The extent to which a prince went to great lengths to become indispensable was demonstrated by Margrave Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg, one of the most astute princes of the 15th century. He waged endless private feuds against Frankish imperial cities and neighboring princes throughout his life and was so obsessed with war that he sometimes stood in the field against as many as eighteen cities and principalities at once. Albrecht always carried a notebook with him in which he meticulously kept track of every detail regarding the fortresses, troop strengths, and debts of his rivals. At imperial councils, he was regarded as the most feared schemer because he formulated laws and alliances in such a complex manner that only he himself ultimately had the overview and had all the warring parties pay him princely fees to render a judgment. He mastered the art of initiating conflicts in the first place in order to then celebrate as an indispensable savior and be highly rewarded. Anyone who got in his way quickly found themselves in a legal mess from which one could only buy one’s way out with cash. His contemporaries called him, with admiration, the German Achilles because he conducted politics not with morality but with ice-cold bookkeeping.

An even more extreme outbreak of violence led to the infamous Brandenburg-Nuremberg City War in the mid-15th century, in which the noble class and bourgeois wealth collided head-on. Albrecht Achilles despised the wealthy patricians and merchants of Nuremberg as ordinary goons who had no respect for noble pomp. To force the proud imperial city to its knees, he had the entire surrounding countryside burned down, mills destroyed, and wells poisoned. When the Nuremberg knight soldiers finally caught him by surprise in a battle and forced him into a corner, the prince was threatened with the heavy disgrace of a ransom trap. He only managed to escape by tearing his magnificent armor, adorned with gold and jewels, piece by piece off his body and hurling it behind him at full gallop. The bill came to fruition: The greedy mercenaries from Nuremberg stayed to collect the precious loot, while the naked Elector escaped over the mountains in a simple undershirt. The incident spread like wildfire throughout the kingdom and ensured that the citizens continued to mock the involuntary royal fashion show for years to come.

That even ecclesiastical leaders were not the slightest bit more circumspect is evidenced by the bloody conflict over the Archdiocese of Mainz from 1461/62, which entered history as the Mainz Chapter War. Pope Pius II had summarily deposed the legitimately elected Archbishop Diether of Isenburg and appointed Adolf von Nassau as the new Archbishop. Diether simply refused to cede his throne, whereupon the two churchmen did not settle their differences with Bible quotes but with mercenary armies and heavy cannons. Adolf von Nassau stormed Mainz in the midst of a pitch-dark October night, burned down large parts of the city, plundered the cathedral and expelled hundreds of respected citizens. Among the unfortunate were Johannes Gutenberg, whose printing workshop caught fire and ended up completely destitute on the street. To mitigate some of the gigantic PR damage caused by the massacre, the victorious Bishop Gutenberg promptly appointed Gutenberg as a court noble and provided the inventor of the printing press with fine court clothes, some grain, and some barrels of free beer.

One of the most bizarre excesses of princely self-display was carried out by Elector Ernst of Saxony together with his brother Albrecht in 1475. After the famous Prinzenteich robbery – in which an dissatisfied knight had abducted the two as little boys from the princely castle and had failed miserably – the brothers no longer made any attempt to show off their boundless wealth. In their displays, they mounted metre-high mock towers from which living singing birds and costumed dwarfs sprang, while the fountains in the castle courtyard spewed real white and red wine instead of water for days on end. To prove that the Saxon silver mines were virtually inexhaustible, they threw freshly minted silver coins with real shovels into the hands of the common people at festive festivals. The fistfights resulting from these spectacles, staged in the mud, were gladly accepted by the princely hosts as amusing additions to their pompous lifestyle. Those who lived in the 15th century were not accustomed to such spectacles. They wanted to create an impression of a century ago; they did not think in terms of austerity, but taunted until the guests were literally drunk and covered in dirt.

The ultimate paradox of princely power was rooted in the completely dysfunctional system of the imperial prince title itself. In the Holy Roman Empire, one was only a full-fledged imperial prince when one possessed the so-called imperial status – that is, a seat and direct vote in the Reichstag. Some princely houses may have been rich in stone, resided in huge castles, and possessed vast lands, but, curiously enough, formally they had no seat in the Reichstag at all. Other minor princes, on the other hand, ruled tiny dwarf states of a few square kilometers, but out of ancient custom they possessed the precious, official imperial prince vote. This led to a bizarre, highly lucrative real estate market: wealthy counts bought bankrupt minor princes tiny plots of land in nowhere in the world for absurd sums, only to inherit the associated imperial vote. As soon as the purchase contract was signed, the newly appointed Reichsfürst was finally allowed to sit in the front row, while the Emperor had to shake his hand in equal measure with a scrunched face as he negotiated with him.