Archchancellor

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This article is about the government title. For the head of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, see Archchancellor (Discworld).

An archchancellor (Latin: archicancellarius, German: Erzkanzler), or chief chancellor, a title given to the highest dignitary of the Holy Roman Empire, and also used occasionally during the Middle Ages to denote an official who supervised the work of chancellors or notaries.

The Carolingian emperors appointed chancellors over the whole realm in the ninth century. Hincmar refers to this official as a summus cancellarius in De ordine palatii et regni and an 864 charter of Lothair I refers to Agilmar, Archbishop of Vienne, as archchancellor, a word which also begins appearing in chronicles about that time.

At the court of Otto the Great, the title seems to have been an appanage of the archbishop of Mainz. After Otto's imperial coronation (962), a similar office was created for the regnum Italicum. By the early eleventh century, this office was perennially held by the archbishop of Cologne. Theoretically, the archbishop of Mainz took care of imperial affairs for Germany and that of Cologne for Italy, though the latter often used deputies, his see being outside of his kingdom. A separate office was created about 1032 for the Kingdom of Burgundy, but it only appears in the hands of the archbishop of Trier in the twelfth century as the chancery of Arles. It is not known if the office was ever more than a prestigious title for the archbishop.

By the Golden Bull of 1356, the Emperor Charles IV confirmed the threefold division of the archchancellory. The imperial functions, however, were carried out by the Mainzer prince-elector alone. The office in this form was part of the constitution of the Empire until 1803 when the archbishopric of Mainz was secularised. The last elector, Karl Theodor von Dalberg, however, retained the title of archchancellor until the dissolution of the Empire in 1806. There was a marked resemblance between the medieval archchancellor and the later chancellors of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic.^[1]