Frankfurt Deputation Day
The Frankfurt deputation day was an imperial deputation and was held by Emperor Ferdinand III. convened in August 1642 in the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main . It began belatedly in January 1643 and negotiated until August 1645.
The electorate and the imperial estates of Austria, Bavaria, Jülich, Hesse, Burgundy, Braunschweig, Pomerania, the Hochstift Würzburg , the diocese of Münster, the diocese of Constance, the abbot of Weinberg, the count of Fürstenberg, the cities of Cologne and Nuremberg were represented by envoys .
The formal imperial work order on this day of deputation was the drafting of a new order of the Reich Chamber of Justice . However, this was not completed until the Regensburg Reichstag in 1654 .
The day of the deputation became important because on it the imperial estates could enforce their right to participate in the Westphalian peace negotiations between the empire and France and Sweden. The peace negotiations were originally supposed to be conducted by the emperor as the sole representative of the empire. Only the electors had already secured participation as advisors without voting rights at the Regensburg Electoral Congress of 1636.
The representatives of the other imperial estates demanded the right to equal participation in the congress on the day of the deputation, since the emperor is not entitled to decide on war and peace alone, but only in cooperation with the entirety of the imperial estates. In terms of power politics, the day of the deputation marked a stalemate between the emperor and the imperial estates in questions of representing the empire externally. The estates could not enforce their right to participate on their own, but the emperor could not fend off the demands either.
The situation was decided by the intervention of France and Sweden. Sweden invited all Protestant estates in April and again in November 1643 and France also invited the Catholic estates in April 1644. The Landgrave of Hesse, Amalie Elisabeth , in particular , had induced the two countries to side with the imperial estates.
Ferdinand III. instructed the imperial estates to reject this invitation. After the military defeat in the Battle of Jankau , his position was weakened, he gave up his resistance and on August 29, 1645 invited all imperial estates to participate in the peace congress. With this, the imperial claim to sole representation of the empire in matters of war and peace was finally abandoned until the end of the Old Kingdom in 1806.
literature
- Roswitha von Kietzell: The Frankfurt Deputation Day from 1642 to 1645. An investigation into the constitutional significance of this Imperial Assembly , in: Nassauische Annalen. Yearbook of the Association for Nassau antiquity and historical research, 83rd volume, 1972, pp. 99–119.
- Fritz Dickmann: Der Westfälische Friede , Münster 1977, pp. 113–117.