Aulic Council

The Aulic Council is one of the two highest judicial tribunals in the Germanic Empire, alongside the Imperial Chamber. In the book’s account, it shares jurisdiction over imperial controversies and disputes among the Empire’s members, while also judging those members in their private capacities. Its formal place within a far-reaching federal constitution contrasts with the weakness of a system whose laws are addressed to sovereigns rather than directly to the people.

Place in the Imperial System

The Aulic Council belongs to a federal system that developed out of the Empire’s feudal order. The Empire’s powers are distributed among a diet representing its component members, an emperor who serves as executive magistrate and may veto the diet’s decrees, and two judicial tribunals: the Imperial Chamber and the Aulic Council. Both tribunals possess supreme jurisdiction in controversies concerning the Empire or occurring among its members.

The Council’s role is part of a broader structure in which the diet legislates for the Empire, makes war and peace, contracts alliances, assesses contributions of troops and money, regulates coin, and may admit or punish members. The existence of these central institutions gives the Empire the appearance of an organized constitutional authority. Yet the Council operates within a union whose constituent princes and states retain sovereign standing, a condition that limits the practical reach of common government.

Jurisdiction and the Members

The account distinguishes between the members of the diet acting in their public capacity and their private capacities. As members of the diet, they are subject in all cases to judgment by the emperor and the diet; in their private capacities, they are judged by the Aulic Council and the Imperial Chamber. The Council therefore forms part of the machinery through which disputes involving the Empire’s members can be adjudicated, rather than leaving every controversy to the separate authority of the parties themselves.

This judicial arrangement accompanies restrictions on the members’ conduct toward one another. They may not make compacts prejudicial to the Empire, impose duties on their mutual intercourse without imperial and diet consent, alter the value of money, commit injustice against one another, or shelter those who disturb public peace. The imperial ban may be imposed on members who violate these limits, depriving them of sovereign rights and possessions. The Council’s jurisdiction thus sits within a constitutional order that both recognizes the members’ status and attempts to regulate their relations.

Constitutional Limits and Significance

The book presents the Empire as an apparent exception to the general weakness of confederacies: it has a representative diet, an executive head, and supreme courts. But its governing principle—that the Empire is a community of sovereigns, represented by sovereigns, and governed by laws addressed to sovereigns—renders it, in the author’s judgment, incapable of reliably regulating its members, insecure against external danger, and subject to persistent internal disturbance. The Aulic Council’s high jurisdiction does not erase that underlying structural weakness.

This example sharpens the book’s distinction between a confederation that depends on its constituent governments and a federal government capable of acting through law. The Council demonstrates that a tribunal may possess formally supreme authority over disputes while remaining embedded in a system whose central institutions struggle to command sovereign members. Its constitutional significance lies less in any particular judgment than in the tension between extensive formal powers and the limited capacity of the confederation to secure compliance.