Church Property in the German Protestant Principalities

Abstract

When the kings of England and Sweden seized church lands and revenues during the 1530s and 1540s, they were following in the footsteps of the major Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Since all the leading secular rulers in Germany, with the notable exceptions of the Austrian Habsburgs and Bavarian Wittelsbachs, sooner or later adopted the Reformation, they all benefited to some extent from a policy of secularisation. The transferred property came under secular control, even if a large part of it continued to be used for the purposes of the new churches. Secularisation in this sense was the fate in Germany not only — and not even principally — of monastic lands, but of church property in the wider sense, embracing also the lands and whole government of bishoprics that were incorporated into most north German Protestant principalities, the property of parishes in town and country, patronage to benefices, religious and charitable endowments, schools and universities, and by extension the ecclesiastical jurisdiction that had controlled all such property. Not surprisingly, the effects of such widescale transfer of ecclesiastical property were not limited to the financial sphere, nor were the major principalities, which will be considered in this survey, the only ones to benefit.