ABSTRACT
Lippe's size and geography dictated the rôle it could afford to play in the various bodies that made up the federal legislature. Above all its limited financial resources made it a major event for the county to send representatives to federal meetings at regional and imperial level. At the end of the period in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a compromise was found by leading participation in the Westphalian College of Counts. At the same time the expense of litigation at the Reichshofrat in Vienna put that court in the same category as the Reichstage and Kreistage legislatures where Lippe had a natural place but where the county was far too small to lobby effectively on its own. 1
