Bernhard Diestelkamp, ed. Das Reichskammergericht: Der Weg zu seiner Gründung und die ersten Jahrzehnte seines Wirkens (1451-1527). Quellen und Forschungen zur Höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004. 289 pp. EUR 39.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-412-12703-9.
Reviewed by Len Scales (Department of History, Durham University)
Published on H-German (June, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
The Rise and Rise of the Reichskammergericht
It used to be possible to dismiss the Reichskammergericht with little more than a few choice quotations from Goethe. To nineteenth-century scholarship, the interminable proceedings at the Holy Roman Empire's cameral court seemed to encapsulate the woeful governmental inadequacies of the Reich itself. For most of the twentieth century, aspiring students had to make do with Rudolf Smend's monograph of 1911.[1] During the 1970s, however, the court took a a new lease on life, when a vast project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) was established to catalogue its ca. 76,000 surviving case records, scattered among nearly fifty archives across Germany and beyond. Since the 1980s a society has dedicated itself to its study, and a museum and research center have been operating at Wetzlar, the court's last seat. The upward trajectory of the Reichskammergericht continues and, as this collection of papers affirms, shows little sign of slackening.
The prodigious infusions of research money that have sustained the court's late-twentieth-century rehabilitation are reflected, directly and indirectly, throughout the seven pieces published here--all the work of scholars deeply immersed in sifting and interpreting the sources for imperial justice and administration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Two papers, by Ralf Mitsch and Julia Maurer, draw on the fruits of a DFG-backed project to edit the documents for the cameral court (Kammergericht)--the fifteenth-century monarchical forum that preceded the new court established at Worms in 1495. Eva Ortlieb's paper on the aulic council under Maximilian I and his immediate successors draws upon her work on another large-scale project, under the auspices of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, investigating the formation of the early modern Reichshofrat. Other major ventures are afoot elsewhere.
The willingness of public bodies to underwrite such grand schemes reflects in turn the more sympathetic light in which the altes Reich itself has in recent decades come to be viewed. With the discrediting in postwar West Germany of the centralized Machtstaat came a growing willingness to reassess supposed historic weaknesses as potential strengths, with encouraging rather than disheartening contemporary lessons. And just as the empire's judicial arrangements once seemed to lie at the root of the problem, so they now appeared to offer a key to a non-toxic, limited, and constitutional Reich--"ein Friedens- und Rechtsverband," as Bernhard Diestelkamp, editor of the present volume and doyen of Reichskammergerichtsforschung, has elsewhere reflected.[2] The growth of the European Union, meanwhile, was teaching the lesson that far-reaching judicial institutions are not to be created overnight and that a modicum of popular legitimacy might prove to be worth any amount of executive muscle. The Reichskammergericht has therefore come to seem well worth knowing about. The resources for its study have also, however, been transformed in the past thirty years. Researchers have been able to draw not only upon the fruits of major projects on the empire's judicial institutions themselves, but on new volumes of Reichstagsakten and, for the early period examined here, the published registers of Frederick III.[3] Never have knowledge and understanding of the empire's cameral court been so extensive or, it seems, the climate for their dissemination so favorable.
How does the present collection reflect and extend this rich abundance? It is noteworthy, first of all, that only two of the seven papers--by Jost Hausmann and Anette Baumann--are actually concerned directly with the Reichskammergericht. On offer here is a series of well-focused snapshots of specialized but important facets of the court's early history, along with some of the various contexts of its creation. The volume's main concentration (we might almost say agenda) is signaled in the subtitle. The background and origins of the new forum--and the extent of its newness--are the principal concerns of three contributions, by Mitsch, Maurer, and Matthias Kordes. The two remaining essays deal with the backdrop to its creation at Worms (Peter Schmid) and with its Habsburg-dominated counterpart, and potential competitor, the post-1497 Hofrat (Ortlieb). In general, the collection holds together very well. That some themes--particularly the Reichskammergericht's relationship to its immediate forebear and the new court's early peregrinations--are visited repeatedly by different contributors is understandable and even, where they bring contrasting perspectives and sources to bear, illuminating. The "fresh-from-the-archive" feel of most papers is also on the whole a great strength--although their extensive heaping-up of raw data might at times leave the reader overwhelmed. Clearly, the magisterial overviews will have to wait. In the meantime, we have here a powerful exposition of the sheer weight of records, some still lying uncataloged in the archives, bearing upon the empire's much-maligned judicial organs at the close of the Middle Ages.
The two papers most centrally concerned with the Reichskammergericht, by Hausmann and Baumann, both combine an emphasis on continuities with a picture of gradual change over the course of the three decades after 1495. Hausmann charts in detail the itinerant existence and irregular sittings of the new court, characteristics it shared with the preceding cameral tribunals of Maximilian and Frederick III, but which now registered the fluctuating state of the tug-of-war between Maximilian and the estates that overshadowed its early years. Continuity with the past was also reflected in the shifting locations: Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Worms, and Esslingen, as well as sessions under the king's domination in Regensburg and Augsburg, before the court finally put down lasting roots in Speyer in 1527. Here, disproportionately, were centers and regions which had, for much of the Middle Ages already, been "close" to the king, and whence were also to come a preponderance of the new court's customers and, as Baumann shows, the great majority of its early personnel.
Baumann, in a pioneering study of procurators in the Reichskammergericht down to 1529, deploys prosopographical data to trace a comparable mix of the persistence of the old with the slow institutionalization of the new. Hers is one of several papers to draw attention to the predominance of urban and high bourgeois elements during this period, both as agents of the imperial justice system and as a major source of demand for its services. Also reflected in other papers is the growing importance of advanced learning traced here in procurators' careers. The substantial legal expertise required of procurators allowed the high bourgeois careerists who now often filled this office to conceive of themselves from the court's inception as quasi-nobles: a letter written by five such men in 1498 insisted that jurists with doctoral titles ought to rank as the equals of knights.
Ortlieb's essay constitutes in many ways a companion piece to Baumann's. Her delineation of the personnel, organization, and work of the Habsburgs' aulic council to 1559 once again necessitates much close scrutiny of individual careers. Ortlieb too discerns gradual processes both of institutionalization and professionalization at work, alongside the persistence of more traditional elements. Her examination of the business occupying the councils of Maximilian, Charles V, and Ferdinand I reveals another recurrent element in this collection: a tendency to soften and qualify the Manichaean contest of principles between monarchy and estates that provided a key to the imperial reform era for earlier generations of scholars. Viewed from the close-up perspective of these papers, matters appear rather more complex. As Ortlieb shows, most of the cases before the Hofrat throughout the first half of the sixteenth century were of a very mundane character: political and controversial matters were seldom addressed. If the aulic council really was conceived as a monarchist counterblast to the Reichskammergericht, this purpose was quickly submerged beneath the nitty-gritty of day-to-day routine.
Reinforcing this stress upon contingency and complexity is the main contribution of Schmid's dissection of the shifting international-relations context of the 1495 Worms Reichstag. Although concerned hardly at all with judicial institutions and their development, Schmid does successfully show how the pressure of unfolding events, particularly in Italy, helped to redefine, even as it was sitting, the objectives of an assembly that had not been summoned to discuss reform. Schmid too is at pains to undercut some of the polarities of more traditional accounts: the Reichstag, as he shows, encompassed a diverse range of views, positions, and interactions; and the king and the reform party around Bethold of Mainz each had considerable understanding of the other's needs and aspirations. Maximilian may subsequently have declared it his intention never again to be left, like King Gunther, tied up and hanging from a nail in Worms; but the alliances and principles in play were more multiple and complex, and the king's own position less beleaguered, than such a stark image implies.
The three remaining pieces all serve in various ways to blur the 1495 divide in the empire's judicial history by locating the roots of the new cameral court in the development of monarchical institutions of justice during the preceding half-century. Kordes draws on Reichskammergericht documents from Lower Rhenish archives to show that the court's early business included cases initiated before the cameral court of Maximilian. Seen in this way, the new court was in some degree jump-started by a sharp burst of activity before the king's own forum while Maximilian was on the Rhine and in the Low Countries in the months preceding the Worms Reichstag. Maurer identifies an important precursor of a different kind in the 1470s, when Frederick III's Kammergericht was "leased" for a time to archbishop Adolf of Mainz. The sharp upswing in business and temporary improvement in the court's functioning during this period, she suggests, created a precedent for the estates: Berthold von Henneberg was, from this perspective, the heir to the work of his predecessor in the see of Mainz.
Mitsch, in the longest piece in the volume, examines in detail the role of delegated royal justice under Frederick III (the documentary records for which he has scrutinized and data-processed, under the auspices of yet another DFG-funded project). He explains how the hearing of cases in the regions by royally appointed commissioners often proved acceptable to princes and other powerful members of the Reich who did not recognize any obligation to appear before Frederick's Kammergericht. Mitsch draws attention to the very large number of commissions issued to hear judicial cases and the part they played, by raising the visibility of royal justice in the localities, in strengthening ties between the geographically distant monarch and at least some among his German subjects. Frederick's own boat also rises on a generally optimistic tide (as it has been doing for some time already) and the "imperial arch-sleepyhead" of old emerges as a periodically quite astute exploiter of the admittedly somewhat limited judicial instruments at his disposal.[4] The prominence of urban elites among the beneficiaries of Frederick's justice and the role of legal learning among those administering it are elements that link Mitsch's findings to the post-1495 scene.
Inevitably, a collection like this one might have chosen to examine other aspects of the early history of the Reichskammergericht. Readers will find little here, for example, on the place of judicial institutions in debates and schemes for the empire's reform. The concentration falls instead upon the external forms of institutions and on the persons who served and patronized them. This focus, however, reflects the character and source base of recent and ongoing research, most of which has been concerned with unlocking, quantifying, and putting in order very large bodies of archival data. The result is a convincing picture, one that sets aside the programmatic and the doctrinal to emphasize instead the elements of tentativeness and contingency, as well as continuity, underlying the establishment of the post-Worms order. All this is most welcome, of course, so long as it is not forgotten (and more than one contributor does issue a reminder) that consciously instituted, real, and fundamental change--the separation, for the first time, of the empire's supreme judicial forum from the ruler and his court--was also a part of the story.
These papers also reflect a climate more willing to see good in the judicial institutions of the altes Reich--or perhaps simply more realistic as to what might be hoped for from them--than has been the case in times past. Clearly, other points of emphasis would also be possible here, and the richness of the evidence presented in these studies leaves the reader plenty of scope to supply his or her own. One salient feature of imperial justice both before and after 1495 was its essentially reactive quality. Characteristically, it was less the ruler, his ministers, or the estates than the demands of individual plaintiffs that impelled new developments. The infiltration of the Roman law into processes before Frederick III's commissioners was thus mainly the work of the parties to cases and their advocates. Even the commissioners were often appointed, and might also be dismissed, at the behest of the contestants themselves. The delegation of cases from the Kammergericht to judges-delegate must indeed, as Mitch contends, have helped to render royal justice symbolically present in the regions; but in the absence of effective local means for its enforcement, contemporaries might still feel less than awed. When Adam von Ansoltsheim was summoned before Frederick's commissioners to answer a plaint from the town of Basel, he wished it to be known that "he shits on the king and his letter" (p. 26).
One eye-catching element in these papers, despite the new mood and deep archival excavations of recent decades, is the extent to which they still turn approvingly to Smend's 1911 study--and particularly to his early advocacy of the "continuity" case so strongly articulated here. On this central matter, observes Kordes, "there is still, after more than ninety years, nothing to add to Smend's words" (p. 219)--which he duly proceeds to reproduce in extenso in his own closing paragraphs. Nevertheless, issuing Smend's sturdy Wilhelmine dreadnought with a fresh certificate of seaworthiness for the new century is itself undoubtedly a worthwhile research outcome. And, of course, these studies also do much more than merely reaffirm older findings: they add many original elements of depth, nuance, and complexity. The work at the archival coal-face, meanwhile, continues.
Notes
[1]. Rudolf Smend, Das Reichskammergericht (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1911).
[2]. Interview archived at www.zeitenblicke.de/2004/03/index.htm.
[3]. Regesten Kaiser Friedrichs III. (1440-1493), ed. H. Koller, 20 vols (Vienna, Cologne, Graz: Böhlau, 1982-2004).
[4]. For a recent, comparatively sympathetic, assessment of Frederick's reign see Heinrich Koller, Kaiser Friedrich III (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005).
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Citation:
Len Scales. Review of Diestelkamp, Bernhard, ed., Das Reichskammergericht: Der Weg zu seiner Gründung und die ersten Jahrzehnte seines Wirkens (1451-1527).
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24077
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