17 - Germany and the Empire

Summary

to speak of ‘Germany’ in the fifteenth century is an anachronism. Until late in the century the sources invariably refer to the ‘German lands’; even the seemingly singular Deutschland, which became current in the sixteenth century, may in fact derive from a plural form. But what made these lands German? Recourse to geography, or ethnicity, or language quickly reveals more contradictions than congruences. To take the most obvious example: in the west the Rhine from Roman times had separated Germania from Gallia, but in the mid-fourteenth century the Strasburg chronicler Fritsche Closener could note that the archbishop of Trier possessed political authority in that part of Gallia which lay ‘on German soil’ (in tutschem lande). In the early sixteenth century Alsatian humanists became locked in a bitter controversy over the historical roots of German identity west of the Rhine, in which Thomas Murner (1475– c. 1527) derided as naive the contention of Jakob Wimpfeling (1450– 1528) that Alsace had always been both geographically and politically ‘German’ since the days of the Roman Empire.