Rabbit Council

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The Hasenrat (named after Heinrich Has ) was a politically effective assembly in the southern German cities of the Holy Roman Empire since the 16th century .

The political preponderance of the Habsburgs as territorial lords ( front Austria ) and owners of the German kingship and empire in southwest Germany during the Reformation also had consequences for the imperial cities, which were so abundantly represented in the Swabian region .

Emperor Charles V (1519–1556) blamed the guild constitutions that mostly existed in the cities for the spread of the Reformation. In the wake of the Augsburg interim (1548), he therefore smashed the existing council constitutions in Ulm and Augsburg and replaced them with oligarchic patrician councils that were convenient for him and recruited from the upper classes in the city and those who remained Catholic . The Imperial Councilor Dr. Heinrich Has (or Haas) then introduced this type of council constitution in 20 other imperial cities in 1551/1552.

After that, the Small Council determined the political events in the respective imperial city as a secret council . The Small Council consisted of oligarchs and patricians appointed for life; political power was concentrated in these councils. The Great Council , to which the guilds also belonged, was sidelined and the guilds were sometimes dissolved. The politically effective council was also called the Hasenrat after Heinrich Has.

The “rabbit councils” were to determine what was going on in most imperial cities over the next few centuries. Only in Ulm, Reutlingen , Überlingen and Pfullendorf did the old council constitutions or the council be enlarged again in the 1570s, with imperial approval.

literature

  • Meinrad Schaab , Hansmartin Schwarzmaier , Gerhard Taddey (eds.): Handbook of Baden-Württemberg history. Published on behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Volume 1: General History. Volume 2: From the late Middle Ages to the end of the Old Kingdom. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-608-91948-1 , p. 151.
  • Eberhard Naujoks (ed.), Emperor Karl V and the guild constitution. Selected files on the constitutional changes in the Upper German imperial cities (1547–1556) (= publications of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Series A: Sources. Vol. 36). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-17-008562-X .