page_title: Free Imperial City of Nuremberg
section_title: Gradual mediatisation from 1790
hierarchical_section_title: Free Imperial City of Nuremberg / Territory / Gradual mediatisation from 1790
caption_attribution_description: Ansbach-Bayreuth (1805)
context_page_description: The Imperial City of Nuremberg was a free imperial city — independent city-state — within the Holy Roman Empire. After Nuremberg gained piecemeal independence from the Burgraviate of Nuremberg in the High Middle Ages and considerable territory from Bavaria in the Landshut War of Succession, it grew to become one of the largest and most important Imperial cities, the 'unofficial capital' of the Empire, particularly because Imperial Diets and courts met at Nuremberg Castle. The Diets of Nuremberg were an important part of the administrative structure of the Empire. The Golden Bull of 1356, issued by Emperor Charles IV, named Nuremberg as the city where newly elected kings of Germany must hold their first Imperial Diet, making Nuremberg one of the three highest cities of the Empire.
  The cultural flowering of Nuremberg, in the 15th and 16th centuries, made it the center of the German Renaissance.
context_section_description: In both Margraves' Wars (1449/50 and 1552–54) and in the Thirty Years' War, the city's territory and its population were violently affected by quartering of troops, looting, troop movements and disease.
  After the ducal line of Bavaria fell extinct and the Electorate of Bavaria was inherited by Charles Theodore, Count Palatine of Sulzbach in 1777, the Electorate began to claim Nuremberg's exclaves in the Upper Palatinate as well as counting the Ämter of Heideck and Hilpoltstein into the County Palatine of Neuburg for judicial and tax purposes. In 1790/91, the Electorate used its historic claim from before the Landshut War of Succession to occupy Nuremberger territories in what became known as the Bavarian Sequestrations (Bayerische Sequestrationen).
  Large parts of the Pflegämter Hiltpoltstein, Gräfenberg and Velden and were now occupied, which led to corresponding tax losses for Nuremberg; protests to the Emperor and the Empire were in vain, due to the military-political situation at the time. The power-play over the Nuremberger legacy saw the Electorate providing goodwill and support to Revolutionary France in competition with Prussia, to whom the two Franconian margraviates had fallen in 1791. Since then, the Minister President of Prussia, Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822), had been trying to create an integral Prussian Province of Franconia. When Prussia, in the course of her Revindikationspolitik, had already claimed the margravial rights of high justice (Fraischbezirk) over the Old District in 1796, Nuremberg was all but restricted to the territory circumscribed by town walls; Nuremberg retained the right of high justice only over the reduced Pflegamt Lichtenau and the exclaves within the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg, also diminished by annexation by the Electorate.
  In 1972, most of the former territories of Nuremberg — particularly those in the New District — were reunited into the Bavarian Landkreis of Nürnberger Land.
caption: The Prussian provinces of Ansbach and Bayreuth in 1805, with Nuremberg just south of center, showing most of the city's erstwhile possessions now in Hohenzollern hands.    Province of Ansbach   Province of Bayreuth
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