A Source Book for Mediæval History: Selected Documents illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle AgeThatcher, Oliver J. (Oliver Joseph)
History
A Source Book for Mediæval History: Selected Documents illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age
Thatcher, Oliver J. (Oliver Joseph)
Europe -- History -- 476-1492 -- Sources; Middle Ages -- Sources
1. During the meeting of the diet at Nürnberg, the princes came together
as a public court of justice, in the presence of the most serene lord,
Rudolf, king of the Romans, and attended by a large following of counts
and barons and a great multitude of nobles and common people. And first
the king asked them for a decision on the following question: who should
be judge in cases which involve imperial or fiscal property, and other
offences against the king or the realm, and in which the king of the
Romans makes accusation against a prince of the empire. It was decided
by all the princes and barons who were present that the count palatine
of the Rhine has, and has had from of old, the right to act as judge in
cases where the emperor or king accuses a prince of the empire.
2. The aforesaid count palatine then took his place as judge and the
king asked for a decision on this question: what might and should the
king do in regard to the property, now held by others, which the former
emperor Frederick [II] had held and possessed in peace and quiet before
he was deposed by the princes, and in regard to other imperial property
wrongfully withheld from the empire. It was decided that the king ought
to lay claim to such property and recover it; and that if anyone should
resist the king in his attempt to recover his own, he should use his
royal power to overcome this illegal resistance to authority and to
preserve the rights of the empire.
3. The king asked, in the second place, what the law was in the case of
the king of Bohemia, who had wilfully allowed more than a year and a day
to elapse from the day of the coronation [of Rudolf] at Aachen without
seeking to be invested with his fiefs by the king of the Romans. It was
decided by all the princes and barons that whenever anyone, by his own
neglect or contumacy and without just excuse, failed to seek investiture
of his fiefs within a year and a day, all his fiefs were forfeited by
the mere lapse of time.
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