cities are known to form concerning the general peace of provinces and
territories’.^122
The reigns of Charles and his son Wenceslas saw the Landfrieden,
as local associations for the keeping of the peace backed by royal
authority, begin to be dissolved by a politics which opposed leagues of
nobles and knights to the town leagues and forced the king to take sides.
Though rooted in the Landfrieden, the urban associations now came
under the ban of the ‘conspiracies’ in the Golden Bull.^123 Sigismund,
king of Hungary, who was elected king in 1410, deployed Landfrieden
against the Hussites of Bohemia, but in Germany he found peace
measures dependent on the initiative of provincial meetings of estates
under the leadership of the princes. Among the sixteen propositions for
reform that he put to the estates in the Reichstag in 1434 were that the
violent pursuit of legal rights should end; that every man should receive
justice in courts both lay and ecclesiastical, the latter ceasing to hear
secular cases (cause prophane); that criminal cases in the secular courts
should be decided only by the verdict of proper jurymen (scabini); and
that the notorious ‘secret’ courts, the popular tribunals spreading out
from Westphalia should be brought under control. But to the imposi-
tion of peace by royal order and the suggested appointment of a Haupt-
mannto oversee the keeping of the peace in each of four (later six)
‘circles’ (Kreise) the estates replied with an affirmation of the rights of
princes, counts, and lords to administer justice in their own courts.
After the return of the Habsburgs to the kingship in 1438 the debate
about the reform of imperial government intensified.^124
In 1495 Maximilian I made a perpetual peace (ewiger Landfriede)
central to his great scheme for the reform of imperial government, but
again the appointment of royal ‘administrators’ of the peace was
rejected by the estates, and the first article prohibiting persons of what-
ever status or condition from carrying on private wars and descending
with fire and sword on castles, towns, markets, or homesteads ordered
disputes to be settled in the ordinary courts. The role of the Landfriede
in forming the German constitution was to promote Kleinstaaterei
rather than a vision of Germany as a unitary state: the Golden Bull had
marked the failure of that. From the beginning the vernacular
Landfriedenhad dispensed with the solemn preamble of the Constitutio
The territorial states of Germany 107(^122) Die Goldene Bulle Kaiser Karls IV, vom Jahre 1356, ed. W. D. Fritz, MGH Fontes iuris
Germanici antiqui 11 (Weimar, 1972).
(^123) DRTAi (1376–87), 345, 373; DRTAii (1388–97), 493–4; Angermeier, Königtum und
Landfriede, 254–61, 266–82, 314, 318–21, 350–3; Arnold, Princes and Territories, 250, 278;
(^124) DRTAviii (1421–6), 141, 147, 219–20, 290, 315–16, 391–2; DRTAix 287, 365,
541–3; DRTAxi (1433–5), 503–22; DRTA xii (1435–7), 143–53 (esp. p. 144); DRTA xiii
(1438), 157–65, 443–60 (esp. 446, c.5); DRTA xv (1440–1), 406–25; DRTA xvi (1441–2),
388–96.