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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.
The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.
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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.
So far I have:
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen
The Holy Roman Empire 1250-1356
The Reformation before the Reformation
The House of Habsburg once ruled Spain, Benelux, Austria, Hungary, Czechia, most of Italy, at times Portugal and all of Latin America, the Philippines and of course, the Holy Roman Empire. Most histories of the Habsburgs start out with Maximilian I, his marriage alliances that brought together this empire. But he was not the first Habsburg emperor, and by no means the first Habsburg ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. Their history goes back to the 13th century when they almost established their dynasty on the throne, had it not been for John Parricida murdering his uncle. In this show we follow the dramatic events that saw this dynasty rising and then falling hard, its struggles to recover, the feats and forgeries, the victories and terrible defeats that shaped this family and its lore. We take the story from Rudolf of Habsburgs’ ascent to the throne in 1273 to the election of Charles V in 1519.
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The Ottonians (919 AD-1024 AD)
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy (1024 AD-1125 AD)
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen (1125-1190)
Frederick II Stupor Mundi (1190-1268)
Saxony and Eastward Expansion
The Hanseatic League
The Teutonic Knights
The Holy Roman Empire (1250 AD -1356 AD)
The Reformation before the Reformation (1356AD -1439 AD)
The Empire in the 15th Century
The Fall and Rise of the Habsburgs (1439AD -1519 AD)
Hello and welcome to the
History of The Germans, episode 224,
the Reichstag of the Holy
Roman Empire.
I'm afraid today's episode is
not your usual swordplay and skullduggery.
What we're 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'll look at a couple of
classic tropes, like whether the
Empire really consisted of
more than 300 sovereign states who
could do, well, whatever they
wanted, whether the Reichstag was
a talking shop that never did
anything except stopping the Emperor
from being a proper monarch.
And as usual, we'll talk about
money and printing and why German
political speeches are
invariably long on fact and short
on rhetoric.
So lets start at the beginning.
When was the first 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
as you should, 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 17, 770.
That was so long ago.
It was called by Charlemagne's
father, Pippin the Short.
But these aren't real Reichstag.
Why?
Is it because the chroniclers
in the 11th century called them something
different?
No, there were several
gatherings that were referred to
as Dieta Imperialii, which is
Latin for Reichstag.
What happened is that in the
1980s some German historians met
up and they decided that all
imperial assemblies that took place
before 1495 were Hoftager
Royal assemblies.
Now those that came after
Maximilian's imperial reforms were
to be called Reichstager
Imperial Diets.
Was that just down to that
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 actually mean something?
The key difference between a
Hoftag and a Reichstag is the role
of the king or emperor in the proceedings.
Hoftag in the Middle Ages was
all about the Emperor.
He called the meetings, 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.
Or 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 at the Hoftak
was Not really an option.
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, 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's about to
slip back out of Italy and it will
take 50 years of war to get
rid of him again.
But though he was of course
absolutely right about that, he could
not be heard because, well, he
was outside.
All he could really do was
gently massage the minds of the participants
in one on one private meetings.
In short, both the Hoftag and
the Reichstag are gatherings of the
most powerful people in the
realm, while the Hoftag is presided
over by the king, whilst the
Reichstag largely excludes the king
from the deliberations.
This idea of banning the king,
except for special occasions, actually
still exists in the uk.
So by constitutional
convention, King Charles III is not
allowed to enter the commons
debating chamber.
The last king to set foot in
here had been Charles I in 1642,
and then they cut his head off.
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 in 1495 was
however, not the first time the imperial
estates got together without
their king.
Sometimes that had been due to
natural causes, as 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 Trebuh
in 1076, where the
excommunicated Emperor Henry IV was
banned from taking part.
I think that's episode 33 if
I'm not mistaken.
And then there are the
assemblies where anti kings were
elected, like again one from
that period in March 1077, when for
obvious reasons the reigning
king wasn't present during the 15th
century, when the emperors
Sigismund and Friedrich III were
often far too busy to come to
the assemblies they had called.
The imperial states had become
accustomed to discussing their issues
by themselves.
So accustomed indeed that they
no longer even wanted him to be in
the room when he finally
showed up.
I have tried to pin down the
exact date when they threw the emperor
out, but I have not got to the
bottom of it.
What we do know is that in
1495 the rule 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 additional information,
suggestions, or something like
that, not by forcing him in one way
or another.
As we move into the 14th and
15th century, these assemblies take
a more antagonistic stance,
demanding that the emperor resolves
key issues like the Schism,
the endless feuding, the marauding
mercenaries or foreign incursions.
And as we've seen, these
antagonistic stances culminated in
the blow up of 1495, when the
Imperial states tried to put a gun
to Maximilian's head.
So there really is a change in
the late 15th 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.
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
been around for 200 years.
The Polish Sejm and the Cortes
of Spain and Portugal claimed to
be even older.
There were assemblies in
Hungary, Estates General in the Duchy
of Burgundy in France, royal
councils in Denmark and Sweden.
And on the level below the
imperial principalities, there were
Assemblies Lande, where
representatives of the local nobility,
clergy, cities and commoners
agreed their position vis a vis their
lord.
The Landtag of Wurttemberg was
one of the most prominent and lasting
of these.
But we've also encountered
them in Austria and Tyrol already
in recent episodes.
Almost every political entity
in the 15th and 16th century had
some sort of representative
body in inverted commas alongside
its ruler.
They all differed in terms of
member selection, organization, procedure.
But even then, compared to all
these, the Reichstag was very much
an outlier.
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 the 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 seven 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.
But not every count, duke or
prince was admitted to the Reichstag.
Only if your great, great,
great, great, great and some more
great's grandfather had been
enfeived with a county or duchy directly
by the emperor, then you had a
seat or share of a seat in the Reichstag.
If, on the other hand, 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 three imperial
cities were admitted, even though
many were smaller than, say,
Stralsund or Rostock, which were
territorial cities.
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 counsel
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, but on the
ancient mont of vassalage established
hundreds of years ago and
renewed dozens of times since.
That explains again the
presence of the free imperial cities.
They too had become vassals of
the emperor when they had been granted
their charter.
They were there not to
represent the interests of the urban
population of the empire, but
to safeguard the interest and the
liberties of their hometowns.
If one were to take this logic
to its conclusion, the imperial knights,
who were also direct vassals
of the empire, 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'm
talking about today comes from.
Now, having discussed the
intellectual uber bar 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 special
status to the important constituents
of the realm, usually the
bishops, dukes, counts, nobles, etc.
They were supposed to keep
them engaged and aligned with the
king or prince.
The assembly was their 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.
They were to a large extent
dependent on the willingness of their
subjects to cough up the cash.
And 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 lords
decision to support the King's wars,
palace building or mistresses.
If you look at the parliaments
in England and the Estates General
in France, you can see a
fairly clean picture.
The nobles and the clergy
debate the grand politics and then
the funding is put to the
commoners or the tiers.
Et you can see how this
pattern then developed further, either
organically as in England or
as a rupture in France.
The tax paying commons in
tiers etat demanded more and more
say in the big decisions and
then power shifted to to these precursors
of modern parliaments.
The Reichstag did not
experience such a trajectory.
It started in 1495 and ran
until 1803 and was then revived under
the same name but in a
fundamentally different form in 1866.
1871.
Part of why the Reichstag
never became a true representative
structure was the fixed membership.
Now 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 Thirty
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 that are today the country of
Liechtenstein.
Effectively, the membership of
the Reichstag shrunk throughout most
of 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 Hanover.
The secular princes went from
51 to 84, in part through the elevation
of counts to princes, and 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, mainly
through expiry of the family
sale or elevation to princely rank.
Only about 50 new members were
created throughout the 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
is slowly sidelined, and in France,
the Assembly national did away
with the colleges of the nobles,
their heads.
It is the representation of
the commoners that tended to be the
nucleus of democracy.
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 is what gave Parliament
and the Assembly 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.
But 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 that 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.
So after this failure of the
common penny, the Empire reverted
back to the system of the
Imperial Register, or Imperial Matricel
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
Saint Maximian owed six horse and
44 men on foot.
Now, such small contingents
then had become quite ineffective
around 1500, so that
obligation was converted into a cash
contribution.
Now, this system of having a
fixed amount for every single estate
has had a number of advantages.
First, it made it very simple
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
Saint 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 from each household, it
would have shown how many
taxable households there were in,
say, Nuremberg.
And if the neighboring princes
had known how much wealth there really
was, the cities feared that
would be gobbled up.
On the downside, the matrical
system was a very imbalanced, with
some places paying high dues
relative to economic capacity and
others very low ones, and b it
was only very rarely reset.
So the matricel became simply
a sort of unit of measure.
So, for instance, during the
long Turkish War, 1663-1742, the
Reichstag would regularly
express their commitment as a multiple
of the matrical.
That is, it would say, this
time we raise tax at a rate of 50
times the matrical or 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, because the men on
the street didn't owe the taxes.
It was the entity, the
imperial estate, that owed the taxes.
And so 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, or the
Reichstag refused to to raise
the taxes, well then the local lord
was unlikely to reduce the tax burden.
He would just simply keep it
for himself.
Moreover, maximum 10% of the
empire's population lived in the
free imperial cities who were
represented in the Reichstag.
So even if these estates had a
stronger 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,
well, that never changed.
So if the Reichstag was not
about representing the interest of
social groups, not even in a
rather rudimentary early modern medieval
way, what was it about?
In the main, it was about status.
The Empire was held together
by the status hierarchy.
It conveyed to its members,
say you were a prince elector, she
is the highest princely rank
in the Empire, with the right to
elect the Emperor.
You feel really good about that.
But this status can obviously
only exist as long as there is an
Emperor to elect.
Therefore, even once the
elections had become non contentious
acclamations of whichever
Habsburg's turn it was at the time,
there were still elections so
that the electors could feel valued
and important.
They might think this is weird
and backward and pointless, but I
find it a lot less ridiculous
than the French aristocrats, who
believed that their self worth
was entirely dependent on which part
of the royal underwear they
could pass to His Majesty during
their mourning levee.
And this status model was
extremely successful, arguably more
successful than anything the
emperors had tried to do in the centuries
before.
You may painfully remember
that about two years ago, we broke
the narrative line of the
history of the Germans and discussed
the north, namely the eastern
expansion into the former Slavic
lands east of the Elbe, then
the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic
Knights.
The reason we had to do 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 usually
have 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.
As Martin Rady snarkily
commented, the 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, Kahlenberg,
etc.
Barely featured in imperial
history more or less from the 11th
century onwards.
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, with England
and Poland.
The imperial reform 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 worthwhile getting
involved with imperial politics again.
And status was not the only thing.
The other institutions like
the courts, eternal pace, etc.
That obviously played a role
as well.
But this was a time where
status was exceedingly important.
Princes were constantly
stretching themselves and their estates
to keep up with the Joneses.
If your neighbour built a
theatre, well, 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.
But 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 less likely 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 matter.
Take the city of Trier as 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 their own
Reichstag in 1512.
But most of the time Trier did
not show up.
And crucially, when push came
to shove, they 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
Reichskamerch, decided in 1580 that,
well, if you did not pay, you
did not play.
And now it was too late to
come back into the game.
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 Lubeck, who had
only scant interaction with
the empire until then, had decided
to pay four times what they
used to order to be a member of the
Reichstag.
And Lubeck remained a free
imperial city until the end of the
Empire, and was later a city
state within Germany until 1937.
Money well spent, I would say.
Decision making in the
Reichstag was famously laborious
and slow.
Jacob Wimpfling 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 and 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.
And that arbitration process
began with aligning electors and
princes before the cities were
brought in.
And only once all three
colleges had reached unanimity did
the Reichstag decision then go
to the emperor, who had only the
choice between accepting it 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's the good.
Only 281 of the 402 imperial
estates ever participated in a Reichstag.
Usually no more than half of
the invitees showed up.
Even at the kushel Reichstag
of 1495, there were only 147 estates
present.
There's another important point.
Because the seat was linked to
the territory, not to the individual,
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.
And after the Reformation,
several bishoprics became principalities
and integrated into other
territorial lordships.
And then occasionally fiefs
moved across as a consequence of
war.
So after a lot of to and fro,
by 1792, Austria held one electoral
vote, three princely votes and
two comital votes.
Prussia, though smaller in
territory, had one electoral and
eight princely and one comital vote.
Of the remaining 84 princely
votes, 30 were held by bishops and
abbots, the rest by 35 secular
princes and electors, plus, then
there was Denmark and Sweden,
with one vote each.
The smaller entities, in the
end, did not really matter.
The 48 counts and 40 prelates
shared just six votes of the 90 votes
in the College of Princes.
And the 51 remaining cities
were so disadvantaged by the voting
process, their influence was
usually marginal.
If we then take into account
that many of the ecclesiastical princes
were the second sons of
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're actually
looking at more like 20 to 30
guys taking the decision.
And that sounds a lot more
viable than 402.
Basically, all these hundreds
of tiny statelets that everybody
always talks about, they did
not carry much weight in the Reichstag.
And the idea that they were
like independent sovereigns is also
not really true.
Sure, the very largest ones,
Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Hannover,
would forge their own foreign
policy and send 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, say, the
counts of Hohenlu Wekersheim, with
their six villages and their
oversized Schloss, there was no way
that they would send an envoy abroad.
At a stretch, they may appoint
a representative to the Reichstag,
but that usually only as a
joint effort, together with their
cousins in Neuenstein and.
And then even Then their
representative was still not working
exclusively for them, but also
for a couple of other princes.
And if they had to take a
stance in any major conflict, they
usually just aligned with one
of their bigger neighbors.
So where such micro
principalities were much more involved
was in the ten imperial
circles, which we'll discuss in more
detail next week.
Now, what powers did the
Reichstag actually have?
The English Parliament and
many other of these assemblies had
the power to decide on war and
peace, mainly because 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 imperialist
aid, even a tiny one, was allowed
to go to war against a foreign
enemy, provided that that action
did not harm neither the
Emperor nor the Empire.
So, for example, in 1698, the
Elector of Saxony joined Russia in
a war against Sweden without
even sending a letter to 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 or as
Archduke of Austria.
The Emperor only required the
Reichstag consent for his war with
France if he wanted access to
the imperial resources, either in
the form of taxes or military force.
As we have seen with
maximilian I in 1495, that can occasionally
be decisive, but not always.
If, for example, the Habsburgs
could conduct the war just using
their own resources, well,
then they occasionally did not even
ask the Reichstag for approval.
I guess in about two years,
when we have worked our way through
the incessant wars of the
16th, 17th and 18th century, we'll
have come to a much better
perspective on whether the Reichstag
and its support mattered for
the outcome.
War in taxes were, however,
not the only topic of debate in the
Reichstag.
Its other tacit objective was
to improve coordination and coherence
across the Empire.
The Reichstag, for instance,
ensured that people could move freely
between the different territories.
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, from
religious prosecution, or just from
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
then reissue coin with lower
gold or silver content and pocket
the difference.
Or they would simply create
vast amounts of debased coins to
pay their soldiers, mistresses
or palace builders, 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 fully succeed,
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, if you wanted to
transport salt from Frankfurt to
cologne, that added 60% in tolls.
As a consequence, merchants
would unload wine south of Mainz
and then transport them
overland via Frankfurt and Cassel
and then on to the Weser river
down to the North Sea.
That was a truly absurd detour.
In this case, the Reichstag
was less successful.
But then we also have to take
into account that in 1766, France
still employed 20,000 revenue
officers collecting tolls on domestic,
not international, traffic.
And they even treated Lorraine
still as a foreign country, even
though it had been part of
France for a while.
Another unintended benefit of
the Reichstag was that it provided
a sort of permanent
international conference.
The Habsburgs had, of course,
a permanent presence here, as did
the kings of Denmark and Sweden.
So envoys from France and
Italy could easily come to the Reichstag
and use it as a platform for
informal discussions.
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 Imperi,
recorded all the Reichstag decisions,
was first published in 1501, a
solid 270 years before Hansard began
recording the debates in the
English parliament.
The proceedings at the
Reichstag then became part of a broader
political information exchange
that got then turbo boosted when
the Tonon Taxis family opened
the Imperial postal service to private
users in 1516.
Germany, therefore, had the
first daily newspaper in Europe 67
years before England.
Apparently in the 16th and
17th centuries, this country of poets
and thinkers was full of news junkies.
In general, the Reichstag
operated on written memoranda and
weighty policy papers, not on
rousing speeches.
That had a lot to do with the
habit of sending representatives
to the Reichstag.
The gatherings were scheduled
for two months and often went on
much longer.
So 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.
So if the empire had had a
capital, the important princes would
probably have established a
town palace there, as was the case
in Paris, Madrid or London.
And in that case, if the
Reichstag would have gathered at
the capital, well, then the
princes would have attended in person
more often.
But with an itinerant
Reichstag, a large proportion of
participants had sent their
counsellors or envoys, and they would
rarely have the authority to
commit their prints on matters not
previously discussed.
That again, rendered stirring
speeches rather useless, because,
again, if the audience cannot
really decide the matters on the
spot, they would have to ask
for a written copy of the speech
that they could then send to
their boss with a suggestion on how
we should vote.
And then the envoy would
receive a letter back, which he would
then 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 they would
then read out and copy it, and so
forth, and so forth and so forth.
This made the process
incredibly slow, and I think the
polite word for it is lifeless.
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 the waving of
arms and rhetoric flourishes were
effectively pointless, the
debate was always more focused on
facts and thorough review of
the 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
become embedded into German
political discourse.
Debates in the Bundestag are
shockingly dry and dour, in particular
when compared to the
intellectual sparring matches at
Prime Minister's question time
or at a Senate hearing.
That can, of course, be
because the Germans have come out
of the 20th century with a
stronger suspicion of SP stirring
speeches.
But even before 1933, Germany
did not have debating societies like
the Oxford Union that raids
rhetoric over content.
The Liese Gesellschafner
reading societies of the 18th and
19th century tried to find a
deeper understanding of politics,
poetry and philosophy.
They weren't interested in
crowning a winner.
So maybe 300 years, a swapping
written memoranda had left an imprint
on the German political
culture that we now refused to shake.
So if we pull it all 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.
Now all this is true, but one
can look at it another way.
Even though the Reichstag was
more bureaucratic than the eu, less
able to prevent war than the
un, and had more free riders than
NATO, it ensured the empire
remained together as an entity for
another 300 years.
Look at the southern part of
what had once been the medieval empire
in Italy.
Well, they did not have such a
coordination mechanism like the Reichstag.
They managed, therefore, to
consolidate into five larger, maybe
a dozen smaller states.
But throughout these 300
years, plus another 50 or so, Italy's
states were vassals of Spain
and Austria, unable to determine
their own destiny.
I expect I will spend quite a
lot more time with the Reichstag
as the podcast winds its way
through the upcoming three centuries.
It is hence far too early to
come to a conclusion on whether the
Reichstag of the Holy Roman
Empire was good, bad, or just the
best possible solution to a
complex situation.
I hope you'll stick around
until we get to 1806 where we can
really take stock.
And if you want to make sure
we get to the end of the empire without
advertising an 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, Sean
S and Alexander D have already.
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