10 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
as well as fiscal matters, was the function of theReichskammergericht(the
Imperial Chamber Court, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Kammergericht’),
at this time based in Speyer. By the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury the emperor’s influence on this court was limited to nominating
a minority of the members, six judges plus the president, while the
electoral college and the college of princes each nominated a further
six. Notable both here and in the Reichstag was the disproportionate
weight accorded to the electors, both in comparison to other princes
and to the cities, the latter in particular having little more than an
advisory role even though they paid a substantial proportion of the
Imperial taxes. The judgements of the Kammergericht were subject to
review, effectively an appeals mechanism, by a committee known as the
Visitation Commission, which met annually and whose members were
nominated in rotation by individual entitled members of the Reichstag.
Not surprisingly, the final resolution of cases through this system was
notoriously slow.
The administration of justice had always been closely associated with
monarchical power, so that in due course emperors responded to their
diminished influence on the Kammergericht by seeking an alternative.
Thus in the mid-sixteenth century a section of the emperor’s privy coun-
cil also began to function as a court, theReichshofrat(Imperial Court
Council or Aulic Council, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Hofrat’). Here the
emperor had full control, as he nominated and paid the president, vice-
president and all the twelve to eighteen other judges, as well as retaining
an ultimate right of decision in critical cases. In time this court began
to take on cases over the full range for which the Kammergericht was
responsible, thus effectively duplicating it. The cumbersome and impre-
cise constitution of the Empire provided little scope for the latter court
or the Reichstag to challenge this development, even had they wished
to do so, so that in practice it was simply accepted and the two courts
operated in parallel. The Hofrat thus came to deal with many rela-
tively ordinary cases, but it also provided the emperor with a faster and
more biddable means of securing legal backing in more controversial
circumstances.
The Empire before
Given the conflicts all around its borders, it may seem surprising that
the Empire itself enjoyed some sixty years of substantial peace before the
outbreak of the war which then convulsed it for the next thirty. Apart
from the recurrent episodes on the Turkish or Transylvanian borders