Imperial immediacy
Imperial immediacy (German: Reichsfreiheit or Reichsunmittelbarkeit) was a privileged feudal and political status, which the estates of the realm such as an imperial city, a religious entity, a feudal principality, or a minor lordship could attain within the Holy Roman Empire. A reichsfrei city, abbey or territory was under the direct authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Imperial Diet (Reichstag), without any intermediary liege lord(s). In modern terms, it would be understood as a form of sovereignty.
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[edit] Gradations
Several immediate estates held the privilege to attend the Reichstag meetings in person including an individual vote (votum virile):
- the seven Prince-electors designated by the Golden Bull of 1356
- the other Princes of the Holy Roman Empire
- secular: Dukes, Margraves, Landgraves etc.
- ecclesiastical: Prince-Bishops and Prince-Provosts.
They formed the Imperial Estates together with those Counts and Barons, Imperial prelates and Imperial cities who only held a collective vote (votum curiatum).
Further immediate estates not represented in the Reichstag were the Imperial Knights as well as several abbeys and minor localities, the remains of those territories, which in the High Middle Ages had been under the direct authority of the Emperor and mostly had been given in pledge to the princes meanwhile.
[edit] Advantages and disadvantages
Some additional advantages could include the right to collect taxes and tolls, hold a market, mint coins, bear arms, and conduct legal proceedings. The latter could include the so called Blutgericht (or "blood justice") through which capital punishment could be administered. These rights depended on the legal patents granted by the emperor.
Some disadvantages could include the direct intervention by imperial commissions, such as those that happened in several of the southwestern cities after the Schmalkaldic War and the potential restriction or outright loss of previously held legal patents. Other disadvantages could include the loss of all immediate rights, if the Emperor and/or the Imperial Diet could not defend those rights against outside aggression, such as that which occurred in the French Revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic Wars. The Treaty of Lunéville in 1801 required the emperor to renounce all claims to the portions of the Holy Roman Empire left of the Rhine. At the last meeting of the Imperial Diet (German: Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) in 1802-03, also called the German Mediatisation, most of the free imperial cities and the ecclesiastic states lost their imperial immediacy and were absorbed by several dynastic states.
[edit] Problems in understanding the Empire
Understanding the practical application of the rights of immediacy makes the history of the Holy Roman Empire particularly difficult to understand, especially among modern historians. Even such contemporaries as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottlieb Fichte called the empire a monstrosity. Mid-19th century historians wrote of the Empire as something neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire, and in comparison to the British "empire", saw its German counterpart as an abysmal failure that reached its pinnacle of success in the early Middle Ages and declined thereafter.[1] For nearly a century after the publication of James Bryce's monumental work The Holy Roman Empire (1864), this view prevailed among most English-speaking historians of the Early Modern period, and contributed to the development of the Sonderweg theory of the German past.[2]
[edit] Citations
[edit] See also
- Imperial Abbey
- Imperial Estate
- Free Imperial City
- List of states of the Holy Roman Empire
- Mediatization
[edit] References
- Braun, B.: Reichsunmittelbarkeit in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. Version of 2005-05-03. URL last accessed 2006-11-29.
- Bryce, James (1838-1922), Holy Roman Empire, London, 1865.
- Sheehan, James, German History 1770-1866, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.
