Commentary on the Splendor of the Arch-Offices in the Coronations of Charles VII, Maria Amalia, and Francis

necessity, nor is there any prescription regarding it in the Aurea Bulla Golden Bull, in the Capitulations, or in any other imperial law, if you exclude the imperial privileges by which certain Abbots protect their functions in the inaugurations of Empresses. Rather, it depends on the Emperor’s discretion; if he pleases, the Empress is crowned and anointed, which was also the custom before the Golden Bull and the Emperors' Capitulations. Meanwhile, Empresses have their own arch-officials 1) Johann Carl Koenig commented learnedly on the three arch-officials of the Empresses in his dissertation on public law regarding the Arch-Marshal of the Empress, Marburg, 1748.. For the Bishop Abbot of Fulda is the Arch-Chancellor of the Empress, the Abbot of Kempten is her Marshal, and the Abbot of St. Maximin near Trier is her Arch-Chaplain—though this last office is dormant today because the abbey is joined to the Church of Trier. Nor are the Emperor's arch-officials absent; they perform their duties to some extent in the inaugurations of Empresses, just as in those of Emperors. Since the divine Leopold crowned his third wife, Eleonora Magdalena, at Augsburg in the year 1690, we have no similar example in the Empire, except for Maria Amalia 2) Maria Amalia was born on October 22, 1701. Her father was Emperor Joseph, her mother Wilhelmina Amalia, daughter of Duke John Frederick of Brunswick. She married Charles Albert, heir to the Bavarian Electorate, on October 5, 1722. She was crowned at Frankfurt on March 8, 1742., the wife of Emperor Charles VII. Because this event is quite memorable and illustrates the unwritten laws of our public jurisprudence, and differs significantly from the public law observed in the coronations of Emperors, I shall now examine it more accurately and explain and indicate the entire arrangement of the arch-offices, both of the Emperor and of the Empress, at the coronation of Maria Amalia. The eighth day of March in the year 1742 was the honorable time when Emperor Charles VII wished for his consort to be solemnly adorned with imperial insignia at Frankfurt am Main. Therefore, the Elector of Cologne, Clemens Augustus, to whom the task of anointing the Empress was granted on this occasion, along with the legates of Mainz and Trier, and the assisting prelates, went at the ninth hour to the Church of St. Bartholomew, where they donned their liturgical vestments.