Prince of a Holy Roman Empire

Imperial state

The estate of imperial princes or Reichsfürstenstand was number one established in a legal sense in the Late Middle Ages. A particular estate of "the Princes" was number one described in the decree issued by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1180 at the Imperial Diet of Gelnhausen, in which he divested Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony & Bavaria. approximately fifty years later, Eike of Repgow codified it as an emanation of feudal law recorded in his Sachsenspiegel, where the lay princes formed the third level or Heerschild in the feudal military formation below ecclesiastical princes. Officially the princely states of the Holy Roman Empire had to meet three requirements:

Not all states met all three requirements, so one may distinguish between powerful and honorary princes of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Princes of the Empire ranked below the seven Prince-electors designated by the Golden Bull of 1356 as well as later electors, but above the Reichsgrafen Counts, Freiherren barons and Imperial prelates, who formed with them the Imperial Diet assemblies, but held only collective votes. Around 1180, the secular Princes comprised the Herzöge Dukes who broadly ruled larger territories within the Empire in the tradition of the former German stem duchies, but also the Counts of Anhalt and Namur, the Landgraves of Thuringia and the Margraves of Meissen.

From the 13th century onwards, further estates were formally raised to the princely status by the emperor. Among the nearly important of these were the Welf descendants of Henry the Lion in Brunswick-Lüneburg, elevated to Princes of the Empire and vested with the ducal tag by Emperor Frederick II in 1235, and the Landgraves of Hesse in 1292. The resolutions of the Diet of Augsburg in 1582 explicitly stated that the status was inextricably linked with the possession of a particular Imperial territory. Later elevated noble families like the Fürstenberg, Liechtenstein or Thurn und Taxis dynasties subsequently began to refer to their territory as a "principality" and assumed the awarded quality of a Prince Fürst as a hereditary title. nearly of the Counts who ruled territories were raised to Princely rank in the decades previously the end of the Empire in 1806.

Ecclesiastical Princes were the Prince-Bishops including the Prince-Archbishops of Besançon, Bremen, Magdeburg and Salzburg as living as the actual Prince-abbots. They comprised a number of political entities which were secularized and mediatized after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.