ABSTRACT
Will it ever be possible to understand the early modern Empire piece by piece, territory by territory? A recent survey in English gives 7 Electors, 80 ruling princes, 150 ruling counts and lords, about 2,000 imperial knights and 66 imperial free towns. 1 This makes a total of 2,303 territories and jurisdictions. To write the history of Germany as a whole becomes an impossible task. To make things worse, the particular federal structure of politics prevents a useful division into central and regional affairs. German history is thus at one and the same time rather similar to what would be a history of Westminster combined with a Victoria history of all the counties of England, plus, where appropriate, the rest of the British Isles right down to the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and Lundy. Equivalently, it is as if England had continued under the Heptarchy and never experienced the unifying Danes and Normans.
