Tage (Courts, Councils and Diets): Political and Judicial Nodal Points in the Holy Roman Empire, c.1300–1550*

Abstract

Prevailing interpretations of the late medieval and early modern Holy Roman Empire conceptualize it in terms of discrete units: as a mosaic of territories or as the Reichsverfassung (imperial constitution), a term that is intended to capture the social and political organization of the Empire. These models create an artificial divide between ‘central’ or ‘imperial’ and regional or local developments. This article argues that the evidence points to a more integrated picture of the Empire, in which there were many connections between political units and actors at every level, within networks that spanned multiple localities. It illustrates this interconnection by examining a much-neglected format of customary interaction: the Tag (‘diet’, ‘council’ or ‘court’). In judicial matters, Tage were ubiquitous as fora for arbitration and conflict resolution. Political associations and communities also made use of Tage as nodal points of contact and negotiation. Against this backdrop, the creation and consolidation of the Empire’s ‘central’ institutions—not least the so-called ‘imperial diet’ (Hoftag, gemeiner Tag, Reichstag)—can be understood as just one manifestation of contact within the customary framework of Tag-based negotiation, as widely practised by the elites of German-speaking Europe in the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This has important implications for how the structures and political culture of the Holy Roman Empire should be understood in this period, and forces us to think beyond the disjunctive frameworks which have prevailed in the historiography of the Empire so far.