Ten cities
The Ten City League ( Dekapolis or French Décapole ) was an alliance of ten free imperial cities in Alsace . It was founded in 1354 with the aim of helping each other defend their rights and freedoms. The designation as the ten-city federation or décapole, however, was only used much later in historiography. The medieval documents speak rather of Richestette common in Alsace or later villes d'Empire associées en Alsace , especially since their number fluctuated between nine and eleven.
Members
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| Colmar | Haguenau | Kaysersberg | Landau | Mulhouse | Muenster |
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| Oberehnheim | Rosheim | Schlettstadt | Selz | Türkheim | Weissenburg |
The following ten cities were founding members:
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Four years later, Selz ( Seltz ) was added as the eleventh city, which was removed from the federal government in 1418. After Mülhausen left (1515), Landau added the Décapole from 1521 and expanded it to the north.
When it was founded in the middle of the 14th century, Hagenau, Colmar and Schlettstadt each had 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, Weißenburg around 4,000, Mulhouse 1,800 and the other members between 1,000 and 1,500.
development
After repeated amalgamations of the ten imperial cities in 1342, 1346 and 1349 to preserve their freedoms and to enforce a civil order, King Charles IV founded the League of Ten cities in 1354 on their initiative. His reservations, however, were that the federal government should only apply for the duration of its own reign and that it should have the right to dissolve it at any time. After the emperor's death in 1378, the union was also dissolved, but re-established in 1379; it was able to consolidate itself in the following decades and secure its imperial city status for its members vis-à-vis the emperor. This was of particular importance at a time when the imperial property was increasingly viewed from the financial aspect of pledging.
The ten-city federation had the task of mutually safeguarding the rights and freedoms of its members and was in this respect a collective unification on a cooperative basis (Confederation) . In addition, the members supported each other militarily in internal and external conflicts. This military aspect was under the direction of the Reichslandvogt at the time of Charles IV. After the re-establishment of the Confederation in 1379, the Reichslandvogt was eliminated.
In accordance with the cooperative character of the unification, the members had equal rights. The meetings did not take place regularly, the meeting place was initially Schlettstadt (Sélestat), later Strasbourg , which itself did not belong to the federal government. The suburb of the federal government was Hagenau (Haguenau), which was given the task of inviting people to the meetings, conducting correspondence and sending the deputations to the emperor and king.
In 1515 Mülhausen (Mulhouse) left the Confederation and joined the Swiss Confederation as a "city facing" , and in 1521 Landau joined the Decapolis. The Reformation made some of these cities Protestant; initially Weißenburg (Lutheran, 1522) and Mülhausen (reformed, 1529), later also Hagenau, Münster, Schlettstadt, Landau and Selz. In addition, some of the citizens of the cities of Colmar and Oberehnheim joined the Reformation. In the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, Alsace fell to France, while the free imperial cities on the left bank of the Rhine continued to send their representatives to the permanent Reichstag in Regensburg . With his reunification policy , Louis XIV had the ten cities conquered in 1673 and 1674, their fortifications razed and placed under the French provincial administration. The peace of Nijmegen in 1679 confirmed the loss of the imperial direct status of the ten cities and sealed the end of the Decapolis.
Remarks
literature
- Lucien Sittler : La Décapole alsacienne. Des origines à la fin du moyen âge (= Publications de l'Institut des Hautes Etudes Alsaciennes. Vol. 12, ZDB -ID 152295-4 ). Le Roux, Strasbourg et al. 1955.
- Lucien Sittler: The Alsatian League of Ten, its historical peculiarity and its organization. In: Esslinger Studies. Vol. 10, 1964, ZDB -ID 2547-1 , pp. 59-77.
- Lucien Sittler: Association of Ten Cities. In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages. Volume 3: Codex Wintoniensis - Education and Training. Artemis-Verlage, Munich et al. 1986, ISBN 3-7608-8903-4 , Sp. 654.
- Christian Ohler: Between France and the Reich. The Alsatian Decapolis after the Peace of Westphalia (= Mainz Studies on Modern History. Vol. 9). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2002, ISBN 3-631-38777-6 (also: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2000).
- Bernard Vogler (Ed.): La Décapole. The Villes d'Alsace alliées pour leurs libertés 1354–1679. Editions La Nuée Bleue / DNA, Strasbourg 2009, ISBN 978-27165-0728-8 .
Web links
- Literature on the ten cities in the catalog of the German National Library