The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 9and convents. Accidents of history rather than logic often determined
membership, so that size was no guide, and many big cities and eccle-
siastical foundations were not included as they had an intermediate
overlord between them and the emperor. There were many other odd
situations. The archbishop-elector of Cologne, for example, had a large
territory in the Rhineland, but it did not include the free Imperial city
of Cologne, even though his cathedral was in its centre. A smaller num-
ber, but still some hundreds of the constituents of the Empire, had the
right to make treaties and alliances among themselves or with foreign
powers, restricted only by the formula that such alliances must not be
directed against the emperor or the Empire. However only those with
Sitz und Stimme(a seat and a vote) were entitled to participate in meet-
ings of the Reichstag. These, theReichsstände(estates of the Empire),
comprised six of the electors, of the order of two hundred ecclesiastical
and secular princes (although some had shared rather than individual
votes), and the representatives of around eighty free Imperial cities, a
membership which often made consensus difficult to achieve. Proce-
dure too was cumbersome, as three colleges, respectively the electors,
princes and cities, deliberated separately on propositions put forward
by the emperor, then conferred together, and eventually submitted
a joint response. Only when this was approved by the emperor and
incorporated in the closing resolution of the Reichstag meeting did it
become law.
The ambiguous situation of Bohemia was referred to above. While its
king was one of the seven electors, this entitled him to vote only in
the elections of the king of Rome and the emperor, not to participate
in the other deliberations of the electoral college in the Reichstag. Nor
was Bohemia included in the circle system, or in the administration of
justice by the highest court of the Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century
the situation had become even stranger, as while the three ecclesiastical
electors, the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier, were all Catholic,
three of the secular ones, the dukes of Brandenburg, the Palatinate and
Saxony, had become Protestants, so that the king of Bohemia held the
casting vote as regards confession, and was thus crucial for ensuring the
election of a Catholic emperor, as well as for keeping the Imperial crown
in the Habsburg family.
The law courts constituted the other important institution of the
Empire, as while territories had their own internal legal systems only the
Imperial courts could adjudicate on cases involving disputes between
persons or entities owing fealty directly to the emperor. This, together
with dealing with breaches of the Imperial law and the Imperial peace,