Henry VI's inheritance plan
As an inheritance plan , the plan of the Staufer emperor Heinrich VI. refers to the introduction of the hereditary monarchy “as in France” ( Annals von Marbach to the year 1196 ) within the Holy Roman Empire in the German kingdom . This plan was "unheard of" (ibid.) Because it would have removed the right to vote for the king of the greats of the empire. The sources of this important constitutional reform project are sparse, however; the most reliable sources are the Marbach Annals and the Reinhardsbrunner Chronik.
According to the chroniclers, Heinrich won the majority of German princes for his plan at the Reichstag in Würzburg at the end of March / beginning of April 1196, but only with promises, persuasion and threats. It was a classic compensation deal: In return for renouncing the right to vote for a king, the emperor promised the secular princes to grant the inheritance of their imperial fiefs in male and female lines. In the event that their main line could become extinct, they were also granted the right to name a successor. He promised the clergy princes that they would renounce their right to spoil, i.e. the right of the crown to be able to dispose of the corresponding income from the respective property after the death of a prelate during the vacancy of the spiritual office.
As a result of the inheritance plan, the hereditary monarchy was initially actually introduced in the German kingdom, but soon afterwards numerous princes revoked their promise on the grounds that they had been put under pressure. In fact, it was the princes who could put pressure on the emperor because Henry VI. had to rely on the support of the German princes for the crusade he had promised the Pope to retake Jerusalem. Since he did not want to move to the Holy Land himself without his succession having been arranged in a binding manner, the emperor agreed to withdraw the inheritance project if the princes were ready to replace his son, who later became emperor Friedrich II, as his successor to be elected as Roman-German king. The princes promised this, and so the ruler renounced his maximum goal in order not to endanger the crusade, which was carried out with great commitment.
Contrary to what the older research claims, the inheritance project played a role in the negotiations between the emperor and Pope Celestine III. the recognition of the Hohenstaufen rule in the Kingdom of Sicily does not seem to matter. This could be true because, unlike in his fiefdom of Sicily, the Pope was unable to influence the legal relationships within the German kingdom. With the election of the then two-year-old son Friedrich as Roman-German king in December 1196, the important question of succession in the empire had been settled before the start of the crusade. With the death of the emperor on September 28, 1197, there was a dispute between the Germans for the throne , in particular the double election of 1198. This also meant that Henry VI had the opportunity to try again to introduce the hereditary monarchy in Germany. finally there.
The success of this plan would have been of the utmost constitutional importance, since it could have prevented the decline of the Staufer dynasty and thus the interregnum and the formation of the Electoral College . In this way, however, there was no stabilization of the central power in the empire, unlike, for example, in the kingdoms of England and France .
literature
- Odilo Engels : The Hohenstaufen . 8th edition, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart a. a. 2005, ISBN 3-17-017997-7 .
- Ernst Perels: The inheritance plan of Henry VI . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1927.
- Ulrich Schmidt: election of a king and succession to the throne in the 12th century . Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1987, ISBN 3-412-04087-8 .
- Hartmut Jericke: Imperator Romanorum et Rex Siciliae - Emperor Heinrich VI. and his struggle for the Sicilian-Norman kingdom . Publishing house Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1997.
- Ludwig Vones: Conformatio Imperii et Regni. Hereditary empire, hereditary plan and hereditary monarchy in the political objectives of the last years of Emperor Heinrich VI. (Stauferreich in transition. Concepts of order and politics in the time of Friedrich Barbarossa). Edited by Stefan Weinfurter, Mittelalter-Forschungen 9, Stuttgart 2002 pp. 312–334, ISBN 978-3-7995-4260-9 .