Donauwörth, a free imperial city in the Swabian Circle, serves as a concrete warning about the dangers of enforcing a confederation’s decisions through military force delegated to its members. The city’s punishment began with a dispute over immunities and ended with the Duke of Bavaria using his enforcement commission to take the city for himself, illustrating how an ostensibly shared remedy could become an instrument of territorial ambition.

Setting and Imperial Enforcement

In the account of the Holy Roman Empire, its members’ difficulty maintaining order and administering justice had prompted an experiment: the empire was divided into nine or ten circles, each given an internal organization and charged with military enforcement against members that failed to comply with imperial laws. The arrangement did not cure the underlying weakness. Circles sometimes failed to carry out their commissions; when they did act, enforcement could bring the destruction and violence of civil conflict. Donauwörth supplies a specific example of that institutional danger.

The Dispute and Its Escalation

The Abbe de St. Croix held certain immunities in Donauwörth. On public occasions, the city’s people committed outrages against him in the exercise of those privileges. The city was consequently placed under the ban of the empire, a measure that called for enforcement. The Duke of Bavaria, although director of a different circle, obtained the appointment to carry it out.

The appointment gave the duke an official pretext to bring force against the city, but the account describes a private territorial aim behind his action. He arrived with ten thousand troops and revived an obsolete claim that his ancestors had allowed Donauwörth to be detached from their territory. Having used the enforcement mission as his opportunity, he took possession in his own name, disarmed and punished the inhabitants, and annexed the city to his domains.

Significance in the Argument

The episode exposes the gap between the formal authority of a confederation and its capacity to ensure that authority is exercised impartially. A duke entrusted with enforcing an imperial decision could turn the commission into an opportunity to pursue his own claim; the central system could not prevent punishment from becoming annexation. Donauwörth thus exemplifies the broader critique of military coercion by constituent powers: when enforcement depends on members whose interests may conflict with the common authority, the machinery meant to uphold the union can instead magnify its weakness.