SUMMARY The German language has Säkularisation as meaning the transfer of persons and material goods from the ecclesiastical to the secular domain—not the mental process which alienated men from religion (Säkularisierung), itself of course closely connected to Säkularisation. As in other European countries, secularization of material goods happened in the Holy Roman Empire as a consequence of the Reformation and to a greater extent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Several peace treaties and an imperial law, the so-called Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, distributed almost all Church property, including the sovereign rights of ecclesiastical princes, to secular territories that had lost property and rights on the left bank of the Rhine to France. Apart from many minor territories which benefited, Prussia and Bavaria profited most by winning territorial rights from the ecclesiastical princes, and real estate and numerous works of art from the monks and nuns. Procedure differed in those areas under French law from those under the German secular princes, but everywhere the winners were the treasuries, which used the newly acquired riches mainly for military purposes; the losers were the weaker parts of society and cultural treasures. The year 1803 marked not only the suppression of many monasteries, but the end of ecclesiastical estates in the imperial diet (the Emperor Francis II abdicated only three years later) as well as of the estates in those German territories which had, longer than any other European countries, preserved these institutions from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century.