The exclusive nature of Athenian democracy is significantly different from the inclusive democracy which has guided American political thought for more than two centuries.
Next, the Romans experimented with partially democratic systems. During the Roman Monarchy, from 753 BC to 509 BC, the Senate elected the kings, who were installed for life onto the throne. During the Roman Republic, from 509 BC to 27 BC, there were a few faint elements of democracy in the elections of consuls and tribunes; censors sometimes elevated elected magistrates to the Senate.
But a full-throated systematic democracy, with the free elections of representatives, was still in the future.
The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) would be one of the first — perhaps the first? — political institutions to have a truly elected leader. The reader will remember Voltaire’s old joke: The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Instead it was a secular middle European defensive confederation.
Charlemagne was crowned emperor of most of Europe in 800 AD, and after his death, his dominions were ruled by several generations of his descendents on a hereditary pattern. This Carolingian dynasty eventually dissolved into chaos. The dominions were regrouped and reorganized into what would become the HRE.
The HRE followed an ancient pattern from middle and eastern Europe in which kings were elected, often by a council of feudal lords. The feudal system was localized, with many lords each having his own small territory. The lords were obligated to the peasants who lived on their land; legal documents detailed the responsibilities of the lords to the peasants. The lords functioned as representatives of the peasants in electing a king.
Thus Conrad of Franconia was elected in 911 AD, and his successor, Henry the Fowler, in 919 AD. Here is a clear and early case of an elected leader.
England introduced the notion of limited government in several documents. In 1100 AD, Henry I issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ (also known as The Coronation Charter or The Statutes of the Realm). In 1215, King John consented to the Magna Charta. In 1689, Parliament issued a Bill of Rights which limited the powers of the monarchs. While the English enactment of limited government is a profound precedent, it happened in the absence of elected executive leadership.
In the HRE, and in areas bordering on the HRE in eastern Europe, elected leadership brought about a de facto limited government, if not de dicto or de jure. The emperors of the HRE were not absolute rulers in the style of the Roman Empire. They needed to seek a consensus of those who elected them before taking actions.
The feudal lords who began electing kings, and later emperors, slowly redesignated themselves over the years as ‘princes’ and, to distinguish themselves from other princes, as ‘electoral princes.’ These princes often held the upper hand, and it was the emperor who had to answer to them, and not they to him. The emperor of the HRE was then an elected representative whose task was to do the will of the people.
Note the vocabulary in historian Martyn Rady’s account of political events on the geographical margins of the HRE:
The Transylvanian principality was the creation of the Hungarian king, John Szapolyai, elected in 1526 as a rival to Ferdinand. Unable to make good his claim to the whole of the kingdom, Szapolyai had retreated to the highlands of Transylvania, which was internationally recognized in 1570 as an independent principality under its own prince, who was elected by the Transylvanian diet.
The word ‘elected’ appears twice in a short paragraph.
John Zapolya, an alternate spelling of Szapolyai, was elected King of Hungary in 1526, and remained king until his death in 1540. During his reign, a counter-claim was made by Ferdinand I, who was already archduke of Austria, and who was elected king of Hungary in 1526. That’s right. Two different guys were elected to the same office in the same year. How did that happen?
The monarchs were elected by “diets” which were congresses or conventions or some kind of legislative assembly. It turns out that there were two diets in Hungary. One was the parliament of the untitled lesser nobility or gentry; this diet elected John. The other was the higher aristocracy, magnates, or barons; this diet elected Ferdinand. John and Ferdinand were supported by different factions of the nobility in the Hungarian kingdom. Each thought himself to be rightfully king of Hungary.
It’s a complicated and confusing story, but it points to the importance of elections in that time and place. Democracy can be messy.
For present purposes, what’s important is not the complicated and intricate details of Transylvanian and Hungarian politics, but rather the fact this was all done by electoral politics.
While ancient Greece and ancient Rome may have had a system with a few democratic elements, their leaders were not purely the result of voting. On the other hand, the HRE and some of the late feudal systems of central and eastern Europe had leaders who were placed into office purely by voting. The supremacy of the vote can be seen in elections in which the voters (at that time called ‘the electors’) did not function as a mere “rubber stamp” approval of some previously anticipated outcome, but rather were defiantly independent of expectations.
In 1292, the electors chose Adolf of Nassau to be the emperor of the HRE. In 1312, the electors chose Henry of Luxembourg to be the emperor of the HRE (upon taking the throne, he became known as Henry VII).
Both the election of 1292 and the election of 1312 demonstrated the independence of the electors. In both cases, many observers expected the election to go to a member of the Habsburg dynasty, but the electors exercised their freedom to vote otherwise.
The same is true of Conrad of Teck, formally known as Conrad II of Teck, who was probably elected to be emperor — the documents surrounding his election are ambiguous — but was assassinated “within forty-eight hours of his election,” as Martyn Rady phrases it, if indeed he was actually elected at all.
So the electors had real power — the power of the ballot. That’s democracy.
To be sure, suffrage was far from universal. In the years up until 1257, the number of electors was relatively large, but also undocumented, unknown, and varying. In the pre-Merovingian and Merovingian times, quite large numbers of electors took part in the process; but the exact number is not known.
Gradually the number of electors sank. Between 1257 and 1648 — i.e., until the end of the Thirty Years’ War — the number of electors was seven. Between 1648 and 1806 — i.e., until the end of the HRE — the number grew gradually to ten.
Despite the often relatively small number of electors, the process was truly democratic. This was a pivotal moment in history: major leaders — perhaps the leaders of the most powerful political entities on earth — were chosen democratically.
Like freely-elected leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these elected leaders of earlier centuries could not do whatever they wanted — they could not act arbitrarily or capriciously. They answered to the constituency who elected them.
So it was that these early instances of true democracy were directly linked to early instances of limited government. The emperors of the HRE did not act with the unquestioned absolute limitless authority and power of the ancient Roman emperors. After being elected emperor, they continually had to negotiate and compromise with those who elected them, as is clear in the following narrative reported by Martyn Rady:
Rudolf was forced to back down, agreeing in 1606, in the Treaty of Vienna, to full religious freedom in Hungary. Sensing his weakness, the Bohemian diet obliged Rudolf to make similar concessions, including the right to hold Protestant services on crown and church lands. In the Letter of Majesty of 1609, Rudolf agreed that a permanent sub-committee of the diet, known as the Defenders, should police the religious settlement. He promised that, ‘Henceforth no free noblemen or inhabitants of towns or villages, including peasants, should be forced by a higher authority or indeed anyone, be they churchmen or laymen, to give up their religion or be compelled to change religion in any way whatsoever.’ Rudolf gave similar rights to the townsfolk and nobilities of Upper and Lower Austria.
Officially known as Rudolf II, he became emperor of the HRE in 1576. But as the text above shows, he was continually compromising with his subjects. An unavoidable result of truly free elections in increased liberty for the electors.
In sum, it can be argued that the antecedents of modern political democracy, as it is known in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is found not in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but rather in the central and eastern European elected monarchs, and subsequently in the HRE.
