The Origins of the Thirty Years War? 21of Strasbourg and an individual Imperial knight. Cases with a religious
element were subject to a special procedure of the Kammergericht dat-
ing back to the peace of Augsburg of 1555, whereby they were heard not
in the ordinary way but by a bench comprising three Catholic and three
Protestant judges, and if necessary in case of deadlock by a second simi-
lar bench. Previously this procedure had worked well, and in all four of
these cases the initial panel of judges reached majority verdicts in favour
of the ecclesiastical plaintiffs. All the defendants refused to comply, and
the cases eventually ended up at appeal.
The Visitation Commission had ceased to function some ten years
earlier, but by the late 1590s an alternative had been improvised. This
was the Deputation, the twenty-member principal sub-committee of the
Reichstag, which as a standing body could meet and function between
meetings of the Reichstag itself, and in 1600 and 1601 it attempted to
resolve the appeals in the four cases. Inevitably, given the confessional
divide and the contentious nature of secularisations, it proved impos-
sible to reach consensus decisions, but the more militant Protestant
members were not prepared to allow the Catholic majority to prevail.
Led by the Palatinate, Brandenburg and Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, they
blocked the working of the committee, so that it was unable to reach
any valid decision. The Deputation had been the last resort, and with
this now hamstrung there was no remaining appeals mechanism, so that
the Kammergericht, a key Imperial institution, was unable to function
properly in the future in respect of controversial cases.
This dispute continued in 1603, when the Reichstag met again.
The assembly at least approved the emperor’s main requirement, tax-
ation for the war against the Turks, but an attempt to have the full
Reichstag resolve the court cases left outstanding by the stalemate at
the Deputation foundered again on the resistance of the Palatinate,
which threatened to bring the whole Reichstag to a standstill. Hence
the emperor could only obtain the closing resolutions necessary to give
effect to the tax and other decisions of the meeting by excluding the
disputed issues and deferring them to the next meeting.
The Empire, 1604 to 1618
Inter-confessional strife moved one step closer to actual hostilities when
disturbances in the otherwise insignificant town of Donauwörth esca-
lated into anothercause célèbre. There had been religiously motivated
brawls in a number of free Imperial cities in previous years, and on
occasion the emperor and the Hofrat had issued orders to restrain the