Imperial Reform
The emperor himself, however, who from the time of Sigismund's successor, Albert II, almost always came from the House of Habsburg, used imperial politics generally only if it served to support his own personal base of power at home.
At the 1495 Diet, Maximilian asked the representatives of the estates not only for contributions but also for an imperial tax to be raised and for troops to be committed for his wars against the Ottomans in the East and the French in Italy.
[2] The deputies, led by Chancellor Bertold von Henneberg-Römhild, the Archbishop of Mainz, agreed in principle to a Common Penny tax paid directly to the Empire, but in return set conditions: Maximilian generally opposed the institutions that weakened his power, but he supported the Land Peace, adoption of Roman law, sounder administrative procedures, better record-keeping, qualifications for offices, etc.
Meanwhile, he explored Austria's potential as a base for Imperial power and built his government largely with officials drawn from the lower aristocracy and burghers in Southern Germany.
[13] The legal reform seriously weakened the ancient Vehmic court (Vehmgericht, or Secret Tribunal of Westphalia, traditionally held to be instituted by Charlemagne but this theory is now considered unlikely.
The Circles, originally meant as constituencies of the Imperial Government, enabled a more uniform administration of the Empire to better execute the Perpetual Public Peace, taxation, and the raising of troops.
Wolfgang Wüst opines that even if some aspects remained incomplete, the formation of the Imperial Circles proved to be an essential influence on the development of Early Modern Europe.
Apart from balancing the Reichskammergericht with the Reichshofrat, this act of restructuring seemed to suggest that, as Westphal quoting Ortlieb, the "imperial ruler – independent of the existence of a supreme court – remained the contact person for hard pressed subjects in legal disputes as well, so that a special agency to deal with these matters could appear sensible" (as also shown by the large number of supplications he received).
To the Empire, the mechanisms involving such regional institutions bolstered the Eternal Land Peace (Ewiger Landfriede) declared in 1495 as well as the creation of the Imperial Circles[24][25] between 1500 and 1512, although they were only fully functional some decades later.
[35][36] The development of the printing industry together with the emergence of the postal system (the first modern one in the world[37]), initiated by Maximilian himself with contribution from Frederick III and Charles the Bold, led to a revolution in communication and allowed ideas to spread.
Duncan Hardy notes that, "The earliest historians to engage with this topic, who coined and popularized the notion of 'imperial reform' (Reicksreform), judged it as a well-intentioned partial failure.
For Leopold von Ranke and Erich Molitor, imperial reform was a missed opportunity: an attempt to impose nation-statehood on the Empire from above, inspired by 'patriotic' reform-minded polemicists, which foundered on the particularistic ambitions of the monarchy and the princes, but nevertheless engendered substantial constitutional shifts."
In his influential 1984 study of Reichsreform, Heinz Angermeier took a less top—down view, but also saw the reformist initiatives as "the product of a dialectic between the Empire's un-state-like constitution and the state-forming ambitions of its constituent authorities".
Maximilian sought to raise revenues to repulse the Ottomans in the East and the French in Italy and at the same time wanted to assert central authority and his ascension provided the direct incentive for the Reform.
While the reforms of this period ushered in a new 'constitutional' arrangement, in which power was formally divided between the monarchy and the estates, their long-term effects were unintended, and their implementation was presented as a restoration of (imagined) good old customs and order.
The Habsburgs accepted greater constitutional checks on prerogatives as the price for a more potent infrastructure to mobilize the additional resources from the imperial Estates needed to meet their own ambitions and commitments.
"[51] He calls the post-Reform Empire "a mixed monarchy in which the emperor shared power with an increasingly finely graduated hierarchy of princes, lords and cities collectively known as the imperial Estates".
[52] The institutions and structures developed by Imperial Reform mostly served German lands, while the Habsburg monarchy "remained closely entwined with the Empire", but deliberately refrained from including their other territories in its framework.
"Instead, they developed their own institutions to manage what was, effectively, a parallel dynastic-territorial empire and which gave them an overwhelming superiority of resources, in turn allowing them to retain an almost unbroken grip on the imperial title over the next three centuries.
