This is a detailed book running to 644 closely printed pages, before the glossary, bibliography, and index, to be read if it is a subject you are interested in, a complex story reflecting the complexity of the sources and for many of us unfamiliarity with the subject.
In 1500 the Imperial Estates consisted of 7 Electors, 25 secular principalities, 90 archbishoprics, bishoprics and abbeys and 65 Imperial cities. The Reichstag comprised three chambers, the Electors,Princes and Cities. The Imperial Counts had two collective votes in the Princes’ chamber. Reichstag legislation was intended as a framework to be adapted to the circumstances of particular cities or territories. When the Reichstag sat at particular places they were known as Diets, referred to as the Diets of Worms, Regensburg etc.
There were then other lordships and other units which were not Imperial Estates. Imperial knights were nobles, but without representation in the Reichstag. In the 1790’s there were still 1700 Imperial Knights’ territories. Then there were free villages, at one time 120, by 1803 only 5. They were concentrated in southwest Germany and Alsace which were originally part of the medieval Hohenstaufen royal demesne.
Three of the Electors were bishops, the other four secular princes. They elected the King of the Romans, the designated successor to the throne during the lifetime of a sitting Emperor, extracting what was known as the electoral capitulation, conditions of his election.
As territories were within the Holy Roman Empire (referred to as the Reich), none of them were sovereign. Whaley questions whether any of the territories were on the path to being States. In his view this would understate the importance of the Reich and overstate that of the territories. Even in the areas of their greatest territorial concentration,, the power of territorial princes was limited by the local Estates, whose role was to achieve consensus.
The Reich is described as a feudal nexus not a state. It was in a permanent state of flux; “the internal territorial borders virtually impossible to reproduce.” There was no centre or capital city. It was characterised by instability, regional leagues a response to marauding knights or aggrandising princes, seeking to annex the lands of weaker neighbours. In 1500 the Kreis, Imperial circles, which were themselves non-contiguous were created for defence and tax raising. This was quite unlike a modern nation state. Its external boundaries were uncertain and ever changing, for instance in 1502 two Imperial cities, Basel and Schaffhausen, left the Reich ” to go Swiss”.
There were differences between the Hochstifts, the secular land controlled directly by a bishop which comprised some 1/6th or 1/7th of the Reich, and the wider dioceses, which lead to differences between clerical and secular courts. Bishops’ jurisdiction was disputed by cities leading to cases of the bishop leaving the city and setting up his palace elsewhere, the Bishop of Cologne at Bonn.
Whaley sees the fragmented Reich as facilitating the early spread of Protestantism. It meant neither Protestants or Catholics were ever wholly dominant.
Cathedral chapters attempted to take over parishes, exploiting income rights etc more intensively than had noble patrons. Princely territories were maintained by primogeniture, sending younger children to monasteries and convents. Thus cathedral chapters were aristocratic, described as “welfare institutes for the German nobility”. Luther’s criticism of monasticism led to many leaving the monasteries. By around 1560 69 out of 160 German Augustinian houses had ceased to exist.
All territories were subject to partition, made worse under Protestantism, where younger sons were no longer sent to the church.There were larger contiguous territories in the north and east of Germany into which the Reich had expanded, fragmented territories in Swabia, Franconia and the middle Rhine, around its original core. However even the larger territories, appearing on a map as solid blocks of land. were agglomerations of smaller holdings, to each of which the prince had a separate title.
In the north and east serfdom developed in the 15th and 16th centuries for direct exploitation by the seigneurs. Elsewhere peasants farmed, paying feudal dues with multiple impositions where there were overlapping secular and church authorities. In some areas there were larger peasant holdings maintained by primogeniture and a large class of landless labourers. In others, in the south west and Franconia, partible inheritance led to small farm holdings.
The Knights’ War of 1522/3 was rebellions of the lesser nobility against territorialization, their military usefulness past. It was a series of disconnected events, as was the more serious Peasant Revolt of 1524/5 which was against the consolidation of territories to form coherent domains, serfdom and restrictions on common rights. Whaley thinks it would be better called the Revolt of the Common Man, as in places it involved the urban poor and miners. The revolts were small, but counted as local wars, crushed in some cases by the Swabian League, although in practice this often involved compromise.
Charles V, as Emperor, fought external wars for his other territories outside Germany against the French and Ottomans. Whaley suggests this contributed to establishing which territories were within the German Reich. Whilst he fought such wars outside Germany, what became Lutheranism expanded under the Schmalkaldic League. It was defeated by the Imperialists in the Schmalkaldic War fought 1546/7 in Saxony. Maurice, the Duke of Albertine Saxony, despite himself being a Protestant, campaigned for the Emperor, defeating his Ernestine cousin and as a result replacing him as Saxon Elector.
Following the Schmalkaldic War, Charles V’s Interim Settlement aimed at re-uniting the church, allowing clerical marriage and communion in both kinds, but was accepted by neither side. Maurice changed sides forcing the Emperor to leave Germany, after which the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, whose rule their religion, so a step towards creation of territorial states. However this applied only to Catholics and Lutherans, not Calvinists, and, under the ecclesiastical reservation, did not apply if an ecclesiastical ruler switched to Lutheranism.
The Peace of Augsburg contributed to the maintenance of a long peace until 1618 on the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. This wasn’t wholly, even mainly, a religious conflict, Lutheran territorial princes, at various times, tried to remain neutral or allied with the Emperor, showing loyalty to the Reich. The war began as a conflict over the Reich’s constitution. The essential question was why did the war go on for as long, as it did, fuelled by rivalry between the territorial dynasties within and the Great Powers from outside Germany, but fought largely within Germany, resulting in devastation.
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