ABSTRACT
In 1329, in a treaty sealed at Pavia, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian ceded his Wittelsbach nephews control of the Kurpfalz, or Electoral Palatinate. The principality comprised two very distinct territories; its heartland, the Lower or Rhenish Palatinate, straddled the middle Rhine and the Neckar and was governed from the mighty electoral residence at Heidelberg. A considerable distance to the east, however, lay a second (and in all respects secondary) region, which by the sixteenth century had come to be designated the Obere Pfalz, or Upper Palatinate. It is with this latter area that the present work is concerned. Somewhat smaller than today’s Bezirk Oberpfalz, the early modern Upper Palatinate nestled between Franconia, Bavaria and Bohemia. Geographical logic alone might have long since detached the territory from its Rhenish parent and returned it to neighbouring Bavaria, the duchy which had possessed it as its Nordgau prior to 1329. But logic, or the convenience of administering contiguous lands, often played a small part in the political history of the Old Reich
Several lesser principalities and territories shared the region, their various jurisdictions separating the northern districts of the Upper Palatinate around the towns of Kemnath and Tirschenreuth from the larger, southern part in which could be found the territorial capital, Amberg, and the other main urban centres of Neumarkt, Nabburg and Neunburg vorm Wald. The districts of Burglengenfeld and Hilpoltstein owed allegiance to the duchy of Pfalz-Neuburg, the so-called Jungpfalz, which had been created in 1505 and was ruled from Neuburg an der Donau by a branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty. The areas around Sulzbach and Vohenstrauß, originally within the Jungpfalz, formed, between 1569 and 1604 and again after 1614, the separate principality of Pfalz-Sulzbach. Until 1623 the district of Parkstein-Weiden was administered jointly by Pfalz-Neuburg and the Electoral Palatinate, between 1623 and 1652 by Pfalz-Neuburg alone, from 1652 to 1656 by Pfalz-Neuburg and Pfalz-Sulzbach, and after 1656 and the conversion to Catholicism of Count Christian August of Pfalz-Sulzbach by the latter territory. The previously autonomous county of Cham passed to Bavaria in 1626. The region included tiny enclaves of territory belonging to the prince-bishoprics of Eichstätt (some land around Beilngries), Bamberg (at Neuhaus and Vilseck) and Regensburg (at Hohenburg, Donaustauf and Wörth). The independent landgravate of Leuchtenberg, governed from the colossal fortress of that name at the region’s geographical heart, passed to Bavaria with the extinction of its dynasty in 1646. There were also a number of Upper-Palatine exclaves, including the parishes of Zeitlarn and Sallern, which lay without the walls of Regensburg (see Map 1.1).1 The early seventeenth-century population of the entire region has been estimated at 180,000 souls.2 Although, as will be seen, the religious history of these territories varied, their geographical proximity, economic interdependence, frequently contested borders and shared popular culture meant that the confessional policies of one frequently had an influence on the others. Thus, whilst the concern in this book will be with the electoral Upper Palatinate, the adjacent territories will also on occasion figure in the story.
