Juritsch on the Babenberger -- Part II: Markgrave Heinrich I

We continue with the book by Georg Juritsch, which is a staggering 750+ pages long. We are speaking about Geschichte der Babenberger und ihrer Länder (976-1246), published in Innsbruck with Wagner in 1894.

Markgrave Heinrich I (994-1018)

994 Wolfgang of Regensburg also died (25). He had been a champion of Christianity in the Eastern marches and especially in Hungary. The Hungarian ruler Geisas and his wife Sarolt were supportive of the Christianization. Wenn Gaisas son Waik (995) took over the rulership, he turned to Bavaria not Constantinople, requesting the hand of Gisela, the daughter of the Bavarian duke Heinrich who had just died, to accept Christianity completely. As a result (26), Stefan I (995-1038) becomes the first Hungarian Christian king. 

The new bishop of Passau, Christian (24), had the emperor Otto III reaffirm all his privileges in 999 (27), including market, mint, weight and toll rights. It was not always clear who influenced which abbey, however; Duke Heinrich II of Bavaria placed abbots in Altaich and Tegernsee, much to the annoyance of the Bishop of Freising (28). The Benedictine rule of Altaich is spread in its reform, as the other abbeys request monks from there to become abbot with them, for example, Lanthbert in Ostrow founded by Boleslaw der Fromme.

The Northern March of the Babenberger, under Markgrave Heinrich, had been promised Bavaria if Duke Heinrich of Bavaria, a cousin of Otto III, was elected king. The election took place in 1002, but the Markgrave did not receive Bavaria. This disappointment could not be fixed with extensive land donations: a complex of grounds between Liesing and Triesting, 20 Huben between Kamp and March. The Northern Markgrave still established connections with the Polish Duke Boleslaw. The insurrection (30) pulled in the Babenberger Ernst, who had assisted in the battle against Arduin in 1002 in Italy, and the brother of the new king, Bruno von Augsburg.

The Northern March was horribly devastated in this conflict, Heinrich was captured, as was Ernst, and would have been executed without the intervention of Willigis von Mainz. Heinrich III of Lützelburg received the Bavarian duchy instead (31), even if the capture of Prague in 1004 (30) lead to the release of the Babenberger (31).

Luitpold's son Poppo had studied in Regensburg to be ready for a church position (31), and moved on to St Emmeran afterwards (32). When Heinrich II founded a new bishopric in Bamberg, which was to be a pattern institution, he made his chancellor Eberhard the bishop (32) and Poppo the cathedral provost (33). 

(rck Juritsch sees the hanging of St Coloman, whom he calls a pilgrim from Palestine, in Stockerau during this time as an indicator that the popular justice of the people continues in spite of the jurisdiction of the markgrave.)

1014 the corpse of Coloman is transferred to Melk and then the miracles begin (34). 

In spite of his involvement in the insurrection, Count Ernst was allowed to marry the older sister of Duke Hermann III of Suebia. In 1012, Hermann died and Ernst now became Duke of Suebia (34), but dies soon when hit by a friend's arrow during the hunt (35).

Adalbero von Lützelburg had basically been holding Trier hostage since 1008 (36). But the Emperor called his bluff in 1017 and had the clerics and the people acclaim Poppo to be archbishop of Trier. Poppo goes to Rome (37) to pick up his Pallium on April 8, 1017. Poppo reflects the Benedictine reform, expands the cathedral by 1/3rd, and becomes the guardian for his nephew Ernst. His sister Christina moves to Trier to enter a nunnery there. Poppo visits Palestine (38) and possibly even Babylon.

Markgrave Heinrich I is equally reliable on the emperor's side, attacking the polisch borderlands of Moravia in 1015 and leaving some 800 men of Boleslaw's dead on the field (38). Two years later, in 1017, he cuts off the returning Polish army laden down with plunder.

Then the Northern Markgrave Heinrich of Babenberg dies and his brother Adalbert becomes the new markgrave (39). 

Juritsch on the Babenberger -- Part I: Markgrave Luitpold I

This is probably going to have to be a multi-part post, since the book by Georg Juritsch is a staggering 750+ pages long. We are speaking about Geschichte der Babenberger und ihrer Länder (976-1246), published in Innsbruck with Wagner in 1894.

The general organization of the work is to go through the individual rulers, though some of them, such as Leopold VI and his son (and final Babenberger) Friedrich have multiple chapters. It is not clear if this is correlated with their importance only; after all, the general state of records improves the closer one moves toward the present.

Before the Babenberger

Juritsch sets us up in 907, a hundred years after Charlemagne, when the East Marches are lost to the invading Hungarians, and the area from the Plattensee to the Enns is taken. Duke Luitpold and his Bavarian army was killed that year, including the bishops Thietmar of Salzburg and those of Freising and Säben (1). Juritsch speculates that, not unlike the Romans, the German pioneers retreated to the west and left the border marches depopulated, while abbeys (Altaich, Regensburg, Passau, Freising, Salzburg) and bishops held on to their legal titles (2) of their latifundiae (4) in the hope of future reclamation (2).

Though most of the villages were wood constructions, there were a few stone fortifications, such as the Eparesburg of Kremsmuenster, or the Hollenburg, and the holdings of some of Charlemagne's liegemen near St Pölten. Karlmann had owned a palatinate near Baden (3), and there was Mödling, a fief of Passau; surely both were fortified as well. In the Tullnerfeld, the remains of the Roman fortifications at Faviana and Comagena (Tulln) could be repurposed as defenses at short notice. (rck: Juritsch thinks that Faviana is Traismauer, where the Moravian duke Priwina was baptized (3), which however was called Augustianis; Favianis would have been the Roman castle Mautern.)

Though colonization had pushed along the rivers emptying into the Danube into the pre-alps, those ranching areas were just as deserted (3), though the Huns undertook no effort to destroy either fruit orchards or vineyards, looking mainly for plunder and slaves.

The military fortunes varied around the reign of Duke Heinrich II of Bavaria, the brother of the king; the Hungarians were defeated at Sediraburg and in the swamps of Drömling (938), and near Wels at the Traun (943 or 944). Bohemia had been put into its place (4; 5) making it possible for Bavaria to focus on the reconquest. The victory of 948 found its projection even into the writings of the Gandersheimer nun Hrotsuit (5). When the Hungarians tried to take advantage of the uprising of Arnulf and Luitpold in 954, they revolt was put down decisively and the Hungarians defeated August 10, 955 near Augsburg (Lechfeld). 

The religious rulers were ready for re-colonization of their properties (6) and pushed beyond the Wachau on the left and the Traisen on the right side of the Danube banks. This reinstated the separation of the church territories of Salzburg and Passau (6). 

Several of the Hungarian rulers at the Lechfeld (Karchan Bultzu, Dewix, Achtum) had already been christianized via Constantinople. The East-Roman monk Hierotheus was the bishop of Hungary, and the monastery of St John the Baptist near the river Maros was in place (7). The prince-bishoprics of Salzburg and Passau tried to build on these foundations when attempting pacification through Christianization. 

An important person in that context was Pilgrim of Passau (8), nephew of Archbishop Friedrich von Salzburg, who had grown up in the monastery of Altaich, another owner of latifundiae in the Eastern marches. Pilgrim was also related to the Arnulfinger, key landowners in Bavaria and Carinthia (8). Pilgrim attempted to reorganize the responsibilities by consecrating a few more bishops via Benedict VII in Rome. He justified this with embellished reports of the missionizing successes in Hungary (9) and in his role as the archbishop of Lorch. Implied was the elevation of Passau to a metropolis (10) of an archbishop. Haldemar organized a papal bull in Rome supposedly reflecting the archival state there (11) which was used in this regard. Friedrich von Salzburg was not excited (11),  and his influence in Rome sufficient to get the decision reversed. Pilgrim, thwarted, kept the bull and twelfth-century documents record him as archbishop nevertheless.

Refounding the Eastern Marches (976-774)

Emperor Otto I died 973 (12). The Bavarian Duke Heinrich II made a pact with Boleslava II of Bohemia and Miseco of Poland. Among those assisting the new emperor Otto II to put down the revolt was Luitpold, a count of the Danube district, and his brother Berthold, whose father was a relative of the sister of Heinrich I of Saxony. They themselves believed their descent from one Adalbert of Babenberg, who was executed in the reign of Ludwig the Child, but a franko-suebian origin makes more sense. 

The brothers had known the favor of Otto I already and now Berthold received the northern district and Luitpold the Eastern marches. 

The marches toward Carinthia and Verona were separated to form the Duchy of Carinthia (13), and the reduced Bavaria given to the Suebian Duke Otto.

This Ostarrichi of Luitpold was enclosed by the Enns in the West, the town of Spitz in the East (13), and the Traisen in the South (14). In order to secure this border region, the count of the marches was the sole count in this territory, required to both hold diets and attend the Bavarian diets (13) and serve in their wars.

We know that soon thereafter three counties were established, at Neuburg, Tulln and Mautern, which the marcher count had to service in a six-week rhythm (14). At the same time, Luitpold remained the count of the Danube district, especially the monastery of Metten received donations from him. He also held the castle of Melk (20), later claims of Passau notwithstanding.

Otto II was generous toward Passau as well (15): 975 they received Kremsmünster, the toll at Passau, the Ennsburg, St Florian and St Pölten. When the Carinthian duke Heinrich rebelled, Passau suffered destruction of its cathedral, which was made good with donations around Lorch. Salzburg, which had also stood with Otto II, received lands as well (16).

Otto II was smart to look to the churchmen for support against his aristocracy, and some of them, such as Wolfgang of Regensburg, were brave warriors that built their own defenses, such as the Wieselburg.

With the elimination of Duke Arnulf, the monasteries of Altaich and Tegernsee had lost their roles, and the game of latifundiae was down to Salzburg, Passau and Regensburg.

While the marcher counts did not have to participate in Italian wars, such as Otto II's campaign of 979, it was good to remain close to the emperor and the Roman curiae to realize plans, as the Merseburger bishop Giseler had demonstrated when he achieved his elevation to the archbishopric of Magdeburg (16) when Merseburg (which Otto I had created as a bishopric in gratitude to Laurentius after the Lechfeld) was decommissioned again (17). Unsurprisingly, the disaster in Italy of 979 (17) was considered "payback" from Saint Laurentius for having lost his bishopric so hastily [rck Wikipedia suggests that Otto II died of a malaria infection during the campaign]. 

Perhaps the contemporaries also expected a return of the Hungarians, which happened in 983 with the death of the Bavarian duke, but Luitpold managed to beat them back and even extend his sphere of influence to the Wiener Wald (17). Pilgrim nevertheless painted a picture of devastation of his lands in the Eastern marches when meeting Otto III in Bamberg 985. The point of this complaint was (18) to receive rights to bring free settlers into the marches, in addition to the bishop's colonials. These free settlers should be free of the Ministerial's interference, either fiscally or legally through the courts of the markgrave. Otto III obliged Passau, extending the immunities of Karl III, which in turn led to an apparently quick increase in free Bavarian settlers into the Eastern marches.

Pilgrim organized Synods to Lorch and Mautern (18) to settle the question of who would receive the tithe between Enns and the Wiener Wald (19), a topic that was also discussed at the Synod of Mistelbach.

Friedrich of Salzburg was no less concerned to get his holdings certified by the authorities in Rome and at the Imperial court, and the list is long and impressive: Ybbs, Url, Megalicha, Wachau, Arnsburg, Grinzing, Holenburg, Tulln, Pottenbrunn, Traismauer, Oberwöling. Unfortunately, these rights were backed with a forged privilege of King Arnulf (19), which led to ongoing frustrations 200 years later still (20). 

The warfare had diminished the education in the new marches as well; Count Udalrich von Ebersberg claimed that all Bavarians knew how to read the public law (Volksrecht) (20), but saw this no longer the case during his adulthood. The school in St Emmeran (21), reformed in 980 by St Wolfgang of Regensburg and reorganized by the Benedictine monk Ramwold of St Maximin near Trier, was famous and had 300 books in its library managed by Reginbald, who worked to increase the holdings. Ramwold had the Aureus Codex of Emmeran renovated. Salzburg had inherited most of its books, including Beda's De Arte Metrica of 701 and a collection of letters from Alexander the Great to Aristotle. There was also Bishop Reginold of Eichstätt, who knew Hebrew and Greek und wrote a vita of St Willibald and poems about St Wunnibald and St Blasius. Tegernsee (22) was renovated from St Emmeran through Gozpert (21), who brought enthusiasm for the classics with im (22) and had Boethius, Stasius, Persius, Horaz and the letters of Cicero read and copied.

(rck Juritsch thinks that Master Conrad wrote earlier versions of the Nibelungenlied in Latin, no less, at the behest of Pilgrim of Passau around this time; modern scholarship assumes that the epic was written in Middle High German from the beginning and that Pilgrim occurs because this was during the time that Pilgrim was supposed to be canonized. (22) Juritsch is well-informed about the miracles some 200 years after Pilgrim's death at the rediscovery of his grave (23).)

In 991 both Friedrich of Salzburg and Pilgrim of Passau died (23).

In 994 (24), Luitpold is hit by a stray error during a wargame and dies July 10th, 994. Thietmar of Merseburg praises him (24), as do the Annals of Quedlinburg. 

Luitpold's son Heinrich I becomes the new markgrave, even though the role is not hereditary yet.

David Manheim on Underspecified Goals

 In a follow-up to the previous David Manheim discussion, a blog-post from 2016/09/29 entitled Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals, Manheim analyzes examples of twitter use and startups to get a handle on how goals ought to be formalized, especially when transitioning to a corporate structure — here, Peter Drucker's SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) versus the BHA goals (Big, Hairy, Audacious) that startups use.

Manheim reminds us that

metrics work because they help ensure that the tasks aligned the intuition of the workers with the needs of the company, create trust between workers and their management, and reduce the complexity of larger goals into manageable steps.

Manheim points out that, in their existing formulation, Goodhart's Law, which probably derived from Donald T Campell's formulation, are at least sometimes false. This follows from the good regulator work of Roger Conant and Ross Ashby, which show an isomorphism between the model of the regulator and the system regulated and which lead to the internal model principle in control theory.

Since Conant's and Ashby's good regulator cannot existing in a process that exceeds modeling complexity, simplified models are targeted by the regulators instead, which can then be exploited.

This means any simplified model used by a regulator can be exploited, especially when the agents understand the model and metrics used. This happens almost everywhere; employees understand the compensation system and seek to maximize their bonuses and promotion, drug manufacturers know the FDA requirements and seek to minimize cost to get their drug approved, and companies know the EPA regulations and seek to minimize the probability and cost of fines. The tension created by the agents is what leads to Goodhart’s theorem; whatever simplifications exist in the model can be exploited by agents.

Manheim now shows how this interacts with the principal-agent problem. [Fn1] Manheim argues that where the story of the individual agent and the bigger story of the cooperative collide, that's too bad for the bigger story.

In companies, the discrepancy between the metrics used and the goal isn’t maximized by the agents: the agents aren’t necessarily against the larger goal, they just pursue their own goals, albeit subject to the regulator’s rules. Goodhart said the correlation doesn’t reverse, it simply collapses.

The outcome is a mismatch between the company's space of possibilities and

the subspace induced by agents’ maximization behaviors.

In other words, even metrics that are aligned well with agents whose goals are understood, they are distorted by the agents whose motives or goals are different than the ones used to build the metric. And because all metrics are simplifications, and all people have their own goals, this is inevitable. 

 This puts the onus on the model to be as explicit as possible (I think that is what Manheim means with legibility, but I am not 100% sure).

If the model is explicit, game-theoretic optima can be calculated, and principal-agent negotiations can guarantee cooperation. This is equivalent to saying that simple products and simple systems can be regulated with simple metrics and Conant and Ashby style regulators, since they represent the system fully.

Manheim then suggests that Wilson in his discussion of bureaucracy and organizational theory made a useful contribution by replacing the goals with missions (Manheim is persuasive that complexity is often irreducible, thereby curtailing Wilson's other suggestion of how to remedy organizational misalignments.) 

[Wilson writes:] "The great advantage of mission is that… operators will act… in ways that the head would have acted had he or she been in their shoes.” But that requires alignment not of metrics and goals, but of goals and missions.

When saddled with unclear goals, metrics begin to take on the role of (self-)justification. 

And as Abram Demski pointed out to me, this is an even deeper point; Holmström’s theorem shows that when people are carving a fixed pie, it’s impossible to achieve a stable game-theoretic equilibrium and be efficient too, unless you ignore the budget constraints. 

A corporation's solution to this conundrum is

... to make sure people can contribute to growing the size of the pie, making it a non-zero-sum game. Creating this non-zero-sum game to serve as a context for goals is the function of the mission; it’s something that everyone wins by furthering.

To put matters into my own words, missions are supposed to be goal generators.

For Manheim, this is how to turn the old adage from management theory

To motivate a team, you need goals that are clear, and metrics that support them.

into something actionable.

Failure to use metrics well means that motivations and behaviors can drift. On the other hand, using metrics won’t work exactly, because complexity isn’t going away. A strong-enough sense of mission means it may even be possible to align people without metrics.

(This may explain why start-ups and open source projects work.) 

The solution may well be to hybridize them, or turn them into a flywheel process.

It makes sense, however, to use both sets of tools; adding goals that are understood by the workers and aligned with the mission, which clearly allow everyone to benefit, will assist in moderating the perverse effects of metrics, and the combination can align the organization to achieve them. Which means ambitious things can be done despite the soft bias of underspecified goals and the hard bias of overpowered metrics.

 

David Manheim on Goodhart's Law

I was reading Jascha Sohl-Dickstein' 2022-11-06 blog post on how Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart's law when I realized that I had never heard of Goodhart's Law before. 

The Wikipedia article sent me to David Manheim's 2016 blog-post on the difficulties of measuring Goodhart's Law and Why Measurement is Hard. Manheim points to the triad of "intuition, trust and complexity" and its interaction with measurement. Measurement primarily replaces intuition, but requires trust in the data and cannot adequately overcome complexity. 

Manheim has an interesting aside on the discussion between Kahneman and Klein on how effective interventions of the type of "recognition-primed decision making" may beat out measuring, leading to "raw intuition beating reflection", with a link indicating that Kahneman and Klein agree on this being the case for specific interesting situations.

Manheim also notes that Douglas Hubbard offers a general methodology for measuring anything, though this process side-steps the question of whether this can always be done in a timely and cost-effective manner.

... no matter how ‘fuzzy’ the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before. (Douglas Hubbard, as quoted in Manheim's blog-post)

Manheim points out that the problem of trust that marrs data collection can be reduced by segregating the responsibilities.

Test takers are monitored for cheating, graders are anonymized, and the people creating the test have no stake in the game. Strategies that split these tasks are effective at reducing the need for trust, but doing so is expensive, not always worthwhile, and requires complex systems . And complex systems have their own problems. (Manheim in his post) 

The fact that measures summarize complexity without reducing it, and the problems that causes, Manheim proposes to make the failures understandable by another interaction triad.

These failures are especially probable when dimensionality is reduced, causation is not clarified, and the reification of metrics into goals promotes misunderstanding.

Manheim argues that (even in the face of Arrow's theorem proving the absence of any correct metric), models such as those in economics are quickly subjected to dimensional reductions and hyperplane slicing to make simple metrics computable (often even a single function).

For causation, Manheim turns to

Cosma Shalizi’s amazing course notes, when he talks about about modeling causal relationships. One benefit of the type of visual model he explains is that it is an intuitive representation of a causal structure. 

(Notice that Manheim already warned about the fact that single causation is often a fallacy.) The example of the factors both direct and indirect that impact the grade in a statistics class show that reducing the class to a grade eliminates the articulation points.

[In Shalizi's example] ... there are plenty of causes that can be manipulated to improve grades: reducing workload will be effective, as will increasing actual learning in the previous course. But if you are only using simple metrics, and which cannot represent the causal structure, it’s irreducible. This is why ... loss of fidelity matters when decisions are made.

 Manheim uses (cute) optical illusions to approach the reification problem, discussing the potential for the reification fallacy (at least) for metrics of IQ or wealth. The punchline though is:

What’s harmful is that when we create a measure, it is never the thing we care about, and we always want to make decisions. And if you reify metrics away from the true goal, you end up in trouble when they stop being good measures. 

Which is what Goodhart's Law argues, and Manheim now exemplifies:

Investors care about bond ratings, but only because they measure risk of default. It’s only a measure, until you use it to determine capital reserves. 

Bank regulators care about capital reserves, but only because it is a measure of solvency. It’s only a measure, until you use it to set bank reserve requirements. 

Manheim then points out that this is caused by Stephen Ross' formalization of the solution to principal-agent problems in economics, which are base-payment plus bonus type of systems, which however require measurements to succeed.

The combination of reification and decisions that use a metric which ignores the causal structure will bite you.  

Thinking of tests as measuring student achievement is fine, and it usefully simplifies a complex question. Reifying a score as the complex concept of student achievement, however, is incorrect.

For Manheim, Goodhart points out that the absence of any correct metric means that the system will drift to satisfy the mismatch between measure and goal.

Metrics make things better overall, but only occurs to the extent that they are effective at encouraging the true goals of the system. To the extent that they are misaligned, the system’s behavior will diverge from the goals being mismeasured.

Because the collapse of the complexity elides aspects of the system, the resulting measurement will push in unintended directions, be it sensationalism via user engagement at Facebook or racial bias in recidivism in crime statistics.

Manheim argues that another way to see Goodhart's Law is that mapping goals to measurements increases the communicability about complex systems between people, but the inaccuracy of the metric over time  causes drift that eventually obfuscates the intended goals. 

Some works of Jean Bodin

 Jean Bodin, who is this these days perhaps best known for his musings on Historiography, engaged in problems of religion and tolerance as well. His only posthumously published Conference of the Seven Wise Men on the Hidden Secrets of Sublime Things (Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis) clearly belongs into this category. It's seven speakers represent the views that Bodin was familiar with (summary by ChatGPT 3.5):

Coronaeus - Represents traditional Catholicism.

Fridericus - A Lutheran who defends Protestantism.

Curtius - A Calvinist, representing the Reformed tradition.

Torres - A Jew, offering a Jewish perspective.

Senamus - A skeptic, embodying the voice of doubt and questioning.

Salomon Barcassius - A Muslim, representing Islamic thought.

Octavius Fagnola - A Deist, who argues for a natural religion devoid of specific dogma.