As medievalists we all know, or think we know, that Germany Was Different. In most other European kingdoms, whether English, Scottish, French, Castilian, Aragonese, Portuguese, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Hungarian, Danish or Norwegian, a modernization paradigm seems to apply. The period between about 1100 and 1350 saw a Weberian transformation of rulership from a mixture of the charismatic and the patrimonial to the bureaucratic, if only incipiently so. It is not difficult to recite the litany of developments: hereditary rulership ensuring continuity (‘the king is dead, long live the king’); hierarchically organized appellate jurisdiction; officials paid at least in part on a salaried basis; institutions which had a fixed existence and often even a permanent physical location and were not wholly dependent on the whims or itinerancy of the ruler for the time being; institutionalized consultation between the ruler and his subjects about legislation and taxation; the general acceptance of the doctrine that all authority derived ultimately from the king, for whom, in a later stage of development, an abstraction like the crown or the state could then be substituted. But the regnum Teutonicum failed to make the transition between Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, to use Perry Anderson's terminology. Germany came to modernity late, differently or not at all, and can thus be said to have experienced a medieval Sonderweg.