An Inevitable War? 37Calvinist core. The concept of the majority being able to bind the
minority encountered not only the theoretical difficulty of individuals
supposedly entering into voluntary commitments, but also the practical
problem of inequality between participants representing only them-
selves. Hence a minor abbot might have the same voting right in the
chamber of princes as the ruler of a substantial territory, while the cities
had no vote at all, even though they had to contribute a dispropor-
tionate share of taxation, the rights of their chamber being limited to
commenting upon a position previously agreed between the chambers
of electors and princes. Nevertheless majority voting was already estab-
lished in meetings of the electors by the thirteenth century, and by the
sixteenth century it was commonly used on questions of procedure, as
well as in committees of the Reichstag. A majority decision could also
be made under strict conditions in cases of urgency, but there was no
wider formal provision for majority voting on substantive issues in the
Reichstag itself. In earlier and less disputatious times it seems to have
been acceptedde facto, but in the late sixteenth century it became the
subject of argument.
Although there was much talk of principle and of equality between
the confessions, the main disputes in the late sixteenth and early sev-
enteenth centuries actually concerned money and property. In 1582 the
Protestant activists objected that the majority in the Reichstag was made
up of ecclesiastical members, most of whom contributed little to the
tax levy and consequently enjoyed a ‘cost-free vote’. Their complaint
was politically as well as financially motivated, as any change would
have altered the confessional balance in the Reichstag, but despite con-
tinuing challenges taxation for the Turkish wars was always approved
eventually, even in 1613, the sole exception being 1608.^22
The other major issue, for the Reichstag as for the Kammergericht,
was secularised church property, the central problem underlying the
confrontation over Catholic domination of the appeals committee. For
the Calvinist activists the issue was mainly political, but for many other
Protestant princes it had large financial and territorial implications. This
provided them with a strong vested interest in opposing majority voting
in the Reichstag, particularly on what they claimed to be religious issues,
a term which they defined so widely as to make compromise impossible.
The resulting stalemate ‘was exactly what the Protestants wanted’, as it
‘shielded them from restitution demands passed by a majority’.^23
The principal difference between the Reichstag meetings of 1608 and
1613 compared to the preceding ones was not the dispute over major-
ity voting and the Kammergericht appeals system, but the twenty-year