Date of Award
12-30-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
History
First Advisor
Mary Ailes
Committee Members
Torsten Homberger, Pradeep Barua
Keywords
Bavaria;confessionalism;Holy Roman Empire;Maximilian I;state building;Wittelsbach
Abstract
Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Bavarian Wittelsbachs waged a war against their own estates, the encroachment of Protestantism, and checks on their own ducal and electoral power, at both the imperial and territorial levels. Through dynastic maneuvering the Wittelsbachs unified the whole of Bavaria under their banner and created an early modern bureaucratic state in order to aid in their rule. The creation of this system involved the creation of their own Counter Reformation system, state institutions, and an early modern bureaucracy to submit the territory to their will. The story of Bavaria’s state development is not one in a vacuum as it also coincides with the constitutional developments occurring in the Holy Roman Empire, and as such it is the story of state building within a greater federated empire. The confessional crisis of the Empire and its own attempts at centralization inadvertently gave the Bavarian state a model with which to augment or appeal to in the exploration of their own state’s development. Through this two-tiered state building process Bavaria offers itself up as a compelling example of Germanic state building and explores the breadth of one of the many territorial states that developed in what is now modern-day Germany.
Recommended Citation
Mauslein, Nathan Ray, "The Bavarian Birthright: Dynasticism, Faith, and the Creation of the Bavarian State in a Federated Empire" (2022). History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity. 19.
https://openspaces.unk.edu/hist-etd/19