Emperor Charles V promulgated the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina at Regensburg in the Holy Roman Empire, establishing the first comprehensive German criminal procedure code. The Carolina regulated the use of torture as an investigative tool, codified rules of evidence, and set procedures for witness testimony in criminal proceedings. It required that confessions extracted under torture be voluntarily repeated afterwards to be valid — a significant procedural safeguard for its time — and remained influential across German-speaking Europe for over two centuries.

The Carolina's codification of torture and confession as legal instruments shadowed the literature of the German Reformation and Baroque periods. Writers including Hans Sachs dramatised courts and criminal proceedings, while the tension between forced confession and authentic truth resonates in later German literary traditions, from Schiller's exploration of justice to Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, a foundational text on the corruption of legal process.