Kaiserliche Reichspost

Kaiserliche Reichspost (German: [ˈʁaɪçsˌpɔst], Imperial Mail) was the name of the country-wide postal service of the Holy Roman Empire.

Kaiserlich Reichspost sign in Limburg

It was founded by Jannetto de Tassis in 1495. The Bergamascan Tasso family had built up postal routes throughout Italy since c. 1290 and Jannetto's uncle Ruggiero had worked for Frederick III since the mid-15th century. Ruggiero had already connected Vienna and Innsbruck with Italy, Styria, and Brussels, before Maximilian expanded from those routes throughout his realm. Maximilian's Philip of Burgundy appointed Jannetto's brother Francisco as capitaine et maistre de nos postes in 1502 and it was a payment dispute between the two which caused Francisco to open the family's network to public correspondence in 1506. Charles V confirmed Jannetto's son Giovanni Battista as Postmaster General (chief et maistre general de noz postes par tous noz royaumes, pays, et seigneuries) in 1520. Confirmed by Emperor Rudolph II in 1595, the Imperial postal service remained a monopoly of the Thurn und Taxis family (officially hereditary from 1615 onwards) until it was terminated with the end of the Empire in 1806.

The Imperial Reichspost was based in Brussels in the Spanish Netherlands, from where the original ("Dutch") route led via Namur, Bastogne, Lieser, Wöllstein, Rheinhausen, and Augsburg to Innsbruck and Trento. It was also used to bypass the Kingdom of France in order to keep in touch with Habsburg Spain during times of hostility. Competing services were prohibited, although the Imperial cities were permitted to maintain their own communication system.

After the accession of Rudolph's brother Emperor Matthias in 1612, a second route was established from Cologne via Frankfurt, Aschaffenburg, and Nuremberg to Bohemia and later also to Leipzig and Hamburg. After the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia, Postmaster General Count Lamoral II Claudius Franz von Thurn und Taxis and his successors had to deal with the establishment of separate postal agencies, mainly by the Protestant Imperial States of Northern German but also in several lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, leading to long-lasting disputes over their range of authority. In the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Thurn und Taxis seat was relocated from Brussels to the Free City of Frankfurt in 1702.

Though the dynasty had sided with the Wittelsbach rival Charles VII in the War of the Austrian Succession, their services were indispensable, and Maria Theresa's husband Emperor Francis I officially re-implemented the Thurn und Taxis monopoly in 1746. Two years later, the postal authority moved to Regensburg, seat of the Imperial Diet. The family had accumulated extreme wealth; nonetheless, it was devastated by the Napoleonic Wars. The last Postmaster General, Prince Karl Alexander von Thurn und Taxis, lost his office with the Empire's dissolution on 6 August 1806, but his postal authority continued as the Frankfurt-based Thurn-und-Taxis Post until the unification of Germany.