Lordship and Administration

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.