In the German-speaking Reich, the term 'state' in its modern understanding was not coined with reference to the early modern Old Reich as a whole and certainly not with the consolidation of princely power over land and people as its aim. Rather, its genesis was related to the bitter conflicts between emerging estates and princes in the face of the devastations of the Thirty Years' War. Taking up the contemporary polemics against criminal princes dating back to Luther, Seckendorff's 'Teutscher Furstenstaat' (1656) was supposed to protect its inhabitants from the incompetence and wickedness of the princes by means of their own legal system and lawful administration (Policey) as a unit of land, people and laws that allegedly reached far back into the Middle Ages. Since the last third of the 17th century these ideas, the development of which the book traces on a broad source basis, have increasingly found favour with many princes and their advisors in Protestant and Catholic German countries.