gained forest rights with the same power to enforce the imperial bannus
andpax(‘wildban’) in their forests that other churches had from the
emperor’s predecessors, every grant ending with the injunction that it
should remain stabilis et inconvulsa.^50
As in France, so in Germany, the eleventh century saw the ideal of
peace achieving greater importance, but in this case it was the emperor’s
peace rather than God’s. On the death in 1004 of Hermann duke of
Swabia, leaving a son too young to govern, Henry II (1002–24), the last
of the Saxon kings, is reported to have called a council in the duchy and
made everyone, from the least to the greatest, swear an oath to keep the
peace and refrain from stealing. Then, with all Germany ‘set [statuta]
under the quiet of peace’, Henry moved on to Alsace ‘to make law and
do justice’. Much of the justice consisted of the settlement of disputes
between churches and the restoration of the ‘state’ of particular bishops
and convents.^51 Conrad II (1024–39), the first of a new Salian dynasty,
in a grant to the cathedral church of Bamberg, roundly asserted the
imperial right to regulate ‘the affairs of the whole realm and the state of
the empire, and above all the welfare of god’s holy churches’ lest they
fall away from the ancient purity of religion. He settled disputes
between bishops out of his imperial duty to ‘spread peace and concord
and augment religion throughout his realm’ and always ‘to consult the
interests of the commonwealth and everyone within it’ (publice rei et
communi hominum utilitati in omnibus et per omnia consulendum).^52
Since the reign of Otto I the German ‘kings of the Franks and the
Lombards’ had periodically gone across the Alps to stabilize the affairs
of Italy ‘with law and justice’. When the knights of Milan threatened to
‘make a law by themselves, for themselves’ if Conrad did not come to
settle their grievances against the archbishop, the emperor reputedly
answered that he would sate Italy with laws if the country hungered for
them, and issued the diploma known as the constitutio de feudis, the
ordinance which stands at the beginning of the Libri feudorumadded
by medieval jurists to Justinian’s Corpus of Civil Law. No vassal of a
bishop, abbot, abbess, margrave, or count, or holding from the royal
estate or from the Church, should be deprived of his benefice unless he
was convicted of a fault by his peers in accordance with imperial
constitutions. Vassals’ fiefs were declared, in the absence of fault, to be
84 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^50) Heinrici II et Arduini Diplomata, 1. 20 , 35 (Worms), 291. 39 (Fulda), 412, 34 (Würz-
burg), 449. 10 (Hersfeld) etc.; Conradi II Diplomata, 150–1, 201–2, 231–2; Heinrici IV Diplo-
mata, 25, 204, 250, 282. 10 (‘bannum unum quod vulgo wildban dicitur’).
(^51) J. Gernhuber, Die Landfriedensbewegung in Deutschland bis zum Mainzer Reichsland-
frieden von 1235(Bonn, 1952), 28–33; Heinrici II et Arduini Diplomata, 208. 23 , 267. 30 (‘in
pristinam libertatem stabilitatemque restituat’), 549. 12 , 656. 8.
(^52) Conradi II Diplomata, 149, 206, 240, 263; Wipo, ‘The Deeds of Conrad II’, in Imperial
Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, tr. T. E. Mommsen and K. F. Morrison (New York:
Columbia UP, 1962), 72.