Leibeigenschaft rechtfertigen. Kontroversen um Ursprung und Legitimität der Leibeigenschaft im Wildfangstreit

Summary This article examines justifications for and understandings of serfdom in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. It does this with particular reference to the Wildfang dispute between 1650 and 1669. In this conflict, the Elector Palatine reactivated an old privilege that allowed him to make the subjects of neighbouring rulers his serfs. Under the leadership of the Elector of Mainz, the neighbouring princes protested against these encroachments with tracts and longer pamphlets, diplomatic efforts, and ultimately through warfare. Between the German Peasants’ Wars of the sixteenth and the ‘peasant liberation’ in the nineteenth century, the Wildfang dispute was the only occasion on which a form of serfdom became a matter of wide public debate in the Holy Roman Empire, thus allowing to reconstruct commonly held but rarely recorded views of this institution. Narratives about its origins were a key element in early modern discourses of serfdom, because they allowed to underline the institution’s long tradit...