A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

Alpine Rhine seen from Hoher Kasten
Source: Alexander Schnurer

Back in 1990, when I worked at the EFTA Secretariat in Geneva, I had just finished a major investigation into EFTA countries' practices concerning capital movements. So I thought I had earned a short leave. Said and done! I bought a hiking package from Raifa (the Swiss Raiffaisenkasse) and set off to a four days' walk in the Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden. The last day of the hike implied taking a lift to the top of Hoher Kasten and from then descending slowly along the sharp ridge of this mountain and thereafter down to Brülisau.

In those days, I held only rather dim notions of the geography and history of the border region between Switzerland and Austria. But this walk got me wide awake to the wonders of this land. About two hours' hike along the mountain ridge I came to a rather abrupt steep slope, with a tower of a mountain in front of me.

Approaching the Saxer Lücke
Source: Endeavour1a

Proceeding further towards the slope, suddenly an unhindered look at an immense void of a valley opened up in front of me, shimmering in the heat of high noon, and with a blue ribbon of a river sleazily finding its way towards a far off immense body of a lake. Across the expanse, I could admire a range of ragged peaks, partly hidden behind high clouds. All in all, an enchanting vista! I was looking at the Alpine Rhine Valley´s Northern end, and, across the valley, at the hills and mountains of the Bregenzerwald in Vorarlberg (the easternmost State of Austria).

With the hindsight of mature age, I can fully appreciate this memory. Looking again at the title picture, you see the Rhine taking a bend towards the upper end and the foothills getting much closer to the river on its right hand side. Thereaways lies the domain of Hohenems, where the Emser reached the zenith of their power. But, you can find traces of the family throughout the Alpine Rhine, which makes the region the main theatre of Ems history.

Let's go back in history for a spell. In Roman times, since Diocletiani reign, the Alpine Rhine formed the Province of Raetia Prima, which reached from Lake Constance all the way South to the sources of the Rhine and, further, to the mountain passes leading to Northern Italy. Its capital was Curia Raetorum (Chur). Raetia Prima's location was a kind of "neither, nor". It did not belong to the Italian heartlands, cut off from them through the crest of the Adula Alps (the watershed between rivers Rhine and Po) and connected only via the Splügen and San Bernardino Passes. It was not a frontier province either, since to its North East lay the province of Raetia Secunda with its capital in Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg) on the Danube River.

Administration in Raetia Prima, like in most Roman interior provinces in those days, was pretty much decentralised and depended to a high degree on co-operation between the Praeses (the governor appointed by the Emperor) and a network of mostly indigenous, but romanised landowners. Literacy was high among the landed gentry and, in particular, among the inhabitants of the administrative centre of Curia. When central power declined and ultimately collapsed during the Völkerwanderung, this system simply kept on operating, the provincial courts kept practising Roman Law, and the regional Archbishop, residing in Chur, started to step in, gradually, as local leader.

Theodoric, King of Italy (493-526). Safeguard of Roman culture on the Alpine Rhine.
Source: Wikipedia

By a slight of history, Raetia Prima was spared the main troubles of the Völkerwanderung. When Odoaker took charge of Italy in 476 AD, he considered the province to be part of his realm. His successor, Theoderic the Great of the Ostrogoths, followed this up by formally declaring the border of Italy to lie along Lake Constance. This banned the Alaman tribes from massing into the Alpine Rhine and safeguarded the essentially Roman civilisation there. When East Rome reconquered Italy, some 50 years later, the Franks gained control of the region and thereby spared it from an otherwise troubling Byzantine occupancy.

With the Franks becoming the dominant power in the West, the Lombards did not dare invade the valleys either on their way to Italy, so they went on to conquer the peninsula instead. All in all, "Roman" civilisation was preserved for up to 400 years after the collapse of West Rome. Only slowly did Frankish overlords take possession of strategic domains, and Alemannic peoples, peacefully, start to infilltrate the region from the North. Even to this very day, a third of the population in the Southern parts of the Alpine Rhine (Graubünden, Canton Grison) still speaks a version of the Vulgar Latin prevalent in the region since the original takeover by the Romans back in 15 BC.

At the outset, Frankish influence was rather lapse. Raetia Prima, or Raetia Curiensis, as it started to be called, lay far off the Frankish heartlands and governance consisted mainly of choosing an Archbishop friendly to the Frankish cause and letting him administer the region, together with a small contingent of military, hardly noticeable in the vast territory. It is towards the end of this period, around 750, that the name of Ems in its Raeto-roman form of "Amedes" appears for the first time in an official document, indicating the name of a place along the Rhine just South of Chur, which to this very day is called Ems.

Raetia Curiensis around 800. In earlier centuries, it reached towards lake Constance.
Source: Wikipedia

Things changed when the Merovinger Kings were supplanted by the Carolinger. Concurrently, the so called Victorid Dynasty who had ruled for over a century as Archbishop and secular leader, died out. Charles the Great put an end to the ecclesiastical regime and enfeoffed, in year 807, a Frankish noble, Hunfried I, as Comes Curiensis, i e as feodal lord paying allegiance to the Emperor himself. The Hunfriedings ruled as counts for over a hundred years until, in 917, Burchard II Hunfrieding claimed the title of Duke of Alamannia and combined Raetia with that much larger province to the North.

Soon thereafter, the combined area was renamed Duchy of Swabia and became one of the five Stem Duchies (besides Bavaria, Franconia, Lotharingia and Saxony) constituting the successor Kingdom of Germany after the break-down of Carolingian reign. The Duchy's heydays came under the Hohenstaufen, who rose, from their base as Duke of Swabia, to become Kings and Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (the period 1138-1254). Swabia was by far the richest province in Germany in those days and thus provided the wealth and income needed by those rulers to gain and preserve Imperial power.

The Southern part of the Duchy, former Raetia Curiensis, held particular interest, since through the Alpine Rhine Valley went the route to Italy, which was also ruled by the Hohenstaufen Emperors. It is during this period that the Emser nobles became firmly established at the Lower Alpine Rhine, in domains around what nowadays is the town of Hohenems. There, they became governors of a mighty fortress, one of the largest in Southern Germany of its time.

Duchy of Swabia (in yellow) in 917 AD.
Source: Wikipedia

Swabia's importance came to an abrupt end with the end of Hohenstaufen Rule. After that dynasty had died out, the duchy effectively lost its ducal lord, leaving the secondary fiefdoms of the province in feodal limbo. Rudolf von Habsburg, the successor King of Germany, tried in vain to reconstitute the Duchy as fiefdom for his descendants, but the Grandees of Germany had had enough of monarchs reigning supreme with the support of Swabian wealth. Instead, Rudolf tried to ingratiate himself by deeding the major cities of the former duchy with the status of Imperial Immediacy ("Reichsunmittelbarkeit"), which rendered them subject only to the King, thus no longer to any feodal overlord. In addition, the Habsburger attempted, initially successfully, to get regions in vicinity of their stem domains in Aargau under their control.

All in all, the absence of a duke led to a general free-for-all of struggle between lesser lords, Imperial cities and free domains (Eidgenossen) to increase their power through land grabbing by whatever means available, be it acquisition, inheritance or aggression. There followed a four centuries' period of unrest terminating first at the Peace of Osnabrück in the mid-1600s. Throughout these centuries-long struggles, the Emser threw in their lot mainly with the Habsburger. At the end of this period, a considerable part of the former Duchy had clawed itself loose from the Empire, that is, the Eidgenossen in the Southeast and Grisons (Graubünden) in the South, and a host of smaller domains lay scattered throughout the remainder of the Alpine Rhine region, with the Habsburger left with just a small outpost in the region, on the right hand side of the Alpine Rhine South of Lake Constance, a region that they had to share with the Emser.

Domains of Houses Ems and Habsburg in Vorarlberg, around 1620.

A last drama in miniature finally played itself out in this small region, which nowadays is called Vorarlberg. The Emser, who around 1620 were the Lords of Hohenems and Lustenau, had recently (in 1613) also acquired the two Counties of Schellenberg and Vaduz, which at a throw increased their territory by half (counting also their domain in Italy, the County of Gallerate close to Milan). In addition they governed the domains of Feldkirch and Neuburg, held as pawn for a large loan to the Archduke of Tyrol, as well as the domain of Bludenz/Sonnenberg. So they got the idea to offer the Archduke 100 000 Gulden for the domains of Dornbirn, Höchst, Fussau and Gaiszau, in order to create a contiguous Principality on the Alpine Rhine.

The Archduke was tempted, but declined eventually, since the Vorarlberg Estates strongly objected and the Habsburger realised the importance of keeping their strategic outpost controlling the Alpine Rhine and ultimately the roads towards Italy, instead of getting a new sovereign neighbour, whose alliance they could not fully trust. Had the Habsburger agreed, there would nowadays not be small "Liechtenstein" (formerly Schellenberg and Vaduz) wedged in between Austria and Switzerland; instead, a much larger country of "Hohenems" would stretch out from Lake Constance all the way down to the Luciersteig!

Sweeping through more than thousand years of history in one single blog post may appear presumptuous. But, without this general background it is difficult to grasp the history of the Ems Dynasty, with its beginning in early post-Roman times and its decline towards the second half of the 1600s. Having said this, we will return to our travelogue presently and to a far easier, and hopefully more engaging reading. So don't despair, dear Readers, our night train will soon arrive in Feldkirch (Vorarlberg) for our story to continue with a flair!