32 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
Schormann, in discussing ‘the struggle which led to the paralysis of
all Imperial institutions’, states that ‘the eventual remaining alterna-
tives were agreement on the basis of fundamental equality between
the confessions, or war’.^4 Nevertheless it is very questionable whether
this apparent collapse of the political system was in fact as serious as
is contended, and in particular whether it was sufficiently serious to be
regarded as a principal cause of the Thirty Years War.
The key institutions of the Empire
The Imperial courts
For practical purposes the courts were the most important of the very
limited range of Imperial institutions. Firstly they played a key part
in enforcing Imperial law and the Imperial peace, as although actions
against breaches were decreed by the emperor they were also validated
by an order of a court, at this time usually the Hofrat. Secondly, and
perhaps even more important, they were also the principal means of
resolving disputes between all those individuals and entities standing
directly below the emperor, and hence of avoiding a resort to violence.
Thus the breakdown of the appeals system for the Kammergericht was
certainly a serious matter. It did not, however, bring the administration
of Imperial justice to a standstill, except perhaps in cases involving reli-
giously contentious issues, and such cases were very much the minority,
albeit attracting most of the attention. The Kammergericht continued
to deal successfully with the great bulk of normal cases, and princes also
increasingly took their disputes to the Hofrat, provided that they did
not have a religious element.^5
Recent research has provided a considerable range of evidence to sup-
port this observation. Thus Ehrenpreis reports that the number of active
cases coming before the Kammergericht rose from about 250 per year
in the 1580s to around 400 in the 1590s, while there was only a small
decline thereafter. However the number of what he regards as the most
important cases, on the basis that they were the subject of three or
more hearings in a calendar year, continued to increase in the early
1600s.^6 Ranieri shows that while the number of cases in the twenty
years after 1600 was a little over 10 per cent down compared to the
previous two decades, a figure well within the range of longer-term
chronological fluctuations, it was nevertheless more than 20 per cent
higher than in 1560–1579.^7 Far from being crippled after the break-
down of the appeals system in 1601, Ortlieb and Polster observe that
the figures ‘confirm that a “long” sixteenth century, up to about 1620,