Episode 225 – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495

by History of the Germans Podcast on 12th February 202625th February 2026

Part Three of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 225 – Der Ewige Landfrieden (the Public Peace) of 1495.

Let me start today’s episode with some outrageous national stereotypes. If an Englishman is disappointed with the way the affairs of state are conducted, he writes a letter to his member of Parliament. A Frenchman in that same situation rents a tractor and dumps manure outside the Palais d’Elysee. A German threatens to file a lawsuit with the constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht.

Where did the Germans pick up the belief that courts and the law will protect them against government overreach? Sure, 19^th and early 20^th century judges had on occasion stood up to the Kaiser’s administration and the Grundgesetz, the liberal constitution of 1949, had become a cornerstone of our national identity following the comprehensive loss of moral standing.

But there is also a long strain that goes back to the Holy Roman Empire and the two imperial courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat. These courts have a bad reputation, not only because Johan Wolfgang von Goethe saw it fit to ridicule his former place of work. However, not everyone shared this negative perspective. Many social groups down to mere commoners relied on these independent judges to protect their life and property against rapacious princes.

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And with that, back to the show.

I guess you are sitting in your car or on the train listening to this and thinking, how can there be a connection between what you have heard these last 224 episodes about lawlessness and chaos in the Holy Roman Empire and the high status court judgements enjoy in Germany today? I do admit, it is a long shot, but bear with me.

Let’s go back first to the early and high Middle Ages, the Ottonians, Salians and early Hohenstaufen. The emperors of this period saw law and justice as their primary tasks, alongside the protection of the church and the defense of the honor of the empire.

The Laws of the Empire – or Absence Thereof

But what did they mean by law and justice? There was of course no codified law in existence. The closest thing to a law code was the Sachsenspiegel and its variations. But this was a collection of legal customs compiled by a scholar, Eike von Repgow, not a compilation of binding laws. There were other, competing sources of law, the ancient Frankish law codes, specific local traditions, Canon law, aka the law of the church, precedents in the form of previous imperial judgements and charters, some real, some fake.

Roman Law, specifically the Codex Juris of Justinian was added to this mélange in the mid-12^th century when scholars in Bologna recovered the original text and Barbarossa re-issued it as the laws of Roncaglia (episode 55).

There was obviously no coherence between these various sources of law, not even a widely accepted hierarchy. Attempts were made both on the territorial and imperial level to reconcile all these into one coherent “law of the land”, but it took until 1794 before Prussia passed the first comprehensive law code, the Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht. Austria followed in 1802 and France with the much more modern Code Napoleon in 1804 that was adopted by several German principalities. I.e., for 98% of the time the empire existed, there was no coherent law, not even on a territorial level.

The purpose of Judgements

So, without a coherent set of laws, how did the courts arrive at their judgements, and why did so many people think these courts were a place to get actual justice?

If you read about legal disputes in the papers, the headline is usually X won or Y had lost, framing the lawcourts as a place of epic battles where victory or defeat are determined by the rhetoric flourish of the advocates and the stern application of the law.

But most people who go to court do not give a jot about the law. They want something and all other routes to compel the other side to concede have been exhausted. Going to court is expensive and the outcome uncertain, or as my law professors used to say, in court and on the High seas, you are in the hand of the gods. Which is why about 70% of cases that go to court end in a settlement. If you take into account that most lawyers advise clients to settle out of court, the percentage of disputes resolved without an actual court decision may well be north of 90%. In other words, a legal system that promotes viable settlements gets you 90% the way to law and order.

And that is what the imperial courts of the medieval emperors were aiming for, viable settlement. Only rarely would they lay down the law. And where they did so, these judgements were underwritten not just by the king, but by all the powerful individuals who had been involved in finding this solution, committing them to uphold the judgement.

The objective was not to discover the accurate legal solution, but to find a compromise that allowed both parties to leave the court with their honor intact. Disagreements could be framed as misunderstandings and the abandoning of position could be described as magnanimity. In the early Middle Ages, no other form of dispute resolution was possible. This was a society built on personal reputation. The political system consisted of personal bonds between vassals and lords, not institutions. A vassal followed a lord because the lord had promised to protect his rights and status. That expectation would be damaged irrevocably, if the lord was subjected to a humiliating defeat in court. His followers would then wonder whether this lord was still able to protect their land and possessions? At which point the lord’s only remaining option was to rebel against the “bad king”, resulting in civil war. That is what happened way back in episode 3, when Otto the definitely not yet great, convicted duke Eberhard of Franconia to the humiliation of having to carry dogs. Eberhard rebelled, causing a civil war that nearly wiped out Otto.

Bottom line, a medieval imperial court was a forum to negotiate a compromise, not a place to determine guilt or ascertain property rights.

The territorial courts

That should have got us 80% of the way, was it not for some major logistical challenges. There was usually only one emperor and he could not be everywhere. As it happened, from the 12^th century he was barely anywhere. Moreover, from the 12^th century onwards, the operating radius of the emperors had shrunk to the southern parts of the German lands. Large parts of the duchy of Saxony never saw an emperor again for centuries. So, who was supposed to do all that mediating.

Itinerary of kings and emperors 919-1519

In the Carolingian empire, the counts were given the task of adjudicating as representatives of the emperor. But as the role of count had become hereditary, emperors no longer wanted to be held responsible for the decisions of these counts.

This left a vacuum that was gradually filled by the dukes and then the territorial lords. This situation was formally recognized by Frederick II’s privileges for the bishops and princes in the 1230s. Therin the emperor granted the imperial princes the jurisdiction over all the people in their territories, not just their personal servants and vassals.

Based on this privilege the territorial princes established a system of courts, usually split into the lower jurisdiction that focused on civic disputes and minor crimes and misdemeanors and the Blutgerichtsbarkeit, literally the jurisdiction over the blood, which had the right to condemn people to death and use torture to force confessions.

Court procedural for Lower and Higher Bavaria 1520

Lower jurisdiction was exercised by the mayor of the village or town, usually in conjunction with jurors chosen amongst the senior members of the community. As the territorial principalities became more vertically integrated, they were divided up into districts, called Ӓmter, where a judge and court would be established either hearing cases directly or to hear appeals against the lower level justice. And there could be a further appeal to the princely court or a senior law court.

The higher criminal jurisdiction, the Blutgerichtsbarkeit was usually exercised by the prince, either as a Hofgericht, a princely court where the lord would preside, or as a Landgericht, staffed with professional judges and jurors.

Though the territorial courts often had the means to implement their judgements by force, they did maintain the older tradition of preferring settlements over judgements. That was in part down to the complexity and contradictory nature of the law, but also because such compromises were better at calming down tensions. Rebellions and uprisings were common throughout the 15^th and 16^th centuries and could attract the support of jealous neighbours. So princes preferred calm to the strict application of the law.

Similar structures were established in the cities with a lower magistrates court dealing with civil cases and minor misdemeanours and a higher court meeting out more severe punishments.

Appellate Courts and Private Courts

These territorial and city courts brought about a major improvement in law and justice in particular when staffed with professional judges, who kept records and tried to maintain coherence in the application of the law.

But they did have some weaknesses. Territorial laws and customs varied considerably from one place to the other. Behaviours and business practices that were perfectly acceptable in one place could be severely sanctioned in the next. People who stumbled into these idiosyncrasies might refuse to accept the proposed settlements, leaving the case open or potentially escalating.

That was a particular issue for the cities that traded with each other over long distances. Material differences in laws and customs could hamper this trade. That is why many cities, in particular those newly founded in the east, copied existing city laws, Stadtrechte, from so called mother cities. The laws of Magdeburg, Soest and of course Lubeck were wide spread. And to ensure the practical application of these laws remained in synch, complex cases could be brought to the mother city, making for instance City Council of Lubeck the appellate court for many Hanse cities.

From the Stadtrecht (city law) of Hamburg

Territories increasingly shifted to the use of Roman law and asked universities to opine on complex legal questions. That brought their practices into some at least broad alignment, though differences remained.

Leagues were another co-ordination mechanism acting as a bridge between different status groups. For instance the Swabian Leage maintained its own court system to adjudicate conflict between members which comprised princes, cities and imperial knights. The court could even overturn local magistrates decisions, thereby deepening the integration of their legal frameworks.

Landfrieden attempts until 1495

Therefore the empire wasn’t a lawless free for all before 1495, as has often been claimed. The inhabitants of cities and territories were bound by rules, adhered to commercial law practices and were subject to criminal justice, all administered by increasingly professional lawcourts.

But there was a massive gap in this system of the territorial courts. By definition they had no jurisdiction to adjudicate in conflicts between territories, cities or imperial knights. The framework under which these conflicts were supposed to be resolved was the so-called Landfrieden, the public peace.

When the first Landfrieden was promulgated by Henry IV in 1103, it was already a step backwards. His father, Henry III had forced a great pacification of the empire in 1043, that referred all conflicts to resolution by him and a prohibition of violence. But that has in large parts gone down the swanny during the regency of Agnes of Poitou and the conflict between pope and emperor known as the Investiture Controversy that followed.

The concept of a Landfrieden after 1103 was that all the powerful princes come together and promise to resolve their conflicts through mediation. But crucially, it did not and as we have discussed before actually could not ban feuds altogether. Feuds remained allowed, provided the party declared the feud in the proper manner, sought reconciliation first and did not breach specific rules, like for instance, not to attack royal highways.

After this first Landfrieden of 1103, several more were declared, including ones in 1152, 1158,1179,1186,1235, 1287, 1323, 1383, 1389, 1442, 1467. Having to say the same thing again and again is not a good sign.

The success of these declarations of a public peace depended heavily on the ability of the imperial courts to actually mitigate the conflicts before they descended into feuds. You needed a court that was able to come up with sensible settlement proposals and within a reasonable time frame.

And that was not always the case – hence the regular renewals. During the interregnum and then the long period when the imperial title moved between the Habsburgs, Luxemburgs and Wittelsbachs, emperors simply did not have the time to build up the court infrastructure needed. That meant mediation either did not happen, was ill thought out or came too late. Any of those and blood was be spilled. And once they were going at each other hammer and tongs, it was three times harder to get them back to the negotiation table.

In the 15^th century things went properly downhill. Wenceslaus the Lazy, Sigismund and Friedrich III spent most of their time on the eastern edge of the empire dealing with existential threats from Bohemia and Hungary. Adjudication often stalled completely.

As the 15^th century continued this gaping hole in the legal system gave room to veritable chaos. Princely warfare became more intense with the development of artillery and the growing size of the armies. Imperial knights whose income from tenants had shrunk following the Black Death, made up for it by conducting feuds on behalf of paying patrons. Even villages resorted to feuds in order to protect their hard won freedoms.

With no mediation process in place, let alone any kind of sanction for breaking the rules of feuding, things went seriously out of control, so seriously that even the imperial princes demanded an end to the madness.

On the positive side, the idea that violence needed to be a legitimate part of the negotiation process had lost credibility.

The right to feud against a “bad” overlord or an unjustified claim from a neighbour was rooted in the concept of vassalage. As mentioned before, a Lord had to keep face if he wanted to hold on to the support of his vassals. And that meant he had the right to rebel if disrespected. If you check out Otto von Northeim’s speech in episode 31 and 100, you can see the line or arguments that justified rebellion. But by the 15^th century, feuding was no longer necessary. The power of the territorial princes no longer rested on the oaths of their vassals, but on the institutions, administration and military forces they had established. They could now sustain a negative judgement without losing their status.

That is why in 1467 Friedrich III could issue his Landfrieden that banned all feuding outright as lèse-majesté. That was a major step forward, though this arrangement still remained time limited to 10 years. And it lacked an enforcement mechanism, since the Reichskammergericht he had tasked with providing mediation and – if necessary – order the execution of its judgements, ceased to operate after 1475.

The 1495 Landfrieden brought this sorry saga to an end. It declared that (quote):

“..from this moment on, no person of whatever rank, status, or condition shall make war on others, or rob, declare feud with, invade, or besiege them, or help anyone else to do so in person or through servitors; or violently occupy any castle, town, market, fortress, village, farmstead, or hamlet, or seize them illegally against another’s will, or damage them with fire or in any other way, or assist by word or deed or in any other way support or supply any perpetrators of such deeds, or knowingly harbor, house, feed, or give drink, aid, and comfort to such persons.” (end quote).

The Ewige Landfrieden banned private warfare under all and any circumstances and for ever. It established the state’s monopoly of violence. This, once enforced became another nail in the coffin of the Middle Ages.

Reichskammergericht, Reichshofgericht and Kreise

But as Friedrich III could tell you, the operative word here is “once enforced”. Even if everybody would have been happy to outlaw feuds for ever, and not everybody did, that would not have yielded results. Conflicts between the holders of imperial immediacy did not vanish overnight. The dukes still wanted the cities, the landgraves the bishops’ lands, princes still debased currencies and imperial knights kidnapped merchants.

What made the difference was the establishment of two courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat and another coordination mechanism, the Kreise, the imperial circles.

The Reichskammergericht in its latest incarnation was established at the diet of Worms in August 1495, its judges were appointed on October 31^st and it heard its first cases four days later, a sign that at least occasionally, the empire could move swiftly.

The reason it did work, and worked for so long, came down to a number of institutional choices.

As I do not have to explain to our American friends, the composition of the court is almost as important as its remit and procedures.

In case of the Reichskammergericht, the presiding judge, the Kammerrichter, was appointed by the emperor, whilst the judges who shared the decision making, were proposed by the imperial estates. The imperial estates submitted a list from which the incumbent judges chose the new member of the court. The judges, including the presiding judge, swore allegiance to the court, not to the emperor and not to the imperial estates.

Though these appointments did have some influence, in practice, the Reichskammergericht acted independently from the emperor and the imperial princes. It had its own budget, its own administration and chancellery.

The Reichskammergericht was also based away from the Habsburg’s capital, first as an itinerant court, then from 1527 until 1689 in Speyer and after that in Wetzlar.

The Reichskammergericht Building in Wetzlar

This degree of independence set it apart from the territorial court that aligned much closer to the increasingly absolutist territorial princes.

Its remit was to adjudicate disputes between the imperial estates and other holders of imperial immediacy and banning anyone who broke the public peace for any reason. And, beyond this role as protector of the public peace, it also acted as the final appellate court above the territorial courts. This latter role was however unevenly distributed across the empire, since the Prince Electors, all the Habsburg lands and several other senior lords had the “ius de non appellando”, a privilege that protected their judgments from being reviewed by the Reichskammergericht. Over time the court was able to chip away at these exemptions, before it gained a much wider remit in 1526, which we will discuss in a minute.

Two years after the Reichstag established the new Reichskammergericht, Maximilian established another court, the Reichshofrat. The Reichhofrat was very much the court of the emperor, as opposed to the Reichskammergericht that was the court of the empire. Its judges were appointed by the emperor and it was based wherever the emperor resided. Its remit was conflicts over the rights and obligations of vassals. In practice this involved mostly matters of inheritance. Typical issues were the succession to fiefs where the incumbent family had died out or the permission to split a fief between multiple heirs.

The two courts did have quite a bit of overlap, since inheritance conflicts could easily tip over into breaches of the public peace. To limit forum shopping, the courts agreed a rule that no case could be brought if it was already pending in front of the other court.

The other Achilles heel of previous Landfrieden arrangements, beyond courts simply shutting down, had been the lack of viable enforcement mechanisms. The way the 1495 reforms addressed that, was by allowing the Reichskammergericht to demand the Reichstag to issue an imperial ban to coerce a reluctant party to adhere to its rulings. That was deemed too slow and complicated and from 1559 the emperor was tasked with issuing the ban on behalf of the Reichskammergericht. The Reichshofrat, as the court of the emperor could issue the imperial ban directly, though there were some limitation to prevent abuse.

Imperial ban was however very sparsely used as a tool. The sanctions associated with it were often going too far. It allowed anyone to kill the banned person without repercussions and his property and fiefs could be confiscated without compensation. The execution of an imperial ban threatened to unsettle the social order, creating a high bar to its application.

The Reichskammergericht – like the medieval imperial courts before – preferred finding viable compromises, rather than bringing down the full force of the law. Where they needed execution, they relied more on the imperial circles. These circles had been instituted in 1512 as a means to co-ordinate on a regional basis. There were initially six circles and later 10, comprising the entire empire except for Bohemia and Switzerland. The Kreise became the closest thing the empire developed in terms of administration. They organised the military forces of the empire, collected the taxes based on the Matrikel system, executed imperial and court orders and maintained the peace in their region. They were headed by a Kreistag, an assembly of the Kreis members. It is here in the Kreistag, where the smaller estates of the empire, the cities, counts and minor princes were engaged. That is where they passed legislation, co-ordinated infrastructure projects and settled their differences. Thanks to the imperial circles, the empire was a lot more coherent in its actions and laws than these maps with 350 tiny statelets suggest. They were so successful that older leagues, like the Swabian league, were ultimately replaced by these imperial circles.

One would assume that the Reichskammergericht would be more popular for claimants than the Reichshofrat. The ofrmer was independent, whilst the other was under the direct control of the emperor. However, the Reichskammergericht found itself often overwhelmed with cases, making its proceedings slow and protracted. Some of the numbers, in particular Goethe’s claim of 10s of thousands of open cases were clearly exaggerated. Sure, there were cases that had been ongoing for a century. But these were often inheritance cases where the purpose was to settle the matter in an amicable way to prevent open hostilities, a scenario where delay can be the prudent choice. The Reichskammergericht regularly cleared its backlog suggesting it could not have been all that bad.

And, if necessary the Reichskammergericht could act very quickly. For instance Commissioners could be sent with injunctions to mobilise the military forces of the Kreise to prevent breaches of the peace.

Nevertheless, the Reichshofrat had a reputation to be quicker and sometimes more effective since its enforcement could rely on the full force of the Habsburg emperor. Moreover, despite its institutional attachment, the Reichshofrat gained a reputation as a defender of smaller imperial vassals against expanding territorial princes.

The court procedures and the witch craze

Both Reichskammergericht and Reichshofrat conducted their cases mainly in writing. Lawyers submitted writs and memoranda summarising their arguments. Before 1495 the courts operated in the fashion of an Anglo-Saxon court, basing its decision only on evidence brought forward by the parties. The Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat procedure allowed the courts to task officials with the collection of evidence, including taking witness statements.

This more inquisitive process spread across the legal system of the empire to the territorial courts, which had some painful unintended consequences.

The imperial criminal code of 1532 shifted the responsibility to prove guilt from the accuser to a public prosecutor. Previously an accuser had to bring the evidence for the alleged crime and if he failed to prove his allegation could face severe financial and even criminal recriminations. Once this task has been taken over by a public prosecutor it became a lot less risky and less expensive to report crimes. So far so sensible. The more crimes get reported, the more likely it is that they get prosecuted.

What turned it into a toxic cocktail was the rise in allegations of witchcraft. Witchcraft was a crime and prosecutors were compelled to investigate them. Torture was a broadly acceptable tool in the investigative process. Plus the criminal codes of the time contained scarce protection against arbitrary arrest. One can imagine what then happened. Investigators torture alleged witches who bring up names who in turn get tortured as well, leading to even more arrests until the whole empire is in the grip of a veritable witch craze. Over the course of the 16^th and early 17^th century territorial courts had 22,500 alleged witches executed.

Map of Convictions of Witches in Bavaria

Neither the Reichskammergericht nor the Reichshofrat had tools to intervene, since criminal law, the “jurisdiction of the blood” had become the exclusive prerogative of the territorial princes. The only grounds for intervention was a breach of procedural rules, which curbed some excesses, but failed to prevent the ultimate outcome. A very sad topic we will probably have to get back to at some stage.

The broader remit after 1526

Against this darkness stands a more positive and more lasting impact of the system of imperial justice. In 1526 the remit of the Reichskammergericht was expanded. It allowed ordinary citizens to challenge their prince if he or she overstepped his legitimate powers, for instance unlawful exactions, arbitrary violence or the violation of traditional rights and protections.

This is a fairly rare institutional set-up in continental europe before the 19^th century. By submitting themselves to the court’s verdicts, the princes gave up a big chunk of their autonomy. For instance the duke of Hohenzollern-Hechingen had to return the hunting guns he had taken off his peasants and reverse enclosures. A count found himself imprisoned for 10 years for having forged his subjects signatures on loan agreements. Duke Karl Leopold of Mecklenburg was deposed for putting excessive taxes on his subjects and trying to suppress his ducal assembly.

Why did German princes accept that? The decision came in the immediate aftermath of the peasant’s revolt of 1525, the largest uprising in Europe before the French revolution. It had become clear to the imperial estates, in particular the smaller ones, that they needed a way to ease social tensions. Populations who know that there is a way to seek legal redress for perceived infringements are less likely to risk life, limb and property on the barricades. It did not work perfectly and there were several rebellions and uprisings in the 17^th and 18^th century. But they were limited in sale and severity, compared to similar occurrences in Bohemia and Hungary where there was no room for redress.

Here is what Peter Wilson said about the consequences: quote: This process had been labelled ‘juridification’ and involved a fundamental change in behaviour at all social levels. Lords had previously used violence to assert authority and status. Feuding had been criminalised in 1495 and now repression was likely to be condemned in the courts”. The courts provided a platform for princes, burghers, peasants even the Jewish minority to hash out their differences based on the understanding that each side could call on certain rights and protections.

Other than in France, common people in the empire did not feel utterly powerless before the institutions of their princes or the emperors. Sure, a court case was hard to mount and ruinously expensive, but it was possible and it had a chance of success.

That in part explains the lack of enthusiasm for the French revolution amongst the broader population in Germany. Like in Britain, Germans were quickly turned off by the excesses of Jacobin rule and they simply did not see themselves being as oppressed by their governments as the French. That did change once the empire and its legal safeguards against princely overreach had gone, but it was there in 1789.

The other lasting impact was that calling a court for help became the Germans’ reflexive reaction to injustice. Germans, or at least Germans of my generation, see their country first and foremost as a Rechtsstaat, a state under the law.

Let me end with a quote I found in Peter Wilson, by a Habsburg Official, Joseph Haas bemoaning the dissolution of the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat in 1806 (quote):

“The judicial power [which] was until now the shining jewel of our constitution. Two Imperial Courts, whose councillors were appointed with great care and were free of external influence, competed with each other in the impartial administration of justice, and gave even the lowest subject right against the most powerful prince”. Now that these are dissolved, he goes on to say: “there is no doubt that canals will be dug, roads laid, avenues and parks, theatres and pools created, cities illuminated, and we will shine and starve. The only robbers threatening the subjects’ property will be the tax collector and the French and German Soldiers” (end quote).

And this brings our mini series about the Imperial reform of 1495 to its conclusion. Next week I will be away in Naples because I cannot bear the incessant rain here in London any longer. But I leave you a particular present. I did an interview with professor Duncan Hardy who I have mentioned several times before and who is a true expert in the empire of the 15^th and 16^th century. I am sure you will find that as enlightening as I did.

And in the meantime, spare a thought for your hard toiling podcaster, who has no Reichskammergericht to call upon for fair wages, but lives in hope of the generosity of his fellow history nerds. If you want to be part of the exclusive club that luxuriates in the soft glow of your fellow listeners gratitude, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and click on any one of the options.

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Episode 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire

by History of the Germans Podcast on 5th February 202618th February 2026

Part Two of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire

I am afraid today’s episode is not your usual swordplay and skullduggery. What we are looking at today is the Reichstag as it operated throughout the Holy Roman Empire from 1495 to 1803. Sounds a bit like dour constitutional law, but bear with me.

We will look at a couple of classic tropes, like, whether the empire consisted of more than 300 sovereign states who could do whatever they wanted, whether the Reichstag was a talking shop hat never did anything except stopping the emperor from becoming a proper monarch. And, as usual, we will talk about money and printing, and why German politician speeches are invariably long on fact and short on rhetoric.

So, let’s start at the beginning. When was the first Reichstag?

The shift from Royal Assembly (Hoftag) to Imperial diet (Reichstag)

Oh – and that is already the first booby trap. Because if you go to the historyofthegermans.com website, not just to support the show, but also to consult the transcript, you can find me mentioning a Reichstag in Worms in 1069. And if you go to the internet, you can find another Diet of Worms in 770, that was so long ago, it was called by Charlemagne’s father, Pippin the Short.

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But these aren’t real Reichstage. Why? Is it because the chroniclers in the 11^th century called them something different? No, there were several gatherings that were referred to as Diata Imperialii, which is Latin for Reichstag. What happened is that in the 1980s some German historians met up and decided that all Imperial assemblies that took place before 1495 were Hoftage, “Royal Assemblies”, and that those that came after Maximilian’s Imperial Reforms were to be called Reichstage, “Imperial Diets”.

Was that just down to the uncontrollable urge to categorize everything from the size of sheets of paper to the 20+ categories of delays on the Deutsche Bahn trains. Or does it mean something?

The key difference between a Hoftag and a Reichstag is the role of the king or emperor in the proceedings.

A Hoftag in the Middle Ages was all about the emperor. He called the meeting, he presided over the proceedings. If there were decisions to be made, like for instance the resolution of a dispute or the conviction of a criminal, it was the emperor who chaired the panel of judges. Princes who were dissatisfied with how things went made their views known by leaving the Hoftag. Speaking out against the emperor was not really an option.

Moritz von Schwind: Der Hoftag Ottos des Großen in Quedlinburg 973, um 1850

At the diet of Worms in 1495, things were dramatically different. As we heard last week Maximilian wasn’t allowed to take part in any of the debates. His role was limited to opening the assembly, setting the agenda and – once the imperial estates had concluded their debates – either approve or reject the proposals. So, during the weeks and months the debates were going on within the three colleges, of the electors, the princes and the cities, he was basically hopping up and down outside the locked doors shouting, give me the money, the French king is about to slip back out of Italy and it will take fifty years of war to get rid of him again.

But he could not be heard, because he was – outside. All he could really do was gently massage the minds of participants in 1 on 1 private meetings.

In short, both the Hoftag and the Reichstag are gatherings of the most powerful people of the realm, but the Hoftag is presided over by the king, whilst the Reichstag largely excludes the king form the deliberations. This idea of banning the king except for special occasions still exists in the UK. By constitutional convention king Charles III is not allowed to enter the Commons debating chamber. The last king to set foot in there had been Charles I in 1642. And that is why the State Opening of Parliament takes place in the House of Lords, where the king is allowed to enter.

The diet in Worms was however not the first time the imperial estates got together without their king. Sometimes that was due to natural causes, as in when the king or emperor had died and the estates came together to elect a new one. But there had also been assemblies like the one in Trebur in 1076, where the excommunicated emperor Henry IV was banned from taking part (episode 33 if I am not mistaken). And then there are the assemblies where antikings were elected, like the one in March 1077, where for obvious reasons the reigning king wasn’t present.

During the 15^th century, when the emperors Sigismund and Friedrich III were often far too busy to come to the assemblies they had called, the imperial estates had become accustomed to discussing their issues by themselves, so accustomed indeed that they no longer wanted him to be in the room when he finally showed up.

I did try to pin down the exact date when they threw the emperor out, but have not got to the bottom of it. What we do know is that in 1495, the rule was “No kings, no emperors indoors”.

And this obviously changed the nature of these gatherings. Earlier assemblies were grounded in the medieval understanding that vassals owed their lord not just military aid, but also advice and good counsel. Hence they were meant to improve the ruler’s decision making in war and justice by providing information or suggestions, not by forcing him in one way or another.

As we move into the 14^th and 15^th century, these assemblies take a more antagonistic stance, demanding that the emperor resolves key issues, like the schism, the endless feuding, marauding mercenaries or foreign incursions. As we have seen, these antagonistic stances culminated in the blow-up of 1495, where the imperial estates tried to put a gun to Maximilian’s head.

So, there really is a change in the late 15^th century that justifies the distinction between Hoftag and Reichstag, but I will not go and correct every episode where I used the term Reichstag before. If this was a book, I would probably do it, but it isn’t and I won’t.

The peculiar composition of the Reichstag

In 1495 the Reichstag was by no means the only assembly that took part in the governance of kingdoms and principalities. The English parliament had already been around for 200plus years, the Polish Sejm and the Cortes of Spain and Portugal claim to be even older. There were assemblies in Hungary, Estates general in the duchy of Burgundy and France, royal councils in Denmark and Sweden. And on the level below, the imperial principalities, there were assemblies, Landstände, where representatives of the local nobility, clergy, cities and commoners agreed their position vis-a-vis their lord. The Landtag of Württemberg was one of the most prominent and lasting of these, but we encountered them as well in Austria and Tyrol in recent episodes. Almost every political entity in the 15^th and 16^th century had some sort of representative body alongside its ruler. They all different in terms of member selection, organisation, procedure etc, but even then, the Reichstag was very much an outlier.

Blick auf die württembergischen Landtagsgebäude in der Stuttgarter Kronprinzstraße im 19. Jahrhundert. Links an der Ecke zur Kienestraße stand das Gebäude der Ersten Kammer (Kammer der Standesherren), ganz rechts das Gebäude der Zweiten Kammer (Kammer der Abgeordneten) mit dem Halbmondsaal.

Let’s start with the composition – who is a member of the Reichstag and why?

In England parliament had the lords and the commoners, the Cortes in Spain were organized into clergy, nobles and procurators of the cities. In France, the Estates General comprised the three orders of clergy, nobility and commoners. All of these were meant to represent their social group in their dealings with the king.

In 1521, when membership of the Reichstag was initially fixed, there were 402 estates invited to participate , divided into three colleges. The most senior college was that of the 7 electors. The College of the princes comprised 51 ecclesiastical princes, 32 secular princes, 83 prelates and 143 counts. And lastly the 86 free imperial cities formed the third college.

Reichstag in Worms 1521 (the one with Martin Luther)

But, not every count, duke or prince was admitted to the Reichstag. Only if your great,great,great,great,great and some more greats grandfather had been enfeoffed with a county or duchy directly by the emperor, then you had a seat or share of a seat in the Reichstag. However, if you were a wealthy count, even if you were three times richer and three times more powerful than the wealthiest count in the Reichstag, but you were a vassal of a territorial prince, no dice. Equally only free imperial cities were admitted, even though many were smaller than say Stralsund or Rostock. The key difference to England, France and almost everywhere else is that the Reichstag was not based on social orders, like noble, churchman or commoner, but based on whether or not there was a direct vassalage connection to the emperor – the famous immediacy.

Basically the Reichstag reflected and continued the feudal status hierarchy which was already ancient history by 1495. The idea was that the obligation of the imperial vassals to provide advice and council to the king, was flipped into a right to take part in the decision making. And this right was not based on being a member of a particular social group like noble, clergy or commoner, but on the ancient bond of vassalage, established hundreds of years ago and renewed dozens of times since. That explains the presence of the free imperial cities. They too had become vassals of the emperor when he had granted them their charter. They were there not to represent the interests of the urban population of the empire, but to safeguard the interest and liberties of their hometowns.

The Quaternion Eagle, hand-coloured woodcut (c. 1510) by Hans Burgkmair.

If one were to take this logic to its conclusion the imperial knights who were direct vassals of the emperor should have been invited to vote in the Reichstag. But logic is apparently only for those who can afford it.

The historian Peter Wilson describes this unusual structure of the empire as a “mixed Monarchy”. If you really want to understand how the Holy Roman Empire worked, get his brilliant book alternatively called “The Heart of Europe” or “The Holy Roman Empire”. This is where most of what I am taking about today comes from.

What was the Reichstag and all these other assemblies for?

Now, having discussed the intellectual Uberbau of the Reichstag as a continuation of the feudal structure in a modernized form, let’s talk about the practical purpose of these assemblies and the Reichstag in particular.

These early modern assemblies were not meant as a representation of the will of the people or some such newfangled stuff. They served two basic purposes, one was to grant a special status to the important constituents of the realm, usually the bishops, dukes, counts, nobles etc. That was supposed to keep them engaged and aligned with the king or prince. The assembly was a place to find consensus amongst the people who really mattered.

Secondly, assemblies and parliaments were there to facilitate tax collection. Most kings and princes did not have their own tax collection infrastructure. That meant they were to a large extent dependent on the willingness of their subjects to cough up the cash. Such willingness is typically correlated to the amount of influence the payer has over the use of the funds, or for our American friends, no taxation without representation. Hence most of the early modern estates included some form of representation of those who ended up paying. And in many cases the estates established and maintained the tax collection infrastructure, thereby ensuring the fairness or sometimes unfairness of the process.

That is why most of these assemblies had a separate chamber or order for the commoners who bore the lion’s share of the tax burden created by the lord’s decision to support the king’s wars, palace building or mistresses.

If you look at the parliament In England and the estates general in France you can see a fairly clean picture – the nobles and clergy debate the grand politics and then the funding is put t the Commons or Tiers Etat. And you can see how this pattern then developed further, either organically as in England or as a rupture in France. The taxpaying Commons and Tiers Etat demanded more and more say in the big decisions and then power shifts to these precursors of modern parliaments.

Why the Reichstag could not become the nucleus of a democratic parliament

The Reichstag did not experience such a trajectory. It started in 1495, ran until 1803 and was revived in a fundamentally different form in 1866/1871.

The stability of the membership

Part of why the Reichstag never became a true representative structure was the fixed membership. In England the king can and always could appoint literally anyone to the house of Lords, like for instance a 29-year old parliamentary aide with no publicly known skills or achievements.

In the empire, that was not that easy. For example the Liechtensteins, who had for centuries been amongst the largest landowners in Bohemia, Moravia and Austria were elevated to imperial princes during the 30-years war. But it took them almost another century before they could purchase the tiny fiefs of Vaduz and Schellenberg that gave them access to the Reichstag and are today the country of Liechtenstein.

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor receives the Augsburg Confession at the Diet of Augsburg on 25 June 1530

Effectively the membership of the Reichstag shrunk throughout most its history. In 1521, the initial tally was 402 imperial estates and by 1792 that had gone down to 204 imperial estates. If you forget about the back and forth with the Palatine vote, only one Elector was added before 1803, the Elector of Hannover. The secular princes went from 51 to 84, in part through the elevation of counts to princes. 21 of the 51 ecclesiastical principalities disappeared during the reformation. Imperial cities shrank from 86 to 51 and the number of counts fell from 143 to 48 through expiry of the family, sale or elevation to princely rank. Only about fifty new members were created throughout that period.

Stability in the upper house is neither unusual nor an impediment to a transition to a modern parliament. In England the House of Lords was slowly sidelined and in France the Assemblée Nationale did away with the colleges of the nobles and their heads. It is the representation of the commoners that tended to be the nucleus of democracy.

The lopsided structure of the taxation model

As we said, the reason that commoners are invited to assemblies is because they pay the lion’s share of the taxes. And matters of burden sharing and taxation gave parliament and the Assemblee Nationale their role in the English and the French Revolution.

The Reichstag could never play such a role, because the Reichstag did not decide on individual taxation. In 1495 the Reichstag approved the “common penny” a tax levied on every household in the empire. That system failed, mainly because the empire could not collect the tax. The princes had refused to let the emperor use their infrastructure to the extent they had one in the first place. Collection was then given to the parish priests. And parish priests had no interest in chasing their flock for some imperial tax they would not see any benefit from.

After this failure the empire reverted back to the system of the Imperial register or Imperial Matrikel that existed since 1420. This register contained a fixed quota of soldiers each imperial estate had to provide if called. So for instance the duke of Cleves owed 60 horse and 540 men on foot, whilst the abbot of St. Maximian owed 6 horse and 44 men on foot. Such small contingents had become ineffective by the 1500s, so the obligation was converted into a cash contribution.

Soldiers on horse (Ross) and on foot (xu Fuss) in the Reichsmatrikel of 1532.

This system had a number of advantages. First, it allowed to break down the overall commitment made to the imperial estates. So if the Reichstag awarded 100,000 florins for a campaign against the Turk, it was clear to the last penny how much of that the duke of Cleves or the abbot of St. Maximian owed. It also allowed the wealthiest estates, namely the great cities to hide how wealthy they really were. If taxes had been collected directly, for one it would be hard to predict how much would actually be collected, and it would show how many taxable households there were in say Nürnberg. And if the neighboring princes had known how much wealth there was, the cities feared, they would be gobbled up.

On the downside, the Matrikel system was a) very imbalanced, with some places paying high dues relative to economic capacity and others low ones and b) only very rarely reset. So the matrikel became a sort of unit of measure. For instance during the long Turkish war 1663 to 1742, the Reichstag would regularly express their commitment as x times the matrikel, i.e., x times their commitment in the imperial register.

All this meant was that the level of taxation agreed in the Reichstag had limited impact on the man on the street. Sure, if the empire demanded very high contributions, their local lord would raise local taxes to pay for it. However, when the emperor asked for lower or no taxes, the local lord was unlikely to reduce the tax burden. He would simply keep it for him or herself. Moreover, maximum 10% of the empire’s population lived in the free imperial cities represented in the Reichstag. Even if these estates had an interest in keeping taxes low for the common man, they did not care for the other 90% of the empire’s population. And because the composition of the Reichstag was extremely static, that never changed.

The Reichstag as part of the “Status Hierarchy”

So, if the Reichstag was not about representing the interests of social groups, not even in the rather rudimentary early modern/medieval way, what was it about?

In the main, it was a about status. The empire was held together by the status hierarchy it conveyed to its members. Say you were a Prince Elector, the highest princely rank in the empire with the right to elect the emperor. This status can only exist as long as there is an empire and an emperor to elect. Therefore, even once the elections had become non-contentious acclamation of whichever Habsburg’s turn it was, there were still elections, so that the electors could feel valued and important. You may think how backward, but I find this a lot less ridiculous than the French aristocrats believing their self-worth was dependent on which part of the royal underwear they could pass to his majesty during their morning levee.

The election of Matthias as Roman-German Emperor by the prince electors in 1612 depicted on a contemporary engraving

This status model was extremely successful, arguably more successful than anything the emperors had tried in the centuries before.

You may painfully remember that we split the History of the Germans some two years ago and discussed the North, namely the Eastern Expansion into the formerly Slavic lands east of the Elbe, the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. The reason for that was that the empire had broken into two parts, the lands near to the king and the lands far from the king.

The former were mainly southern Germany, Austria, Bohemia and the Rhine Valley, lands where the kings and emperors had their base, where they would often pass through on their way to coronations, elections and imperial diets. Meanwhile the lands north of the Main River and East of the Rhine had drifted further and further away from the imperial orbit. Martin Rady commented that the very first time an emperor came to Pomerania was in 1712, and that was the emperor of all the Russians.

Basically the dukes of Mecklenburg, Holstein, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Calenberg etc. barely featured in the imperial history since the 11^th century and even the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg put in only brief appearances. Basically they did not see much value in what the empire had to offer and they got busy with the Scandinavian Kingdoms, England and Poland.

The imperial reforms of 1495 changed that. Being an imperial prince with a full vote in the college of Princes provided them with a sense of importance and status that suddenly made it worth while getting involved with imperial politics again. Status was not the only thing, the other institutions, like the courts, the eternal peace etc., played a role as well.

But this was a time where status was exceedingly important. Princes were constantly stretching themselves and their states to keep up with the Joneses’. If your neighbor built a theatre, you needed one too. Your collection of Chinese porcelain had to be on par with the other princes. At weddings and hunts, you had to scrub up not just nicely but real nice. The obsession filled the country with literally thousands of baroque palaces, gardens, follies, hunting lodges, opera houses and whatever a discerning prince could need. Each one trying to be a mini or sometimes maxi Versailles and always, always, bigger and better than the one next door.

Apart from self-aggrandization, the status component did also have tangible benefits for those who had it. Basically once an entity had become an imperial estate, it had become unlikely that they would fall under the control of a territorial prince. For instance, not a single free imperial city lost their status after 1607. And that mattered.

Take the city of Trier is an example. Trier had sent its archbishop off to live out his life in Koblenz and had become a free city. As a free city, they were invited to come to the Reichstag in 1495 and several occasions thereafter. They even hosted a Reichstag in 1512. But most of the time, Trier did not show up and, crucially, refused to commit to the imperial taxation system. So the city was unceremoniously dropped from the 1521 register. When they realized what they had done, they desperately wanted to get back in and crucially, be again recognized as a free, imperial city. But the Imperial court, the Reichskammergericht decided in 1580 that, if you did not pay, you had no right to play. And now it was too late to come back in. The Archbishop took back control of the city and the dream of freedom and independence was over, sacrificed by a stingy accountant.

That explains why the much wiser burghers of Lübeck, who had had only scant interaction with the empire until then, decided to pay 4x what they used to in order to be a member of the Reichstag. Lübeck remained a free imperial city and and later a city state within Germany until 1937. Money well spent I would say.

The Decision making process in the Reichstag

Decision making in the Reichstag was famously laborious and slow. Jakb Wimpfeling said already in 1500 that “The Reichstag is a body where the Emperor proposes, the colleges deliberate in secret, vote separately, then quarrel endlessly until nothing is decided—or everything is diluted to meaninglessness.” Regensburg, where the Reichstag would sit permanently after 1663 was better known for the quality of its taverns than of its debates.

As we discussed last week, there were three separate colleges, one for the electors, one for the imperial princes as well as the counts and prelates and one for the imperial cities. Voting happened first within the colleges followed by an arbitration process between the colleges. That arbitration process began with aligning electors and princes before the cities were brought in. Only once all three colleges had reached unanimity did the Reichstag decision go to the emperor who had only the choice between accepting or sending it back to be debated for another month or two.

That sounds complex already, and when you take into account that there were 402 imperial estates with a seat in the Reichstag, it sounds almost impossible to manage.

But here is the good news, only 281 of the 402 imperial estates ever participated in a Reichstag. Usually no more that half of the invitees showed up. Even at the crucial Reichstag of 1495 only 147 estates were present.

And there is the other important point. Because the seat was linked to the territory, not to individuals, one single individual could represent more than one vote. So, if a bishop held several bishoprics, he had multiple votes. Or if a count sold his county, or passed it on via inheritance, this vote could now be exercised by someone else. After the reformation, several bishoprics became principalities and integrated into other territorial lordships. And occasionally fiefs moved across as a consequence of war.

So, after all this two and fro in 1792 Austria held 1 electoral vote, 3 princely votes and 2 comital votes. Prussia, though smaller in territory, had 1 electoral, but 8 princely and 1 comital vote. Of the remaining 84 princely votes, 30 were held by bishops and abbots, the rest by 35 secular princes and electors plus Denmark and Sweden with one vote each.

The smaller entities did not really matter. The 48 counts and 40 prelates shared just 6 votes of the 90 votes in the College of Princes. The 51 remaining cities were so disadvantaged by the voting process, their influence was also usually marginal.

If you then take into account that many of the ecclesiastical princes were second sons of the princely or electoral houses, the Reichstag really required only about 40 to 50 individuals to agree. And since rarely more than half of them showed up, we are looking at more like 20-30 guys taking the decisions. That sounds a lot more viable than 402.

Were there really over 300 sovereign states in the empire?

Basically these hundreds tiny statelets did not carry much weight in the Reichstag. And the idea that they were like independent sovereigns is also not true. Sure, the very largest ones, Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Hannover would forge their own foreign policy and sent envoys to foreign courts, occasionally courts where they were themselves the king, as for example in England, Poland, Denmark, Russia and Sweden.

But for someone like the counts of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim with their six villages and oversized Schloss, there was no way they would send an envoy abroad. At a stretch they may appoint a representatives to the Reichstag, but usually only as a joint effort together with their cousins in Neuenstein and Öhringen and still their representative was not be working exclusively for them. If they had to take a stance in major conflicts, they usually aligned with one of their bigger neighbors.

Such micro-principalities were much more involved in the 10 imperial circles which we will discuss in more detail next week.

What powers did the Reichstag have?

The English parliament and many other assemblies had the power to decide on war and peace, since they controlled the money needed to conduct such wars.

On paper that was the same in the Reichstag. If the emperor wanted to take the empire to war against for example France, he could only do that with the consent of the Reichstag. However, every imperial estate, even a tiny one, was allowed to go to war against foreign enemies, provided it did not harm neither the emperor nor the empire. For example in 1698 the elector of Saxony joined Russia in a war against Sweden without asking the Reichstag. And that logic applied to the emperor as well. He could go to war against France in his capacity as Lord of the Low Countries and archduke of Austria.

The emperor only required the Reichstag consent for his war with France, if he wanted access to imperial resources, either in the form of taxes or military forces. As we have seen with Maximilian I in 1495, that can occasionally be decisive, but not always. And if they could conduct the war using just their own resources, the Habsburg occasionally did go without Reichstag approval. I guess in about 2 years, when we have worked our way through the incessant wars of the 16^th, 17^th and 18h century, we will have a much better perspective on whether the Reichstag and its support mattered to the outcome.

Reichstag matters beyond war and peace

War and taxes was however not the only topic of debate in the Reichstag. Its other tacit objective as to improve co-ordination and coherence across the empire.

The Reichstag for instance ensured that people could move freely between the imperial estates. The problem then was not so much people trying to come in, rather than people trying to get away, for example from the draft into the Prussian army, religious prosecution or just general economic malaise. Quite often the states competed for immigrants, like the French Huguenots in order to refill the population depleted by war and disease. The Reichstag ensured that most people in the empire could take advantage of these sometimes generous offers.

Another issue that came up regularly was coinage. For centuries the emperors had been forced to pass the imperial regalia to the princes, which included the right to mint their own coins. So that by 1495 there were 456 places with the right to produce currency. Minting was a short term money spinner for many cash strapped princes, because they could call in the existing coins in their lands and reissue coin with lower gold or silver content. Or they would simply create vast amounts of debased coins to pay their soldiers, resulting in immediate inflation and occasionally a financial crash.

The Reichstag passed rules limiting the number of mints to no more than 40, set standards for the two most common coins, the Florin and the Thaler and intervened again and again in cases of debasement. They did not succeed completely and there were always wildly different coins in circulation, but they curbed the worst excesses. And maybe one central currency in the hand of an absolutist king would not have been such a great idea – just ask the French about the Mississippi bubble.

Similar efforts were made to reduce the number of toll stations that seriously hampered trade. For instance transporting salt from Frankfurt to Cologne added 60% in tolls. As a consequence merchants would unload wine south of Mainz and transport them over land via Frankfurt and Kassel and then on the Weser down to the North Sea. An absurd detour. Here the Reichstag was less successful, but note that in 1766 France still employed 20,000 revenue officers collecting tolls on domestic traffic and treated Lorraine as a foreign country.

Another – unintended – benefit of the Reichstag was that it provided a sort of permanent international conference. The Habsburgs had of course a permanent presence, as did the kings of Denmark and Sweden. Envoys from France and Italy could easily come to the Reichstag and use it as a platform for informal discussions.

The Bureaucracy

Something else that is quite specific to the Reichstag was the amount of paper it produced. For one, most Reichstag decisions were published in print, the first one in 1486. The Corpus Recessum Imperii that recorded all the Reichstag decisions was first published in 1501, a solid 270 years before Hansard recorded the debates in the English parliament. The proceedings at the Reichstag became part of a broad political information exchange that got turbo boosted when the Thurn and Taxis family opened the imperial postal service to private users in 1516. Germany had the first daily newspaper in Europe, 67 years before England. Apparently in the 16^th and 17^th centuries this country of poets and thinkers was full of news junkies.

In general, the Reichstag was mainly driven by written memoranda and weighty policy papers, not by rousing speeches. That had a lot to do with the habit of sending representatives to the Reichstag. The gatherings were scheduled for 2 months and often went on much longer. Most princes found it impossible or inopportune to leave their comfy palaces for such a long time. Moreover, the Reichstag was initially gathering in different imperial cities, before it finally settled in Regensburg. If the empire had had a capital, the important princes would have established a town palace there, as was the case in Paris, Madrid or London. And in that case they would have attended in person more often. But with an itinerant Reichstag, a large proportion of participants had sent their councilors or envoys. And they would rarely have the authority to commit their prince on matters not previously discussed.

That rendered stirring speeches rather useless. The audience could not really decide matters on their own. So they would ask for a written copy of the speech they could send to their boss with a suggestion on how to vote. They would receive a letter back, which they would read out to their fellow deputies, who would in turn ask for a copy of this letter to send to their bosses and then receive a letter back, that would be read out and copied so forth, and so forth and so forth. This made the process very slow and, I think the polite word is, lifeless.

Handbook of German Laws (1787), 814 pages (for just just parts 6,7 and 8)

However, it had a couple of advantages. The public could follow the debates almost in real time even if they were hundreds of miles away. And given that waving arms and rhetoric flourishes were effectively pointless, the debate became more focused on facts and the thorough review of competing arguments.

I do not have a source for this, but I believe this tradition of written debate aimed at the rational weighing of arguments has been embedded into German political discourse. Debates in the Bundestag are shockingly dry and dour, in particular when compared to the intellectual sparring at Prime Minister’s question time or at Senate Hearings.

That can of course be because Germans have come out of the 20^th century with a strong suspicion of stirring speeches. But even before 1933, Germany did not have debating societies like the Oxford Union that rates rhetoric over content. The Lesegesellschaften or reading societies of the 18^th and 19^th century tried to find a deeper understanding of politics, poetry and philosophy, not to crown a winner.

So maybe 300 years of swapping written memoranda had left an imprint on the German political culture that we now refuse to shake.

Summary

If we pull it all this together, the Reichstag was verbose, slow, unexciting, all about status, not representation and not as effective as one would have wanted. And it slowed down the consolidation of the German lands by effectively guaranteeing the continued existence of its smaller members. All this is true. But one could look at it in another way, even though it was more bureaucratic than the EU, less able to prevent war than the UN and had more freeriders than Nato, it ensured the empire remained together as an entity for another 300 years. If we look to the southern part of what had once been the medieval empire, Italy. They did not have a co-ordination mechanism like the Reichstag. They consolidated into five large and maybe a dozen smaller states. But throughout these 300 years plus another 50 or so, Itay’s states were vassals of Spain and Austria, unable to determine their own destiny.

I expect we will spend quite a lot more time with the Reichstag as the Podcast winds its way through the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century. It is hence far too early to come to a conclusion on whether the Reichstag of the holy Roman Empire was good or a bad, or just the best possible solution to a complex situation. I hope you will stick around until we get to 1806 and can really take stock.

And if you want to make sure we get to the end of the empire without advertising and undue haste, you can do so by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and make a contribution, just like Matt B., Hilary R., Michael P., Chris, Henrietta B. Shawn S. and Alexander D. have already done.

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Episode 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 Edition)

by History of the Germans Podcast on 29th January 20265th February 2026

Part One of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 Edition)

We are now 7 episodes into the action-packed life of emperor Maximilian and he is only 35 years old. We still have another 24 years to go and they will be again full of wars, outlandish schemes, including one where he wants to make himself pope and of course marriages that create an empire. But if you look into German history schoolbooks, the thing that Maximilian is most famous for is what we will discuss today, the Imperial reforms that start in earnest in 1495 and will go through some iterations, before being largely completed in 1555.

Of the 1495 reforms, the Ewige Landfrieden is the most impactful. And it begins as follows quote:

That sounds great. Who could possibly disagree with that? Why did it take months and months of negotiations to agree this?

Let’s find out.

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First up, why was reform suddenly needed?

It is hard to nail down the point in time when things went wrong for the Holy Roman Empire. It might have been as long ago as 1077 when emperor Heinrich IV had to kneel before the pope in Canossa, or was it in 1166 when the last great army of imperial vassals dies in mud and shit outside the walls of Rome. Or was it the sword that murdered Philipp of Swabia in 1208 that was the last of the thousand cuts.

But whatever event you choose, by 1495 the empire has been in dire straits for centuries. As friend of the podcast Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini said to the imperial princes “you acknowledge the emperor for your king and master, nevertheless he possesses but a precarious sovereignty; he has no powers; you only obey him when you choose and you are seldom inclined to obey. You are all desirous to be free: neither the princes nor estates render to him what is due; he has no revenues, no treasure. Hence you are involved in endless contests, and daily wars; hence you suffer rapine, murder and conflagrations, and a thousand evils which arise from divided authority.”

…because the endless feuding destroyed the country

When there are no powerful central institutions, law and order collapses. As one chronicler said, when the cat is away, the mice govern as they will. And what these mice liked even more than cheese was other people’s cheese.

Feuding was endemic. There weren’t just the major conflicts like the Mainzer Stiftsfehde or the Princes’ War, there were lots and lots of little fights, in particular in the south, where political power was particularly fragmented. It is the scale of it that is so shocking. Peter Wilson counted that between 1440 and 1570 there were 278 noble feuds – in Franconia alone. In the first half of the 15^th century, feuding destroyed 1,200 villages and the Hussite Revolt a further 1,500. And remember these villages are those that had survived the utter devastation in the wake of the Black Death.

Looting and pludering from the Housebook of Wolfegg

Now nobody can claim that in the 14^th and 15^th century the rest of europe was an island of peace where everybody was holding hands and singing Cumbaya. The Hundred years war, the War of the Roses, the battles between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish king, the Reconquista were epic struggles that ruined the countryside in very much the same way as it did in the empire. But all these conflicts were about the consolidation of central power, the king of France against his major vassals, which included the king of England, the king of England against the dukes, the Polish king against an independent state in his midst etc. You get my drift. These wars ended with a victory of the kings, who established strong institutions that did in the end made the roads safe and stopped peasants being assaulted by the local lords. The problem in the empire was that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. One day the Margrave of Brandenburg or the Count Palatine would win some territory, next time duke of Bavaria or the duke of Wurttemberg would take it away from them. There could never be a decisive victory that could bring all this mess to an end.

Feuding and the ensuing misery for the peasant population had been a scourge of the empire for centuries. So, what was it about the 15^th century that made the call for reform so deafening that it could no longer be ignored?

…because the empire is under threat from enemies for the first time

Arguably, there were two, or depending how you want to count, three things that changed during the 15^th century.

Firstly, up until the middle of the 15^th century, the empire had no natural predators. It may be a mess internally and the emperors were already very weak. But the gap to its neighbouring kingdoms, France, Poland, Denmark, Hungary wasn’t that huge. All these places, as discussed before, were going through a whole lot upheaval themselves. But as they consolidated, the fringes of the empire came under threat. Provence, Dauphine, Franche Comte, Prussia, Holland, the Venetian mainland, and even Austria were gradually swallowed up by these newly consolidated kingdoms.

And the empire is still shellshocked by the outcome of the Hussite wars where crusade after crusade is defeated in ever more humiliating fashion by the Bohemian peasant armies. If the flower of the German knighthood cannot even defeat these unwashed hillbilly’s, what if someone even better organised and even more powerful shows up on the border?

And there was exactly such a new kid on the block, a sort of bodybuilder kid, the Turkish Sultan who was rolling up the Balkans.

For the first time since the Magyar’s had been defeated on the Lechfeld in 955 was there a genuine threat to the very existence of the empire.

…because the cost of defence of the realm had exploded

These new threats emerged at a time when the cost of warfare exploded. Infantry tactics using pikes could now defeat cavalry and artillery had become a necessity. The best infantry troops were mercenaries, Bohemians, Swiss and German Landsknechte who expected to be paid handsomely. Founding canon was a highly specialised skill, and even a simple field gun cost a multiple of the typical knight’s equipment of warhorse, sword and working armour.

The defence of the empire could no longer be ensured by an occasional raising of the feudal levy. France and Hungary had created standing armies, and so had the Ottoman sultan. The Janissaries counted to about 8,000 to 10,000 men plus the permanent cavalry roughly the same size. And in case of war, the sultan could call on a multiples of that from the various regional governors, arguably as many as 200,000 men, though logistics meant they could not all be deployed at the same time in one place.

So the empire had to keep pace. In the 12^th and 13^th century the emperors would take 5 to 10,000 men south, Charles VIII took 30,000 men to Italy and as the Italian wars intensified, armies of 50,000 became the norm.

By the early 16^th century one year of campaigning against the Ottomans cost between 1.8m and 3.6m florins and another two decades later, the annual cost of the wars with France ran at 5.4m florins annually. The regular income from the imperial treasury was 25,000 florins though occasional one-off subsidies could be materially higher. An emperor, even if he was a major territorial prince in his own right simply could no longer protect the borders.

Though the full scale of the urgency was not clear to everybody in 1495, it was understood that the current political structure of the empire had run out of road.

..and the Council of Constance had shown a way out

But there were rays of sunshine here too. Feuding and threats to the territorial integrity of the empire had not been the biggest concerns of the people in the beginning of the 15^th century. The #1 issue was the great western schism, the fact that there were three popes who had all excommunicated each other and anyone who had followed their rivals, meaning everyone in europe had been excommunicated by at least 2 popes, giving them a 2 in 3 chance of hellfire.

Antonio Baldana: *De magno schismate* (On the Great Schism)

This massive problem had been resolved by the Council of Constance that sat between 1414 and 1418. This gave people not only hope that even the most intractable of problems could be resolved, it also gave them the tool to do it with. A church council, as we laid out way back in episodes 171 to 174 was the congregation of the faithful whose authority superseded even that of the pope. In other words ideas that had circulated since at least Marsilius of Padua, namely that authority is based on the consent of the ruled, had found manifest expression and prove more effective in resolving the schism than the hapless attempts of kings, cardinals and emperors that went on before.

The debate over Imperial Reform begins

It is no surprise that the serious debate over imperial reform kicked off for good during the later stages of the Council of Basel, i.e. in the 1430s.

This debate is I think extremely unusual, since it wasn’t conducted in the context of gatherings, like imperial assemblies or parliament, as it would have happened in the more centralised kingdoms of France or England. Because Germany was already fragmented into dozens of important centres, some princely residences, some free imperial cities, the debate was conducted in writing. Initially by copying manuscripts by hand, but soon after Gutenberg had invented the printing press, many of these documents were printed and distributed widely.

Most of these documents begin with an analysis of the dire state of the empire. Here is one commissioned by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 (quote): “… we perceive that there is neither peace nor justice nor prosecution of the law anywhere in the Empire’s affairs. There are many wanton conflicts, disobediences of subjects towards their lords, robberies, arsons, murders, thefts on the roads, feuds and enmities, without any justice or integrity. Neither freedom nor peace is anywhere to be found. Any given prince must defend himself with his own might. When he pursues peace or war in one place, new disputes instantly begin elsewhere. It is constantly necessary for princes, counts, lords, nobles and other good people to prepare for battle, or to pay money to avoid being attacked. It follows from this that the principalities are decayed and ruined through pledging, destruction, base and sinful usury and other day-to-day futile, pernicious, great and severe costs. In the same way, counties, lordships, monasteries and collegiate churches are also reduced to extreme poverty and ruin, and the more prestige and temporal goods they have, the greater the damage they suffer.

From this it also follows that the Roman Empire, the emperor, the princes and all the German nation is now considered the least by all other nations… It therefore seems to me to be necessary to consider a means to raise up the Empire and to put in order the matters of the Empire.”

The analysis was the part that everyone agreed on, it was the solution that was contentious. There are a dozen or so “major” documents that are considered part of this debate and that have influenced the Imperial reform process, though I would assume there were loads more that did not cut as deep.

In a very broad way, they fall into three camps.

Solution 1 – MEGA – Make the Emperor Great Again

In 1437 a paper appears that proclaims to be the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund”, though it it is very unlikely he actually wrote it. For that the language is a little bit too fruity. The author does not hold back when he lays into the corruption and selfishness of the imperial princes. He is also interestingly very much against the imperial free cities, who he blames for not paying enough taxes. He says that when the heads of the church and the empire are confronted with their injustices, they quote: “turn their arses to us”. Not quite the tone of the imperial chancery.

His solution was to go back to the great and powerful emperors of the early Middle Ages. The princes, both the temporal and the spiritual ones should return all the lands, tolls, mints, mining rights that had once belonged to the empire. Then the emperor would again have the resources to deliver peace and justice and protect the realm.

This was of course never going to happen. But the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund” remained in print throughout the 15th and 16^th century and enjoyed a lot of support amongst the lower classes, largely because it declared the following – quote:

“It is an unheard-of outrage – a great, ongoing injustice which ought to be publicized to all of Christendom – that some are so spiritually impoverished before God that they speak thus to their fellow human, whom God has powerfully redeemed and freed: ‘You are my property!’ This is a heathen way of behaving. God has redeemed us from all bonds, and henceforth nobody should haughtily exalt themselves into any position of ownership over another.” End quote

This idea of a renewed imperial power that could right all the wrongs done to the serfs and peasants was an important factor in the various uprisings and finally the Peasant War.

When these proposals were going a bit too fa, there were other, more moderate suggestions to create an effective imperial executive that enjoyed support.

Solution 2 – Let a Dozen Oligarchs Bloom

This position was first articulated in the policy paper, issued by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 that I have already quoted from before.

He proposed that every year the emperor and the electors come together in a city in the centre of the Reich and establish a court. Here all decisions about war, peace and justice were to be taken. As for the inner workings of this court he says quote: “each and every thing required for this establishment of justice and organization of the emperor’s court should be properly ordained by us, the electors, and the councillors whom we appoint for this purpose”.

The idea here is to set up a sort of oligarchy that runs the empire, keeps the peace, establish a system of courts to resolve disputes, bans feuding and raises armies for the defence of the realm as and when needed. The name for this structure was the Reichsregiment, best translated as the Imperial Government.

In this scenario the emperor was just a senior member of the Imperial Government with some ceremonial duties and maybe the nominal command of the army in case of war.

There are variations to this theme differing around the question of who is going to be a member of the Imperial Government. There were after all a number of very powerful imperial princes who were not electors like the dukes of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Brunswick, Holstein and the Landgraves of Hesse to name just a few. And these princes were as disinclined to be ruled by the seven electors as they resented imperial interference in their affairs.

Solution 3 – Be More Pope

This proposal originated with Nicolas von Cues, one of the most influential theologians and thinkers of the age. Cues took inspiration from the church councils of Constance and Basel, the events that had given people hope that the difficulties of the empire could be resolved in the first place.

For him, the Reichstag, much like a church council, should represent the constituent parts of the empire, decide the laws and has the ultimate say in how the empire is to be run. The Reichstag should convene annually and a committee formed by the Reichstag should exercise its rights during the time the Reichstag wasn’t sitting.

But Cusanus did not want to replace the emperor with an imperial government, in the same way the church council did not replace the pope. He believed the empire needed a strong executive power to deliver peace and justice. The emperor should command a standing imperial army funded by an imperial tax. He would also direct four imperial vicars based in Brabant, Austria, Milan and Savoy who would administrate four regions or circles of the empire. Next, an eternal peace that banned feuding would be passed by the Reichstag and a system of courts established. Decision of the courts would be enforced by the imperial vicars or the emperor himself.

These are the three options, return to the good old days of Otto the Great, create an Imperial government made up of electors and maybe princes and third, a sort of middle way where we end up with the Reichstag and the emperor working together, one focusing on passing the rules and the other on enforcing the decisions, in particular the ban on feuding and the defence of the empire.

Attempts so far by Trier & Martin Mayr

Fascinating as this debate amongst clerics and intellectuals may be, this does not solve the problem unless somebody does something.

As you may remember from the previous seasons, efforts have been made to bring about imperial reform.

The electors deposed Wenceslaus the Lazy for incompetence and replaced him with Ruprecht of the Palatinate in the hope he would resolve the issue. When neither he nor Sigismund moved things on, they planned to depose Sigismund as well, but failed to agree on a candidate for his succession. Still first attempts at establishing a general imperial tax were made, but petered out rapidly (episode 179).

There was a lot of enthusiasm when Friedrich III come in and established the Kammergericht as an imperial court staffed with professional judges but that had evaporated rapidly. In the 1450s and 1460s several princes, guided by Martin Mayr, attempted to reform the empire by replacing Friedrich III with a more suitable, or malleable candidate. Various names were floated, including Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate and Georg von Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia.

But neither of these schemes came to fruition. In the 30 years before the diet of Worms of 1495, the debate had gradually turned into a standoff. The princes demanded action, and in 1467 Friedrich III passed a time limited Landfrieden, or general peace and re- established the Kammergericht. However this did not materially reduced feuding, mainly because the Kammergericht judges often went without pay and Friedrich III lacked the resources to enforce their judgements.

After that things then ground to a complete halt. Every time the estates demanded more significant change, Friedrich III refused to even debate it, at which point the princes refused any help in the various wars and conflicts, except for the most obvious cases at Neuss and when Maximilian was imprisoned in Bruges.

The 19^th century came down hard on Friedrich III, blamed the continued delay in German statehood on his intransigence. However, since the princely proposals were usually along the lines of the archbishop of Trier, aka asking for a complete emasculation of the emperor and the establishment of a princely Imperial Government, I can understand why he kept going Njet, or in Austria “na”

Maximilian on the other hand was more inclined to discuss imperial reform. He could see that his father’s strategy had run out of road. He had fought the French on the Western border for a decade and his dream was to go up against the Turks. There was no way he could do that without the support of the imperial estates. And the only way to ensure consistent support from the estates was by establishing new institutions and taxation model.

Therefore, when he was elected in 1486 he gave some subtle or not so subtle hints that he was ready to negotiate. But he could never really act on this since his father stepped in every time Maximilian was about to make concessions.

That is why nothing happened until 1495. But in 1495 Friedrich III, minus one half leg, was safely three feet under and the real discussion could begin.

Convocation of the Diet of Worms

Maximilian called on the imperial estates to assemble in Worms on February 2, 1495. When he did that, he had not intended to make this a debate about imperial reform. All he wanted was a two week get together, at the end of which the estates would grant him two things, an immediate subsidy to raise an army to go after king Charles VIII of France who had invaded the empire in Italy, and ideally a longer term say 10 to 12 year commitment to fund a standing army for the defense against the Turks.

Worms – Haus zur Munze where the Diet met

As usual, Maximilian was late. When he got to Worms on March 18^th, there was hardly anyone there. It took another 10 days before enough princes were assembled to form a quorum. Maximilian made a speech, said, give me the money now, it is urgent, the French are already in Naples.

This went down like a lead balloon. The still rather small audience was taken aback by the speech. Maximilian had not mentioned the imperial reform at all. Not a single word, not even a gentle nod in the general direction. Why, this was the first gathering after Friedrich III’s death. Of course we should discuss the Imperial reform now. They stalled and said we should wait until more princes are here.

April 1495 – The debate begins for real.

It took until April 7^th for the 147 participants to make their way to Worms. There were 5 of the 7 electors, 29 temporal princes and 10 spiritual lords had come in person and a further 12 had sent their representatives. Then there were 67 counts and imperial knights and 24 imperial cities present.

By now Maximilian was getting seriously twitchy. He was not prepared for some longish constitutional debate. Literally a week ago his envoys had signed up for the Holy League and his new Italian and Spanish allies expected him to come down to Italy with an army and help trap the king of France in Naples. He also had another couple of irons in the fire. Perkin Warbeck, the Yorkist pretender was recruiting an army for his landing in England. This army was paid for by Maximilian and his mother in law, Margaret of York and was sailing in July of that same year. And there was still a rest of the Burgundian war going on in Gelders, where the French supported a claimant to the duchy.

Maximilian really needed to get this done and quick.

But that was not easy. The princes, bishops, counts, knights and cities who had gathered in Worms believed that it was now or never. Maximilian’s father was dead and the new king should now engage on the long overdue reforms, and moreover, they had him by the short and curly’s. Plus, if they would give him the money now and he defeated the French, went to Rome, got crowned emperor and returned as the victorious hero, it would take decades before they could nail him down again.

So they stalled. They took the imperial funding proposals and pretended they were debating them. But in reality, they discussed what imperial reforms they would demand of Maximilian. After a few weeks of no progress, Maximilian realised that his schedule was no longer achievable. He called the estates, asked them what they wanted and they presented him with a document outlining a range of reforms they wanted to discuss. These looked aspirational, but not excessive and Maximilian reluctantly agreed that the Reichstag would now debate imperial reform.

The decision making process

To understand what happened next, we have to take a quick look at the way the Reichstag makes its decisions.

The Reichstag is not a parliament where everybody is in one room and debates the issues of the day. The Reichstag is actually three separate colleges, one for the Electors, one for the imperial princes and the counts and a third one for the cities.

The process starts with an imperial proposal that sets the agenda. The proposal goes into each of the colleges, where the members discuss it behind closed doors and vote on their response.

Then the three colleges compare their respective opinions and debate and revise them, until they arrive at a unanimous opinion of all three colleges which is then presented to the emperor. The emperor can then either agree or reject it. If he rejected it, it went back to the colleges and the whole process starts again.

This process took ages!

The process was heavily tilted in favour of the electors and major territorial princes. These two colleges would coordinate their opinions before they would show them to the college of the cities who could then only get smaller adjustments through. Secondly, the smaller entities, the counts, abbots, abbesses and imperial knights had to pool their votes, weighing no more than the vote of one of the princes, and peasants were of course not represented at all.

And the emperor was not allowed to be present at any of these. He was literally hopping mad outside the closed doors as the king of France slipped through his fingers.

And because it was complex and involved a lot of chats in corridors and meetups in side rooms, it required someone to manage the process. Enter stage left, Berthold von Henneberg, archbishop of Mainz.

Berthold has been painted as Maximilian’s great adversary who fought for the rights of the estates against a recalcitrant ruler, unwilling to pass any reforms. But that is probably inaccurate. Berthold was, like many other bishops and abbots, very keen on a permanent peace and an effective ban on feuding. As we have seen in the example of Mainz, the largely defenceless church territories were under constant attack from rapacious princes. And he also believed that an Imperial Government would be much better able to achieve law and order than the emperor. But he wasn’t a revolutionary flying the flag of the liberty in the face of tyranny. He was more the guy who brokered the compromise the estates could bring to the emperor.

With all the preliminaries out of the way, we can look at the actual debates. I think the whole process breaks down into three separate phases.

Phase 1 lasted from March 18^th to April 27^th 1495. In that phase Maximilian pushed for his initial proposal to just give him the money and maybe discuss imperial reform later. That proposal was stalled by the estates. Instead they presented him with a counterproposal, to first discuss a permanent peace, the establishment or revival of the courts, the Kammergericht and the Reichsregiment, the Imperial government. Once that has been agreed they would be happy to discuss the funding of the army and taxation. Maximilian resented the idea of an Imperial government where the electors had a huge amount of power, but given his position, he agreed to proceed on this basis.

Phase 2 lasted from April 27^th to June 22^nd. As described above, the Reichstag set-up and process is heavily skewed to the electors and Imperial princes. And the electors and imperial princes know that Maximilian is under massive pressure. So they ransack the sweetshop. What the Reichstag presents on May 18^th 1495 was a princely fever dream.

They propose an Imperial Government made up of 17 representatives that would be given full control of the state. They would handle Finance, domestic and foreign policy, defence, law and order, justice and even legislation. In this Imperial government the emperor would have only 3 of the 17 votes. In a particularly misjudged slight, the Habsburg duchies did not have a permanent seat in this government. What enraged Maximilian even more, if that is at all possible, was that the conduct of external wars was taken away from him completely. The Imperial government was to appoint an Imperial Captain who would raise troops, appoint officers, manage logistics and lead in battle.

That would have turned the emperor into a completely powerless figurehead, wheeled out on special occasions looking fancy in his crown and gown.

It also did not help that the proposal came with a whole host of accusations that Maximilian and his predecessors had presided over a century of decay and loss of territory. And since the emperors had let so many lands go, the burden on these who had remained was now exorbitant. So before he asked for more money, he should go and collect the outstanding dues in Provence, the Rhone Valley and the Low Countries.

Obviously there is no way in the world or outside it that Maximilian would sign on to this. They tried to sweeten the deal by granting him 100,000 florins to raise an army but that was less than the 150,000 he had asked for, and as we will see is only paid when it was too late.

When he receive the proposals on May 25^th, he called it for what it was, blackmail. He was so angry, he did not respond for almost a month. Instead he acted as if there was no Reichstag going on. He invested Ludovico il Moro as duke of Milan without asking the electors, he negotiated with the Swiss about hiring mercenaries for a war against the French and the Turks.

Having spent weeks jumping up and down outside the council chambers of the Reichstag, now he let the princes walk by his chamber wondering what the king would do next.

It must have been a true feat of self-discipline to not go and beg for money. With every day that passed the chances to meet his international commitments and to catch the king of France were dwindling away. But there was no way he could hand over the crown of the empire to the princes. There is more of his old man in Maximilian that it appears at first sight.

But Maximilian wasn’t idle. He seeded discontent amongst the estates. Not everyone was keen on an all-powerful Imperial government dominated by the Prince-electors. All the smaller entities, the counts, the abbots, the cities, the imperial knights feared quite rightly that they would be swallowed up by the larger territorial princes. But even some of the most powerful dukes, of Bavaria and Saxony were unhappy with the limitations to what was right now almost complete autonomy. Slowly but surely the consensus over a princely oligarchy was falling apart.

The first indication that the princes were about to cave came when they revised their proposals for the permanent peace and the process for the professional court, the Kammergericht. These were all topics where the two sides had a lot of common ground. These proposals then became the basis on which productive negotiations continued for the rest of the Reichstag.

But on the Imperial government, not a peep until, almost a month later, on June 22 he sent a revised version of the Reichstag proposals back to the colleges. He had taken their text and just simply flipped words, so that for instance the Imperial Government was to be staffed not by the princes, but by people the emperor chose. It would be based, not in Frankfurt, but at the imperial court. Whole sections he did not approve off, like the section on the Imperial Captain, he simply dropped.

All that went back to Reichstag for further debate, which kicks off Phase 3.

We are now at the end of June. The battle of Fornuovo took place on July 8^th. Charles VIII was home and dry. Perkin Warbeck’s landing in England had ended in a total disaster. The guy did not even get ashore before his small army was decimated. Gelders could wait another year.

Basically, the power of blackmail the estates had over Maximilian was gone. The ball is now in the King’s court. Now he can use time to force concessions.

On June 28^th, the electors and princes give up their idea of an Imperial Government that replaces the emperor. Instead they agree to something called the “Handhabung” that laid down some rules about a governing council and the Reichstag procedure that would soon be revised.

And whilst all this back and forth over power in the empire went on, a few unsung heroes managed to forge an agreement between all the parties involved that would actually stand the test of time. The “Ewige Landfrieden”, the eternal peace which at least formally ended feuding in the empire, the Kammergerichtsordnung, the procedural for the professional imperial court and the Common Penny, the tax that was meant to fund these institutions.

Some of these were real breakthroughs that stayed on the statute book until 1806, others were less successful, but 1495 marked a huge step towards the curious constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire that we will discuss in more detail next week. I hope you will join us again.

And as always, if you feel this show serves a purpose that you feel is worth supporting, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you find all sorts of exciting ways to keep me in my seat chatting about long forgotten empires.

And a big thankyou to Duncan Hardy whose translations of key documents I used extensively in this episode. You can find a link to his excellent book in the travel, maps and books section of my website

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Episode 225 – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495

Part Three of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 225: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495 – History of the Germans

Transcript

The Laws of the Empire – or Absence Thereof

The purpose of Judgements

The territorial courts

Appellate Courts and Private Courts

Landfrieden attempts until 1495

Reichskammergericht, Reichshofgericht and Kreise

The court procedures and the witch craze

The broader remit after 1526

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Episode 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire

Part Two of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 224: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire – History of the Germans

Transcript

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Episode 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 Edition)

Part One of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 223: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Diet of Worms – History of the Germans

Transcript

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Part Three of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 225: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495 – History of the Germans

Transcript

The Laws of the Empire – or Absence Thereof

The purpose of Judgements

The territorial courts

Appellate Courts and Private Courts

Landfrieden attempts until 1495

Reichskammergericht, Reichshofgericht and Kreise

The court procedures and the witch craze

The broader remit after 1526

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Part Two of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 224: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire – History of the Germans

Transcript

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Part One of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 223: Imperial Reform 1495 – The Diet of Worms – History of the Germans

Transcript

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