Ottokar had destroyed could be rebuilt without the need of Rudolf’s
specific licence. Finally the local magistrates (terrarum iudices) were
instructed, under threat of heavy penalties, to enforce the privileges of
nobles, ministeriales, and others, as they were hitherto approved by the
law and custom of particular territories.^108
This Austrian peace was not intended as a surrender of the king’s
peace-jurisdiction to the lords of the land, but rather acknowledged that
effective peace would be established by local arrangements, and it
marked the beginning of a royal strategy of legislating piecemeal for the
needs of individual provinces. In 1281 Rudolf gave his authority to the
Landfriedesworn in Bavaria at his order (nach unserm gebot) and
renewed Frederick II’s peace of Mainz for Franconia and the Rhineland
for a period of five years; and the five-years-old Austrian peace was con-
tinued by the oaths of the towns, knights, and esquires of the duchy in
the presence of the lords of the land. Rudolf enforced peace by the time-
honoured method of constant journeying through his realm, sanction-
ing as he went the peace-leagues sworn by the local nobilities and
townsmen and emphasizing the responsibilities of local judges. But his
reign saw an important new development: the issuing of specific com-
missions to preserve the peace locally. Ottokar may have shown the way
in the peace he instituted for Austria in 1256 or soon after, which pre-
scribed the appointment of four Lantrichter, two for the north bank of
the Danube and two for the south. By 1274 the count of Württemberg,
the Habsburg’s neighbour in Swabia, was acting as King Rudolf’s iudex
provincialisat Ravensburg. When he intervened in 1277 to provide for
the observance of a general peace-agreement among the cities of the
middle Rhine, the king promised to appoint a nobleman to act in his
place while he was preoccupied with the cares of empire and to fulfil the
ruler’s duty to ensure the good and tranquil state of peace in the land
(bonum pacis et tranquillum statum terre); Frederick count of Leiningen
soon appears as iudex provincialisthere.^109
The term ‘judges or keepers of the peace’ (iudices sive conservatores
pacis) is used of eight men (two of them friars) who were appointed to
punish malefactors in Swabia and Bavaria under an agreement of 1282
between King Rudolf and Lewis of Wittelsbach, duke of Bavaria and
Count-Palatine of the Rhine. From the people of Thuringia there came
a plea for the king to invest a noble with an imperial banner as ‘captain’
there (cum vexillo imperii capitaneus), with whose help they might
restore the peace and state of the territory, disturbed by the oppressions
The territorial states of Germany 101(^108) Constitutiones 1273–98, 59–61, 116–18; for the Hofrichter, ibid. 554. 15 , 555. 10 and
30 , 557. 20 , 558–60; Angermeier, Königtum und Landfriede, 60 ff.
(^109) Constitutiones 1198–1272, 607–8 (cc. 17–19, 29–31), for Ottokar’s Lantrichter;
Constitutiones 1273–98, 149–51, 222, 265–6, 275–88, 370–7, 382–4, 443–8, 611, 621–2;
Angermeier, Königtum und Landfriede, 67–76.