34 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
rival Ludwig V of Hessen-Darmstadt also resorted to the court, com-
mencing an action against Moritz around 1605, the beginning of a
long-running case which later escalated into open warfare between the
two branches of the family.^15
The problem of the courts thus reduces to cases with religious or polit-
ical implications, frequently intertwined, of which the troubles arising
in the cities, notably Aachen and particularly Donauwörth, were by
far the most prominent. Here the issue was not that the administra-
tion of Imperial law had broken down, but rather the converse, that
it functioned all too effectively to the detriment of the Protestants.
These were, however, isolated examples. Only Donauwörth became a
major issue, but even here the focus of protest was the emperor himself
as the controlling figure, rather than the Hofrat which formalised the
actions.
Otherwise the most contentious cases almost all centred ultimately
around secularisations of church property, and the simple fact that in
an acquisitive age Protestant princes, knights and cities wanted to hold
on to the substantial lands and other assets which they had largely
fortuitously come by during the course of the Reformation, while the
Catholic prelates wanted them back. In many cases the courts were not
well placed to arbitrate, as the underlying law, the peace of Augsburg,
was at best ambiguous and at worst silent on the relevant points. Because
of the circumstances in which secularisations could occur they were
bound to set Protestants against Catholics, and as neither side was pre-
pared to accept adverse judgements ‘beating the religious drum’ was the
most promising way of contesting them, while for the Calvinist mil-
itants and long-standing foes of the Habsburg emperors they were a
convenient issue around which to rally opposition.
A number of controversial cases remained unresolved as appeals from
the Kammergericht mounted up, but although a few involved newer dis-
putes most stemmed ultimately from secularisations which had taken
place decades earlier, while the prelates, monks and nuns directly con-
cerned had died, dispersed or indeed themselves converted long since.
The most prominent of the cases in the ‘four cloisters’ dispute of the
late 1590s, which became the centre of the Protestant militants’ attack
on the appeals system, had been before the Kammergericht since 1556,
while the basis of another dated back to the 1560s.^16 These were not
live issues, and although their specific outcomes mattered to the parties
concerned they were of little wider importance. The real significance lay
in the much larger number and value of secularised church properties
in the hands of Protestant rulers which were not themselves yet before