Royal Law: Germany, Spain, Flanders, Hungary, Denmark Germany
In speaking of the origins and early development of royal law in Germany, one is confronted by the fact that there was no king of Germany in the sense that there was a king of Sicily or a king of England or a king of France.
There were dukes, kings, and other princes of the individual autonomous territories (Lander, "lands") that made up the empire. Each Land was, in effect, a kingdom in itself. Included were the five major German duchies of Saxony, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, and Lothringen, plus others such as Friesland and Thuringen; the Lombard cities of northern Italy; the Frankish kingdom of Burgundy; the Slavic kingdom of Bohemia; a number of border "marches" (including the Ostmark, which in 1156 was elevated to the status of Duchy of Austria); and various other polities. In the year 1075 a duchy such as Saxony or Bavaria was roughly comparable in size and wealth and power to the Kingdom of France (as it then was) or the Duchy of Normandy or the Kingdom of England. The king of the whole German empire ruled his own Land in addition to being chief of the imperial federation.Hence royal law in Germany may be taken to refer either to the law of the empire as such (imperial law) or to the law of any one of the duchies or other principalities that constituted the empire (princely law). In fact, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries imperial law, which had previously been quite rudimentary, took root and blossomed temporarily, although it did not match the development of royal law in Sicily, England, or France, while princely law not only took root and blossomed but continued thereafter to flourish rather as the royal law of Sicily, England, France, and other parts of Europe flourished.