Women's rule in the HRE

Up to 1806, and right through the Early Modern period, amongst the over 300 statelets that constituted the HRE, were 10 territories that throughout their existence were  ruled only by women, and by Imperial law could be ruled only by women.

The territories, distributed all over the HRE, were Church domains, lands owned by convents, whose abbess also performed the privileges and duties of a worldly ruler.

The larger of these ecclesiastical domains were proper statelets in their own rights, with their own judicial system and their own currency and with their own, but rather, small armies.

Head of the wordly administration was the abbess, with no other over-lord than the Holy Roman Emperor himself. As rulers, the nuns would have a vote in the Imperial diets, and contribute to the financies or, on occasions, to the defense of the Empire.

The abbesses, in theory, were elected democratically to their position by the nuns of the convents, in practise, the abbesses were mostly the daughters of leading aristocratics families of the HRE, sometimes banished into monasteries, and not always was their conduct such as would be expected of a nun that had devoted her life to the Church.

 

Alas, the end of the HRE in 1806, ended the independency of all these strange statelets ruled exclusively by women, but now as, at the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the end of the HRE, something of a re-evaluation of its faults and merits happens in Germany, feminine rule is remembered fondly.

 

Source: "Der Spiegel", 7/8/06

 

EDIT:

 

To be exact, it belongs here too...