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  Welcome to The Almanach de Saxe Gotha The Original Royal Genealogical Reference Handbook |
 The Mediatised Sovereign Houses of The Holy Roman Empire of The German Nation, First Reich Almanach Volume III  The History and Meaning of the Term Mediatised Mediatization, defined broadly, is the subsumption of one monarchy into another monarchy in such a way that the ruler of the annexed state keeps his or her sovereign title and, sometimes, a measure of local power. For instance: when a sovereign county is annexed to a larger principality, its reigning count might find himself subordinated to a prince, but nevertheless remains a count of sovereign rank, if not actually fully sovereign in fact. His subjects owe allegiance to the higher prince through him, and so his sovereignty is said to be mediatised, that is, rendered intermediate. The term "mediatization" was originally applied to the reorganization of the German states during the early 19th century, although the process had been going on since the Middle Ages. Mediatization has occurred in a number of other countries: Italy (e.g. Orsini, Doria, Pallavicini), Russia (e.g. Sibirsky, Vorotynsky), and France (e.g Rohan, de Bouillon and Lorraine) are examples. Mediatized sovereign houses rank higher than other houses of nominally equal (or higher) rank, but who never ruled a state. This division had great social significance, as mediatized princes were considered equal to royals for marriage purposes; in essence they were regarded as royalty. Thus if a scion from the most obscure mediatized family (say the child of an impoverished mediatized count) married an emperor or a king, their alliance was considered equal, not morganatic, and their children could inherit dynastic rights. Thus the children of Ernst Count zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, though the children of a Count, were called princes, and the son of his second son, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, was fit to marry Juliana, Crown Princess, later Queen, of the Netherlands and their eldest daughter, Beatrix, today occupies the Dutch throne.
The Mediatization of The Imperial Between 1803 and 1806, the vast majority of the states of the Holy Roman Empire were mediatized by Napoleon. These states lost their Reichsunmittelbarkeit ("imperial immediacy") and became part of other states. The number of states was reduced from about three hundred to about thirty. Mediatization went along with secularization: the abolition of most of the ecclesiastic states. The legal basis for mediatization was the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, which had become necessary under pressure from France. The Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine of 1806 continued the process of mediatization. The constitution of the German Confederation of 1815 confirmed the mediatization, but gave certain rights to the mediatized princes, such as first instance jurisdiction.
The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire meant that anyone who was previously a directly subject to the authority of the Emperor ceased to be subject to any superior authority. In practice, however, not everyone survived as sovereign into the new legal order that emerged in 1806. Of those who were immediate in the Empire, some became sovereign; the others became subjects of someone else: they were mediatized. Most mediatizations took place in July 1806 as a consequence of the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine. Within the area covered by the Confederation, those who became full-fledged members of the Confederation became full-fledged members of the international community as sovereign entities. A few other mediatizations were carried out by Napoleon between 1806 and 1813, and were not reversed by the Congress of Vienna. The exact process of mediatization was delineated by articles 25-33 of the treaty founding the Confederation. Although the mediatized families did not acquire sovereignty and lost some of their powers (legislation, final jurisdiction, control over police and military conscription, right to levy taxes), they kept their private estates and feudal rights, including lower jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases, jurisdiction over local policing, forests, hunting and fishing rights, mining rights, etc. Mediatized princes continued to be subject to a special jurisdiction in criminal matters, their estates were free from confiscation, and some of their liabilities were taken over by their new sovereigns. They were free to settle anywhere within the territory of the Confederation. Over the course of the 19th c. the term mediatized families began to slide. The reason is that the act founding the German Confederation (8 June 1815) defined special privileges for members of the mediatized families, in a manner reminiscent of what the Confederation of the Rhine had done. But it left it to the individual members of the Federation to decide who was a mediatized family among its subject, and drew a list of princely families (in 1825) and comital families (in 1829) to whom this status had been recognized. These families became the ones included in the Gotha and are known as standesherrliche. Because of this process, there is some degree of discrepancy between the upper nobility of the Holy Roman Empire and that of 19th century Germany. By the Rheinbundsakte of July 12, 1806, a group of German states consisting in Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau and a few others, seceded from the German Empire. Article 24 specified a long list of domains, hitherto the properties of various princes and counts who were states of the Empire, henceforth to be ruled by the members of the new Confederation. These 72 princes and counts were "mediatized" (the old German term was "eximiert"; the word "mediatize" appears in French and English about the same time, in 1815).  The process of mediatization was not unknown, it was called "exemption" (from the obligations to the Empire), there were also cases of partial mediatization, in which the territories of a family were partly or wholly placed under the sovereignty of another state, but the family nevertheless retained its seat and vote at the Reichstag: Giech (subjected to Prussia 1791), Stolberg-Wernigerode (sovereignty shared with Prussia, 1714), Stolberg-Stolberg and Stolberg-Roßla (1730-38 partial subjection to Saxony), Schönburg (subjected to Saxony, 4 May 1740), Ortenburg (ceded its county to Bavaria, 1805), counts Fugger (to Bavaria, 7 June 1806), a few weeks later, on August 6, 1806, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, relinquished his imperial sovereign title and dignity and thus absolved all his subjects from their obligations under the old Empire, whereas it is sometimes wrongly quoted and listed that the Emperor abolished the Empire this is quite incorrect and wrong he in fact only ever relinquished and abdicated his imperial titles therein and absolved his imperial subjects from thier oaths and obligations thereon to the Emperor and Empire, whereas there is no such legal document in existence to proof the empire was fully abolished, furthermore the Emperor left all other former states at the mercy of political events and as such No rights were guaranteed to the aforementioned mediatized princes until after the year 1815 when their formal status was defined by the Congress of Vienna of 1815.
The List of The Mediatised Houses of The Empire
The Mediatised States of The Empire The Imperial States [Reichsstand] were the real pillars of the Holy Roman Empire. They consisted mainly of the Princes and Counts of the Empire who posessed immediate territories therein; i.e., fiefs which were held directly of the Emperor himself, and who had, each of them, a vote and a seat in the Imperial Diet. The holders of these Imperial States and all those who were of equal birth with them constituted the High Nobility [Hochadel]. The dignity of States of the Empire was in general attached not to the person but to the fief. Such a territory had to enjoy sovereign rights under the suzerainty of the Empire. ... The States of the Empire accordingly exercised sovereignty over various Imperial Territories. But the fact of sovereignty under the suzerainty of the Emperor was not in itself sufficient to constitute a State of the Empire. Of equal importance was the fact of having a vote and a seat in the Imperial Diet. Still another requirement was the recognition of the quality of a State of the Empire either by usage or by special legal authorization. In a few cases this authorization was granted to persons even without an immediate territority. The following legal requirements were met by all Imperial States, except by those who had received that dignity for their person and not for their territory: 1. The possession of an immediate 2. The consent of the Emperor and of all the
3. The assumption of an appropriate share in 4. The membership in
one of the ten Imperial These Imperial Circles had been set up by Maximilian I, and were for military purposes. As such, they won't be described further here In the Council of Princes [Reichsfürstlicheskollegium] of the Imperial Diet [Reichstag] of 1792 there were 108 seats and votes, allocated as follows, with the name of the dynasty holding the seat given in (parentheses): The Three Ecclesiastical Electors o Mainz The Five Secular Electors: o Bohemia (Habsburg-Lorraine) The Thirty-Three Ecclesiastical Princes (not described here) The Sixty-one Secular Princes: "The Old Princes" + Austria (Habsburg-Lorraine) The Secularized Ecclesiastical Territories + Magdeburg (Hohenzollern-Prussia) "The New Princes": + Zollern
(Hohenzollern-Hechingen) The Four seats representing the Councils of the Counts of the Empire o Council of the Counts of the Wetterau (representing
12 Houses) The Two other seats, representing the Free Cities This is also the order in which the Princes voted. Several points can be made about this list. First, there are a number of Habsburg domains, such as Hungary and Moravia, which are not on this list. This is because they were not part of the Holy Roman Empire. For that matter, Prussia (the territory that the Elector of Brandenburg was King of) was not in the Empire either. Second, note the concentration of votes in just a few houses -- for example the Palatine Elector had six votes and the Elector of Hanover had seven. The Elector of Hanover was, at that time (1792), also King of Great Britain, which illustrates how many non-German sovereigns played a role in the Empire (on the other hand the Kings of Sardinia, while they had a seat in the Diet, seldom bothered even to send a representative). Note also the distinction between "Old Princes" and "New Princes". All of the "Old Princes" were present in the Diet of 1582, and the "New Princes" were added afterwards. Starting in 1641, the Emperor would award the title of "Reichsfürst" [Prince of the Empire] to those persons or Houses he thought worthy, and once the recipient person or dynasty was able to satisfy the other requirements, they were admitted to the Diet. Most though not all Reichsfürst creations were for persons or Houses which already had a territory and a function in the Empire. The Houses which had received the title of Reichsfürst but which had not fulfilled the other requirements remained in the Councils of the Counts of the Empire. These Councils comprised, as of around 1792, the following members: The Council of the Counts of the Wetterau o Princes and Counts of Solms-Braunfels, Solms-Hohensolms, Solms-Rödelheim, and Solms-Laubach The Council of the Counts of Franconia o Princes and Counts of Hohenlohe The Council of the Counts of Westphalia o King
of Great Britain as Lord of Sayn-Altenkirchen Those who are shown as [personaliter] were personal, not hereditary, members of their Council. Note also that these are not by any means the only titled persons in the Empire. Nor are these the only people who held immediate or non-immediate fiefs, or the people who comprised any of the ten Imperial Circles. The people listed above are those who had a voice, however small, in the Imperial decision-making process. By the time of the 1792 Diet, the Empire's western neighbor, France, had already sunk into revolution. France achieved some measure of stability under the Republic and the Directorate, and its armies, especially under the command of Bonaparte, won some major victories against the Empire, particularly at Marengo (14 June 1800). In the Treaty of Luneville (9 February 1801), the Empire lost some twenty-five thousand square miles of territory. The only way for the Emperor to compensate the dispossessed Princes was to sieze the remaining ecclesiastical territories. An Imperial Delegation did so, and published on 25 February 1803 the famous Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, which reorganized the Empire and the Imperial Diet. The Diet ratified this decision on 24 March 1803, and the Emperor ratified it on 27 April 1803 except for the paragraph (Paragraph 32) which dealt specifically with the reorganization of the Diet. The Emperor's objections were never overcome, thus the reorganization of the Diet based on the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss cannot be considered lawful, even though a tentative list of seats was drawn up. What little business transacted by the Diet between 1803 and its dissolution in 1806 was based on the list, part of which (the Council of Princes) was printed in Prince Arenberg's dissertation (cited above) on pp. 61-64 and is given here, territory first with name of the dynasty in (parentheses):
* Austria (Habsburg-Lorraine) In all, 131 seats in the Council of Princes, after the proposed reorganization of the Diet, based on the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803. The Princes who would have benefited from this reorganization by finally gaining a seat in the Diet, such as Leiningen and Waldeck, started acting as though they had become sovereign (though still under the suzerainty of the Emperor), and have continued to be credited, in otherwise accurate references works, as having achieved sovereignty by virtue of the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, even though the 1803 reorganization of the Diet cannot be considered lawful. Also in 1803 the number of secular Electors was almost doubled, from 5 (Bohemia, Palatinate, Electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Hanover) to 9 (with Baden, Hesse-Cassel, Württemberg, and Salzburg [later Würzburg, and held by the Grand Duke of Tuscany] added), while the Ecclesiastial Electors dropped from 3 (Mainz, Trier, and Cologne) to one (Mainz, the other two being secularized). After Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor of the French on 18 May 1804, the Holy Roman Emperor proclaimed himself Emperor of Austria on 11 August 1804, followed immediately by the Electors of Bavaria and Württemberg, who took advantage of the confusion and lack of Imperial control to proclaim themselves Kings, and started gobbling up smaller States, starting on 19 November 1805 when Württemberg annexed Fürstenberg. The formal end of the Empire was signalled on 13 January 1806 when the King of Sweden refused to send a representative to the Imperial Diet because of the violations of its constitution by its members. After
his victory at Austerlitz (2 Dec 1805), Bonaparte tried to break up the Empire by driving a wedge between Brandenburg (the
power in the north) and Austria (the power in the south), by offering to set up a federation of the German States under his
protection. Those States which left the Empire and joined the federation could increase their territories at the expense of
those States which did not. On 12 July 1806 the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine was signed, and the Confederation
came into legal existance. The States which initially joined the Confederation, their dynasties and their date of joining
were: King of Bavaria Wittelsbach 12 July
1806 Note that many of these upgraded their title when they joined. Articles 13-25 of the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine described in detail the territorial exchanges between the States which joined the Confederation, and annexations by the member States of the territories of the Princes and Counts who did not join. The Princes and Counts whose territories were annexed, and who were thus mediatized on 12 July 1806, under the terms of Articles 13-25 of the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine, were: * Prince of Auersperg It should be noted that these were the Princes and Counts who had immediate fiefs which were mediatized by the annexations described in Articles 13-25 of the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine. Some of these Princes and Counts had a seat and a vote in the Council of Princes (before or after the 1803 reorganization of the Imperial Diet), and some of these Princes and Counts had a seat and a vote in one of the Councils of the Counts of the Empire, and some of them had neither seats nor votes. Mediatization of a fief refers only to the degrading of the immediacy of that fief, and does not imply anything else about the holder of the fief. Note also that mediatization under the Confederation of the Rhine is slightly different from mediatization under the Empire, because of the levels of feudal alliance involved. On 1 August 1806, ten States (Bavaria, Württemberg, the Arch-Chancellor, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Hohenzollern-Hechingen, Salm-Salm, Salm-Kyrburg, and Isenburg) presented a note to the Imperial Diet stating that they were seceeding from the Empire and the Diet. Two weeks later Arenberg, von der Leyen, Nassau-Usingen and Nassau-Weilburg were added to the note, but by then the Emperor had abdicated and the Empire dissolved (6 August 1806). The Other States that joined the Confederation: Grand Duke of Würzburg Lorraine-Tuscany 25 Sept 1806 The details of the activities of the Confederation of the Rhine can fill several books and need not concern us here, except that Napoleon's military demands constantly increased. Napoleon at least maintained the appearance of legality in his dealings with the States of the Confederation, until 13 December 1810 when he, without pretext, incorporated the Duchy of Oldenburg, the Duchy of Arenberg, the Principalities of Salm-Salm and Salm-Kyrburg, and large parts of the Grand Duchy of Cleves and Berg, of the former Electorate of Hanover, and of the Kingdom of Westphalia, into France. This followed his swallowing of Holland (9 July 1810). The 13 December 1810 action was later cited by Alexander I of Russia (brother-in-law of the Duke of Oldenburg) as one of the reasons why he (Alexander I) joined the Great Coalition against Napoleon. The Confederation started unravelling after the Treaty of Kalisch (28 February 1813), which provided that the Confederation should be dissolved after an Allied victory. The Mecklenburg Dukes promptly quit the Confederation and joined the Allies, followed by the Anhalt Dukes and most of the rest. Among the last to leave were the Princes of Hohenzollern on 24 November 1813, leaving behind the King of Saxony, the Grand Duke of Frankfurt, Prince von der Leyen, and the Prince of Isenburg, but by then the Confederation of the Rhine was effectively dead. The Congress of Vienna was charged with bringing some sort of order to Europe after the fall and exile of Napoleon. Again the details of the negotiations need not concern us, but one result was the German Federal Act [Deutschen Bundesakte] of 8 June 1815, which dealt with the Mediatized houses in Article 14. In this, the Mediatized Houses were counted among the highest nobility with the right of equality with the reigning houses [Ebenbürtigkeit], the Heads of the Mediatized Houses were the first vassals [Standesherren] of those States in which their former territories were located, they were exempt from military service, given civil and penal jurisdiction at the lowest level, etc., but always within the framework of the laws of the new State and under the supervision of the government of the new State. Many of the Mediatized Houses protested violently against the terms of this Article, but they were powerless to prevent it. At no point, though, did the Congress of Vienna decide exactly which Houses had been mediatized, and thus deserving of these higher privileges, leaving that up to the discretion of the individual States. The astute reader may have noticed that the lists of those Houses which had a seat and vote in the Council of Princes of the Imperial Diet both before and after the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, and the lists of those Houses which either joined the Confederation of the Rhine, or whose territories were mediatized by the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine, bear little or no relation to the list of families we usually refer to as "Mediatized". There's an explanation for this, though perhaps not a reason. After the Congress of Vienna, Europe settled down. The sovereign States in the area which used to be the Holy Roman Empire were the States that are familiar to us: * Empire of Austria Several of these States acknowledged various Standesherren among the nobility in their country, under the terms of Article 14 of the Deutsches Bundesakte, and on 18 August 1825, the German Diet recognized the predicate of "Most Serene Highness" [Durchlaucht] for the Heads of the princely Houses that were recognized as Standesherren, and later on 13 February 1829 the Diet recognized the predicate of "Most Illustrious Highness" [Erlaucht] for the Heads of the countly Houses that were recognized as Standesherren. Note that the Standesherren were the highest nobility in their countries, and that these predicates of "Durchlaucht" and "Erlaucht" denoted nothing more than social status within and among these countries. The Almanach de Gotha, an annual publication, which up until the 1835 edition had divided its genealogical pages into two Parts, Part I showing the Sovereign houses and Part II showing the non-sovereign Princely houses, added a Part III starting in its 1836 issue. This Part III, "Maisons Princieres et Comtales", listed those Princes and Counts who had been recognized as Standesherren, with the predicates of "Durchlaucht" and "Erlaucht", and the States in which the Standesherren had been recognized: The Princes ("Durchlaucht" as of 18 August 1825)
* Arenberg (Austria, Prussia, Hanover) The Counts ("Erlaucht" as of 13 February 1829) * Castell-Remlingen (Bavaria)
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