Imperial Diet (Holy Roman Empire)
gigatos | May 31, 2022
Summary
The diet (Tag), in the ancient law of the Germans, was the meeting of the people, originally suited primarily to the election of the sovereign. In the Holy Roman Empire, it was an assembly that brought together the sovereign (king or emperor) and the major princes of the empire, with mainly legislative duties, although in the constitutional structure of the Middle Ages there was no separation of powers similar to ours, since power was divided according to different criteria: in fact, diets also acted as jurisdictional and executive bodies.
The assemblies of delegates from the Swiss cantons of the Old Confederation also took the name “federal diet” (German Tagsatzung, French diète) until 1848.
The origin of the term is Latin: it comes from the late Latin dieta, as in “day appointed for assembly,” itself thus coming from the Latin dies, meaning “day.” The Latin term is derived from the original Germanic tag, “day.”
A distinction is made between:
Royal diet refers to the informal meetings of the emperor with some of the empire”s grandees. The custom of meeting at court to assist the ruler in making decisions developed from the feudal obligation to assist the king with actions and advice. These meetings are called in different manners: parlamentum, conventus, colloquium, curia, curia regis. To emphasize their importance they were sometimes accompanied by the adjective magnus or solemnis. These meetings differed from the normal consultations that took place at court only in the presence of specially invited personages, who could be princes, nobles, high prelates, but also representatives of foreign states. Beginning in the 13th century, representatives of the free cities of the Empire were also invited to such diets. The diets were organized according to court etiquette, and referred only to the person of the king (and not to the empire as a whole).
The king could freely decide when to convene a diet and who should be part of it. It is more difficult, however, to identify cases in which the princes had a merely advisory role from those in which their consent was binding for the validity of the decisions made. In any case, from the duty to advise the king, there soon developed the right of the princes to be consulted in the case of particular decisions affecting the empire, for example in the case of war. In any case it remained mostly at the king”s discretion to decide when to seek advice, and when to seek the princes” consent: this was not an institutionalized participation in royal power by the princes.
Medieval sources concerning important political decisions, or provisions on imperial wealth, emphasize that such decisions were made with the “advice” and “consent” of the princes. In such documents, these two terms were synonymous with regard to the validity of the documents: if a prince was not invited, or was of a different opinion from the king, he was not considered bound by the decisions of the diet.
After the interregnum (the period between the end of the reign of Conrad IV, 1254, and the election of Rudolf I, 1273) the importance of the princes of the empire increased, as their formal acceptance to royal decrees on imperial matters became necessary, through so-called “letters of consent” (in German Willebriefe). But even then there is no evidence of any obligation on the part of the ruler to obtain such Willenbriefe for the validity of his decrees.
From the end of the 14th century, the ruler became increasingly concerned with his own dynastic territories, which is why “kingless diets,” in which the empire”s grandees gathered without any specific royal initiative, gained in importance. It was from these “kingless diets” that the Imperial Diet developed in the late 15th century.
The term Imperial Diet (Reichstag) originally referred to the assembly of the orders of the Holy Roman Empire. These assemblies began to be convened, alongside the more informal royal diets, in the 12th century, and became an integral part of the constitution of the empire in 1495, with a treaty between the emperor and the representatives of the states.
The Imperial Diet was convened, at irregular intervals, in an episcopal or imperial city, and offered the states a counterweight to the central authority of the emperors. As imperial power disappeared, the figure of the emperor was downgraded to a kind of president of the Diet (Primus inter Pares), as the executive body of decisions deliberated at the Reichstag, which became the supreme law-making body of the empire.
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Composition and organization
From 1489 the Imperial Diet included three colleges that constituted the Reichstag:
Only the emperor had the power to convene the Diet, but, beginning with Charles V”s capitulatio cesarea (1519), the ruler had to seek permission from the electoral princes to convene. The emperor also retained the right to set the agenda, although he could not actually influence the topics under discussion more. The Diet was presided over by the Archbishop of Mainz, the first Grand Elector and dean of the assembly, who also presided over the College of Grand Elector Princes. The Council of Princes was chaired in turn by the Duke of Austria and the Archbishop of Salzburg, while the presidency of the College of Imperial Cities was entrusted to the city in which, from time to time, the Diet was held.
Since since 1663 the “Perpetual Diet” could not be concluded, formally it was not even possible to ratify the decisions made through a “recessus imperii” (see above), and therefore they were issued by the Prinzipalkommissar, the emperor”s representative to the Diet, in the form of a “Decree of the Imperial Commission.”
The Diet deliberated on a wide variety of issues, for which a consensus had to be reached between the emperor and the representatives of the princely states, with the cities being able to vote after the two orders of princes (ecclesiastical and secular) had reached a majority vote. The jurisdiction of the diet extended over the structure of government, and over administrative, jurisdictional and military matters affecting the empire as a whole. Issues related to the maintenance and proclamation of the Landfrieden, that is, the regulation of peaceful coexistence between different religious denominations, declarations of war and peace treaties, the financing of imperial institutions, as well as the setting of the economy in the empire were then discussed.
The decision-making process was very long and complex: each order made a decision, through a vote for which either the majority or unanimity principle could apply. The expression of the vote then was governed by complex regulations: not only was a strict order of precedence of electoral bodies followed (Great Electors, alternating ecclesiastical and secular Princes, Abbot Princes, Counts and Sovereign Lords, Free Cities), but also according to ecclesiastical principles (Ecclesiastical Bench) over secular ones (Secular Bench), according to criteria of religious faith (Catholic Body and Lutheran Body), according to whether it was individual, hereditary or personal, collective (for the two Prelate”s benches, the four Counts” benches, the fiefs in condominium, the two Imperial City benches). An attempt was then made to work out a joint decision, to be submitted to the emperor. The proposals of the college of electors and those of the college of princes carried decisive weight, while the vote of the college of cities had secondary importance, and was often not even considered. Negotiations took place outside the colleges, and often, the principle of majority voting applied to them, unlike the plenary session, where the principle of unanimity applied.
Because of the increasing complexity of decision-making processes, attempts were made to facilitate decisions by resorting to various commissions, in which experts representing the states of the empire generally participated. Thus it was that, beginning in the 16th century, an elite group of experts and politicians specialized in this type of negotiation developed.
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Voting procedure
Voting during diets did not follow the majority principle. They generally took place by curie, that is, first there was agreement within each state (applying, generally, the majority principle), and then each state cast a vote. Regional diets generally deliberated when unanimity had been reached in the votes of the curies. Only rarely was the majority principle applied. In some territories, however, a majority vote of the curie was sufficient, provided that this majority included the first state (generally the clergy or high nobility). In some regions the personal vote, and not tied to the curia, of some particularly powerful members of the states was also allowed.
To be eligible for the seat and vote in the Reichstag Council of Princes (access was conditioned by precise requirements, later regulated in the “Capitulation” of 1653:
However, to these general criteria could be added others that often nullified their absolute value. In fact, there were princes and counts who were allowed to vote even without the possession of immediate fiefs (the princes Thurn und Taxis or the counts von Harrach, the abbots of St. Blasien). Even the concept of sovereignty had a varied typology that could also contemplate a status of semi-sovereignty, delegating the exercise of state powers to other sovereigns, or mortgaging one”s state to others (as in the case of Bentheim County in 1753 in favor of Hanover). Not even the payment of the matriculation tax to the imperial treasury was a sure criterion for admission to the vote: some princes, as in the case of the Savoy, for continuing to hold the right to vote no longer exercised it for some time and refused, not only to pay the matriculation tax, but also to recognize the emperor as their supreme lord. Conversely, there were cases in which some feuds, subject to dispute, had their matricula paid by other princes who claimed ownership, or subjects who, although no longer part of the imperial structure, continued to pay it out of loyalty to the empire (as in the case of the former imperial city of Haguenau, which came under French sovereignty).
There were about 300 states entitled to vote, ruled by about 25 princely families and about 80 counts and lords, for a total of about 108 votes cast.Voting was always opened by a representative of the elector of Mainz who invited the deputy of the elector of Trier to cast his vote first, and so on according to a strict precedence criterion. Votes alternated between members of the ecclesiastical bench and those belonging to the secular bench and within them on the basis of religious faith (Catholic or Lutheran). Imperial cities could cast their votes only after the princes had spoken.
State assemblies were also held in individual lordships (Landtag) and after the Imperial Reformation, even at the level of the Imperial Circle. They spread mainly from the 14th century onward.
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Circle diets
Each imperial circle had its own chancellery and along with it the provincial parliament (in German Kreistag). Depending on the type of fiefdom it could happen that some people were admitted to the diets of the circles but were not recognized as having a vote in the Reichstag.
Among the cities hosting circle diets were Aachen for the Lower Rhine-Westphalian imperial circle, Rothenburg ob der Tauber for the Franconian circle, and Regensburg for the Bavarian circle, formerly the seat of the Reichstag.
Offenburg was instead the seat of the Ortenau Equestrian Circle. Especially famous and active were the Swabian and Franconian Circle Diets, which, although their decisions were irrelevant to the Reichstag, were well organized and full of initiatives.
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Composition
As in the assemblies of common states throughout Europe, there were usually three categories represented: the third state (through the cities), the clergy, and the nobility. However, the latter was often divided between the low nobility of the Knights (ritter in German) and the high nobility (the Lords). Beyond the nobility was the high clergy, whether bishops or monasteries and regular orders. Later cities also acquired the right of representation at the Landtag. More rarely this was the case for municipalities and rural territories (e.g., valleys and courts in Tyrol).Each representation, within the regional diets, formed a curia, while the prince was not part of any state. The set of states represented in the diet was called Landschaft (“country,” “region”).
Representatives of states in diets were not elected by the people. Representation of a class at the diet was a privilege derived from feudal law, and could be exercised by the owner of a land, or by those who held an office (e.g., for abbots of convents). City envoys were often appointed by the city council, without defined elective procedures.
Of course, the participation of individual entities in the assemblies varied over time due to decisions imposed by the sovereign or territorial changes or acquisitions and exclusions from participation of individual lords, prelates and cities.
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Regional peculiarities
In the Netherlands, the assemblies of states gradually succeeded in placing themselves at the apex of power, marginalizing the authority of princes and the emperor. Here the states were identified with the country”s provinces, while in Switzerland the same was true of the cantons. Clergy and nobility had no representation as states.
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