alain wijffels (Reichshofrat).18 On the other hand, the growing autonomy and political weight of the Estates in the Empire (especially the territorial rulers), was reflected in an increasingly autonomous judicial system within each territory, further strengthened by the granting of privileges de non appellando (the granting of which often required the creation of an appellate court within the territory which benefited from the privilege).19 Thus, in the Holy Roman Empire, not unlike in France (but of course in an entirely different political context), various territories co-existed which largely enjoyed judicial autonomy and (quasi-) sovereignty, but nevertheless, at the overarching level of the Empire, the imperial courts continued to function, not least through the procedural remedies of so-called extraordinary ways for challenging a judicial decision by the supreme courts of the territories. One could object that, apart from political reasons, the extension of the Kingdom of France and of the Empire would have made it impractical to impose a uniform, integrated system of courts. But the Low Countries show that jurisdictional diversity also prevailed in smaller complex polities. In the Southern Netherlands, the Great Council of Mechelen originally evolved as a supra-territorial court for the whole of the dukes of Burgundy’s (and later, the Hapsburg rulers’) personal union in the Netherlands.20 However, from the early sixteenth century onwards, some provincial courts succeeded in being recognised as sovereign courts, implying that their judgments could not be challenged before the court in Mechelen.21 By the end of the Ancien Régime, the Mechelen court could 18 For a state of the art of research and bibliography on the council: www.reichshofratsakten.de; see also Sellert, Wolfgang 1999. 19 Eisenhardt, Ulrich 1980. 20 Van Rompaey, Jan 1973. 21 The conventional definition of a sovereign court, and therefore in most cases a supreme court within its own jurisdiction, at least in early-modern times, considers whether or not it is possible to appeal against its decisions. The test is not entirely satisfactory, for in many jurisdictions, extraordinary procedural remedies were available to challenge a judgement given by a sovereign court. Moreover, the test may not be carried out in all cases exclusively along procedural references. The decisions of the Great Council of Mechelen, for instance, were not subject to further appeals, but its final judgements could be challenged in review proceedings (revisio). That review procedure, however, took place before the Great Council, albeit in a different setting, as judges from other provincial courts (and occasio41
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