Noble Bondsmen

Front matter

Noble Bondsmen

MINISTERIAL MARRIAGES IN THE ARCHDIOCESE OF SALZBURG, 1100-1343

John B. Freed

Contents

List of Maps and Genealogical Tables Preface List of Abbreviations

Introduction The Archbishopric and Principality of Salzburg 5 Sources and Terminal Dates 17 Methodology 22

The Archiepiscopal Ministerialage Before the Investiture Conflict 32 The Investiture Conflict 35 The High Middle Ages (1122-1246) 39 The Salzburg Interregnum and the Later Middle Ages (1247-1343) 54

Preface

This book had its remote beginnings one day in the spring of 1972, when I was writing my book about the German Dominicans and Franciscans. I had discovered that many of the prominent friars, like Saint Albertus Magnus, were ministeriales, and I thought that a quick trip to Firestone Library at Princeton University would provide a ready explanation for this phenomenon. I soon learned that there was no modern work of synthesis about the Dienstmänner in German and virtually nothing about them in English. Benjamin Arnold has now happily remedied the latter deficiency, and I eventually coined the word ministerial because I found it awkward and pedantic to resort to a Latin word in almost every sentence.

After I had a finished a historiographical article about the so-called Ministerialenfrage, or ministerial question, I decided to concentrate on the ministerials of a particular prince. I chose the ecclesiastical principality because Illinois State University had just started an international studies program in Salzburg, and serving as the resident faculty member gave me a chance to get there at university expense. It proved a fortuitous choice. By medieval German standards the documentation about Salzburg is abundant, little research had been done about the archiepiscopal ministerials, and Heinz Dopsch had just begun his own work on the province.

My original intention was to write a regional monograph about Salzburg comparable to Georges Duby’s classic study of the Mäconnais so that scholars could compare long-term changes in the social structures of French- and German-speaking areas. A book about the ministerials was merely the first step toward that goal, but before I could do even this, I felt I needed to reconstruct the genealogies, property holdings, and histories of the individual lineages. I planned to xii PREFACE publish these first so as not to burden the reader of the more general work with genealogical reconstructions. While working on this material, I discovered the case of Diemut of Högl, whose name appears frequently in the following pages, and realized that it was also possible to deal with the intersection of family and social history. In the meantime, I published a series of articles about Salzburg.

Then William Chester Jordan asked me to deliver a paper at Princeton in February 1989 on the general theme of authority and marginality. I used the occasion to discuss the ministerials’ marriages. I intended at first to turn the paper into yet another article, but my colleague and friend Roy A. Austensen, who is now the provost at Valparaiso University, persuaded me that I had enough material for a book. I have thus published my conclusions before making public the genealogical and prosopographical studies they are based on, but I hope eventually to make this material available to scholars in some form. As for the regional monograph, in which I give the nobles, peasants, and burghers their due, it remains a distant dream.

I have relied over the years on the help of many institutions and people, and I am grateful for this opportunity to thank them for their kindness. I apologize if I have inadvertantly omitted a name or two. Illinois State University not only paid for two lengthy visits to Salzburg, where I was able to work at the Institut für Geschichte of the University of Salzburg and the Salzburger Landesarchiv, but also provided me with several research grants to pursue my work back home. I was able to write most of the first draft of this book while I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1990—91. Had it not been for this fellowship, the book’s gestation period would have been even longer.

I have relied greatly on interlibrary loan for finding obscure articles and books. I owe a special thanks in this regard to Helga Whitcomb, the now retired librarian at Milner Library at ISU, and to Faridah Kassim at the Institute. Amy Berridge, Mark Darby, and Marcia Tucker, librarians at the Institute, were also extremely helpful. Dr. Martin Bitschnau, head librarian of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, not only supplied me with an obscure document but graciously answered my inquiries about Rodenegg and the Rodanks. Helmut Stampfer of the Landesdenkmalamt für Südtirol provided the photographs of the Rodenegg frescoes, which were taken by Hubert Walder; and I thank Dr. Stampfer and the Landesdenkmalamt for permission to reproduce them. Jill Freund Thomas, cartographer at ISU, and her assistant, William Walters, spent many hours drawing the maps. Sarah Lewin, who served as my part-time secretary at the Institute, helped with the preparation of the original manuscript. Alice Bennett, manuscript editor for Cornell University Press, read the final draft, and I am grateful for the care with which she did so; she found far too many slips.

Several people heard or read portions of the manuscript in various stages of its preparation. I presented a paper about the Rodenegg frescoes to a seminar at

Preface xiii the Institute, and I deeply appreciated the comments of the participants—especially John Baldwin of Johns Hopkins and Elizabeth Beatson—in refining my thinking. In addition, I was able to discuss the frescoes with several medieval art historians: Virginia Roehrig Kaufmann, who provided me with color slides, Horst Bredekamp of the University of Hamburg, and Elizabeth McLachlan of Rutgers. Michael Curschmann of the Princeton German Department, who first called my attention to the frescoes, read an earlier version of chapter 6, and I have profited greatly from his suggestions. Giles Constable of the Institute, Patrick Geary, who is now the director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Benjamin Arnold of the University of Reading in England read the first draft of the entire manuscript and helped to clarify my thinking. The anonymous readers of the manuscript for Cornell University Press gave invaluable advice on how to make a detailed local study more accessible to a wider audience. My retired colleague Lawrence D. Walker, who has been my mentor for many years, read the final draft.

I will always be indebted to Heinz Dopsch, professor of comparative Landesgeschichte at the University of Salzburg and the world’s foremost authority on the history of the province. Professor Dopsch provided me with an office at the Institut where I could work, took me on tours of the countryside and historical sites, answered countless questions over the years, corrected my German, and supplied numerous articles and books that I could not readily obtain in the United States.

Finally, I thank my wife, Susan Anderson-Freed, chair of the Computer Science Department at Illinois Wesleyan University and my resident expert, who programmed the genealogies that appear in this book. Somehow she and our daughter, Jenny, managed to live with me while I, like Ulrich of Liechtenstein, was gallivanting around my imaginary world.

JOHN B. FREED

Normal, Illinois

ABBREVIATIONS

AHR AOG Au

Berchtesgaden

Brixner Urkunden BUB Carinthia I.

CF

FRA GAG Gars JbfLKNO JMH

Mansi

MB

MC

MGH

MGH Schriften MGH SS

American Historical Review Archiv für österreichische Geschichte Codex traditionum Augiensium

Schenkungsbuch der ehemaligen gefürsteten Probstei Berchtesgaden

Die Urkunden der Brixner Hochstifts-Archive, 845-1295 Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Babenberger in Österreich

Carinthia I. Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Landeskunde von Kärnten

Codex Falkensteinensis: Die Rechtsaufzeichnungen der Grafen von Falkenstein

Fontes rerum Austriacarum

Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik

Die Traditionen, Urkunden und Urbare des Stiftes Gars Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich Journal of Medieval History

Monumenta Boica

Monumenta historica ducatus Carinthiae Monumenta Germaniae historica

Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae historica

Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores xvi ABBREVIATIONS

MGSL MIÖG

Necrologia Germaniae OÖUB

QE

Raitenhaslach

Regesten

Regesten Steiermark

Das Salzfass

SUB

Traditionsbücher Brixen

Traditionsbuch Neustift

TUB

UB Raitenhaslach UB Steiermark Urkunden Neustift

VF

VMPIG

WF

ZsbLG

ZsHVStm

Z(S)RG, GA, KA, RA

Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde

Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung

MGH: Necrologia Germaniae

Urkundenbuch des Landes ob der Enns

Quellen und Erörterungen zur bayerischen Geschichte Die Traditionsnotizen des Klosters Raitenhaslach

Die Regesten der Erzbischöfe und des Domkapitels von Salzburg, 1247-1343

Regesten des Herzogtums Steiermark

Das Salzfass: Heimatkundliche Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins Rupertiwinkel

Salzburger Urkundenbuch

Die Traditionsbücher des Hochstifts Brixen vom 10. bis in das 14. Jahrhundert

Das Traditionsbuch des Augustiner-Chorherrenstiftes Neustift bei Brixen

Tiroler Urkundenbuch Die Urkunden des Klosters Raitenhaslach, 1034-1350 Urkundenbuch des Herzogthums Steiermark

Die Urkunden des Augustiner-Chorherrenstiftes Neustift bei Brixen

Vorträge und Forschungen, herausgegeben vom Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte

Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte Wege der Forschung

Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte

Zeitschrift des historischen Vereins für Steiermark

Introduction

I. July 1213 Archbishop Eberhard II of Salzburg (1200-1246) and Bishop Manegold of Passau (1206-15) asked King Frederick II at the imperial court held at Eger (today Cheb in the Czech Republic) to confirm the marriage contract that Gerhoch II of Bergheim-Radeck, an archiepiscopal ministerial, had made with Bertha of Lonsdorf, a Passau ministerial. The couple had agreed, presumably with their lords’ consent, that their first two children were to belong to Salzburg and the third to Passau, and that any remaining children would be divided equally between the two churches. Gerhoch and Bertha could confer their alods on each other, and their children would share their paternal and maternal inheritances equally.' Gerhoch and Bertha’s son Ulrich II of Radeck subsequently served the archbishop, and his brother Henry III, co-owner of the castle of Radeck, belonged to the retinue of the bishops of Passau.’ That the two bishops bothered the young king with such a matter at the imperial court that abrogated the Concordat of Worms and confirmed the papal recuperations in central Italy suggests that Gerhoch and Bertha were hardly ordinary serfs. In reality their brothers, Riidiger of

I. SUB 3:171, no. 666. On the Bergheim-Radecks, see Heinz Dopsch, Geschichte Salzburgs: Stadt und Land, vol. 1, Vorgeschichte, Altertum, Mittelalter, 3 pts. (Salzburg, 1981-84), 1/1:375-79; John B. Freed, “Diemut von Högl: Eine Salzburger Erbtochter und die erzbischöfliche Ministerialität im Hochmittelalter,” MGSL 120-21 (1980-81): 618-20, 638-40; and Franz Valentin Zillner, “Salzburgische Geschlechterstudien: II. Izling-Fischach-Bergheim-Radeck,” MGSL 19 (1879): 1-64.

2. Ulrich was identified in 1254 as Gerhoch’s son and as an archiepiscopal ministerial (Regesten 1:29, no. 204). He was never mentioned in a document issued in Passau. Ulrich’s brother Henry, who was mentioned for the first time in a Salzburg document only in 1270, when the brothers mortgaged Radeck (SUB 4:484-86, no. 417), appeared regularly after 1256 in documents that concerned Passau (OOUB 3:230 ff., nos. 239, 244, 245, 265, 274, 331, 337, 379, 381, 389, 421, 425, 523, 593). Henry was identified as a Passau ministerial in MB 29/2:443-45, no. 67.

Bergheim and Otto of Lonsdorf, later became prince-bishops of Passau (1233-50 and 1254-65, respectively)

This strange agreement highlights one of the oddities of the medieval German constitution: the existence of an estate of men and women who were legally unfree, as can be seen in the restrictions on their right to marry, but who by the thirteenth century formed the de facto nobility of the country. Archbishop Frederick II (1270-84), who was himself a ministerial by birth, even requested that Count Albert II of Görz (1258-1304) divide with him “the children of nobles.” 4 The ministerials’ peculiar position in German society was succinctly stated in a Carinthian manorial register (Urbar) of 1267 that listed various prominent ducal ministerials under the rubric “homines proprii nobiles” —noble bondsmen

Servile knights (milites) were hardly unique to medieval Germany. Although Georges Duby demonstrated that the knights of the twelfth-century Mäconnais were the descendants of men who had earlier been styled as nobles and who had already been influential landowners in the second half of the tenth century, many of the knights in post-Conquest England were serfs who owed their lords labor services and servile dues for their land. What made Germany different from its western neighbors was that until the fourteenth century the taint of servitude continued to be attached to men and women like Gerhoch and Bertha, who would have been classified without question as nobles in France or England. For example, as late as 1311 Archbishop Conrad IV (1291-1312) permitted his ministerial Frederick of Goldegg to marry one of the legitimate daughters of the Styrian ministerial Rudolph of Liechtenstein, whose grandfather had already in 1250 been able to field a force of one hundred knights, on condition that any children of this marriage were to be divided equally between the church and the duke.’ In contrast, English knights were generally assumed to be free by the reign of Henry II.

Marc Bloch popularized the thesis that the church’s crusading ideology and the threat posed by the growing wealth and aspirations of the burghers caused warriors of diverse social origins to coalesce into a single order of knights who became in turn the nobility of twelfth-century Europe. He conceded, however, that such servile knights were accepted as nobles more slowly in Germany than in France because there were simply too many ministerials for them to be absorbed

3. Josef Breinbauer, Otto von Lonsdorf: Bischof von Passau, 1254-1265, Passauer historische Forschungen 6 (Cologne, 1992), pp. 5-II, 445, identified Bertha as Bishop Otto’s aunt; but Otto referred in 1259 to Adelaide, the daughter of Gerhoch II of Radeck, as his niece (neptis) (Breinbauer, p. 400, no. 13).

6. Georges Duby, “Lineage, Nobility, and Knighthood: The Mâconnais in the Twelfth Century — a Revision,” in Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), pp. 59-80; and Jean Scammell, “The Formation of the English Social Structure: Freedom, Knights, and Gentry, 1066-1300,” Speculum 68 (1993): 599.

8. Scammell, “Formation,” pp. 604-9.

imperceptibly into the ranks of the nobility.? More recently, Benjamin Arnold has argued that “the Latin word ministerialis was a scribal experiment . . . which prevailed early in the twelfth [century] as the label for ‘unfree knight’ everywhere in Germany” to differentiate such servile knights from the free knights who in the eleventh century had already been styled as milites. The need for such a technical term arose in Germany because German lords maintained far larger military retinues than their French and English peers. The word ministerialis stressed the knight’s hereditary legal status rather than his military function and could thus be applied to women, children, and clerics as well. Nevertheless, the ministerials were accepted personally as nobles by the twelfth century, and a hundred years later miles replaced ministerialis as the standard designation for a member of the lower German nobility because the few remaining free knights had been absorbed into their ranks. It is Arnold’s view of the ministerials as merely a German variant of the European institution of knighthood that caused him to call his book about them German Knighthood, 1050-1300."

Although Arnold’s application of Bloch’s model of knighthood to Germany does seem to explain reasonably well developments in the Low Countries, the Rhine valley, and east of the Elbe, it is less successful in other areas, most notably the Austro-Bavarian region, whose ministerials were among the most prestigious in the empire.!! As Otto von Zallinger pointed out as early as 1878, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries scribes in southeastern Germany distinguished carefully between the ministerials, who were almost never identified as knights, and the ministerials’ own servile warriors, whom the scribes called knights.'? Although the ministerials and knights did finally merge into a single knightly estate about 1300 in the principality of Salzburg, the late medieval nobility in the duchies of Austria and Styria was divided into two estates: the lords, who were the descendants of the most prominent ministerials, and the knights, who were the lords’ vassals."

9. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago, 1964), pp. 283-331, 344.

Io. Benjamin Arnold, German Knighthood, 1050-1300 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 17-29, 69, esp. p. 20.

II. See the literature cited in John B. Freed, “Nobles, Ministerials, and Knights in the Archdiocese of Salzburg,” Speculum 62 (1987): 577-78, n. 8.

12. Otto von Zallinger, Ministeriales und Milites: Untersuchungen ueber die ritterlichen Unfreien zunaechst in baierischen Rechtsquellen des XII. und XIII. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1878). Arnold, German Knighthood, p. 33, n. 52, was aware of Zallinger’s work but dismissed it in a footnote. The best introduction to German knighthood is Joachim Bumke’s The Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages, trans. W. T. H. Jackson and Erika Jackson, AMS Studies in the Middle Ages 2 (New York, 1982).

13. On the estate structure in Salzburg and the neighboring principalities, see Dopsch, Geschichte Salzburgs 1/1:361—403; idem, “Ministerialität und Herrenstand in der Steiermark und in Salzburg,” ZsHVStm 62 (1971): 3-31; and idem, “Probleme ständischer Wandlung beim Adel Osterreichs, der Steiermark und Salzburg vornehmlich im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Herrschaft und Stand: Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte im 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, VMPIG 51 (Gottingen, 1977), pp. 207-53; Peter Feldbauer, Der Herrenstand in Oberösterreich: Ursprünge, Anfänge, Frühformen, Sozial- und wirtschaftshistorische Studien (Munich, 1972); and idem, Herrschaftsstruktur und Ständebildung: Beiträge zur Typologie der österreichischen Länder aus ihren mittelalterlichen Grundlagen, vol. ı, Herren und Ritter, Sozial- und wirtschaftshistorische Studien (Munich, 1973); and Freed,

To translate ministerialis as servile knight, as Arnold does, makes it impossible to distinguish between the ministerials and their own men (unless one retains the cumbersome Latin term), and wrongly suggests that knighthood bridged the gap between the nobles and the ministerials in southeastern Germany. If anything, knighthood encouraged the union in Salzburg between the ministerials and their own servile vassals. I will therefore employ ministerial and ministerialage to refer to the ministerials and will use the word knight only when the person was actually called a miles or Ritter, because it is essential to know who was called a noble, ministerial, or knight by whom, when, and in what context.

Whereas previous studies of the ministerials, like Arnold’s own excellent work on Eichstatt, have generally examined them from a political and juridical perspective—that is, as a major instrument in the Hohenstaufen revival of imperial authority and in the formation of the German principalities—I will, without ignoring the political and legal dimensions, approach the archiepiscopal ministerials from the vantage point of social and family history. Little work has been done on the ministerials’ own family strategies. Specifically, I will concentrate on marriage, the most fundamental of human institutions, because the restrictions on their right to marry, along with certain limitations on their freedom to alienate property, were the most visible reminders of their servile origins. The archbishops’ ability to control their ministerials’ marriages, I will argue, was a major factor in the assertion of territorial supremacy (Landeshoheit). At the same time the archiepiscopal ministerials, like the nobles, used marriage as a tool to enlarge their patrimony, enhance their prestige, forge dynastic ties to other families, both noble and ministerial, and assert their independence from the archbishop. Marriage can thus serve as a lens for examining the conflict between the ministerials’ legal condition and their real position as the de facto nobility of high medieval southeastern Ger-

“Nobles,” pp. 575-611. For a theoretical discussion of an “ ‘estate’ as the public aspect of individual property,” see Howard Kaminsky, “Estate, Nobility, and the Exhibition of Estate in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 68 (1993): 684-709.

14. Benjamin Arnold, “German Bishops and Their Military Retinues in the Medieval Empire,” German History 7 (1989): 172, n. 61, criticized me for employing the “interesting neologism ‘ministerialage.’ ” Arnold added that “J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon minus (Leiden, 1954-76), 681 prefers ‘aggregate vassals,’ ‘knighthood.’ ” The word ministerialatus, I should point out, was employed in the Middle Ages. It appears, for example, in a 1293 Eichstätt document: “Who . . . belonged to us ministerialatus iure et titulo.” See Benjamin Arnold, Count and Bishop in Medieval Germany: A Study of Regional Power, 1100-1350 (Philadelphia, 1991), p. 121. I see no reason ministerialatus cannot be translated, where appropriate, as ministerialage. Besides, Ministerialitat and Dienstmannschaft are standard German scholarly terms. Karl Bosl’s classic work on the imperial ministerialage bears, for example, the title Die Reichsministerialitat der Salier und Staufer: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des hochmittelalterlichen deutschen Volkes, Staates und Reiches, MGH Schriften 10 (Stuttgart, 1950-51). Certainly, it would inhibit scholarship if we could employ only terms that medieval scribes themselves used. Feudalism itself would disappear from scholarly parlance, though some scholars might not regret the loss.

The Archbishopric and Principality of Salzburg 5 many—the curious situation that Karl Bosl described as “noble servitude” and that is revealed by Gerhoch and Bertha’s marriage contract.!5

The Archbishopric and Principality of Salzburg

The archbishops of Salzburg exercised both spiritual and temporal authority. They were the primates of Bavaria, the ordinaries of a vast diocese in the eastern Alps, and the earthly rulers of the largest and richest ecclesiastical principality in southern Germany. As map I shows, the archdiocese of Salzburg stretched from the Inn River and its tributary the Isen in southeastern Bavaria, across the modern Austrian provinces of Salzburg, Carinthia, and Styria, as far south as the Drava, which formed the boundary between the archbishopric and the patriarchate of Aquileia, in what is now Slovenia. Those parts of the duchies of Carinthia and Styria that were south of the Drava were under the patriarch’s spiritual jurisdiction. In addition, the southeastern portion of the modern province of Lower Austria, the Pitten district and the area around Wiener Neustadt, belonged to the archdiocese (this region was part of the medieval duchy of Styria). It is approximately 350 kilometers in a straight line from Muhldorf on the Inn in Upper Bavaria in the northwestern corner of the archdiocese to Pettau (today Ptuj, Slovenia) on the Drava in the southeast, but there is a far greater distance to travel over the rugged terrain of the eastern Alps.

As both Pope Alexander II and King Henry IV pointed out, “the excessive extent of the archdiocese and the difficulty of the roads” made it impossible for Archbishop Gebhard (1060-88) to govern his “bishopric situated in the mountains” by himself; and they granted him permission in 1070 and 1072, respectively, to establish and endow a new diocese within the archbishopric. The king added that Gebhard could employ for this purpose the Benedictine convent in Gurk that had been founded by Saint Hemma thirty years earlier. Since Salzburg was not to suffer any loss on account of Gebhard’s concern for the spiritual welfare of his flock, the pope and king granted Gebhard and his successors the unprecedented right to name and invest the bishops of Gurk (Alexander also authorized the archbishop to consecrate the bishops).'* Gebhard, who intended the new bishop to

15. Bosl employed the oxymoron “adelige Unfreiheit,” forexample, inEuropa im Aufbruch: Herrschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1980), p. 205; and Die Grundlagen der modernen Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Eine deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters, 2 vols. Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 4 (Stuttgart, 1972), 1:190.

16. SUB 2:169-71, no. 102; 171-72, no. 103. On Saint Hemma and her cult, see Heinz Dopsch, “Die Stifterfamilie des Klosters Gurk und ihre Verwandtschaft,” Carinthia I. 161/1 (1971): 95-123; and Hemma von Gurk: Katalog: Ausstellung auf Schloss Strassburg! Kärnten: 14. Mai bis 26. Oktober 1988 (Klagenfurt, 1988).

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The Archbishopric and Principality of Salzburg 7 function simply as his vicar throughout the archdiocese, neither delineated Gurk’s boundaries nor assigned any tithes to it. Although in 1075 Gregory VII rebuked Gebhard for his greed, the pope was too dependent on his support during the Investiture Conflict to pursue the issue; and it was only Archbishop Conrad I (1106-47) who finally provided Gurk with a cathedral chapter (1123), a modest diocese (1131), and tithes (1144).”

During the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the bishop and chapter of Gurk sought to emancipate themselves from Salzburg’s tutelage and to obtain a legal status comparable to that of Salzburg’s other suffragans (Brixen, Freising, Passau, and Regensburg). The dispute was finally resolved in 1232. Henceforth the archbishop was to present the chapter with three nominees, none of whom had to be a Gurk cathedral canon; the man the canons elected was then to be consecrated and invested by the archbishop and to swear a specified oath of fealty to him.!š

Gurk’s capitulation in 1232 was the result of Eberhard II’s success in ending its unique status and in thwarting the Babenbergs’ plans to establish bishoprics under ducal control in their own domains. Eberhard had in fact created three additional proprietary bishoprics: Chiemsee in Upper Bavaria (1215), Seckau in Styria (1218), and Lavant in Carinthia (1226). The archbishop possessed the right to nominate, consecrate, and invest these bishops. The new dioceses were minuscule, and Chiemsee and Seckau, like Gurk, were enclaves within the archdiocese (see map I). The bishop of Chiemsee, whose episcopal see was on an island in a lake in the foothills of the Alps, inhabited only by the canons of Herrenchiemsee, soon took up residence in the city of Salzburg, where for six centuries he functioned as an auxiliary bishop. Lavant, which consisted of only four parishes," was derided for its tiny size as the Zwetschkenbistum (it was hardly considered a plum in the idiomatic English sense). The archbishop’s rights in regard to his four proprietary bishoprics were unprecedented in Christendom, and in 1870 Pope Pius IX greeted Cardinal-Archbishop Maximilian Josef von Tarnöczy of Salzburg (1850-76) at Vatican I with the words, “See the half-pope, who can himself make bishops!” 20

The principality of Salzburg embraced only a comparatively small portion of the archdiocese (see maps 2 and 3). It consisted of the modern Austrian province of Salzburg, which has an area of 7,154 square kilometers (2,762 square miles), the Ziller valley and the lordship of Windisch-Matrei, which were assigned to the Tyrol in 1810, and the Rupertiwinkel, which was ceded to Bavaria in 1816. The

20. “Ecco il mezzo papa che può far dei vescovi!” Cited by Johannes Graf von Moy, “Die Hintergriinde der Fiirstungen im Salzburger Domkapitel: Ein Beitrag zur Verfassungsgeschichte des Erzstiftes im 18. Jahrhundert,’ MGSL 119 (1979): 256. For further information about Salzburg’s proprietary bishoprics, see Dopsch, Geschichte Salzburgs 1/1:236-38, 298-99, 321-27, 2:994-98.

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Rupertiwinkel (the name came into use only about 1900), agriculturally the most productive section of the medieval principality, was a strip of territory on the west bank of the Salzach, approximately thirty kilometers long, north of the city of Salzburg and the confluence of the Salzach and its tributary the Saalach, and between the mouth of the Saalach and the town of Tittmoning to the north. The archbishops thus created a principality in the Salzach valley centered on their metropolitan see, which is at the point where the Salzach breaks out of the Alps.

Unlike other bishops who received comital rights from the crown during the Saxon-Salian period, the archbishops were compelled to build their territory piece by piece. Their point of departure was the city of Salzburg, where they alone exercised jurisdiction. The territory to the east and south of the city, the modern Tennengau, was heavily forested, and the archbishops established their lordship through land clearance on the east bank of the Salzach and in the Pongau, the stretch of the Salzach valley between Pass Lueg and the Gastein valley. To legitimize their acquisitions, they forged a charter in the name of King Arnulf and another charter in which Otto II allegedly confirmed the Arnulfinum in 977. All this action was duly confirmed by Henry III in 1051.” The archbishops had no rivals to challenge them in this region.

The archbishops subsequently added to the Arnulfinum, probably during the Investiture Conflict, a delineation of the boundaries of the territory that their church had acquired during the eighth and ninth centuries. This clumsy falsification was intended to secure Salzburg’s rights in the Radstadt basin—that is, the upper Enns valley, west of the Mandling (the stream that still forms the border between Salzburg and Styria in the Enns valley)—whose colonization the archbishops were also promoting; but it was such a patent addition that the archbishops never dared to have the revised Arnulfinum confirmed. It was not until 1297 that Duke Albrecht of Austria, anxious to obtain the support of Archbishop Conrad IV in his bid for the crown, recognized Salzburg’s rights in the Radstadt area.22

It was Eberhard II, creator of the ecclesiastical principality, who procured the key comital rights. In 1207 he purchased from the Swabian count Henry of Lechsgemiind the lordship of Windisch-Matrei and the count’s alodial holdings in the Upper Pinzgau (the Pinzgau is the uppermost stretch of the Salzach valley).23 The comital rights in the Pinzgau had been divided between the Lechsgemiinds, who had died out by the 1220s, in the Upper Pinzgau and the counts of Plain in the Lower Pinzgau (the area around Saalfelden). In 1228 Eberhard obtained from Duke Louis I of Bavaria (1183-1231) the feudal overlordship of the two counties

21. SUB 2:56-64, no. 34; 103-6, no. 57; 148-51, no. 87. See Heinrich Koller, “König Arnolfs grosses Privileg für Salzburg,” MGSL 109 (1969): 65-75; and Eduard Richter, “Immunität, Landeshoheit und Waldschenkungen,” AÖG 94 (1906): 41-62.

22. Heinz Dopsch, “Zur Entstehung der erzbischöflichen Herrschaft und der Landeshoheit im Gerichtsbezirk Radstadt,” in Die alte Stadt im Gebirge: 700 Jahre Radstadt, ed. Friederike Zaisberger and Fritz Koller (Radstadt, 1989), pp. 29-45.

The Archbishopric and Principality of Salzburg II and was duly enfeoffed by King Henry (VII). The Plains held the Lower Pinzgau in fief from the archbishop until the extinction of the main line of this comital dynasty in 1248.” Archbishop Conrad IV purchased the district court (Landgericht) in the Gastein valley in 1297 from the dukes of Lower Bavaria.”

King Henry II’s donation of a property in the Lungau, the later Mauterndorf, to the cathedral canons in 1002 was the beginning of Salzburg’s position in the Lungau, the section of the principality south of the Radstädter Tauern (that is, on the southern side of the continental divide), which belonged to the duchy of Carinthia rather than to Bavaria. In 1213 King Frederick II conferred on Archbishop Eberhard II all the possessions that the empire possessed in the Lungau.?® The comital rights in the Lungau, which the Lower Austrian lords of Lengenbach had held in fief from the counts of Sulzbach, were acquired by Archbishop-Elect Philip between 1246 and 1252.2?