Reichsgut
As imperial refers to the goods, real estate, land, financial and related sovereign rights, as since the Middle Ages Krongut to the Office of the Holy Roman choice king or emperor , then, not to his person or family ( family possessions were tied). With the death of the respective king, they did not fall to his private heir, but to his successor in office.
history
In the East Franconian and the later Roman-German or Holy Roman Empire , the Merovingian and Carolingian goods that were not lent formed the household property of the kings and thus the basis of the later imperial property. This consisted of the royal palaces and subsequently the imperial castles , associated agricultural areas and crown domains, the extensive imperial forests , and in a broader sense also the imperial cities , imperial knights and imperial abbeys , who were obliged to serve as king , army succession and imperial taxes .
Due to the change of dynasty, first from Merovingians to Carolingians, then to the Ottonians and then to the Salians , not only the imperial fiefs or flag fiefs according to the Lex Salica due to the extinction of the male line of the old dynasty were considered to have fallen back to the imperial head as liege lord, but - before especially since Conrad II , the first Salian - the previous allodial household goods of the old, dead dynasties were also treated like imperial estates by the new elected kings.
However, when a new king, Lothar von Supplingenburg , was elected in 1125 , who had no hereditary connection to the previous dynasty, conflicts arose because the Hohenstaufen became the private heirs of the Salians, but not the heirs of the imperial property. They accepted this choice of necessity, but not that Lothar did not want to surrender old Salian household goods to the Hohenstaufen as direct heirs of the Salians on the pretext that they had now become imperial property. This mainly resulted in the anti- kinghood of Conrad III. from 1128 to 1134. The clarification of the problem was made more difficult by the fact that the Staufers, as relatives and supporters of the Salians, had received both imperial and household goods from them as fiefs for administration, which made them difficult to separate.
At that time, territorialization took place , which means that the administration of property and rights, regardless of their origin, was combined in common administrative districts (usually called office). This also applied in the Hohenstaufen sphere of influence for the administration of imperial goods and Salian or Hohenstaufen household goods. In Swabia , in particular , these were grouped together in so-called landgraves and bailiffs . When Konrad IV, the last Staufer on the German throne, died in 1254, disputes arose during the interregnum not only about the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, but also about imperial property.
In Swabia in particular there was therefore no clear ruler. For example , when Conradin , the son of King Conrad IV, tried to be recognized as Duke of Swabia, Richard of Cornwall replied that the Duchy of Swabia, along with its rights and possessions, had long been incorporated into the empire. Also because of this negative answer, Konradin began his march to Italy and Sicily in 1267 in order to take over his father's inheritance there, with which he soon perished. When Rudolf I of Habsburg ascended the throne in 1273, he tried to regain the old Hohenstaufen household and imperial property for the empire. However, he was soon forced to make concessions on the independence of the imperial cities and to the princes who had administered the old imperial estates for the past 20 years. Rudolf's so-called revindication policy was made more difficult by the fact that there was no general register of the imperial property. Soon afterwards, from 1303, the Habsburg successor king Albrecht I created the Habsburg land register to put an end to this neglect .
In the late Middle Ages imperial was always by the kings because of their financial problems mainly due to various rulers pledged ( Empire Pawn stem lost) and thus went mostly to the kingdom since the buyback in accordance with high trip cost was often problematic. Charles IV , who initially tried to reclaim imperial property, systematically sold it in the 1470s. The aim was, on the one hand, to achieve his political goals (acquisition of the Mark Brandenburg and election of his son Wenzel as Roman-German king), but on the other hand, it was intended to ensure that future kings had to rely primarily on their household goods, which the Luxembourgers one would have a strong position of power (which was not a lasting effect with them, but with their heirs, the Habsburgs ). Ultimately, however, this policy meant that the later kings had fewer and fewer opportunities to intervene in certain regions of the empire in which earlier kings had exerted greater influence (so-called "royal landscapes"), which in direct consequence further restricted the power of kingship.
literature
- Hans Constantin Faußner: The power of disposal of the German king over secular imperial property in the high Middle Ages. In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages . Vol. 29, 1973, pp. 345-449 ( online ).
- Dietmar Flach: Reichsgut 751-1024 (= Historical Atlas of the Rhineland. Supplement 5, 17 = Publications of the Society for Rhenish History. NF Dept. 12, 1b, Lfg. 11). Habelt, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-7749-3561-7 .
- Dieter Hägermann : Reichsgut. In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages . Vol. 7, Col. 620-622.
- Hartmut Hoffmann: The inalienability of crown rights in the Middle Ages. In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages. Vol. 20, 1964, pp. 389-474 ( online ).
- Götz Landwehr: The pledging of the German imperial cities in the Middle Ages (= research on German legal history. Vol. 5, ISSN 0429-1522 ). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1967, (At the same time: Göttingen, University, habilitation paper, 1965).
- Ernst Schubert : King and Empire. Studies on the late medieval German constitutional history (= publications of the Max Planck Institute for History. Vol. 63). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1979, ISBN 3-525-35375-8 (also: Erlangen-Nürnberg, University, habilitation paper, 1974).