Luca Scholz presents this truly excellent book first and foremost as an examination of how various forms of safe conduct helped channel movement across the different polities of the Holy Roman Empire. Surveying the development of this institution from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, tapping into a rich vein of largely neglected archival material, and drawing on an eclectic set of methods (including digital humanities), Scholz offers a refreshing new perspective on the nature and development of the Holy Roman Empire itself, adds to the burgeoning history of early modern mobility, and provokes substantial reflection on the long history of borders and frontiers – to spotlight but three of many areas of historical inquiry that this study touches upon.
The book is organized around five chapters. The first, which is not altogether well organized and reads more like a second introduction, offers a broad description of the different means that the polities that made up the Holy Roman Empire had at their disposal for channeling movement: from direct taxation, duties, and tolls to delaying tactics, the obstruction of thoroughfares, the prosecution and criminalization of deviant groups, and other bureaucratic and judicial strategies. Polities also used different forms of safe conduct – an instrument originally meant to “establish public safety and legal peace” (p. 37) – as a political tool to stake their territorial claims.
Safe-conduct processions are the subject of the fascinating second chapter. Offering protection was certainly an important element of such processions, but it was also a way to stake or contest territorial claims: by escorting a foreign visitor, rulers could demonstrate vis-à-vis their neighbors that they rightfully controlled the movement of people and goods through a given territory. Banners made such claims visible while the sounds of drums and trumpets “could confer a safe-conduct procession with its legal meaning” (p. 67). The consumption of alcohol by commoners involved in these processions, by contrast, often led to the escalation of territorial disputes – not infrequently with deadly consequences. Scholz thus shows that granting safe conduct, and all the bravado and ostentation that came with it, was not some pointless farce – as earlier studies would have it – but an expression of “a ruler’s authority to sanction, protect, channel, and exploit movements on the roads and rivers within his dominion” (p. 51–52).
In the third chapter, Scholz relies on maps and geospatial methods to demonstrate that boundaries were less important for channeling everyday mobility in the early modern period than their modern preeminence suggests. Everyday mobility was regulated, we learn, not at territorial borders but at toll stations, which were often located in places with a relatively low elevation, and at bottlenecks along roads and rivers. Borders did perform important symbolic functions – as the previous chapter had shown – but when a commoner had to find his or her way through a given polity crossing a territorial border was easier than passing through a toll station. The resulting paradox that a “boundary that was fiercely, even violently, defended during a safe-conduct procession could have no significance when crossed by a commoner” (p. 109) demonstrates the extent to which early modern borders differed from modern ones. As such, the chapter is a powerful testament to what digital humanities – when done aptly and imaginatively – can achieve.
Not all attempts at channeling movement were successful, though, as is borne out by chapter four. Different polities frequently tried to “force travelers on designated routes” (p. 168) by issuing letters of passage and by criminalizing certain passages. But Scholz reveals in fascinating detail that even those in possession of letters of passage often had to negotiate their way with toll-keepers and other street level officials, who because of their “peripheral position” and “physical distance from their superiors” often enjoyed “a considerable degree of liberty in the exercise of their duties” (p. 156). Everyday movement in and across polities was thus not so easy as simply obtaining right of passage. In the multilevel political organization that was the Holy Roman Empire, one often had to confront a multitude of officials at multiple levels to ensure safe passage.
Protection, as Chapter 5 shows, was similarly difficult to guarantee. It permeated early modern claims of safe conduct, but in practice rulers could not always deliver what they promised. Scholz’s examination of how Bremen navigated this problem demonstrates how this city effectively protected boatsmen on the local river from privateers, but could not always contain its own unruly soldiers. Nevertheless, Bremen, just like other polities, continued to use the language of protection to justify its enclosure of movement. In so doing, it not only “provided the scaffolding for a selective conception of free movement that permitted the mobility of some while restricting that of others” (p. 204), but also contributed to the discourse around free movement that dominates our thinking on this subject to this day.
The final chapter turns to “the conceptual framework and language used to discuss freedom of movement” (p. 205) in early modern learned circles. Freedom of movement was intensely debated by contemporaries, often as a result of territorial disputes. Some writers relied on Grotius’s vindication of the freedom of the seas to argue that roads were a public good. Others, such as Samuel Pufendorf, questioned this liberal stance and invoked a language of property: free passage should be regarded as “the temporary use of the property of someone else” (p. 226), in this case a given ruler. I was particularly struck in this chapter by Scholz’s excellent observation that contemporary jurists understood the spatial dimensions of this discussions: for them roads, not boundaries, were the “preferred spatial references justifying extensive transit rights” (p. 229). This not only shows how practical disputes and intellectual debates around the freedom and restriction of movement actually unfolded, but also reinforces Scholz’s earlier conclusion that territorial boundaries played such a minimized role in channeling movement throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire offers a number of original contributions. It convincingly shows that throughout early modernity “the governance of movement remained punctuated and rhizomatic rather than areal” (p. 231) and that “open” and “closed” are ineffective analytical categories for describing the Holy Roman Empire. Such a dichotomy fails, first of all, to acknowledge the relative unimportance of borders for the governance of everyday goods and people and, second, obscures “the interplay of accelerating and obstructive forces that played out in individual encounters and affected different travellers in different ways” (p. 5). For one salutary lesson that this book teaches us is that different social groups moved “at different speeds and costs” (p. 9) – something that unfortunately still rings true today – and that for all mobility had to be negotiated at different levels. Scholz’s spatial and open-ended approach, which is attentive both to diversity on a local level and to broader patterns, also allows him to avoid anachronistic narratives about state formation, the freedom of movement, and the role of territorial borders therein. This is no linear account of how territorial borders and other frontiers came to determine different kinds of mobility in the nation-state. Successful as well as failed attempts at monopolizing movement are part of the story. For that reason, the Peace of Westphalia – so often hailed as an epochal moment in the creation of sovereign states – hardly figures in Scholz’s book.
As with all studies of such scope and ambition, questions remain. I found the occasional comparisons with Tokugawa Japan, the Ottoman Empire and other multilayered and polycentric polities to be somewhat disappointing. Yes, comparative analyses could in theory “yield significant results” (p. 37) but Scholz’s analogies never develop into a full-fledged comparison, leaving the reader wanting more. The story is also largely told through institutional sources, which means there is comparatively little attention for the perspective of those who actually took to the roads. This level of detail is always difficult to reach and for a book of such breath it may appear gratuitous to point out such gaps. Yet, one nevertheless wonders how travelers experienced the constant negotiation in which they found themselves and how such an analysis would change Scholz’s story. Was mobility indeed such an act of mediation and as makeshift as Scholz wants us to believe or are such complaints, as Scholz himself readily points out, merely the experiences that made it to the historical record?
On the whole, though, this is a really imaginative and meticulously-researched book that deserves a wide readership. Rich in detail and analysis and innovative in its methodology and approach, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire will undoubtedly provoke new research into many areas of historical research for years to come.