Secularisation
From the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by the Salian and Saxon Emperors in the 10th and 11th centuries, the feudal system had turned Germany and northern Italy into a vast network of territories of various sizes each with its own specific privileges, titles and autonomy. To help administer Germany in the face of growing decentralisation and local autonomy, many bishoprics, abbeys and convents throughout Germany were granted temporal estates by successive Emperors. The personal appointment of bishops by the Emperors had sparked the investiture controversy, and in its aftermath the emperors were unable to use the bishops for this end. Following this, some of the bishops and abbots had begun to run their territories as temporal lords as opposed to spiritual lords. In the course of the Reformation, several of the prince-bishoprics were secularized, mostly to the benefit of Protestant princes. In the later sixteenth century the Counter-Reformation attempted to reverse some of these secularizations, and the question of the fates of secularized territories became an important one in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In the end, the Peace of Westphalia confirmed the secularizations which had already occurred, but also stabilized the situation.
In 1794 the armies of revolutionary France overran the Rhineland, and by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797 the Emperor recognized French annexation of all imperial territories west of the Rhine river. The Emperor sought to compensate the now stateless or diminished monarchs who lost their lands by granting them new realms. The only available lands were those held by the Prince-Bishops, so most were secularised and dispersed amongst the monarchs of Germany.
The territory of secularized ecclesiastical principalities was usually annexed whole to a neighboring secular principality or, in the case of several prince-abbeys, granted to one of the princes or imperial counts whose lands on the west bank of the Rhine had been annexed by France. Only three survived for a relatively short time as non-secular states: the Archbishopric of Regensburg, which was raised from a bishopric with the incorporation of part of the Archbishopric of Mainz, and the lands of the Teutonic Knights and Knights of Saint John. Also of note is the former Archbishopric of Salzburg, which was secularised as a duchy with an increased territorial scope, and was also made an electorate.
Monasteries and abbeys lost their means of existence as they had to abandon their land and most were closed. The remaining ecclesiastical states were also secularized after the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The lands of the Order of St. John were secularized in 1806, Regensburg was annexed by Bavaria in 1809, and in the same year Napoleon dissolved the Teutonic Knights and gave their lands to neighboring princes, particularly the King of Württemberg.
The outcome of the Final Recess of 1803 was the most extensive redistribution of property in German history before 1945. Approximately 73,000 km2 of ecclesiastical territory, with some 2,36 million inhabitants and 12,72 million guildens per annum of revenue was transferred to new rulers. The rationale behind the Final Recess had been to compensate those rulers who had lost territory to the French, but considerably more territory was gained through massive secularisation: Baden received over seven times the amount of territory it has lost, Prussia nearly five times. Hanover gained the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück, even though it had lost nothing. Austria also did very well.
The position of the established Catholic Church in Germany, the Reichskirche, was not only diminished, it was nearly destroyed. The Catholic Church lost its constitutional role in the Empire. Most of the catholic universities were closed as well as thousands of monasteries. Myriads of Catholic foundations closed down. The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss did to German land ownership what the Revolution had done to France.
Read more about this topic: German Mediatisation