the Counter-Reformation. Its attempt posed the central question
of who held the real power. Was the sovereign now only a `painted'
or `paper' prince, as the Habsburg ruler of Styria feared? Were the
estates the real masters of the country? Or did plenum imperium, or
absolutum Imperium, as in other lands, accrue to the prince?
In essence, the Austrian estates developed two positions to cope
with the threat posed by the Counter-Reformation. The first was to
adopt an attitude that could be called 'passive resistance', `whereby
obedience comes to the same thing as the power of obstruction', as
Sturmberger has established for Upper Austria in the stante of
Achaz von Hohenfeld in 1589. I myself have found an instance of
the same thing in Styria in 1582: an estates' report of that year on
the religious question says that the estates should prepare for the
most dire emergency with a responsible defence 'contra vim et
iniuriam"wider besorgende gewalt', since they are holders of public
office who are bound by oath to respect and defend privileges. Thus
we have another instance of the magistrate theory being applied.
Neither position, however, involved offering active, armed resistance to the prince.
Nothing going beyond that defensive posture can be found in the
Erblande until after 1608 when, under the leadership of Georg
Erasmus von Tschernembl and protected by the Lieben treaty of 25
June that year, the Protestant estates of Upper Austria organised
resistance to Archduke Matthias. This phase of the quarret witnessed the most comprehensive definition of corporate resistance in
Europe. In his speeches during negotiations with the Hungarian and
Moravian estates, Tschernembl developed his idea of a truly corporative state which elected its own ruler, whose subjects enjoyed
freedom of religion, and which was `almost a free res publica' as
Archduke Matthias feared at the time. If we also take into account
Tschernembl's `Consultationes', written a decade later, in which he
specifies the conditions under which a prince can be deposed and
also considers how to win over the peasants, there can be little
doubt that what we have here is an alternative model of early
modern statehood, developed on the basis of noble autonomy and
Calvinist reflections on resistance. Its translation into reality,
however, miscarried.
Of course it is possible to argue that the Battle of the White
Mountain could have had a different outcome, and with that the
verdict of history on the policies of the Habsburg estates could have
been different. This objection is certainly valid and, remembering
the fluidity of the situation mentioned at the outset, we should be
wary of discounting from the start the possibility that the estates
could have been successful. Nonetheless, that possibility should not
prevent us from thinking about the problematic character of corporate resistance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We need
to ask why such a discrepancy arose between the theory and the
practice of resistance by the estates. In my opinion, that discrepancy
cannot simply be brushed aside by being blamed on the contingencies of historical development.
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Any answer to this question must draw upon more than one
argument. First we should mention the evidente from all over
Europe that a certain store of political experience had accumulated
in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, best summed
up in the Latin tag: Praesumptio setnper militat pro magistratu. It
indicates a high esteem for the leadership of the authorities, whose
function in creating order and guaranteeing security is especially
appreciated. This Sentiment was matched by a critical attitude to
popular movements, which were described as disordered and dangerous, and whose members were seen as incapable of participating
in politics. Even a thinker like Althusius does not doubt that the
political leadership of a community is best left in the hands of one
man. In Emden, he himself acted accordingly, curtailing the power
of the patriciate and setting himself up as `dictator of Emden', as
Michael Behnen has recently put it. Against this background, any
serious attempt to set up corporative or republican organisations
was bound to carry special weight.
We must also mention the special position into which the Turkish
danger put the Habsburg hereditary lands. Although this factor
could be used as a compelling argument in negotiations with the
princes, it was also an argument for not pushing the estates' claims
vis-ä-vis the prince too far. The European position of the House of
Habsburg, its ties with rich Spain and the Papacy, ensured its ability
successfully to defend the Austrian lands and the Empire. To that
extent the diets' annual resolutions concerning border security
172
Estates and the Problem of Resistance
ultimately turned out to be an argument against the estates.
Moreover, we must also remember that power struggles in corporate societies always included that sector of society which, although
excluded from the direct exercise of power, to a large degree
determined the political decisions that were made. It is therefore
especially interesting to look at the many references to the significance of the subject population in disputes between prince and
estates, and to examine to what extent a conflict superficially taking
place between prince and diet was also intluenced by the
unprivileged Untertanen.
The fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
Habsburg territories were in a state of `perpetual social upheaval',
to quote Karl Eder, cannot have been without significance for the
Protestant nobility. That the peasants might rise at any time was
used as a many-sided argument. Diet and prince accused each other
of provoking disturbances among the common people by their
respective policies on religion. At the 1582 Reichstag, the ruler of
Inner Austria, Archduke Charles, was not as confident of his
peasants' attitude towards the Turks as of the nobility's. lt is
extraordinarily difficult to determine the position of the nobles
vis-ä-vis their subjects because, although they were brought together
by a common religion, they were divided by social antagonisms. On
the other hand, the nobility made common cause with the peasants
against the princely policy of re-Catholicisation when its right to
exercise patronage, and thus to appoint clergy or to accept `runaway' subjects of Catholic lords into Protestant churches, was at
stake. On the other hand, the extent of conflict between the nobles
and their subjects was frequently revealed in refusals to render
compulsory services and labour, in local unrest and lawsuits. In all
these disagreements, the peasantry increasingly appealed to the
prince's authority to settle disputes. Thus the Robotpatent that put
an end to the uprising of 1598 was achieved only because the
emperor put strong pressure on noble interests, whose chief representative, incidentally, was Tschernembl.
In Georg Erasmus von Tschernembl the Problem we are addressing here was concentrated in one person. On the one hand, he
clearly subscribed to monarchomachic ideas; on the other, he was a
vehement defender of the rights of the nobility and, ultimately, an
advocate of the use of force against the subject population. In his
view, the disobedience of peasants towards their lords threatened
the foundations of the polity. His writings contain no references to a
Winfried Schulze
173
possible coalition between the nobility and its subjects for the
purpose of achieving noble religious aims, apart from his advice,
given at the eleventh hour, that Bohemian peasants should be
released from their serfdom in order to make them more favourably
disposed towards the estates, and to forestall the emperor's adoption of the same tactic.
This demonstrates very clearly the limits of the nobility's capacity
for action. In a society predicated upon social inequality, which had
already been recognised as such and made the subject of reform
measures, power struggles between the privileged estates could only
in exceptional circumstances break down social barriers. The
nobility's basic need for internal peace and social stability could be
effectively guaranteed only by the prince, representing an authority
that transcended the interests of the various strata of society.
Awareness of the prince's irreplaceable function affected all conflicts between estates and rulers, and it explains why the solutions
proposed by the estates could be realised only under special
conditions. Those cases in which the estates were finally successful
illustrate, in their often precarious development, the difficulty of
bypassing the authority of the prince. In 1578 the imperial tourt
feared that the estates would rebel against a change in the religious
concessions made by Maximilian II. Even at this early stage, Dr
Georg Eder, member of the Aulic Council, suggested in his report
that the estates of Upper and Lower Austria gave absolutely no
cause for concern. He wrote that they consisted of 'gutherzige
verständige Leuth', and that in these territories there was a very
different opinion from that in France and the Netherlands, 'da hier
viel seien, die der Obrigkeit nach dem Schwert und Regiment
greiffen'.
Undoubtedly more reasons could be listed for the restraint shown
by the estates in their dispute with that princely authority which in
the end destroyed the nobility's autonomy and subjected its political
functions to far-reaching controls, compensating it with greater
social privileges. Ultimately, however, we cannot disregard the
important function fulfilled by the princes themselves, a function
made possible by the historical situation of the sixteenth century.
Our insights depend on the retrospective view granted to historians;
they were not available to Chose participating in the power struggles
at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth
century. From this we can conclude that estates' resistance, in
theory and practice, must be regarded as an alternative possibility of
174
Estates and the Problem of Resistance
Winfried Schulze
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