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William D. Godsey, Das Haus Schönborn. Eine Familienbiographie: Katholischer Reichsadel, 1640–1840, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1040–1042, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem232
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BY almost every measure, the Schönborns were the most spectacularly successful house of the lesser nobility in the late Holy Roman Empire. As this was already clear to contemporaries, the absence until now of a source-based history has been all the more remarkable. To fill the gap, the author offers a ‘family biography’ that covers the period from the beginnings of their rise at the time of the Thirty Years War through the zenith of Schönborn power and influence in the early eighteenth century through to the post-revolutionary era. Both unusual and commendable was the decision of the author to bridge the traditional divide between early and late modern history by taking into account the period after the dissolution of the old order in 1806. Given that few families had the osmotic relationship with the old Empire that the Schönborns did, this decision was not self-evident. Catholic and pedigreed, they were one of only a few dozen German noble families in a position to exploit the political, social, and economic opportunities offered by Germania Sacra. In the generation of Johann Philipp Schönborn (1605–73), who became prince-bishop of Würzburg (1642) and subsequently elector of Mainz (1647), the requisite intellectual, moral, and biological qualities came together as well. The Church was the instrument of Schönborn ascent, and the family's relationship to it is the focus of this book. Here the author follows the precedent set in the previous literature. The Schönborns' extraordinary position in the Rhenish and Franconian ecclesiastical principalities—with representatives in cathedral chapters and on a dozen episcopal thrones—gave them an eminently political stake in the nation as assembled at the diet in Regensburg. The lineage itself was secured constitutionally by membership in two further immediate corporations peculiar to the Empire: the Free Imperial Knights (Reichsritterschaft) and the Franconian College of Imperial Counts (Fränkisches Reichsgrafenkollegium). Admission into the latter, and thereby into the high nobility, is often mistakenly interpreted as having meant a severance of previous ties to the former. Even in the later eighteenth century, however, Schönborn knightly patriotism remained lively and the author aptly places the family squarely within the legal and social context of the Free Imperial Knights down to the end of the Empire. It is therefore regrettable that little specific information is given on the family's involvement in the individual cantons of the Free Imperial Knights to which it belonged, which are not even specified. Strangely, the Schönborns' advent into the imperial high nobility at the turn of the eighteenth century with formal entry into the consortium of counts in Franconia—a milestone in their history—merits only marginal and unsystematic mention.
