Imperial Taxes and German Politics in the Fifteenth Century: An Outline

Abstract

Germany in the fifteenth century was the scene of an extended struggle over the nature and scale of imperial institutions, and much of this conflict boiled down to the question of who was to pay taxes and how much. In the first half of the century, two alternative methods of financing the Reich emerged, and in the years around 1500 only one of these two methods proved to be politically practical. The style of imperial taxation which won out, the Matrikel, has long been studied in detail, and its workings are well known to any student of imperial institutions.1 From the first Matrikel in 1422 until the end of the Old Reich in 1806, negotiated quotas were the basis for payments to the Reich made by each of the three-hundred-odd estates. Paying the listed quota in men or money fell in principle on the government of the individual estate, which had to find its own way of raising the money or of passing the costs on to subjects. This method of raising public revenues was not, however, the only system of taxation which contemporaries thought to be possible or desirable. The Matrikel won out only after princely estates tried and failed to gain the adoption of a monetary tax paid directly by the population in proportion to individual wealth or income. I will first consider the development of imperial direct taxes in the fifteenth century, and then I will show that the defeat of that tax helped to determine the structure and scale of Reich institutions throughout the early modern period.

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