Burgundian treaty
The Burgundian Treaty or Treaty of Augsburg was ratified on June 26, 1548. He reorganized the constitutional status of the Habsburg Netherlands , the so-called Seventeen Provinces , in the structure of the Holy Roman Empire .
Largely the work of the Imperial Councilor Viglius van Aytta , the Treaty of Augsburg was an agreement between Emperor Charles V and the Imperial Estates (in the person of their envoys to the armored Diet ). The regulation was a first step towards the formation of a Dutch territorial state , which the emperor aspired to as the successor to his Burgundian ancestors. His aim was to create self-rule for the Spanish part of the Habsburg dynasty by largely detaching the Netherlands from the rulership system of the Holy Roman Empire and thus to create their second or lower hereditary lands.
The agreement was made possible politically by the established position of the emperor within the empire after the Schmalkaldic War , but also by the development of the Netherlands itself. Artois and Flanders succeeded in loosening their fiefdoms to the French king and annexing them to the territories of Charles. At the same time, a Supreme Tribunal and an accounting chamber were created in Mechelen , which were exclusively responsible for the "Netherlands".
The treaty dissolved the direct dominions of Charles V ( Duchy of Geldern , County of Zutphen , the territories of the Hochstift Utrecht , Groningen , Overijssel and the County of Drenthe ) from the Lower Rhine-Westphalian Empire ; they were added to the Burgundian Empire . The resulting new unity of the Burgundian hereditary lands of Charles V was withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Imperial Court of Justice. On the other hand, connections in the field of foreign and security policy remained: The Reich committed itself to perpetual protection for the territories. For this, the Burgundian Circle was to pay as much as two electors in imperial allocations to the imperial treasury and for the Turkish wars even as much as three electors.
So that this area of rule would henceforth be subject to a single lord and would not be broken up into its components, Emperor Charles V issued the pragmatic sanction on November 4, 1549 , in which he merged the individual territories into an indivisible rule and thus the succession for his Burgundian Inheritance governed.
The feudal relationships between the individual areas and the empire were formally preserved, but lost more and more of their importance. The consequence was that the area of the Habsburg Netherlands was largely detached from the imperial association and thus the factual distancing from the empire that had already begun in the late Middle Ages was legally enforced. The Burgundian Treaty was therefore an important step on the way to the independence of the Netherlands.
literature
- Felix Rachfahl : The separation of the Netherlands from the German empire. In: West German Journal for History and Art 19 (1900), pp. 79–119 ( digitized in the Internet Archive ).
- Nicolette Mout: The Netherlands and the Empire in the 16th Century. In: Volker Press , Dieter Stievermann (Ed.): Alternatives to the Imperial Constitution in the Early Modern Age? Munich 1995, pp. 143-168.
- Winfried Dotzauer : The German Imperial Circles (1383-1806). History and file edition. Steiner, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-515-07146-6 , pp. 390 ff. And 565 ff. (Preview on Google Book Search).
supporting documents
- ↑ See Volker Press : The Netherlands and the Empire in the Early Modern Age. In: Wim P. Blockmans, Herman van Nüffel (ed.): Etat et Religion aux XVe et XVIe siècles. Actes du colloque à Bruxelles du 9 au 12 octobre 1984. Brussels 1986, pp. 321-338.