This dissertation has been nticrotihned exactly as received ® 7-2411 BERGEN, Madelyn Ute, 1940- THE SACHSENSPIEGEL; A PRELIMINARY STUDY FOR A TRANSLATION. The Ohio State University, Ph.D,, 1966 History, medieval University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan I THE SAGHSMSPIEGELî A PRELIMINARY STUDY FOR A TRANSLATION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Madelyn Ute Bergen, B.A., M.A. The Ohio State Ifaiversity 1966 Approved by Advi, Depart] tory ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge the help and encouragement of the Department of History of the Ohio State Ifaiversity in the preparation and completion of this dissertation. I am grateful for the kind assistance of Professor Harold J. Grinm and other members of the faculty. My very special thanks go to Professor Franklin J, Pegues for his many hours of tireless assistance. Without his counsel and help this dissertation could not have been written. I would also like to thank Professor Wolfgang Fleischhauer of the Department of German, the Ohio State University, for his guidance in helping me avoid the pitfalls of studies of philology and translation. I also wish to acknowledge the help and assistance of Professor Hermann Heimpel of the Max-Planck-Institut-fdr-Geschichte in Gdttingen, Germany. A special thank you goes to Miss Harriet J. Rudolph for her help in the preparation of the manuscript. Her lively criticism was greatly appreciated. A note of thanks also goes to the Library of the Ohio State University and the members of the staff for their assistance. A special thank you is directed to the Interlibrary Loan Department in their efforts to help me find rare and obscure books. ii VITA December 22, I94O B o m - Warstade, Germany 1962......... B.A., Hartwlck College, Oneonta, New Yoric 1963. * . • M.A., The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 1963-1966 . Teaching Assistant, Department of History The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History Medieval History. Professor Franklin J. Pegues Renaissance and Reformation, Professor Harold J. Grimm Roman History. Professor William F. McDonald Colonial History. Professor Harry L. Coles United States History 1763-1S25. Professor Harry L. Coles Political Philosophy of the Middel Ages. Professor Marvin Fox iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................. ii VITA ............. iii PREFACE................................ V Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ................................ 1 .The European World from 1150 to 1250 Eike von Repchow: His Life and Personality The Place of the Sachsenspiegel in the Legal Literature of Medieval Germany Manuscripts and Editions of the Sachsenspiegel The Nature of Society in Thirteenth-Century Saxony II. THE LANDRECHT: BOOK I .............. 80 III. THE LANDRECHT; BOOK I I ............................ 132 MAPS ...................................... 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................... 185 iv He vAio commands that law should rule may thus be regarded as commanding that God and reason alone should rule; he tdio commands that a man should rule adds the character of the beast. Appetite has that character, and high spirit, too, perverts the holders of office, even nAien they are the best of men. Law as the pure voice of God and reason may thus be defined as Reason free from all passion. Aristotle^ The foundation of any society, at any age, and in any place may be found in its law. The quest for order, security, peace, and liberty is most prominent in the rational atteng)ts of man to organize his community. It is to this unceasing effort that the Saxom lawyer Eike von Repchow dedicated his life. Raised in an environment Wiich was singularly conscious of its legal traditions, he endeavored to codify those very practices vdiieh his society considered to be its most valued possessions. His works are not only the monumental evidences of an ancient legal system;, they are also reminders of man's ever-present desire to create the best of all possible worlds. The environment may have changed, but the questions vdiich Eike sought to answer some seven hundred years ago still need to be answered today. In the final analysis the appeal to order and to the law must be the basis upon ifdiich all our atten^ted solutions rest. ^Politics. 3 1287* CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The European World from 1150 to 1250 _ It is perhaps a truism to proclaim that the period of European history from 1150 to 1250 is one of the most exciting, con­ fusing, controversial, and decisive moments in the history of the Middle Ages, Tet without this realization no adequate comment about this period can be made. The scope of this paper does not permit the complete study of this era, but a thorough understanding of the Sachsenspiegel and the efforts of its author requires at least an outline of the historical, political, and constitutional picture of 1 this century. Etapire and papacy struggled for supremacy in Europe; France and England sought to create their respective governments out of the heritage of the past. Men vacilated between old ideas and new concepts, seeking to discover the proper transition between the two. Thus Eike von Repchow* s labors mirror this changing world, mixing the archaic ways of his people with the new visions of the coming century. 1 For the purposes of this introduction reference will be made to Geoffrey Barraclough, Origins of Modem Germany (Oxford; Basil Blackwell, 1947) as the best English work on the German Middle Ages, and to Karl Hampe, Das Hochmittelalter, edited by Gerd Tellenbach (5th ed,; Kdln- Graz: Bdhlau Verlag, 1963) as a recent and thorough German text on the medieval period. For a review of the older literature see the Oxbridge Medieval History (7 vols; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926), These hundred years represent not only the age of Henry II of England, Louis VII of France, Frederick I Barbarossa, and Henry the Lion but also the age of their sons - Richard and John of England, Philip Augustus of France, Henry VI, Philip of Swabia, and Otto of Brunswick, All these men in one way or another were affected by Innocent III, spiritual son of Gregory VII, who applied his great strength, his mighty will, and his superior ability to the task of bringing to fruition the idea of the Papal monarchy - the rule of the City of God on Earth, And finally this is the era of Frederick II, that Sicilian wonder of the world, who wrote, perhaps unwillingly, the epilogue to a period of , 2 history vdiich was to be a foreshadowing of things to come. Needless to say, the twelfth century was probably the most formative period of all the European states, Henry I and Henry II laid the foundations of the English legal system viiich later blossomed into the Parliamentary government. The kings of France reconquered their realm castle by castle, and thereby established their concept of the state as a royal bureaucracy. In the Holy Roman Empire the Hohenstaufen ru].er Frederick I ' sought to discard the last remnants of the confusion that had attended the Investiture Controversy. He ^It would be impossible to list here all the biographies done of these important figures of this period. Much work has been done on the Angevin kings as well as the Capetians, Unfortunately the larger German biographies of Barbarossa and his sons are usually a hundred years old. Useful chapters and shorter sudies can be found in Karl Hampe, Herrschergestalten des deutschen Mittelalters (rev, ed.j Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1955)» For Innocent III see Sidney R, Packard, Europe and the Church under Innocent III (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927); Reinhold Schneider, Innozenz der Dritte (Kdln: J, Hegner, I960): Helene Tillman, Papst Innozenz III (Bonn: Ludwig Rtihrscheid, 1954). 3 attempted to establish a better imperial government by introducing a stricter feudalism, systematizing the imperial bureaucracy with the ministeriales,^ and expanding the Hausmacht of the Hohenstaufen,^ applying these ideas with as much vigor as the king of France and hoping to achieve similar results* Although the monarchies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shared many problems, the empire had two peculiar ones to cope with. One of these was the ancient attempt to establish a certain imperial hegemony over the rest of Europe which had some disastrous consequences for Germany,^ The other was the continuous and direct ecclesiastical or rather papal interference into purely German matters. The addition of these two problems to the already crucial situation arising from Hohen­ stauf en internal reform and princely reaction to it brought about a violent confusion in the thirteenth century from which the imperial constitution would never fully recover,^ ^See Karl Bosl, Die Reichsministerialitat der Salier und Staufer (2 vols,; '•Seriften der Monumenta Germaniae Histories," No, 10; Stutt­ gart; Hiersemann Verlag, 1950-51); also Dietrich von Gladiis, Beitrfige zur Geschichte der staufischen Reichsministerialitat (Berlin: Verlag Emil Ebering, 1934) on the tremendous influence of the ministeriales in German affairs, ^Hermann Heimpel, Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa und die Wende der staufischen Zeit (Strassburg: HuenenbergyVerlag, 1942), 5see Peter RassovT- Honor Imperii; Die neue Politik Friedrich Barbarossas - 1152-1159 (München: R, Oldenbourg, 1940), ^So Theodor Mayer, Karl Heilig, und Carl Erdmann, Kaisertum und Herrschergewalt im Zeitalter Friedrich I: Studien zur politischen