Deutsche und Italienische Staatsbeschreibungskunst. Die Einkünfte aller Reichsstände, ca. 1547/48 nach einer unbekannten Quelle

Abstract

Measuring the State in Early-Modern Germany and Italy. The incomes of the Imperial Estates c. 1547/48 according to a newly discovered source

According to the common historiography, the Holy Roman Empire formed an exception among the other Early Modern European fiscal systems: While France, England, Spain, and other kingdoms and republics developed early forms of more or less central fiscal administrations that were oriented at estimations of the overall revenues of the state and that developed anticipatory budgets for planning the expenses, the Holy Roman Empire never knew such procedures. All fiscal communication, namely the estates' contributions to the Empire's war faring costs, functioned, from 1521 to 1806, by using a somewhat strange repartition list, the “Reichsmatrikel“. Originally (since 1422) put together to determine the quota of horses and men owed by each estate per month to the emperor when he had to cross the Alps to be crowned by the Pope in Rome with an important entourage, this list of quotas (“Römermonat“/“Roman month“) became quite fix after 1521 and was used in general in every moment when a prorated contribution to whatever political goal was at demand. But due to that quota system, the Holy Roman Empire's administration seems not to have had any auto-consciousness and description tools to grasp empirically the amount of revenues of each estate and of the Empire as a whole; the fixed quotas did not say anything specific about the real financial potency of an estate. This contribution presents and analyses a newly discovered source, a list in Italian language from 1547/48 of the revenues of all the Imperial Estates, showing detailed knowledge of the changings since 1545. The list circulated among Italian diplomats, Venetian intellectuals (Accademia Veneziana), and was printed in 1558. This contribution investigates the contexts of its circulation and analyzes its content. For the first time in over 100 years of professional historical research on the Holy Roman Empire, we may deduce from that source a – certainly approximate and estimated – account of the financial power of the Empire and each of its estates. That knowledge seems to have been lossed quickly during the second half of the 16^th century right upto the end of the Empire in 1806.