Corollaries of the Hohenstaufen Collapse

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines further the repercussions of the tensions between lay and religious authority by studying the political consequences of the final papal victory over the Hohenstaufen imperial dynasty in the thirteenth century. The result was another state collapse—in the form of a prolonged succession crisis known as the Great Interregnum (1250–1312)—this time confined to the Roman Empire of the German Nation. The chapter documents how this crisis, itself a consequence of the conflict of church and state, further consolidated urban self-government across large swatches of Western and Central Europe. Besides stimulating the internal balancing act, the progressive fragmentation and decentralization of the Empire—throughout the High Middle Ages the main candidate for creating an imperialization of the Latin West—left space for the advent of territorial states such as France. Finally, it had repercussions elsewhere in the form of generalized geopolitical pressure. The chapter shows how the rulers of the Crown of Aragon became embroiled in the Hohenstaufen collapse, and how this made them more hemmed in by but also able to channel power via institutions of constraint.