Electorate of Trier

The Electorate of Trier, known in German as Kurtrier, was an ecclesiastical principality of the Holy Roman Empire that existed from the end of the ninth century to the early nineteenth. It was the temporal possession of the prince-archbishop of Trier, who by his office was one of the prince-electors of the empire, alongside the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz. Its capital was Trier, though from the sixteenth century the elector's main residence was at Koblenz. The archbishop's ecclesiastical diocese was a different and larger territory than his secular land. Trier had been the seat of a bishop since Roman times, as Augusta Treverorum, and was raised to archiepiscopal rank under Charlemagne, whose will names Metz, Toul and Verdun as its suffragans. The bishops of Trier were already independent territorial magnates in Merovingian times: in 772 Charlemagne granted Bishop Wiomad immunity from the local count's jurisdiction over all the churches, monasteries, villages and castles that belonged to the church of St Peter at Trier, a privilege Louis the Pious confirmed in 816. The electorate was secularised in 1803 during the German mediatisation after French troops occupied it, and only the bishopric of Trier survived without secular power.