The Common Penny ( or Imperial Penny ) was an

imperial tax Imperial is that which relates to an empire, Emperor, emperor/empress, or imperialism. Imperial or The Imperial may also refer to: Places United States * Imperial, California * Imperial, Missouri * Imperial, Nebraska * Imperial, Pennsylvania ...

() that was agreed at the instigation of Maximilian I in 1495 at the

Diet of Worms The Diet of Worms of 1521 ( ) was an Imperial Diet (Holy Roman Empire), imperial diet (a formal deliberative assembly) of the Holy Roman Empire called by Emperor Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V and conducted in the Imperial Free City o ...

, in order to give the

emperor The word ''emperor'' (from , via ) can mean the male ruler of an empire. ''Empress'', the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), mother/grandmother (empress dowager/grand empress dowager), or a woman who rules ...

the means to wage war against France and against the Osman regime in the

Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an empire, imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Centr ...

. The tax was to be paid by all subjects of the

Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation The Holy Roman Empire, also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, was a polity in Central and Western Europe, usually headed by the Holy Roman Emperor. It developed in the Early Middle Ages, and lasted for a millennium ...

aged 15 years or more. It was designed as a

poll tax A poll tax, also known as head tax or capitation, is a tax levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. ''Poll'' is an archaic term for "head" or "top of the head". The sen ...

income tax An income tax is a tax imposed on individuals or entities (taxpayers) in respect of the income or profits earned by them (commonly called taxable income). Income tax generally is computed as the product of a tax rate times the taxable income. Tax ...

and

property tax A property tax (whose rate is expressed as a percentage or per mille, also called ''millage'') is an ad valorem tax on the value of a property.In the OECD classification scheme, tax on property includes "taxes on immovable property or Wealth t ...

that depended on personal status and wealth. Its recovery ran into so many difficulties everywhere that it was explicitly abandoned in 1505. After the Hussite Penny () in 1427, it was another attempt to introduce an imperial tax and was part of the comprehensive, but ultimately unsuccessful

Imperial Reform Imperial Reform (, ) is the name given to repeated attempts in the 15th and 16th centuries to adapt the structure and the constitutional order () of the Holy Roman Empire to the requirements of the early modern state and to give it a unified gove ...

under Emperor Maximilian. The successor of the Common Penny as an imperial tax was the .

Literature

* Eberhard Isenmann: ''The Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages''. In: ''The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe. ca. 1200–1815''. Herausgegeben von Richard Bonney, Oxford 1999, pp. 243–280, here pp. 265–267. * Eberhard Isenmann: ''Reichsfinanzen und Reichssteuern im 15. Jahrhundert''. In: ''Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 7''. 1980, pp. 1–76, 129–218. * Peter Moraw: ''Der »Gemeine Pfennig«''. In: ''Mit dem Zehnten fing es an''. Published by U. Schultz, 1986, pp. 130–142. * Peter Schmid: ''Der gemeine Pfennig von 1495. Vorgeschichte und Entstehung, verfassungsgeschichtliche, politische und finanzielle Bedeutung''. (zugleich Habilitation Regensburg 1986), Göttingen, 1989, In: ''Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 34''. {{Authority control Law of the Holy Roman Empire History of taxation