German mediatisation
The German mediatisation was the major redistribution and reshaping of territorial holdings that took place between 1802 and 1814 in Germany by means of the subsumption and secularisation of a large number of Imperial Estates. Nearly all the ecclesiastical principalities and free imperial cities, as well as most minor secular principalities and other self-ruling entities of the Holy Roman Empire lost their independent status and were absorbed by the remaining states. By the end of the mediatisation process, the number of German states had been reduced from almost 300 to 39.
In the strict sense of the word, mediatisation consists in the subsumption of an immediate state into another state, thus becoming mediate, while generally leaving the dispossessed ruler with his private estates and a number of privileges and feudal rights, such as low justice. For convenience, historians use the term mediatisation for the entire restructuring process that took place at the time, whether the mediatised states persisted in some form or lost all individuality. The secularisation of ecclesiastical states took place concurrently with the mediatisation of free imperial cities and other secular states.
The mass mediatisation and secularisation of German states that took place at the time was not initiated by Germans. It came under relentless military and diplomatic pressure from revolutionary France and Napoleon. It constituted the most extensive redistribution of property and territories in German history prior to 1945.
Background
Although most of its neighbors coalesced into relatively centralized states before the 19th century, Germany did not follow that path. Instead, the Holy Roman Empire remained a feudal patchwork comprising "polyglot congeries of literally hundreds of nearly sovereign states and territories ranging in size from considerable to minuscule". From a high of nearly four hundred – 136 ecclesiastical and 173 secular lords plus 85 free imperial cities – on the eve of the Reformation, this number had only reduced to a little less than 300 by the late-18th century. The traditional explanation for this fragmentation has focused on the gradual usurpation by the princes of the powers of the Holy Roman Emperor during the Staufen period, to the extent that by the Peace of Westphalia, the Emperor had become a mere primus inter pares. In recent decades, some historians have maintained that the fragmentation of Germany was not to be found in the misfortunes, weakness or mistakes of imperial dynasties, but rather in the huge geographical extent of the Empire and the vigor of aristocratic and ecclesiastical rule in its localities. Successive imperial dynasties were compelled to accept a set of circumstances that could not be reversed until the 19th century: that the autonomous rule of the bishops, abbots, and secular princes, interspersed with independent city-states and lands of the imperial knights, constituted the German political structure, in other words, local sovereignty under the Emperor's suzerainty. Already in the 12th century, the secular and spiritual princes did not regard themselves as the Emperor's subordinates, still less his subjects, but as rulers in their own right – and they jealously defended their established sphere of predominance. At the time of Emperor Frederick II's death in 1250, it had already been decided that the regnum Teutonicum was "an aristocracy with a monarchical head".Among those states and territories, the ecclesiastical principalities were unique to Germany. Historically, the Ottonian and early Salian Emperors, who appointed the bishops and abbots, used them as agents of the imperial crown – as they considered them more dependable than the dukes they appointed and who often attempted to establish independent hereditary principalities. The emperors expanded the power of the Church, and especially of the bishops, with land grants and numerous privileges of immunity and protection as well as extensive judicial rights, which eventually coalesced into a distinctive temporal principality: the Hochstift. The German bishop became a "prince of the Empire" and direct vassal of the Emperor for his Hochstift, while continuing to exercise only pastoral authority over his larger diocese. The personal appointment of bishops by the Emperors had sparked the investiture controversy in the 11th century, and in its aftermath the emperor's control over the bishops' selection and rule diminished considerably. The bishops, now elected by independent-minded cathedral chapters rather than chosen by the emperor or the pope, were confirmed as territorial lords equal to the secular princes.
Secularisation
Early secularisations
The register prepared for the 1521 Imperial Diet of Worms listed as ecclesiastical Estates three ecclesiastical electors, four archbishops, 46 bishops and 83 lesser prelates compared to 180 secular lords. By 1792 only three electors, one archbishop, 29 bishops and prince-abbots, and 40 prelates remained, alongside 165 secular Estates. The decline had started well before the Reformation, which only accelerated the trend for secular rulers to incorporate into their territories the material assets of Church fiefs. Many of the ecclesiastical Estates recorded in the 1521 register were already disappearing this way, including 15 prince-bishoprics. In the course of the Reformation, several of the bishoprics in the north and northeast were secularized and transformed into secular duchies, mostly to the benefit of Protestant princes. In the later sixteenth century the Counter-Reformation attempted to reverse some of these secularisations, and the question of the fates of secularized territories became an important one in the Thirty Years' War. In the end, the Peace of Westphalia confirmed the secularisation of a score of prince-bishoprics, including the archbishoprics of Bremen and Magdeburg and six bishoprics with full political powers, which were assigned to Sweden, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. On the other hand, Hildesheim and Paderborn – under Protestant administration for decades and given up for lost – were restored as prince-bishoprics. In addition, the Peace conclusively reaffirmed the imperial immediacy, and therefore the de facto independence, of the prince-bishops and imperial abbots, free imperial cities, imperial counts, as well as the imperial knights. According to one authority, the sixty-five ecclesiastical rulers then controlled one-seventh of the total land area and approximately 12% of the Empire's population, perhaps three and a half million subjects.Owing to the traumatic experience of the Thirty Years' War and in order to avoid a repetition of this catastrophe, the German rulers great or small were now inclined to value law and legal structures more highly than ever before in the history of the Empire. This explains in good part why medium and small states, both ecclesiastical and secular, were able to survive and even prosper in the vicinity of powerful states with standing armies such as Brandenburg/Prussia, Bavaria and Austria.
18th-century secularisation plans
While no actual secularisation took place during the century and a half that followed the Peace of Westphalia, there was a long history of rumors and half-baked plans on possible secularisations. The continued existence of independent prince-bishoprics, an anomalous phenomenon unique to the Holy Roman Empire, was increasingly considered an anachronism especially, but not exclusively, by the Protestant princes, who also coveted these defenceless territories. Thus, secret proposals by Prussia to end the War of the Austrian Succession called for increasing the insufficient territorial base of the Wittelsbach Emperor Charles VII through his annexation of some prince-bishoprics. In 1743, Frederick II's minister Heinrich von Podewils wrote a memorandum that suggested giving to the Wittelsbach Emperor the bishoprics of Passau, Augsburg and Regensburg, as well as the imperial cities of Augsburg, Regensburg and Ulm. Frederick II added the Archbishopric of Salzburg to the list and Charles VII went as far as adding the bishoprics of Eichstätt and Freising. The plan caused a sensation, and outrage among the prince-bishops, the free imperial cities and the other minor imperial estates, and the bishops discussed raising an army of 40,000 to defend themselves against the Emperor who contemplated grabbing ecclesiastical land that his coronation oath committed him to protect. Although the sudden death of Charles VII put an end to this scheming, the idea of secularisation did not fade away. It was actively discussed during the Seven Years' War, and again during Joseph II's maneuverings over the Bavarian inheritance and during his later exchange plan to swap Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands, which included a secret provision for the secularisation of the Archbishopric of Salzburg and the Provostry of Berchtesgaden. Yet, none of these projects ever came close to be implemented because, in the end, key actors appreciated that the secularisation of one single prince-bishopric would open a Pandora's box and have severe repercussions on the institutional stability of the Empire.Impact of the French Revolution
By the late 18th century, the continued existence of the Holy Roman Empire, despite its archaic constitution, was not seriously threatened from within its limits. An external factor – the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte – brought about its demise.The outbreak of the French Revolution had immediate repercussions in Germany. From July 1789, a steady stream of French émigrés arrived in Germany. While most neighboring secular rulers, such as the Palatine Elector, the Margrave of Baden and the Duke of Württemberg, remained cautious, even following the confiscation of their property and jurisdictions in Alsace, the ecclesiastical rulers, who in addition to Church property had seen their diocesan rights abolished in that province, showed no such restraint. The Archbishop-Elector of Mainz offered hospitality to the Count of Artois and the Prince of Condé, and their presence attracted many others. The Archbishop-Elector of Trier, maternal uncle to Louis XVI and his brothers, followed suit and before long an émigré community of some 20,000, many plotting the overthrow of the French revolutionaries, was established in the ecclesiastical principalities. In addition, some ecclesiastical rulers, most stridently August von Limburg, Prince-Bishop of Speyer, demanded immediate intervention against the "godless" revolutionaries. In this context the émigrés, and the ecclesiastical princes who harbored them, became the object of vituperative propaganda by the French revolutionaries. The threat posed by the émigrés was one of the factors that contributed to the growing ascendancy of the radical Jacobins who believed that a revolutionary war was the only way the achievements of the Revolution could be secured.
After Revolutionary France declared war on Prussia and Austria in April 1792, its armies invaded, and by the end of 1794, France had consolidated its hold over the Austrian Netherlands and the rest of the left bank of the Rhine. The forcefully secular French Republic had outlawed independent, non-state-sanctioned houses of worship; thus both Catholic and Protestant Germany were hostile to the Republic. Many German rulers allowed French émigrés to carry on counterrevolutionary activities from their lands. The French leaders resolved more or less openly to annex those lands to the Republic as soon as circumstances permitted, dispossessing both secular and ecclesiastical German rulers. The French revolutionaries, and later Napoleon, felt that some of these secular rulers should be compensated, by receiving "secularized" ecclesiastical land and property located on the right bank.
Already, the Franco-Prussian Treaty of Basel of April 1795 spoke of "a compensation" in case a future general peace with the Holy Roman Empire surrendered to France the German territories west of the Rhine, including the Prussian provinces. A secret Franco-Prussian convention signed in August 1796 specified that such a compensation would be the Prince-Bishopric of Münster and Vest Recklinghausen. In addition, Article 3 of the convention provided that the Prince of Orange-Nassau, dynastically related to the king of Prussia, who actively defended his interests, would be compensated with the Prince-Bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg if his loss of the Dutch hereditary stadtholdership, which followed the creation of the French-backed Batavian Republic, was to become permanent. Likewise, the peace treaties France signed with Württemberg and Baden the same month contained secret articles whereby France committed to intercede to obtain the cession of specific ecclesiastical territories as their compensation in case their losses became permanent.
Signed in the wake of major French victories over the Austrian armies, the Treaty of Campo Formio of October 1797, dictated by General Bonaparte, provided that Austria would be compensated for the loss of the Austrian Netherlands and Austrian Lombardy with Venice and Dalmatia. A secret article, not implemented at the time, added the Archbishopric of Salzburg and a portion of Bavaria as additional compensation. The treaty also provided for the holding of a congress at Rastatt where delegates of the Imperial Diet would negotiate a general peace with France. It was widely and correctly anticipated that France would demand the formal cession of the entire west bank, that the dispossessed secular princes be compensated with ecclesiastical territories east of the Rhine, and that a specific compensation plan be discussed and adopted. Indeed, on 9 March 1798, the delegates at the congress at Rastatt formally accepted the sacrifice of the entire left bank and, on 4 April 1798, approved the secularisation of all the ecclesiastical states save the three Electorates of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, whose continued existence was an absolute red line for Emperor Francis II. The congress, which lingered on well into 1799, failed in its other goals due to disagreement among the delegates on the repartition of the secularized territories and insufficient French control over the process caused by the mounting power struggle in Paris.
In March 1799, Austria, allied with Russia, resumed the war against France. A series of military defeats and the withdrawal of Russia from the war forced Austria to seek an armistice and, on 9 February 1801 to sign the Treaty of Lunéville which mostly reconfirmed the Treaty of Campo Formio and the guidelines set at Rastatt. Article 7 of the treaty provided that "in conformity with the principles formally established at the congress of Rastatt, the empire shall be bound to give to the hereditary Princes who shall be dispossessed on the left bank of the Rhine, an indemnity, which shall be taken from the whole of the empire, according to arrangements which on these bases shall be ultimately determined upon". This time, Francis II signed the treaty not only on Austria's behalf but also on behalf of the Empire, which officially conceded the loss of the Austrian Netherlands and the left bank of the Rhine.