charters to pray for, was manifested not in his general dispensation of
justice but in constant political interventions to confer lands and privi-
leges which the lords should enjoy ‘in perpetual stability’, and to enforce
his own and the nobles’ rights.^84 His aim, a diploma of 1161 pro-
claimed, was to still the fury of dissension and create peace, friendship,
and justice in an ordered state (ordinatum statum) of princes and
ruler.^85 The major examples of the emperor’s political action by diploma
were the Landfrieden themselves, which were most effective when
directed at particular localities. In February 1179, dispensing justice in
his court at Würzburg, Frederick enacted a two-year peace for Rhenish
Franconia, allegedly in answer to the request of the nobles and people
of that land, and in fulfilment of his office ‘to ordain peace throughout
our whole empire for the necessity and state of the provinces (per
universum imperium nostrum pro necessitate et statu provinciarum
pacem ordinare)’. The chief object of this peace-ordinance was again to
mitigate the results of feud—a man entering a town in flight from his
enemy must be treated as a peace-breaker unless he threw away his arms
at the gates; to make outlawry effective—a person outlawed for more
than a year and a day might not be absolved, even by the emperor, until
he had made satisfaction to the complainant in the case; and to urge the
local iudicesto do justice on alleged disturbers of the peace—though
these had each to be allowed thirty followers armed with swords to
support them in court. Before the witness-list of counts and nobles in
this Franconian Landfriedethere stands a description of the terraor
Landwithin which the ‘peace statute’ should hold, which is simply a list
of jurisdictions: the bishoprics of Speyer, Cologne, Trier and Würzburg,
five hereditary ‘counties’ or ‘provinces’, and four other areas simply
called terrae.^86
Frederick presided over a realm where the law was enforced in what
Karl Leyser called ‘a teeming welter of developing princely and aristo-
cratic lordships, lay and clerical, [and] a bewildering variety of sub-
structures like counties, advocacies, immunities, burgraviates, banni,
and mundeburdia. They did not possess any common underlying grid or
shared development... like the English shires.’^87 The prescription in
the Landfriedenof newly draconian penalties for a lengthening list of
94 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^84) Friderici I Diplomata, 1152–1158, 73, 128, 198, 209, Friderici I Diplomata, 1158–1167,
155, 213, 233, 267, 274, 307 etc., especially for examples of requests for prayers for
stabilitas nostra vel tocius regnior pro incolumitate nostra et regni statuor pro salute nostra
et pro felici statu imperii nostri; see also Friderici I Diplomata, 1168–1180, 61 (‘de pace atque
de statu regni tractare’), 328–30; Friderici I Diplomata, 1181–1190, 199 (‘in bonum publice
utilitatis statum reformare’).^85 Friderici I Diplomata 1158–1167 , 174. 19.
(^86) Constitutiones 911–1197, 380–3; B. Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval
Germany(Cambridge UP, 1991), 44, 216.
(^87) K. J. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen Polity’, Viator, 19 (1988),
153–76.