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What "mediatized" means

Many GOTHA pages on German princely families say that a house was mediatized in 1806. This guide explains the term, the events of 1803 to 1806, and the special status that the mediatized houses received in 1815. It relies on the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, the text of the German Federal Act of 1815 and articles in the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB).

The meaning of the word

In the Holy Roman Empire, a ruler was immediate (reichsunmittelbar) when he stood directly under the Emperor and the Empire, with no other lord in between. The Historisches Lexikon Bayerns defines mediatization as the process by which a previously immediate ruler was subordinated to another immediate ruler, so that a further holder of authority came between him and the Emperor; in German this is also called Mittelbarmachung, "making mediate" [1]. The lexicon stresses that the word carries a sense of forced subordination: territory that passed to another ruler by inheritance, pledge or abdication is not counted as mediatization [1].

The practice was old. The lexicon notes that mediatizations were already used to satisfy territorial claims at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and afterwards [1]. What changed at the end of the Empire was its scale.

1803: the Imperial Recess

The great wave came between 1803 and 1806, a large-scale consolidation in favour of the secular princes of the Empire, which brought most ecclesiastical territories and many small secular territories under the rule of the larger states [1]. The Imperial Recess (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) of 25 February 1803 sanctioned the mediatization of 41 imperial cities, all imperial villages and almost all ecclesiastical princes; Nuremberg, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck remained imperial cities [1].

For many secular dynasties 1803 was, at first, a gain. The NDB records that the Recess gave Hohenlohe three votes in the College of Princes [4], and gave the lines of Oettingen-Spielberg and Oettingen-Wallerstein one vote each, where they had previously shared only the joint vote of the Swabian counts [3].

1805–1806: the end of the small principalities

After Austria's defeats in late 1805, Bavaria and other states occupied neighbouring territories of imperial knights and smaller princes, and the Peace of Pressburg of 26 December 1805 gave the Bavarian electorate, among other places, the imperial city of Augsburg [1]. The decisive step was the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine of 12 July 1806, whose Articles 24 and 25 are the legal basis the lexicon cites for the mediatizations in present-day Bavaria [1].

The examples on GOTHA's house pages show how this worked in practice:

Oettingen: the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine assigned the whole territory to Bavaria, and parts passed to Württemberg in 1810 [3].
Hohenlohe: most of its lands went to Württemberg, and the lordship of Schillingsfürst to Bavaria [4].
Fürstenberg: the principality was divided between Baden, Württemberg and Hohenzollern [5].

The lexicon adds a legal subtlety: once the Empire had ended in 1806, there was no longer an Emperor or any "immediacy", so, strictly speaking, there could be no further mediatization. It calls it misleading to describe the later nineteenth-century debates about the status of these families as "mediatization" [1].

1815: Article 14 of the German Federal Act

After Napoleon's fall, the Congress of Vienna did not restore the mediatized houses. Instead, Article 14 of the German Federal Act of 8 June 1815 gave the "former estates of the Empire and members of the Empire made mediate in 1806 and since" a uniform legal status in all states of the German Confederation [2]. Its main provisions were:

these princely and comital houses would still be counted among the high nobility (hoher Adel) in Germany, and keep the right of equality of birth (Ebenbürtigkeit) "in the sense hitherto attached to it" [2];
the heads of these houses would be the first Standesherren in the state they belonged to, and they and their families would form its most privileged class, especially in taxation [2];
they kept the rights arising from their property that did not belong to state power, including free choice of residence within the Confederation, the maintenance of their family treaties, a privileged jurisdiction and exemption from military service, and, under state law, local justice, police and supervision of church and school affairs [2].

The Act named a Bavarian ordinance of 1807 as the basis and norm for defining these rights [2].

The guarantee of equality of birth is why the mediatized houses still matter in genealogy: Article 14 kept them, as a matter of law, in the same high nobility as the reigning houses, even though they no longer ruled [2].

After 1815

The privileges did not last forever. The NDB notes that the princes of Oettingen, as Standesherren, were privileged subjects of the kings of Bavaria and Württemberg, and that some of their personal privileges survived until 1918 [3]. Some families also served the states that had absorbed them: from 1855 until the end of the Bavarian monarchy, three successive princes of Oettingen-Spielberg held the court office of Kronobersthofmeister [3].

Mediatized houses on GOTHA

Licence: this article is original GOTHA text, released under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Its sources are summarised or briefly quoted.