Heart Of Europe: A History Of The Roman Empire - Plot & Excerpts
Social engagement was limited to largely symbolic acts like helping individual widows and other ‘defenceless’ inhabitants. According to the chronicler Wipo, Conrad II brushed aside his courtiers’ advice to hasten to his coronation and instead stopped to listen to petitions from a peasant, an orphan and a widow, and thereby ‘prepared himself that day the way to the remaining affairs of government’. Wipo stressed that Conrad ‘responded like a vicar of Christ’, yet there was nothing particularly ‘imperial’ about his actions.87 Similar stories are recounted for other medieval kings. However, subjects increasingly expected their kings to respond to their concerns in a more sustained and systematic way. Through petitions, protests and representation in parliaments, subjects compelled monarchs to legislate and eventually to develop centrally directed institutions to ameliorate society’s concerns.At first sight, the Empire appears to move in the opposite direction as its central authority seemingly becomes more distant from the lives of ordinary inhabitants after the mid-thirteenth century.
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