As it pertains to the legal conditions of the Holy Roman Empire, mediatization describes the abolition of the imperial immediacy of a secular imperial estate (Estates, assembly of). The historical drama of mediatization in the late 18th and early 19th centuries produced a distinction between two forms of mediatization: one that preserved the existence of a state and did not abolish its autonomy, and one that resulted in annexation, as the state was absorbed into the territory of a larger state. With respect to the status immediatus of imperial estates endowed with immediacy (i…