German Mediatisation

The German Mediatisation was the series of mediatisations and secularisations that took place in Germany between 1795 and 1814 and that drastically altered the political map of the country under relentless military and diplomatic pressure from revolutionary France and later Napoleon.

Mediatisation was the process of suppressing the imperial immediacy of a secular or an ecclesiastical state or a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire and annexing that entity to another one, usually leaving the dispossessed prince, in the case of a secular principality, with some rights and privileges. The mediatisation of an ecclesiastical state is usually called secularisation and did not always involve the annexation of the secularised state to another state.

Following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, due to the equal heritage splitting prescribed by Salic Law, and the rise of feudalism, much of Europe had been reduced to an array of self-governing states of various sizes. Successive Kings of Germany and Holy Roman Emperors vested temporal authority in many bishoprics and abbeys, and also granted free city rights to many cities and villages throughout Germany. Unlike more centralized kingdoms such as Great Britain, France, or Spain, the Holy Roman Empire did not coalesce into a centralized entity. On the eve of the French Revolution, Germany still consisted of well over 200 self-governing states.

The lengthy tractations surrounding the mediatisation process usually involved the French Foreign minister Talleyrand. The states that benefited from or were saved from mediatisation were expected to pay fees and form alliances with the French Republic, then the new Napoleonic Empire.