ABSTRACT
The political history of early modern Germany is that of a federation of territorial princes and free towns. Changing constantly with the accidents of marriage, inheritance and acquisition by fair means or foul, their number fluctuated around 300. The reckoning at any time depended upon what was held to belong to the German Empire, itself a part of a larger entity, or rather myth-for that is what the Holy Roman Empire had become by the seventeenth century. The medieval emperors’ claim of universal sovereignty was hollow long before the Reformation destroyed the underlying ideal of Christian unity. Ferdinand II (1619-37) called for the support of German princes while concerting with Spain a Counter-Reformation strategy in which the princes saw more of dynastic ambition than Catholic zeal; he put the traditional idea of empire to the test when he claimed the right to adjudicate over the succession to the Italian duchy of Mantua (1627) against the claim of the French-supported due de Nevers. At the diet of Regensburg, in 1630, the princes ruled that he had no such right. They still cherished the idea that they belonged to what they called, in more parochial terms, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.
