VARIOUS ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS GROUPS IN MEDIEVAL GERMAN TOWNS? SOME EVIDENCE AND REFLECTIONS
Felicitas Schmieder (Frankfurt am Main)
The question posed in this workshop about "segregation, integration, and assimilation" of religious and ethnic minorities in medieval towns is rarely asked in German urban history. Except for the Jews - whose existence and diminishing acceptability was intensively discussed in Medieval Latin Europe - religious minorities were not to be tolerated in principle, and only on the rim in practice, for the time being. No Muslims or heathens, no heretics or even schismatics lived in German towns if we look to official or unofficial perceptions.
There is more chance of finding evidence when it comes to ethnic groups. After considering briefly the possible definitions of ethnicity, linguistic or legal, in this context, the paper will turn to some examples of ethnic minorities that were really to be found - different in time, situation, and status. When urban centres developed in the high Middle Ages, very often people of different legal status and sometimes explicitly different ethnic origin migrated together.
This initial difference was widely levelled out in the further legal and social development of many towns. Llinguistic and even ethnically defined differences remained, however, or were renewed time and again at the edges of the "German" area, close to the "Sprachgrenze" between Germans and Romance-language speaking inhabitants, and in the former Slavic regions, where Germans and "others" lived side by side permanently. While the existence of Slavic minorities in the East created legal and social discrimination in the later Middle Ages, no such problem seems to have existed in the West and South, at the Roman-German frontier. A short glance over the frontiers, on Germans in foreign urban environments of different kinds, may provide hints to what would have been possible in terms of German experiences as well as possible explanations.
In the later Middle Ages, also, immigration created ethnic minority groups, among them a Romance-language speaking minority in the West of Germany. These were the so-called Lombards or "Cawerschen", money-lenders with a special legal status who were often driven away in the fifteenth century, together with the Jews.
At this point we might finally discover a type of religious minority not yet considered. The Lombards, living permanently in a town, were usually not accepted as members of the local parish, but discriminated against. On the other hand, foreign merchants, who regularly visited the important markets and created a kind of welcome recurrent minority group, could and would not become members of the parish, and built up their own religious communities in foreign towns.