Episode Notes

Visit my site at https://mitteleuropa.simplecast.com/

Twitter @MitteleuropaP  

Sources:  

Emmett Cooke- The Monarchs.  https://www.premiumbeat.com/royalty-free-tracks/the-monarchs

Peter H. Wilson. The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History, Allen Lane 2016

Oswald Spengler. Le Déclin de l'Occident. Esquisse d'une morphologie de l'histoire universelle. (Première parution en 1931),Trad. de l'allemand par M. Tazerout Édition en deux volumes (01-10-1948) --- (or Gutenberg project The Decline of the West)

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FULL SCRIPT:

[The Monarchs- Emmett Cooke. Music intro starts slowly fades out]

RELIGION AND IMPERIAL POLITICS AFTER 1555

Preserving the Augsburg Settlement

The Peace of Augsburg suffered from the same divergence of interpretation undermining the earlier agreement at Speyer in 1526, though it survived far longer without serious trouble. Catholics regarded it as limiting further encroachments on their church, while Protestants believed the legal protection licensed the continued expansion of their own religion. Many now openly embraced Lutheranism by reforming clergy and churches in their territories along evangelical lines. The basic religious balance within Germany was complete by the late 1550s, at which point Lutheranism had been officially adopted in around 50 principalities and counties and three dozen imperial cities. These included some very substantial territories, notably the electorates of Saxony, Brandenburg and the Palatinate, as well as most of the old, established princely houses: the Ernestine Saxons, all branches of Hessen, the Franconian Hohenzollerns in Ansbach and what became known as Bayreuth, as well as Württemberg, Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Anhalt, and the majority of Westphalian and Lower Saxon counties.

Catholicism was reduced in Germany to only three large principalities: Lorraine, which was already semi-autonomous, Bavaria and Austria, which was by far the largest principality in the Empire. Elsewhere, Catholicism held out in the small counties of the south-west and in two-fifths of the imperial cities. However, since the numerous (but individually fairly small) church lands were reserved for them, Catholics still ruled around 200 imperial Estates, giving them a decisive majority in the Empire’s common institutions.

Lutherans did not establish any national organizations. Instead, each prince or city council assumed the powers formerly exercised by a Catholic bishop in their territory. In practice, these powers were entrusted to church councils, considerably expanding the scope of territorial administration and increasing its presence at parish level. Catholic authorities implemented similar reforms in their own lands, though they still accepted the spiritual jurisdiction of their bishops. Regardless of belief, all secular and ecclesiastical authorities pursued similar policies of ‘confessionalization’ intended to impose the official faith of their territory through education, improved clerical supervision and more intensive ‘visitations’ to probe individual belief and monitor religious practices.114 Such measures were far from universally effective. Heterodoxy and dissent persisted, while there were often considerable discrepancies between outward conformity and inner belief. Many people simply adopted a pragmatic approach, embracing those beliefs and practices that made most sense to their own circumstances.115 Nonetheless, confessionalization initially helped preserve the Augsburg settlement by directing official energies inwards and away from activities likely to cause friction with neighbouring territories.

Ferdinand I and his successor Maximilian II worked hard to maintain the peace through good personal relations with influential princes, not least since consensus was in their own interests in the face of the constant Ottoman threat to their own possessions. Moreover, the benefits of peace were soon clear to all, as first France and then the Netherlands descended into violent religious civil war after the 1560s. Most German observers were horrified by such atrocities as the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France in August 1572, and urged a culture of self-restraint.116 Moreover, unlike France, where the monarchy was a participant in the struggles, the Empire remained a neutral, cross-confessional legal framework. Lutherans and Catholics might disagree, but they largely refrained from criticizing the Empire since their own rights and status derived from imperial law. The later sixteenth century saw a strong ‘irenic’ current, providing additional arguments to bridge religious divisions in favour of preserving political harmony.117

Confessional and Political Tension

Three developments challenged harmony after 1555. One was the emergence of Calvinism during the 1560s. Calvinists distinguished themselves from Lutherans theologically, yet considered they were simply continuing Luther’s ‘Reformation of the Word’ with their own moral ‘Reformation of Life’.118 Calvinism made most of its converts in the Empire among the aristocracy, unlike the French Huguenots and English Puritans, who evolved into more genuinely popular movements. Apart from Emden in East Frisia, which adopted a Presbyterian structure, Calvinism spread through its acceptance by Lutheran princes who then used their right of Reformation and the territorial church to impose the new faith on their subjects. The first and most significant conversion was the elector Palatine, who abandoned Lutheranism in 1559. Calvinism slowly gained ground from the 1580s, including the conversion of the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel (1604) and the elector of Brandenburg (1613), but had been adopted by only 28 territories, including a single city (Bremen) by 1618.119

Lutherans increasingly resented these inroads into their own faith, but minimized the differences to preserve the Peace of Augsburg. The elector Palatine, as self-appointed Calvinist leader, promoted his own, narrow form of irenicism to remain within the Peace by finding common ground with Lutherans. Internally, the Palatine government remained dominated by Calvinists who bullied the largely Lutheran population, persecuted Jews and refused dialogue with Catholics.120 Calvinism threatened the peace by seemingly adding substance to Catholic zealots’ arguments that no Protestant could be trusted. More seriously, the elector Palatine deliberately fanned fears of Catholic plots to persuade Lutherans to accept his leadership and his demands for constitutional change. The Palatinate had lost influence to Bavaria, ruled by a rival branch of the same Wittelsbach family who had conquered much of its territory in 1504 and who had remained Catholic.121 The elector Palatine’s demand for religious parity in imperial institutions promised not merely to remove the inbuilt Catholic majority, but also to level some of the status distinctions that currently disadvantaged the minor princes and aristocrats who formed the bulk of his political clientele. A hierarchy dominated by the electors and a few senior princes would be replaced by a political structure of two confessional blocs, with that of the Protestants firmly under Palatine leadership.

Developments in the imperial church represented a second challenge to peace.122 Protestant princes and nobles were not prepared to forgo the benefits of engagement in the imperial church, which still offered around 1,000 lucrative benefices for cathedral canons, as well as the considerable political influence through the 50 bishoprics and 80-odd abbeys recognized as imperial Estates. Although these were reserved for Catholics in 1555, Ferdinand’s Declaration extended toleration to individual Protestants living in church territories. Under this protection, Protestant nobles gained majorities in several important chapters, enabling them to elect their own candidates on the death of each Catholic bishop. Maximilian II and Rudolf II refused to accept these men as imperial princes, but tolerated them as ‘administrators’ to preserve peace. Ten sees passed this way into Protestant hands, including the substantial archbishoprics of Magdeburg and Bremen. The duke of Bavaria meanwhile promoted his relations in the church lands as a means of pushing his own family as Catholic champions in the Empire. Thanks to Spanish support, Bavaria blocked a Calvinist takeover of Cologne in 1583, establishing a Bavarian monopoly of this important archbishopric lasting until 1761. To advance these objectives, Bavaria pushed the emperor to deny the Protestant administrators rights of imperial Estates.

The dispute over the ecclesiastical imperial Estates was complicated by problems surrounding mediate church property, such as monasteries under secular jurisdiction. Enforcement of the 1552 normative year was hindered by the often confused legal arrangements, involving rights and assets which had been pawned or were shared by several lords. The Peace of Augsburg charged the Reichskammergericht with resolving any disputes by entrusting cases to bipartisan panels composed equally of Lutheran and Catholic judges. The court made sincere efforts to judge according to law, encountering few complaints until cases became increasingly politicized through Palatine and Bavarian propaganda during the later sixteenth century.

It is likely that the Peace would have survived the challenge of both Calvinism and disputes over the imperial church had the Habsburg monarchy not encountered serious difficulties of its own around 1600. Charles’s partition of his inheritance left Austria with the imperial title, but cut off from Spain’s vast resources. Problems were compounded by a further internal partition creating three separate Austrian lines in 1564: the Tirolean branch (based in Innsbruck), that of Inner Austria, or Styria (in Graz), and the main line based in Vienna. Each branch traded limited toleration for cash grants from the largely Lutheran nobility who dominated their provincial assemblies. Lutheran nobles in turn used their powers over parish churches to install Protestant pastors and encourage their tenants to adopt their faith. Around three-quarters of Habsburg subjects followed some kind of Protestantism by the time the dynasty began to reverse this by restricting court and military appointments to loyal Catholics during the 1590s.123 Coordination of this roll-back broke down amidst bankruptcy following the protracted and unsuccessful Long Turkish War (1593–1606) and subsequent quarrelling amongst Rudolf II’s relations over his succession, leading to renewed concessions to Protestant nobles in Bohemia and parts of Austria.

The distraction created a political vacuum in Germany, adding to anxiety fanned by extremists. The Palatinate was finally able to rally sufficient support to form the Protestant Union in 1608, answered the following year by the Bavarian-led Catholic League. Despite these ominous developments, support for the Augsburg settlement remained strong among moderate Catholics and most Lutherans, and there was no inevitable slide towards war.124

The Thirty Years War

The famous Defenestration of Prague on 23 May 1618 was the work of a small group of disaffected Bohemian aristocrats who felt their gains from the Letter of Majesty were being eroded by the Habsburgs’ practice of restricting government appointments to Catholics. The aristocrats acted independently of the Protestant Union, which was in a state of near collapse. By throwing three Habsburg officials from a window in Prague castle, the Defenestrators hoped to force the moderate majority to take sides in their dispute with the dynasty.125

The Defenestrators presented their cause as common for all Protestants. Confessionalization had forged new connections across Europe, especially among radicals of the same faith. Militants tended to interpret events in providential terms, feeling personally summoned by God and believing their religious goals were almost within reach. Setbacks were interpreted as tests of faith. Such zealots were a minority within all confessional groups, confined mainly to exiles, clergy and external observers frustrated with their own government’s policies. Militants dominated public discussions, but rarely influenced decision-making directly. Most people were more moderate, wanting to advance their faith by pragmatic and peaceful means.126

These insights explain the fragility of confessionally based alliances during the ensuing conflict. Contrary to popular memory, military operations did not escape political control, but remained tied to negotiations that continued almost unbroken throughout the war. All belligerents fought as members of complex, often delicate coalitions and knew that peace would entail compromise. Generals were asked to achieve a position of strength so that concessions would appear magnanimous gestures rather than signs of weakness, which could endanger the established authorities and cause further problems.127

The war escalated through the failure to contain successive crises. The initial revolt widened through the decision of Elector Palatine Frederick V, one of the few genuinely militant leaders, to accept the rebels’ offer of the Bohemian crown in 1619. This set him against the Austrian Habsburgs, who now received substantial Bavarian support. Outsiders were drawn in. Spain aided Austria in the hope that assistance against its own Dutch rebels would follow a swift victory in the Empire. The Dutch, English and French sent men and money to help Bohemia and the Palatinate, largely because they saw war in the Empire as a useful way of distracting Spain.

Habsburg policy became more determined with Ferdinand II’s accession in 1619, because he regarded his opponents as rebels who forfeited their constitutional rights. The comprehensive victory at White Mountain, outside Prague, in November 1620, allowed him to start the largest transfer of private property in central Europe prior to the Communist land seizures after 1945. Assets were redistributed from defeated rebels to Habsburg loyalists. Following further victories in western Germany, this policy was extended across the Empire, culminating in the transfer of Frederick V’s lands and titles to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria in 1623. The war was essentially over, though Danish intervention reignited it in May 1625, shifting the focus to northern Germany. Danish defeats by 1629 merely extended the area covered by Ferdinand’s policy of redistribution and reward.128

Ferdinand sought a comprehensive settlement, securing Danish acceptance through generous terms, but overreaching himself by issuing the Edict of Restitution in March 1629. This sought to resolve the ambiguities in the Peace of Augsburg by asserting a narrowly Catholic interpretation of the disputed terms, which included excluding Calvinists from legal protection and ordering Protestants to return all church lands usurped since 1552. The Edict was widely condemned, even by many Catholics who felt Ferdinand had exceeded his prerogatives by issuing it as a definitive verdict for immediate enforcement, rather than as guidelines to assist the imperial courts in resolving disputes case by case. Coming after the substantial redistribution of land to Habsburg supporters, Restitution appeared a further step towards converting the Empire into a more centralized monarchy. Despite their confessional differences, the electors closed ranks at their congress in Regensburg in 1630 to block the emperor’s bid to have his son Ferdinand III made king of the Romans, and to force him to dismiss his controversial general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and reduce the expensive imperial army.129

Any hope that negotiations might ease tensions over Restitution were wrecked by the Swedish invasion in June 1630. Sweden had its own security and economic reasons for intervention, which it only subsequently officially masked as saving German Protestants from Ferdinand’s Counter-Reformation. The religious dimension grew pronounced following the death of Sweden’s king Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Lützen in November 1632. The site later became a virtual shrine after locals celebrated the battle’s bicentenary, and the subsequent hagiography profoundly influenced later interpretations of the Thirty Years War as a religious conflict.130 At the time, though, Sweden legitimated its involvement principally as defending the Palatinate’s more aristocratic interpretation of the imperial constitution, since this would weaken Habsburg management of the Empire. Sweden’s operations were facilitated by the exiled rebels and those imperial Estates most threatened by Ferdinand’s edict. This ensured that the new round of conflict was a continuation of that which began in 1618 and not an entirely separate war as Ferdinand claimed.

German support grew after Sweden’s victory at Breitenfeld in September 1631 made it a credible ally. Subsequent successes enabled Sweden to copy Ferdinand II’s methods and redistribute captured imperial church lands to its allies. Gustavus Adolphus clearly intended usurping constitutional structures to tie these allies within a new Swedish imperial system, though it is not entirely clear how far he intended to displace the emperor. His death in 1632 and subsequent Swedish defeats forced these ambitions to be scaled back. The imperial victory at Nördlingen in September 1634 gave Ferdinand another chance to make ‘peace with honour’ through concessions to moderate Lutheran states like Saxony. He agreed the Peace of Prague in May 1635, suspending the Edict and revising the normative year to 1627, allowing Lutherans to keep many of the church lands acquired since 1552, though not all those they had held in 1618. The need to retain Bavarian support meant the Palatinate’s exclusion from the amnesty, along with several other important principalities. These exclusions allowed Sweden to claim it was still fighting to restore ‘German freedom’.

Opportunities slipped from Ferdinand’s grasp as he delegated negotiations with Sweden to Saxony, while he embarked on ill-advised support for Spain in its new war with France.131 France had sponsored Austria’s opponents since 1625 and now moved over to direct involvement. The full impact was delayed until France and Sweden agreed a more coordinated strategy in 1642, now concentrating on forcing a succession of pro-imperial principalities into neutrality. The war was channelled into fewer areas, but fought with desperate intensity, contributing to the lasting impression of all-destructive fury.

The Peace of Westphalia

The Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück were declared neutral in 1643 as venues for a peace congress intended to resolve the Thirty Years War in the Empire, Spain’s struggle with the Dutch rebels, which had resumed in 1621, and the Franco-Spanish war waged since 1635. Military operations continued as the belligerents fought to improve their bargaining positions. Spain eventually accepted Dutch independence in a treaty concluded in Münster in May 1648, but the Franco-Spanish war continued for another 11 years, because both powers overestimated their chances of future military successes.

However, the diplomats successfully concluded an end to the Empire’s war in two treaties negotiated in Münster and Osnabrück and signed simultaneously on 24 October 1648, known respectively from the abbreviations of their Latin titles as IPM and IPO.132 Together with the first peace of Münster, the two treaties formed the Peace of Westphalia, which was both an international agreement and a revision to the Empire’s constitution. France and Sweden received territorial compensation, but the Peace neither made the princes independent sovereigns nor reduced the Empire to a weak confederation. Instead, the existing trend towards a mixed monarchy continued. This can be seen by examining the adjustments to the place of religion in imperial politics.

The Peace of Augsburg was renewed but also revised by adjusting the normative year to 1624, agreed as a compromise. This allowed Catholics to recover some church lands, but not as many as they would have done had either the Edict of Restitution or the Peace of Prague been fully implemented.133 Calvinism was included alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism, but other faiths remained excluded, except for the Jews’ existing privileges that remained unaffected. Contrary to the later perception that Westphalia widened princely powers, Article V of the IPO in fact significantly curtailed the right of Reformation granted at Augsburg by removing the power of imperial Estates to change their subjects’ faith. Henceforth, the official faith of each territory was permanently fixed as it had existed in the new normative year of 1624. Individual freedoms were extended to ease implementation of this rule by protecting dissenters from discrimination over emigration, education, marriage, burial and worship. Violence was again renounced in favour of arbitration through the Empire’s judicial system. The Palatine programme of constitutional change was definitively rejected. Fixing each territory’s official religious identity cemented the permanent Catholic majority in imperial institutions. However, new voting arrangements (known as itio in partes) were introduced in the Reichstag to allow that body to debate as two confessional bodies (corpora) if religious matters had to be discussed.134

Tension and Toleration After 1648

From this review of the key terms, it is obvious that the Westphalian settlement did not remove religion from imperial politics, still less inaugurate a fully secular international order, but it did signal the defeat of militant confessionalism. Imperial Estates lodged 750 official complaints at breaches of the religious terms between 1648 and 1803, but virtually all these concerned jurisdictions and possessions. Many were relatively trivial: a fifth involved individual farms or houses, and only 5 per cent were about entire districts.135 Church and state had not been separated, but doctrinal issues had been quarantined to allow the Empire’s courts to settle ‘religious’ disputes like other disagreements over demarcating legal rights and privileges. None of the 74 allegations of religious bias in Reichshofrat judgements were upheld by reviews conducted by the Reichstag between 1663 and 1788.136

Only three issues proved significantly difficult. One concerned Protestant anxiety at the Catholic revival after 1648. Calvinism’s political defeat during the Thirty Years War compounded its inability to attract further influential adherents after the conversion of the elector of Brandenburg in 1613. Likewise, Lutheranism lost ground, apart from new grass-roots activism known as Pietism, which was generally viewed with suspicion by the authorities, except in Prussia.137 By contrast, even minor Catholic abbeys embarked on massive building and cultural projects associated with the baroque, while the emperor’s wealth and prestige (all signs he had not lost the war) attracted nobles from across the Empire into his service. Competition for imperial favour encouraged 31 leading princes to convert to Catholicism between 1651 and 1769, including Elector Friedrich August I ‘the Strong’ of Saxony in 1697, followed by his son in 1712. Saxony, birthplace of Protestantism, was now under Catholic rule.138 Each major conversion caused momentary tension, but the constitutional problems were resolved fairly easily, indicating the Empire’s continued flexibility into the eighteenth century. The revised normative-year rules prevented princes from requiring their subjects to follow their new faith. Instead, the ruling family was allowed to worship in their palace chapel, but had to sign documents known as Reversalien guaranteeing the unimpeded management of their Lutheran territorial church by officials sworn to uphold these arrangements regardless of their prince’s own beliefs. The agreements were usually guaranteed by the territorial assembly and often other Protestant princes, extending the basis upon which appeals could be lodged with the imperial courts in the event of disputes.139

Despite the Reversalien, many Protestants suspected princes of secretly promoting Catholicism through the priests attached to the court chapel. This helps explain the furore surrounding developments in the Palatinate, which formed a second major difficulty. On the extinction of the Calvinist ruling line, the Palatinate passed to a junior, Catholic branch of the Wittelsbachs in 1685. The new elector collaborated with the French occupying his lands during the Nine Years War (1688–97) to reintroduce Catholicism. France then secured international recognition for the changes as part of the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697, despite this breaching the 1624 normative year (which France, as a guarantor of the Westphalian settlement, was supposed to uphold). The impact was magnified by its coincidence with the conversion of the Saxon elector to Catholicism and Louis XIV’s expulsion of the Huguenots from France, where their religious rights had been revoked in 1685. The depth of concern is apparent from the fact that 258 of the 750 official complaints were about this one issue.

The response opened the third major difficulty, because Protestants invoked their right to ‘debate in parts’ by splitting the Reichstag into two confessional groups. While legal under the post-1648 constitution, this threatened to deadlock debate at a time when the Empire needed to respond to the outbreak of the Great Northern War (1700–1721) and the looming dispute over the Spanish inheritance, which embroiled it directly in renewed war with France (1701–14). Despite the intensity of public discussion, there was little political appetite to abandon established ways of working in the Reichstag and other institutions. The Protestants did meet separately as a Corpus Evangelicorum from 1712 to 1725, 1750 to 1769, and 1774 to 1778, but continued to participate throughout in the other imperial institutions. The Catholics regarded existing structures as satisfactory and never convened a separate body. The Protestant Corpus was hamstrung by a struggle over its leadership between Prussia, Hanover and Saxony (whose elector, despite becoming a Catholic, refused to relinquish his leadership). The practice of formally debating in parts was used only four times (1727, 1758, 1761 and 1764), largely as a tactical device for Prussia to hinder Habsburg management of the Empire. In the longer term, Prussian manipulation of religious issues eroded their potential to cause trouble and by the late eighteenth century the established constitution was regarded as sufficient protection for religious freedoms.140

The Westphalian settlement also proved successful in resolving more local, everyday disputes, again indicating how the Empire remained meaningful to its inhabitants into early modernity. The new normative year left Brandenburg, the Palatinate, several Lower Rhenish principalities, and the bishoprics of Osnabrück, Lübeck and Hildesheim as confessionally mixed. Four imperial cities had been officially bi-confessional since 1548. The IPO imposed parity in civic office and there are signs that confessional identities hardened into an ‘invisible frontier’ dividing each community.141 The number of cross-confessional marriages declined in Augsburg and it was said that even Protestant and Catholic pigs had separate sties. The adoption by Catholics of the Gregorian calendar in 1584 had placed them ten days ahead of their Protestant neighbours, who only caught up in 1700. However, the riots accompanying the calendar’s adoption were not repeated. Inhabitants might be acutely aware of subtle differences, but they now preferred court cases to violent protest.

Clergy, especially in border areas, placed innumerable petty obstacles in the way of ordinary folk exercising their religious freedoms. Mixed marriages were regarded as divided houses, and individuals were often pressured to convert. Nonetheless, pragmatism generally prevailed. A fifth of marriages in Osnabrück were cross-confessional, while Protestants joined Catholic religious processions and in a few communities different congregations even shared the same church. Official policy remained toleration not tolerance, suffering minorities as a political and legal necessity. Attitudes did change during the later eighteenth century, notably following Joseph II’s patent in 1781, which allowed greater equality and was adopted by most other German governments between 1785 and the 1840s.

THE IMPERIAL CHURCH DURING EARLY MODERNITY

Size

The register prepared for the 1521 Reichstag in Worms recorded 3 ecclesiastical electors, 4 archbishops, 46 bishops and 83 lesser prelates, compared to 180 secular lords. By 1792 only 3 electors, 1 archbishop, 29 bishops and prince abbots, and 40 prelates remained, alongside 165 secular Estates. This decline is only partly attributable to the Reformation, which merely accelerated the existing trend for secular rulers to incorporate the material assets of church fiefs within their own territories. Many of the ecclesiastical Estates listed in the 1521 register were already disappearing this way, including 15 bishoprics. While the Reformation added new theological arguments for this, political changes associated with imperial reform were equally important, because they tied the status of imperial Estates more clearly to imperial fiscal and military obligations. Many prelates voluntarily accepted incorporation within secular jurisdiction in the hope of escaping these obligations.142 Thus, all ‘secularization’ up to 1552 involved a reduction from immediate to mediate status by removing a fief’s political rights. By contrast, the Peace of Westphalia sanctioned the secularization of two archbishoprics and six bishoprics by converting them into secular duchies with full political rights and obligations.

Movement was not only in one direction. Some ecclesiastical territories emancipated themselves from secular influence, notably the bishopric of Speyer that had been under the Palatinate’s protection from 1396 to 1552, though it did lose all its mediate monasteries and two-thirds of its churches and benefices in the process. Twelve prelates were promoted to princely rank, while a few mediate monasteries bought out their secular protectors to become full immediate Estates.143

As Speyer’s experience indicates, losses amongst mediate church property were far greater. Protestant rulers in the Palatinate, Württemberg, Hessen, Ansbach and elsewhere suppressed religious houses that lacked full immediacy yet had been vibrant parts of Catholic cultural and political life – often for centuries. Nonetheless, many Catholic institutions survived in Protestant territories. Magdeburg retained half its convents and a fifth of its monasteries after its conversion to a secular duchy by the Peace of Westphalia. The bishopric of Lübeck even remained part of the imperial church, despite its official designation as a Lutheran territory permanently assigned to Holstein-Gottorp. Three imperial convents likewise remained within the imperial church as Lutheran institutions, because Protestant princely families valued them for their unmarried daughters. Altogether, there were still 78 mediate foundations and 209 abbeys worth 2.87 million florins in annual revenue east of the Rhine in 1802, in addition to hundreds of monasteries, mainly in Catholic territories. The 73 immediate ecclesiastical Estates controlled 95,000 square kilometres, with nearly 3.2 million subjects generating 18.16 million florins of annual revenue.144

Social Composition

This vast wealth extended the political influence of the Empire’s aristocracy, which held virtually all the roughly one thousand cathedral and abbey benefices and dominated the imperial church. The geographical distribution of church lands reflected their origins in the areas of densest population, which had supported higher concentrations of lordships since the Middle Ages. The majority of the counts and knights were in the same regions as the surviving church lands: Westphalia, the Rhineland, and the Upper Rhine–Main nexus across Swabia and Franconia. Election as bishop automatically elevated the successful candidate to full princely rank, and so was especially attractive for the knights who otherwise remained disadvantaged by the Empire’s hierarchical distribution of political rights. The knights provided a third of all early modern prince-bishops, with the Schönborn family being the most successful, twice securing election in the premier see of Mainz.145 Aristocratic domination was already well advanced in the Middle Ages and was strengthened during early modernity by additional barriers, such as requiring canons to prove they had 16 noble ancestors. Of the 166 archbishops in the Empire between 900 and 1500, only 4 are known to have been commoners, while there were only 120 known commoners among the 2,074 German bishops from the seventh to fifteenth centuries. This proportion remained broadly the same with 332 nobles, 10 commoners and 5 foreigners serving as archbishops or bishops between 1500 and 1803.146

Unfortunately for the knights and counts, the princes also had long pedigrees. The Wittelsbachs emerged as strong contenders to be archbishops or bishops, especially once Protestants officially disqualified themselves by their faith after 1555. The papacy relaxed the rules prohibiting the accumulation of bishoprics to prevent these falling into Protestant hands. The Bavarian Duke Ernst secured Cologne and four bishoprics in the late sixteenth century, while his relation Clemens August was known as ‘Mr Five Churches’ for securing a similar number around 150 years later.147 The accumulation of bishoprics was often welcomed by cathedral canons, because it could link a weaker bishopric to a more powerful one, such as Münster to Cologne, or allow neighbours to cooperate, like Bamberg and Würzburg.

Such unions remained temporary with each bishopric retaining its own administration. This apparent failure to participate in wider institutional development attracted criticism after 1648, especially from Protestants and Enlightened thinkers who complained about the ‘dead hand’ of the church tying up valuable resources that might be put to better uses. These arguments for renewed secularization grew stronger after 1740, because they appeared to offer a way to defuse Austro-Prussian tension, or to improve the viability of the middling principalities, all at the expense of their ecclesiastical neighbours. Some later historians accepted this discussion at face value and presented the imperial church as a fossilized medieval relic.148 In practice, the internal development of the church lands was broadly similar to that of the secular territories and included many of the measures advocated by Enlightened thinkers. Unfortunately, this meant the church lands were also not the benevolent backwaters claimed by some Catholics, as all of them established their own armies and many participated in the same European wars as the secular princes.149

Political reform was supplemented by a grass-roots movement for spiritual renewal across Catholic Germany from the 1760s. This faltered in the 1770s, but recovered renewed vigour in response to Joseph II’s suppression of 700 mediate monasteries in the Habsburg lands and curtailment of the spiritual jurisdiction of several south German prince-bishops after 1782.150 Renewal and reform became known as Febronism after the pseudonym adopted by the Trier suffragan bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim in a manifesto published in 1763. Hontheim asked the pope to settle the remaining Protestant Gravamina, or formal complaints, to permit the reunification of all German Christians within a national church. The anti-papal element deepened as several bishops called for an end to all-papal jurisdiction and the recall of the papal nuncios in Vienna, Cologne and Luzern. This contributed to the alienation of all those whom Febronism hoped to enlist as supporters, including the largely conservative Catholic peasantry who opposed many of the bishops’ social reforms. The association of Febronist bishops with Prussia’s League of Princes in 1785 angered Joseph II and left the imperial church politically vulnerable by the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792.151

Carl Theodor von Dalberg was prominent in these efforts to defend the imperial church. He came from a family of imperial knights that had owned estates between Speyer and Oppenheim since the fourteenth century and was related to the influential Metternich, Stadion and von der Leyen families. Having been a cathedral canon for ten years, Dalberg rose in the service of the elector of Mainz to become his successor as imperial arch-chancellor and head of the Empire’s church in 1802. His promotion came precisely at a time when the world he loved was coming to an end through the demise of the three interrelated institutions of the imperial church, imperial knights and imperial constitution. Dalberg struggled amidst rapidly changing circumstances to preserve the old order, remaining optimistic (his critics say naive) despite what appear with hindsight to have been impossible odds. Napoleon Bonaparte used him to legitimate his reorganization of Germany between 1802 and 1806. Dalberg’s lavish flattery of Napoleon did nothing to deflect accusations of treachery and led to his being made a scapegoat for the end of the Empire.152

In fact, the imperial church’s fate was sealed by arrangements under the Peace of Campo Formio accompanying Austria’s surrender of the left bank of the Rhine to France in 1797. Secular princes who lost possessions were to be compensated at the expense of church lands east of the Rhine. The Habsburgs hoped to limit the damage, but the process gathered its own momentum in the wake of further French victories culminating in a final, extensive wave of secularization between 1802 and 1803. This went far beyond all previous changes, irrevocably changing the Empire by effectively destroying the imperial church. Only Dalberg’s electorate was relocated, to the former bishopric of Regensburg, while Mergentheim and Heitersheim remained in the hands of the Teutonic Order and Knights of St John as preserves of the German aristocracy. The rest of the imperial church passed into secular hands, including its mediate properties. Austria alone seized property worth 15 million florins, while Württemberg suppressed 95 abbeys, converting them into barracks, schools, mental hospitals, government offices and palaces to accommodate the secular lords of the lands it had also annexed by 1806. The former Augustinian monastery at Oberndorf became an arms factory, later famous for producing the Mauser rifle.153 Property, artworks and records were scattered or destroyed, and 18 Catholic universities closed, though most of the wealth was used initially to provide pensions for the former imperial clergy.154

Dalberg saved his principality by acting as a figurehead of the 16 princes who left the Empire through a pact with Napoleon in July 1806, precipitating Emperor Francis II’s abdication three weeks later (see Plate 31). Dalberg was rewarded with additional territory and the title of Grand Duke of Frankfurt, but was obliged to accept Napoleon’s stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as his designated successor. Austria assumed the Teutonic Grand Master title, but the Knights of St John were eliminated as a political element entirely in 1805. Dalberg became the Empire’s executor, working hard to reorganize the Catholic church and redefine its relations to the now sovereign principalities. He was hindered by laws passed by the Reichstag in 1803 exempting Austria and Prussia from future imperial concordats with the papacy. Prussia annexed most of the Westphalian bishoprics in 1802, reorganizing them without reference to the pope. Meanwhile, the papacy rebuffed Dalberg’s overtures on behalf of the rest of the Empire after 1803, because it saw him as continuing Febronism. Bavaria fanned papal suspicions, hoping as it did to obtain the autonomy enjoyed by Austria and Prussia. Other princes made their own arrangements, reducing Dalberg’s supporters to those whose lands were too small or poor to support their own bishops. The project failed. Dalberg’s death in 1817 cleared the way for the papacy to agree concordats with the surviving sovereign states, thereby participating in the Empire’s demise by adjusting to the federalization of Germany, which was left without a national church.155 However, this story was not simply one of loss, since the imperial church’s destruction freed energies and resources that fuelled the dynamism of German Catholicism in the nineteenth century.

I am Aleks, thanks for listening.

[The Monarchs- Emmett Cooke. (full) slow rise, peak, fades out]