Abstract

Summary

This article examines justifications for and understandings of serfdom in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. It does this with particular reference to the Wildfang dispute between 1650 and 1669. In this conflict, the Elector Palatine reactivated an old privilege that allowed him to make the subjects of neighbouring rulers his serfs. Under the leadership of the Elector of Mainz, the neighbouring princes protested against these encroachments with tracts and longer pamphlets, diplomatic efforts, and ultimately through warfare. Between the German Peasants’ Wars of the sixteenth and the ‘peasant liberation’ in the nineteenth century, the Wildfang dispute was the only occasion on which a form of serfdom became a matter of wide public debate in the Holy Roman Empire, thus allowing to reconstruct commonly held but rarely recorded views of this institution. Narratives about its origins were a key element in early modern discourses of serfdom, because they allowed to underline the institution’s long tradition while demarcating it from ancient slavery. Concerning the territorial dimension of serfdom, the dispute touched upon such questions as how a person’s residence determined its liberty and who could be considered a stranger, revealing the idiosyncrasies of territorial rule in the fractured landscape of the Old Reich. Moreover, to underline their claims, both advocates and opponents of serfdom used the language of freedom. Attempts to define freedom as a quality of political bodies, Christian souls, as a distant state of nature or as a category of Roman law aimed at deflecting arguments based on the language of liberty. In spite of a shared language and argumentative repertoire, the article reveals a discrepancy between abstract academic discussions of serfdom and the more pragmatic and malleable arguments made by officials and peasants on the ground.