Fürstenbund
On July 23, 1785, Prussia , Hanover and Saxony joined forces to form the Three Elector League, which was quickly expanded through the accession of 14 other, albeit less powerful, imperial princes to the Prince League. The members soon included Hessen-Kassel and Zweibrücken , Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel , Saxe-Gotha and Saxe-Weimar , Mecklenburg , Baden and Brandenburg-Ansbach .
An essential part of the concept of this alliance was that imperial estates came together not only to reform the imperial system, but - in view of the Prussian-Austrian rivalry in the empire - above all to defend it, as the third element of a triad to be formed.
In addition to Protestant imperial princes, the Catholic Imperial Archbishop , the Elector Archbishop of Mainz ( Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Erthal ), and in 1787 his coadjutor, Karl Theodor Freiherr von Dalberg, also joined . Although the Princes 'League was designed to preserve the imperial constitution and the existing ownership structure, Frederick II (after the end of the Seven Years' War the Prussian king enjoyed a high reputation in the empire) instrumentalized the prince's league as an anti-Habsburg counterweight among the imperial estates.
The reason was the imperial policy of Emperor Joseph II to achieve territorial gains in southern Germany, since the Bavarian Elector Karl Theodor was ready to exchange all of Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands .
When this barter did not materialize, the resistance of the Prussian League had served its purpose, especially from the Prussian point of view. The Electoral Mainz policy was thwarted by Prussia, which withdrew from the federal government in 1788. With the rapprochement between the two German great powers, Austria and Prussia, which took place in 1791 and agreed on joint action against the revolution that had broken out in France in 1791, the Princes' League under Frederick's successor fell apart and fell apart.
literature
- Ulrich Krämer: Carl August von Weimar and the German Princes' Union. Hardt and Hauck, Wiesbaden 1961.
- Johannes Kunisch: Frederick the Great. The king and his time . Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52209-2 , pp. 518-523
- k. A .: Comments on the occasion of the newest princes' union in the German Empire . Berlin u. Leipzig, 1786 online in the Bavarian State Library digital
- Political correspondence of Karl Friedrich von Baden 1783–1806 . Edited by B. Erdmannsdörffer, Volume 1 (1783–1792), Heidelberg 1888; P. 29 ff. Online in the Internet archive
- Leopold von Ranke : The German powers and the princes' union. German history from 1780 to 1790 , Leipzig 1871/72, 2 volumes online in the Internet archive