Kingdom of Germany
The Kingdom of Germany or German Kingdom was the mostly Germanic language-speaking East Frankish kingdom, which was formed by the Treaty of Verdun in 843. The king was elected, initially by the rulers of the stem duchies, who generally chose one of their own. After 962, when Otto I was crowned emperor, East Francia formed the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire, which also included the Kingdom of Italy and, after 1032, the Kingdom of Burgundy.
Like medieval England and medieval France, medieval Germany consolidated from a conglomerate of smaller tribes, nations or polities by the High Middle Ages. The term rex teutonicorum first came into use in Italy around the year 1000. It was popularized by the chancery of Pope Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy, perhaps as a polemical tool against Emperor Henry IV. In the 12th century, in order to stress the imperial and transnational character of their office, the emperors began to employ the title rex Romanorum on their election.
The Archbishop of Mainz was ex officio arch-chancellor of Germany, as his colleagues the Archbishop of Cologne and Archbishop of Trier were, respectively, arch-chancellors of Italy and Burgundy. These titles continued in use until the end of the empire, but only the German chancery actually existed. The Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, Magdeburg and Salzburg also claimed to be primate of Germania.
Distinct titulature for Germany, Italy and Burgundy, which traditionally had their own courts, laws, and chanceries, gradually dropped from use as the King/Emperor's influence outside of Germany waned and the German kingdom came to be identified with the Holy Roman Empire.
Reigns were either dated from the day a ruler was elected king or crowned king. The election day became the starting date permanently with Sigismund. Throughout the Middle Ages, the King of Germany was known as "King of the Romans" from his election as king until the Pope crowned him Emperor in Rome.
Background
Carolingian East Francia, 843–911
The tripartite division of the Carolingian Empire effected by the Treaty of Verdun was challenged very early on with the death of the Emperor Lothair I in 855. He had divided his kingdom of Middle Francia between his three sons and immediately the northernmost of the three divisions, Lotharingia, was disputed between the kings of East and West Francia. The war over Lotharingia lasted until 925. Lothair II of Lotharingia died in 869 and the 870 Treaty of Meerssen divided his kingdom between East and West Francia, but the West Frankish sovereigns relinquished their rightful portion to East Francia by the Treaty of Ribemont in 880. Ribemont determined the border between France and Germany until the fourteenth century. The Lotharingian nobility tried to preserve their independence of East or West Frankish rule by switching allegiance at will with the death of king Louis the Child in 911, but in 925 Lotharingia was finally ceded to East Francia by Rudolph of West Francia and it thereafter formed the Duchy of Lorraine within the East Frankish kingdom.Louis the German was known at the time as "Rex Germaniae" as his brother was called King of Gaul. This was meant to distinguish the different parts of a theoretically single Frankish kingdom, although it is not known if this was meant to signify anything further.
East Francia was itself divided into three parts at the death of Louis the German. Traditionally referred to as "Saxony", "Bavaria", and "Swabia", these kingdoms were ruled by the three sons of Louis in cooperation and were reunited by Charles the Fat in 882. Regional differences existed between the peoples of the different regions of the kingdom and each region could be readily described by contemporaries as a regnum, though each was certainly not a kingdom of its own. The common Germanic language and the tradition of common rule dating to 843 preserved political ties between the different regna and prevented the kingdom from coming apart after the death of Charles the Fat. The work of Louis the German to maintain his kingdom and give it a strong royal government also went a long way to creating an East Frankish state.
Stem duchies
Within East Francia were large duchies, sometimes called kingdoms after their former status, which had a certain level of internal solidarity. Early among these were Saxony and Bavaria, which had been conquered by Charlemagne.In German historiography they are called the jüngere Stammesherzogtümer, or "younger stem duchies",
The conventional five "younger stem duchies" of the Holy Roman Empire are
Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia and Lotharingia. Thuringia, while one of the "old stem duchies", is not counted among the young stem duchies because it had been absorbed into Saxony in 908, before the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire.
The conventional term "younger" serves to distinguish them from the duchies under the Merovingian monarchs.
Herwig Wolfram denied any real distinction between older and younger stem duchies, or between the stem duchies of Germany and similar territorial principalities in other parts of the Carolingian empire:
I am attempting to refute the whole hallowed doctrine of the difference between the beginnings of the West-Frankish, "French", principautés territoriales, and the East-Frankish, "German," stem-duchies... Certainly, their names had already appeared during the Migrations. Yet, their political institutional, and biological structures had more often than not thoroughly changed. I have, moreover, refuted the basic difference between the so-called älteres Stammesfürstentum and jüngeres Stammesfürstentum , since I consider the duchies before and after Charlemagne to have been basically the same Frankish institution...
There has been debate in modern German historiography over the sense in which these duchies were "tribal", as in a people sharing a common descent, being governed as units over long periods of time, sharing a tribal sense of solidarity, shared customs, etc. In the context of modern German nationalism, Gerd Tellenbach emphasised the role of feudalism, both of the kings in the formation of the German kingdom and of the dukes in the formation of the stem duchies, against Martin Lintzel and Walter Schlesinger, who emphasised the role of the individual "stems" or "tribes".
The existence of a "tribal" self-designation among Saxons and Bavarians can be asserted
for the 10th and 12th centuries, respectively, although they may have existed much earlier.
After the death of the last Carolingian, Louis the Child, in 911, the stem duchies acknowledged the unity of the kingdom. The dukes gathered and elected Conrad I to be their king. According to Tellenbach's thesis, the dukes created the duchies during Conrad's reign. No duke attempted to set up an independent kingdom. Even after the death of Conrad in 918, when the election of Henry the Fowler was disputed, his rival, Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria, did not establish a separate kingdom but claimed the whole, before being forced by Henry to submit to royal authority. Henry may even have promulgated a law stipulating that the kingdom would thereafter be united. Arnulf continued to rule it like a king even after his submission, but after his death in 937 it was quickly brought under royal control by Henry's son Otto the Great. The Ottonians worked to preserve the duchies as offices of the crown, but by the reign of Henry IV the dukes had made them functionally hereditary.
Emergence of "German" terminology
Ottonians
The eastern division of the Treaty of Verdun was called the regnum Francorum Orientalium or Francia Orientalis: the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks or simply East Francia. It was the eastern half of the old Merovingian regnum Austrasiorum. The "east Franks" themselves were the people of Franconia, which had been settled by Franks. The other peoples of East Francia were Saxons, Frisians, Thuringi, and the like, referred to as Teutonici and sometimes as Franks as ethnic identities changed over the course of the ninth century.An entry in the Annales Iuvavenses for the year 919, roughly contemporary but surviving only in a twelfth-century copy, records that Baiuarii sponte se reddiderunt Arnolfo duci et regnare ei fecerunt in regno teutonicorum, i.e. that "Arnulf, Duke of the Bavarians, was elected to reign in the Kingdom of the Germans". Historians disagree on whether this text is what was written in the lost original; also on the wider issue whether the idea of the Kingdom as German, rather than Frankish, dates from the tenth or the eleventh century; but the idea of the kingdom as "German" is firmly established by the end of the eleventh century. In the tenth century, German writers already tended toward using modified terms such as "Francia and Saxony" or "land of the Teutons".
Any firm distinction between the kingdoms of Eastern Francia and Germany is to some extent the product of later retrospection. It is impossible to base this distinction on primary sources, as Eastern Francia remains in use long after Kingdom of Germany comes into use. The 12th century imperial historian Otto von Freising reported that the election of Henry the Fowler was regarded as marking the beginning of the kingdom, though Otto himself disagreed with this. Thus:
From this point some reckon a kingdom of the Germans as supplanting that of the Franks. Hence, they say that Pope Leo in the decrees of the popes, called Henry's son Otto the first king of the Germans. For that Henry of whom we are speaking refused, it is said, the honor offered by the supreme pontiff. But it seems to me that the kingdom of the Germans—which today, as we see, has possession of Rome—is a part of the kingdom of the Franks. For, as is perfectly clear in what precedes, at the time of Charles the boundaries of the kingdom of the Franks included the whole of Gaul and all Germany, from the Rhine to Illyricum. When the realm was divided between his son's sons, one part was called eastern, the other western, yet both together were called the Kingdom of the Franks. So then in the eastern part, which is called the Kingdom of the Germans, Henry was the first of the race of Saxons to succeed to the throne when the line of Charles failed... ... Henry's son Otto, because he restored to the German East Franks the empire which had been usurped by the Lombards, is called the first king of the Germans—not, perhaps, because he was the first king to reign among the Germans.It is here and elsewhere that Otto distinguishes the first German king and the first German king to hold imperial power.
Henry II was the first to be called "King of the Germans". The Ottonians seem to have adopted the use of the "Teutonic" label as it helped them to counter critics who questioned how the Ottonians, who were neither Carolingian nor Frankish, could legitimately rule. The Ottonians, by calling themselves "German" kings, instead presented themselves as rulers of all peoples north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. This "German kingdom" was later regarded as a subdivision of the Empire alongside Italy, Burgundy and Bohemia.