Hi there!

I hope you’re doing fine today my friend. So here goes my answer to your very fascinating question! I had started to write something a bit longer, but I eventually scaled it down to keep it to the point.

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As a matter of fact, the traditional Germanic custom of splitting one kingdom into several depending on how many sons I king had fell out of use during the Ottonian era. It came a bit as a problem to Otto I. His brothers were jealous of his inheritance. However he managed to fight them off or to rally them to his cause and from then on, the succession law that turned the Carolingian Empire into a mosaic was no more.

So, how did we go from compact stem-duchies to a myriad of principalities from the Ottonian to the Hohenstaufen era? Well, first, we cannot escape some good old source criticism.

Early medieval Germanic history is deeply rooted in oral traditions. Lords, Bishops and Kings were talking directly to one another and their word was their bond. It had a heavy judicial weight. When we think of trials by ordeal we picture people drowned, put on fire, or sworn to fight each other. Yet we often forget that several men “of good faith” swearing on the Bible were deemed as enough of an evidence to discredit or exonerate someone.

From the second half of the 11th century onwards however, charters and written documents multiply. They are heavily guarded and protected. They are sealed and put into heavily defended towers. The written word now carried the value of tangible proof. Oral traditions were far from dead yet and regal administration were still at an embryonic state, but we do have much more as historians to go on and to help us understand how power was structured and yielded in those former centuries.

Therefore maps depicting the “evolution” of the early Holy Roman Empire tend to be deceiving. We have fewer records for the Carolingian and Ottonian eras than we have for the Hohenstaufen era onward. We should then consider pre-Hohenstaufen maps as “blurred” or at least over-simplified. Nonetheless we can actually assume that principalities and seats of power multiplied for several reasons.

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Let’s start with Northern Italy. By the end of the 10th century, Italy was still the richest region of the former Western Roman Empire, before West Francia and Iberia. Italy also had inherited a long, very long tradition of urban culture from the Classical Era. Many cities had been ransacked or even razed by the Huns, the Goths, the Byzantines themselves and the Lombards from the 4th to the 8th century, but it doesn’t mean that the Italian urban culture died out.

The 9th and 10th centuries saw new waves of immigration threatening the peace in Italy. Saracens from the South and Hungarian from the East were setting foot in the Italian peninsula and a quick succession of weak Carolingian Emperors didn’t help to defend the country. The pope was not yet the fearsome overlord rivalling Kings and Emperors that he would become a few centuries later. Italians could only rely upon themselves and so they did.

There is a historical process that we call the incastellamento to describe how Italians moved in or bolstered up their fortified settlements. The città (or city) became a centre of local power closely attached to its contado (or countryside)—a city and its country were economically and politically tied together. Some cities emerged as more influent or powerful than others, like Milan or Firenze, and exercised their authority over several less potent cities. On the long run that’s how the Duchy of Milan and Toscana were eventually formed thanks to the political intrigues of shrewd families like the Visconti, the Sforza or the Medici.

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Late migration waves also hit the early Holy Roman Empire (HRE). Hungarians, Slavs and Vikings posed serious threats on the stability of the Empire. It took skilled Emperors like Otto I and his successors to safeguard the peace and expand their borders further North, East and South. They proved unsuccessful to march on Paris, though. Yet, contrarily to the King of West Francia that became the powerless King of France, the Emperor, who inherited East Francia, stood tall and long remained the most powerful man on his half of the late Carolingian Empire.

Nonetheless the feudal system was slowly implemented to a degree that would necessarily fracture the wholesome unity of the Empire. Personal feuds opposing Lords started to fester the country and it became an all-time job to repress such acts of uncontrolled violence. Privileges were granted to some cities to keep some to all of the money made from their taxes to insure their defence. The process of incastellamento therefore spread to the HRE. Episcopal cities and principalities became very powerful places and as the pope rose from his ashes the Emperor had a new adversary to challenge his authority, by the end of the 11th century. Who could nominate bishops? The pope told one story and the Emperor another.

To help him rule his large empire the Emperor appointed ministeriales to carry out special missions or to supervise certain chunks of land. Those ministeriales tended to make their way into the Feudal system and add to the complexity of the Imperial power network. All of those elements contributed to fracture the HRE in many somewhat autonomous principalities and weaken the Emperor’s might.

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I hope this answer to your question ;-) I would only add a few observations regarding your map:

· It would be good to name at least the neighbouring “countries”, especially those under the influence of the early HRE as the kingdoms of Burgundy and Bohemia, or also the Nordmark and the Mark of the Billings

· Your stem-duchy of Bavaria seems a bit too big, it encompasses the stem-duchy of Carinthia and also the Ostmark (Austria’s core).

· I don’t exactly know what your “East-March” refers too, but it includes the Mark Zeits, the Meissen and the Lusata. It shouldn’t be confused with the Ostmark.

· The “kingdom of Lorraine” sounds funny to me: I prefer the term “Lotharingia”, divided into the upper and lower Lorraine.

· Also, it would be very interesting if not absolutely necessary to spot all the episcopal cities on the map alongside their territories.

I’ll soon post this answer on my blog with other maps to help you further your work :-)

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Further readings:

~ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010)

~ Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe. A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge [MA]: Belknap press, 2016.

~ J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West. A.D. 400-1000. The Early Middle Ages. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

~ Urban Identities in Northern Italy (800-1100 ca.). Edited by Cristina La Rocca and Piero Majocchi. Brepols: Turnhout, 2015.