Landeshoheit

In the Holy Roman Empire, Landeshoheit or superioritas territorialis[1] (translated as territorial superiority, territorial supremacy or territorial sovereignty) was the authority possessed by the immediate lords within their own territories. It was possessed by all imperial estates and imperial knights. It has often been conflated with sovereignty but while it "carried with it nearly all the ingredients or attributes of true sovereignty, [it] was legally distinct from it, and was everywhere in Germany admitted to be so."[2]

The Peace of Westphalia has frequently been portrayed as conferring full sovereignty on at least the imperial princes. In fact, the princes' powers were not expanded, but the right of their aristocratic subjects (mediate lords) to maintain military forces was removed. The princes' rights to make treaties and to enter into alliances and thus to engage in foreign relations was not affected but remained "constrained by the obligation not to harm the emperor or Empire."[3] Their authority in their own territories remained "circumscribed by imperial law and by the emperor's formal position as their feudal overlord".[3]

Notes
  1. Latin, sometimes ius territoriale.
  2. Gagliardo (1980), p. 4.
  3. Wilson (2016), p. 174.

Sources
  • Gagliardo, John G. (1980). Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Renault, Rachel (2014). "Landeshoheit". «Les mots du Saint-Empire» – un glossaire. Retrieved 14 February 2019.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Walker, Mack (1980). Johann Jacob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. University of North Carolina Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Wilson, Peter H. (2016). Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)


gollark: Orbital nature lasers are already warming up.
gollark: And this seems too vaguely defined to be useful if you can just handwave any issue which does not in fact run on something like "balance" as being caused by some other imbalance.
gollark: Actually, no, they're partly just background radiation. Nobody is particularly responsible for this, on the majority of Earth.
gollark: By some unreasonably stretched definitions, maybe.
gollark: There are upper and lower bounds for how much water I should drink. The precise amount of cancer I should contain is exactly zero, though.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.