Since the election of Lothar II in 1125, Germany’s most powerful princes have held the clear right to choose the king of the German peoples and eventually the successor to that king, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Golden Bull of 1356 resolved various disputes among the princes and fixed the number of these so-called “Prince-Electors” at seven.
Three of these princes were ecclesiastic:
the Archbishop of Mainz
the Archbishop of Trier
the Archbishop of Cologne
And four were secular:
the King of Bohemia
the Margrave of Brandenburg
the Count Palatine of the Rhine
the Duke of Saxony
The composition of the College of Electors remained unchanged for 300 years until the Duke of Bavaria was added to the group as an indirect consequence of the Thirty Years’ War in 1623. The Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg was added to the College (as the Elector of Hanover) in 1696. Despite some temporary reshuffling during the War of the Spanish Succession, it is only these nine electors (eight, really, because the Elector Palatine inherited the Bavarian dukedom in 1777) who can be considered legitimate, though purists may object to the inclusion of both Bavaria and Hanover.
Unfortunately, the continent-wide ravages of Napoleon at the start of the 19th Century did not spare the ancient College of Electors. The Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, forced upon the Germans by the Corsican upstart, led to the abolition of the archbishoprics of Trier and Cologne, and the transfer of the remaining spiritual Electorship from the Archbishop of Mainz to the Archbishop of Regensburg. In 1803, electorates were created for the Duke of Württemberg, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and the Duke of Salzburg, bringing the total number of electors to a preposterous ten. When Austria annexed Salzburg under the Treaty of Pressburg (1805), the Duke of Salzburg moved to the Grand Duchy of Würzburg and retained his electorate.
It is important to note that none of these Johnny-come-lately electors ever actually exercised their power by casting a vote for a potential Holy Roman Emperor since the Holy Roman Empire was abolished in 1806 and, this is key, the new electorates were never confirmed by the Emperor.
Therefore, these Napoleonic electors are most definitely NOT entitled to the additional rights and privileges that prince-electors enjoyed such as their monopoly over all mines of gold, silver, and other metals within their territories, the right to tax Jews, to collect tolls, and to mint money; as well as their unique judicial powers which were that their subjects could be not be tried in the imperial courts, and appeal from their courts lay only in cases where denial of justice was claimed.
DO NOT BE FOOLED. These “phony five,” the Archbishop of Regensburg, the Duke of Württemberg, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, and the Grand-Duke of Würzburg, are no more entitled to elect a Holy Roman Emperor than you or I. And if you or I are the Archbishop of Mainz, the Archbishop of Trier, the Archbishop of Cologne, the King of Bohemia, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, or the Duke of Saxony, then we would be entirely justified in looking down our noses at these bogus prince-electors and perhaps taking a swing at them.
