During a deposition at the Old Town Hall of Prague in 1608, the court chamberlain Philipp Lang argued that although he had taken bribes from the Count of Belgioioso, he had not been corrupted by him. The apparent contradiction is not an anomaly: early modern political actors operated within a normative framework vastly different from our own. And yet the world was not upside down; their matrix of moral decision-making encompassed the same competing imperatives that guide leaders today. My dissertation therefore asks, what exactly did early modern litigants understand by corruption? The question is salient to their time as well as our own because, like many abstract nouns, the term offers invaluable glimpses into the moral assumptions people hold but do not always say out loud. This work investigates the phenomenon of corruption through the case law of the Holy Roman Empire. The legal approach partly reflects my training as a lawyer, but also allows for full use of the micro-historical form. Because social norms are so deeply embedded within a particular context, micro history provides space for the ‘thick description’ essential to a capturing the multivalent nature of corruption as an arbiter of political ethics. My manuscript sources offer entry into what sociologists call the “labeling approach” – a method that focuses on the accuser rather than the perpetrator. Strung in a line chronologically, the five cases I analyze (1600-1780) traverse the institutional tenure of the court and weave the reciprocal encounters between petitioners and judges into a common fabric of jurisprudential change. Corruption is a phenomenon determined by what a given community subjectively considers to be reasonable. Every generation and every locality redefines wrongdoing for their own time and place. Shoehorned artfully into the archaic legal vocabulary of the baroque, the furious denunciations of wrongdoing analyzed in my dissertation state the opposite: certain eternal truths render corruption a sin. Paradoxically, all three claims are true. This dissertation exposes the diverse genealogies of “corruption” and the contradictory metamorphosis of the concept in that most contradictory of places, neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.