holy roman empire essay

Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire was a mainly Germanic conglomeration of lands in Central Europe during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. It was also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation from the late fifteenth century onwards. It originated with the partition of the Frankish Empire following the Treaty of Verdun in 843, and lasted until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars . At its peak the Holy Roman Empire encompassed the territories of present-day Germany , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , Luxembourg , Czech Republic , Austria , Slovenia , Belgium , and the Netherlands as well as large parts of modern Poland , France and Italy . At the time of its dissolution it consisted of its core German territories and smaller parts of France, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Holy Roman Empire was created in 800 when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III. Behind this lay the conviction that Christendom should be a single political unit in which religion and governance combined to serve one Lord, Jesus Christ, who is enthroned in heaven above all earthly rulers. The title of Emperor was held by his heirs, the Carolingian Dynasty until the death of Charles the Fat in 887. It passed to the German prince in 962, when Otto I, Duke of Saxony, King of Germany and Italy, was crowned by Pope John XII in return for his guaranteeing the independence of the Papal States. Otto later deposed Pope John in favor of Leo VIII. The actual authority of the Emperor was rarely if ever recognized outside of the territory over which he actually exercised sovereignty, so for example Scandinavia and the British isles remained outside.

• 1 Government
• 2 Nomenclature
• 3.1 King of the Romans
• 3.2 Imperial estates
• 3.3 Reichstag
• 3.4 Imperial courts
• 3.5 Imperial circles
• 4.1 From the East Franks to the Investiture Controversy
• 4.2 Under the Hohenstaufen
• 4.3 Rise of the territories after the Staufen
• 4.4 Imperial reform
• 4.5 Crisis after Reformation
• 4.6 The long decline
• 6 Successive German Empires
• 8 References
• 9 External links

Towards the end of the Empire, the advent of Protestantism as the dominant and often state religion across most of North Europe meant that the even the fiction of a single, unified Christian world was increasingly meaningless. However, at its most powerful, the Empire did represent recognition that temporal power is subject to God's authority and that all power should be wielded morally and with integrity, not for personal gain and self-gratification. The Empire, for much of its history, can be seen as the Christian equivalent of the Muslim caliphate except that the Caliph combined political authority with the spiritual role of being the first amongst equals [1] , while the Emperor was subject to the Pope's authority [2] .

The Reich (empire) was an elective monarchy whose Emperor was crowned by the Pope until 1508. For most of its existence the Empire lacked the central authority of a modern state and was more akin to a loose religious confederation, divided into numerous territories ruled by hereditary nobles, prince-bishops, knightly orders, and free cities. These rulers (later only a select few of them known as Electors) would elect the Emperor from among their number, although there was a strong tendency for the office of Emperor to become hereditary. The House of Habsburg and the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine, for example, furnished an almost continuous line of Emperors from 1452.

The concept of the Reich not only included the government of a specific territory, but had strong Christian religious connotations (hence the holy prefix). The Emperors thought of themselves as continuing the function of the Roman Emperors in defending, governing and supporting the Church. This viewpoint led to much strife between the Empire and the papacy .

Nomenclature

The Holy Roman Empire was a conscious attempt to resurrect the Western Roman Empire, considered to have ended with the abdication of Romulus Augustulus in 476. Although Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Imperator Augustus on December 25, 800, and his son, Louis the Pious was also crowned as Emperor by the Pope, the Empire and the imperial office did not become formalized for some decades, due largely to the Frankish tendency to divide realms between heirs after a ruler's death. It is notable that Louis first crowned himself in 814, upon his father's death, but in 816, Pope Stephen V , who had succeeded Leo III, visited Rheims and again crowned Louis. By that act, the Emperor strengthened the papacy by recognizing the importance of the pope in imperial coronations.

Contemporary terminology for the Empire varied greatly over the centuries. The term Roman Empire was used in 1034 to denote the lands under Conrad II, and Holy Empire in 1157. The use of the term Roman Emperor to refer to Northern European rulers started earlier with Otto II (Emperor 973–983). Emperors from Charlemagne (c. 742 or 747 – 814) to Otto I the Great (Emperor 962–973) had simply used the phrase Imperator Augustus ("August Emperor"). The precise term Holy Roman Empire (German: Heiliges Römisches Reich dates from 1254; the final version Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (German Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation ) appears in 1512, after several variations in the late 15th century. [3]

Contemporaries did not quite know how to describe this entity either. In his famous 1667 description De statu imperii Germanici, published under the alias Severinus de Monzambano, Samuel Pufendorf wrote: "Nihil ergo aliud restat, quam ut dicamus Germaniam esse irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile …" ("We are therefore left with calling Germany a body that conforms to no rule and resembles a monster").

In his Essai sur l'histoire generale et sur les moeurs et l'espirit des nations (1756), the French essayist and philosopher Voltaire described the Holy Roman Empire as an "agglomeration" which was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."

In Faust I, in a scene written in 1775, the German author Goethe has one of the drinkers in Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig ask "Our Holy Roman Empire, lads, what still holds it together?" Goethe also has a longer, not very favourable essay about his personal experiences as a trainee at the Reichskammergericht in his autobiographical work Dichtung und Wahrheit.

Institutions

From the High Middle Ages onwards, the Reich was stamped by a coexistence of the Empire with the struggle of the dukes of the local territories to take power away from it. As opposed to the rulers of the West Frankish lands, which later became France , the Emperors never managed to gain much control over the lands that they formally owned. Instead, Emperors were forced to grant more and more powers to the individual dukes in their respective territories. This process began in the twelfth century and was more or less concluded with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia . Several attempts were made to reverse this degradation of the Reich's former glory, but failed.

Formally, the Reich comprised the King, to be crowned Emperor by the pope (until 1508), on one side, and the Reichsstände (imperial estates) on the other.

King of the Romans

Becoming Emperor required becoming King of the Romans ( Rex romanorum / römischer König ) first. Kings had been elected since time immemorial: in the ninth century by the leaders of the five most important tribes: the Salian Franks of Lorraine, the Riparian Franks of Franconia, and the Saxons, Bavarians, and Swabians, later by the main lay and clerical dukes of the kingdom, finally only by the so-called Kurfürsten (electing dukes, electors). This college was formally established by a 1356 decree known as the Golden Bull. Initially, there were seven electors: the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the Archbishops of Köln, Mainz, and Trier. During the Thirty Years' War , the Duke of Bavaria was given the right to vote as the eighth elector. In order to be elected king, a candidate had to first win over the electors, usually with bribes or promises of land.

Until 1508, the newly-elected king then travelled to Rome to be crowned Emperor by the Pope. In many cases, this took several years while the King was held up by other tasks: frequently he first had to resolve conflicts in rebellious northern Italy or was in quarrel with the Pope himself.

At no time could the Emperor simply issue decrees and govern autonomously over the Empire. His power was severely restricted by the various local leaders: after the late fifteenth century, the Reichstag established itself as the legislative body of the Empire, a complicated assembly that convened irregularly at the request of the Emperor at varying locations. Only after 1663 would the Reichstag become a permanent assembly.

Imperial estates

An entity was considered Reichsstand (imperial estate) if, according to feudal law, it had no authority above it except the Holy Roman Emperor himself. They included:

• Territories governed by a prince or duke, and in some cases kings. (Rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, with the exception of the King of Bohemia (an elector), were not allowed to become King within the Empire, but some had kingdoms outside the Empire, as was, for instance, the case in the Kingdom of Great Britain , where the ruler was also the Prince-elector of Hanover from 1714 until the dissolution of the Empire.)
• Feudal territories led by a clerical dignitary, who was then considered a prince of the church. In the common case of a Prince-Bishop, this temporal territory (called a prince-bishopric) frequently overlapped his—often larger—ecclesiastical diocese (bishopric), giving the bishop both worldly and clerical powers. Examples include the three prince-archbishoprics: Cologne, Trier, and Mainz.
• Imperial Free Cities

The number of territories was amazingly large, rising to several hundred at the time of the Peace of Westphalia . Many of these comprised no more than a few square miles, so the Empire is aptly described as a "patchwork carpet" (Flickenteppich) by many (see Kleinstaaterei). For a list of Reichsstands in 1792, see List of Reichstag participants (1792).

The Reichstag was the legislative body of the Holy Roman Empire. It was divided into three distinct classes:

• The Council of Electors, which included the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire.
• The Secular Bench: Princes (those with the title of Prince, Grand Duke, Duke, Count Palatine, Margrave, or Landgrave) held individual votes; some held more than one vote on the basis of ruling several territories. Also, the Council included Counts or Grafs, who were grouped into four Colleges: Wetterau, Swabia, Franconia, and Westphalia. Each College could cast one vote as a whole.
• The Ecclesiastical Bench: Bishops, certain Abbots, and the two Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order and the Order of St John had individual votes. Certain other Abbots were grouped into two Colleges: Swabia and the Rhine. Each College held one collective vote.
• The Council of Imperial Cities, which included representatives from Imperial Cities grouped into two Colleges: Swabia and the Rhine. Each College had one collective vote. The Council of Imperial Cities was not fully equal to the others; it could not vote on several matters such as the admission of new territories. The representation of the Free Cities at the Reichstag had become common since the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, their participation was formally acknowledged only as late as in 1648 with the peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years' War .

Imperial courts

The Reich also had two courts: the Reichshofrat (also known in English as the Aulic Council) at the court of the King/Emperor (that is, later in Vienna ), and the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court), established with the Imperial Reform of 1495.

Imperial circles

As part of the Reichsreform, six Imperial Circles were established in 1500 and extended to ten in 1512. These were regional groupings of most (though not all) of the various states of the Empire for the purposes of defense, imperial taxation, supervising of coining, peace keeping functions and public security. Each circle had its own Kreistag ("Circle Diet").

From the East Franks to the Investiture Controversy

The Holy Roman Empire is usually considered to have been founded at the latest in 962 by Otto I the Great, the first German holder of the title of Emperor.

Although some date the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire from the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans in 800, Charlemagne himself more typically used the title king of the Franks. This title also makes clearer that the Frankish Kingdom covered an area that included modern-day France and Germany and was thus the kernel of both countries.

Most historians therefore consider the establishment of the Empire to be a process that started with the split of the Frankish realm in the Treaty of Verdun in 843, continuing the Carolingian dynasty independently in all three sections. The eastern part fell to Louis the German, who was followed by several leaders until the death of Louis the Child, the last Carolingian in the eastern part.

The leaders of Alamannia, Bavaria, Frankia and Saxonia elected Conrad I of the Franks, not a Carolingian, as their leader in 911. His successor, Henry (Heinrich) I the Fowler (r. 919–936), a Saxon elected at the Reichstag of Fritzlar in 919, achieved the acceptance of a separate Eastern Empire by the West Frankish (still ruled by the Carolingians) in 921, calling himself rex Francorum orientalum (King of the East Franks). He founded the Ottonian dynasty.

Heinrich designated his son Otto to be his successor, who was elected King in Aachen in 936. A marriage alliance with the widowed queen of Italy gave Otto control over that nation as well. His later crowning as Emperor Otto I (later called "the Great") in 962 would mark an important step, since from then on the Empire – and not the West-Frankish kingdom that was the other remainder of the Frankish kingdoms – would have the blessing of the Pope. Otto had gained much of his power earlier, when, in 955, the Magyars were defeated in the Battle of Lechfeld.

In contemporary and later writings, the crowning would be referred to as translatio imperii, the transfer of the Empire from the Romans to a new Empire. The German Emperors thus thought of themselves as being in direct succession of those of the Roman Empire; this is why they initially called themselves Augustus. Still, they did not call themselves "Roman" Emperors at first, probably in order not to provoke conflict with the Roman Emperor who still existed in Constantinople . The term imperator Romanorum only became common under Conrad II later.

At this time, the eastern kingdom was not "German" but a "confederation" of the old Germanic tribes of the Bavarians, Alamanns, Franks and Saxons. The Empire as a political union probably only survived because of the strong personal influence of King Henry the Saxon and his son, Otto. Although formally elected by the leaders of the Germanic tribes, they were actually able to designate their successors.

This changed after Henry II died in 1024 without any children. Conrad II, first of the Salian Dynasty, was then elected king in 1024 only after some debate. How exactly the king was chosen thus seems to be a complicated conglomeration of personal influence, tribal quarrels, inheritance, and acclamation by those leaders that would eventually become the collegiate of Electors.

Already at this time the dualism between the "territories," then those of the old tribes rooted in the Frankish lands, and the King/Emperor, became apparent. Each king preferred to spend most time in his own homelands; the Saxons, for example, spent much time in palatinates around the Harz mountains, among them Goslar. This practice had only changed under Otto III (king 983, Emperor 996–1002), who began to utilize bishopries all over the Empire as temporary seats of government. Also, his successors, Henry II, Conrad II, and Henry III , apparently managed to appoint the dukes of the territories. It is thus no coincidence that at this time, the terminology changes and the first occurrences of a regnum Teutonicum are found.

The glory of the Empire almost collapsed in the Investiture Controversy, in which Pope Gregory VII declared a ban on King Henry IV (king 1056, Emperor 1084–1106). Although this was taken back after the 1077 Walk to Canossa, the ban had wide-reaching consequences. Meanwhile, the German dukes had elected a second king, Rudolf of Swabia, whom Henry IV could only defeat after a three-year war in 1080. The mythical roots of the Empire were permanently damaged; the German king was humiliated. Most importantly though, the church became an independent player in the political system of the Empire.

Under the Hohenstaufen

Conrad III came to the throne in 1138, being the first of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, which was about to restore the glory of the Empire even under the new conditions of the 1122 Concordat of Worms. It was Frederick I "Barbarossa" (king 1152, Emperor 1155–1190) who first called the Empire "holy," with which he intended to address mainly law and legislation.

Also, under Barbarossa, the idea of the "Romanness" of the Empire culminated again, which seemed to be an attempt to justify the Emperor's power independently of the (now strengthened) Pope. An imperial assembly at the fields of Roncaglia in 1158 explicitly reclaimed imperial rights at the advice of quattuor doctores of the emerging judicial facility of the University of Bologna, citing phrases such as princeps legibus solutus ("the emperor [princeps] is not bound by law") from the Digestae of the Corpus Juris Civilis. That the Roman laws were created for an entirely different system and didn't fit the structure of the Empire was obviously secondary; the point here was that the court of the Emperor made an attempt to establish a legal constitution.

Imperial rights had been referred to as regalia since the Investiture Controversy, but were enumerated for the first time at Roncaglia as well. This comprehensive list included public roads, tariffs, coining, collecting punitive fees, and the investiture, the seating and unseating of office holders. These rights were now explicitly rooted in Roman Law, a far-reaching constitutional act; north of the Alps, the system was also now connected to feudal law, a change most visible in the withdrawal of the feuds of Henry the Lion in 1180 which led to his public banning. Barbarossa thus managed for a time to more closely bind the stubborn Germanic dukes to the Empire as a whole.

Another important constitutional move at Roncaglia was the establishment of a new peace (Landfrieden) for all of the Empire, an attempt to (on the one hand) abolish private vendettas not only between the many local dukes, but on the other hand a means to tie the Emperor's subordinates to a legal system of jurisdiction and public prosecution of criminal acts – a predecessor concept of "rule of law," in modern terms, that was, at this time, not yet universally accepted.

In order to solve the problem that the emperor was (after the Investiture Controversy) no longer as able to use the church as a mechanism to maintain power, the Staufer increasingly lent land to ministerialia, formerly unfree service men, which Frederick hoped would be more reliable than local dukes. Initially used mainly for war services, this new class of people would form the basis for the later knights, another basis of imperial power.

Another new concept of the time was the systematic foundation of new cities, both by the emperor and the local dukes. These were partly due to the explosion in population, but also to concentrate economic power at strategic locations, while formerly cities only existed in the shape of either old Roman foundations or older bishoprics. Cities that were founded in the 12th century include Freiburg, possibly the economic model for many later cities, and Munich .

The later reign of the last Staufer Emperor, Frederick II, was in many ways different from that of earlier Emperors. Still a child, he first reigned in Sicily , while in Germany, Barbarossa's second son Philip of Swabia and Henry the Lion's son Otto IV competed with him for the title of "King of the Germans." After finally having been crowned emperor in 1220, he risked conflict with the pope when he claimed power over Rome; astonishingly to many, he managed to claim Jerusalem in a Crusade in 1228 while still under the pope's ban.

While Frederick brought the mythical idea of the Empire to a last highpoint, he was also the one to initiate the major steps that led to its disintegration. On the one hand, he concentrated on establishing an – for the times – extraordinarily modern state in Sicily, with public services, finances, and jurisdiction. On the other hand, Frederick was the emperor who granted major powers to the German dukes in two far-reaching privileges that would never be reclaimed by the central power. In the 1220 Confoederatio cum principibus ecclesiasticis, Frederick basically gave up a number of regalia in favor of the bishops, among them tariffs, coining, jurisdiction and fortification. The 1232 Statutum in favorem principum mostly extended these privileges to the other (non-clerical) territories (Frederick II was forced to give those privileges by a rebellion of his son, Henry). Although many of these privileges had existed earlier, they were now granted globally, and once and for all, to allow the German dukes to maintain order north of the Alps while Frederick wanted to concentrate on his homelands in Italy. The 1232 document marked the first time that the German dukes were called domini terrae, owners of their lands, a remarkable change in terminology as well.

The Teutonic Knights were invited to Poland by the duke of Masovia Konrad of Masovia to Christianize the Prussians in 1226.

During the long stays of the Hohenstaufen emperors (1138-1254) in Italy , the German princes became stronger and began a successful, mostly peaceful colonization of West Slavic lands, so that the empire's influence increased to eventually include Pomerania and Silesia .

Rise of the territories after the Staufen

After the death of Frederick II in 1250, none of the dynasties worthy of producing the king proved able to do so, and the leading dukes elected several competing kings. The time from 1246 (beginning with the election of Heinrich Raspe and William of Holland) to 1273, when Rudolph I of Habsburg was elected king, is commonly referred to as the Interregnum. During the Interregnum, much of what was left of imperial authority was lost, as the princes were given time to consolidate their holdings and become even more independent rulers.

In 1257, there occurred a double election which produced a situation that guaranteed a long interregnum. William of Holland had fallen the previous year, and Conrad of Swabia had died three years earlier. First, three electors (Palatinate, Cologne and Mainz) (being mostly of the Guelph persuasion) cast their votes for Richard of Cornwall who became the successor of William of Holland as king. After a delay, a fourth elector, Bohemia , joined this choice. However, a couple of months later, Bohemia and the three other electors Trier, Brandenburg and Saxony voted for Alfonso X of Castile, this being based on Ghibelline party. The realm now had two kings. Was the King of Bohemia entitled to change his vote, or was the election complete when four electors had chosen a king? Were the four electors together entitled to depose Richard a couple of months later, if his election had been valid?

The difficulties in electing the king eventually led to the emergence of a fixed college of electors, the Kurfürsten, whose composition and procedures were set forth in the Golden Bull of 1356. This development probably best symbolizes the emerging duality between Kaiser und Reich , emperor and realm, which were no longer considered identical. This is also revealed in the way the post-Staufen kings attempted to sustain their power. Earlier, the Empire's strength (and finances) greatly relied on the Empire's own lands, the so-called Reichsgut, which always belonged to the respective king (and included many Imperial Cities). After the thirteenth century, its relevance faded (even though some parts of it did remain until the Empire's end in 1806). Instead, the Reichsgut was increasingly pawned to local dukes, sometimes to raise money for the Empire but, more frequently, to reward faithful duty or as an attempt to civilize stubborn dukes. The direct governance of the Reichsgut no longer matched the needs of either the king or the dukes.

Instead, the kings, beginning with Rudolph I of Habsburg, increasingly relied on the lands of their respective dynasties to support their power. In contrast with the Reichsgut, which was mostly scattered and difficult to administer, these territories were comparably compact and thus easier to control. In 1282, Rudolph I thus lent Austria and Styria to his own sons.

With Henry VII, the House of Luxembourg entered the stage. In 1312, he was crowned as the first Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick II. After him all kings and emperors relied on the lands of their own family (Hausmacht) : Louis IV of Wittelsbach (king 1314, emperor 1328–1347) relied on his lands in Bavaria; Charles IV of Luxembourg, the grandson of Henry VII, drew strength from his own lands in Bohemia. Interestingly, it was thus increasingly in the king's own interest to strengthen the power of the territories, since the king profited from such a benefit in his own lands as well.

The thirteenth century also saw a general structural change in how land was administered. Instead of personal duties, money increasingly became the common means to represent economic value in agriculture. Peasants were increasingly required to pay tribute for their lands. The concept of "property" more and more replaced more ancient forms of jurisdiction, although they were still very much tied together. In the territories (not at the level of the Empire), power became increasingly bundled: Whoever owned the land had jurisdiction, from which other powers derived. It is important to note, however, that jurisdiction at this time did not include legislation, which virtually did not exist until well into the fifteenth century. Court practice heavily relied on traditional customs or rules described as customary.

It is during this time that the territories began to transform themselves into predecessors of modern states. The process varied greatly among the various lands and was most advanced in those territories that were most identical to the lands of the old Germanic tribes, e.g., Bavaria. It was slower in those scattered territories that were founded through imperial privileges.

Imperial reform

The "constitution" of the Empire was still largely unsettled at the beginning of the 15th century. Although some procedures and institutions had been fixed, for example by the Golden Bull of 1356, the rules of how the king, the electors, and the other dukes should cooperate in the Empire much depended on the personality of the respective king. It therefore proved somewhat fatal that Sigismund of Luxemburg (king 1410, emperor 1433–1437) and Frederick III of Habsburg (king 1440, emperor 1452–1493) neglected the old core lands of the empire and mostly resided in their own lands. Without the presence of the king, the old institution of the Hoftag, the assembly of the realm's leading men, deteriorated. The Reichstag as a legislative organ of the Empire did not exist yet. Even worse, dukes often went into feuds against each other that, more often than not, escalated into local wars.

At the same time, the church was in crisis too. The conflict between several competing popes was only resolved at the Council of Constance (1414–1418); after 1419, much energy was spent on fighting the heresy of the Hussites . The medieval idea of a unified Corpus christianum, of which the papacy and the Empire were the leading institutions, began to decline.

With these drastic changes, much discussion emerged in the 15th century about the Empire itself. Rules from the past no longer adequately described the structure of the time, and a reinforcement of earlier Landfrieden was urgently called for. During this time, the concept of "reform" emerged, in the original sense of the Latin verb re-formare, to regain an earlier shape that had been lost.

When Frederick III needed the dukes to finance war against Hungary in 1486 and at the same time had his son, later Maximilian I elected king, he was presented with the dukes' united demand to participate in an Imperial Court. For the first time, the assembly of the electors and other dukes was now called Reichstag (to be joined by the Imperial Free Cities later). While Frederick refused, his more conciliatory son finally convened the Reichstag at Worms in 1495, after his father's death in 1493. Here, the king and the dukes agreed on four bills, commonly referred to as the Reichsreform (Imperial Reform) : a set of legal acts to give the disintegrating Empire back some structure. Among others, this act produced the Imperial Circle Estates and the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court); structures that would — to a degree — persist until the end of the Empire in 1806.

However, it took a few more decades until the new regulation was universally accepted and the new court began to actually function; only in 1512 would the Imperial Circles be finalized. The King also made sure that his own court, the Reichshofrat, continued to function in parallel to the Reichskammergericht. It is interesting to note that in this year, the Empire also received its new title, the Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation ("Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation").

Crisis after Reformation

In 1517, Martin Luther initiated what would later be known as the Reformation . At this time, many local dukes saw a chance to oppose the hegemony of Emperor Charles V. The empire became then fatally divided along religious lines, with the North, the East, and many of the major cities—Strassburg, Frankfurt and Nuremberg—became Protestant while the southern and western regions largely remained Catholic . Religious conflicts were waged in various parts of Europe for a century, though in German regions there was relative quiet from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 until the Defenestration of Prague in 1618. When Bohemians rebelled against the emperor, the immediate result was the series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which devastated the Empire. Foreign powers, including France and Sweden intervened in the conflict and strengthened those fighting Imperial power, but they also seized considerable chunks of territory for themselves. The long conflict bled the Empire to such a degree that it would never recover its former strength.

The long decline

The actual end of the empire came in several steps. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which gave the territories almost complete sovereignty , even allowing them to form independent alliances with other states, the Empire was only a mere conglomeration of largely independent states. By the rise of Louis XIV of France , the Holy Roman Empire as such had lost all power and clout in major European politics. The Habsburg emperors relied more on their role as Austrian archdukes than as emperors when challenged by Prussia , portions of which were part of the Empire. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs were embroiled in various European conflicts. From 1792 onwards, revolutionary France was at war with various parts of the Empire intermittently. The Empire was formally dissolved on August 6, 1806 when the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804, Emperor Francis I of Austria ) abdicated, following a military defeat by the French Army under Napoleon Bonaparte . Napoleon reorganized much of the empire into the Confederation of the Rhine. This ended the so-called First Reich. Francis II's family continued to be called Austrian emperors until 1918. In fact, the Habsburg Emperors of Austria, however nostalgically and sentimentally, considered themselves, as the lawful heirs of the Holy Roman monarchs, to be themselves the final continuation of the Holy Roman Imperial line, their dynasty dying out with the ousting of Karl I in 1918 (reigned 1916-1918). Germany itself would not become one unified state until 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War . In addition, at the time of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the First World War, it was argued that Liechtenstein as a fief of the Holy Roman Empire (supposedly still incarnated in Liechtensteiner eyes at an abstract level in the person of the then-destitute Austro-Hungarian Emperor, despite its formal dissolution in 1806) was no longer bound to Austria, then emerging as an independent monarchy which did not consider itself as the legal successor to the Empire. Liechtenstein is thus the last independent state in Europe which can claim an element of continuity from the Holy Roman Empire.

It has been said that modern history of Germany was primarily predetermined by three factors: the Reich, the Reformation , and the later dualism between Austria and Prussia. Many attempts have been made to explain why the Reich never managed to gain a strong centralized power over the territories, as opposed to neighboring France. Some reasons include:

• The Reich had been a very federal body from the beginning: again, as opposed to France, which had mostly been part of the Roman Empire, in the eastern parts of the Frankish kingdom, the Germanic tribes later comprising the German nation (Saxons, Thuringians, Franks, Bavarians, Alamanni or Swabians) were much more independent and reluctant to cede power to a central authority. All attempts to make the kingdom hereditary failed; instead, the king was always elected. Later, every candidate for the king had to make promises to his electorate, the so-called Wahlkapitulationen (election capitulations), thus granting the territories more and more power over the centuries.
• Due to its religious connotations, the Reich as an institution was severely damaged by the contest between the Pope and the German Kings over their respective coronations as Emperor. It was never entirely clear under which conditions the pope would crown the emperor and especially whether the worldly power of the emperor was dependent on the clerical power of the pope. Much debate occurred over this, especially during the eleventh century, eventually leading to the Investiture Controversy and the Concordat of Worms in 1122.
• Whether the feudal system of the Reich, where the King formally was the top of the so-called "feudal pyramid," was a cause of or a symptom of the Empire's weakness is unclear. In any case, military obedience, which – according to Germanic tradition – was closely tied to the giving of land to tributaries, was always a problem: when the Reich had to go to war, decisions were slow and brittle.
• Until the sixteenth century, the economic interests of the south and west diverged from those of the north where the Hanseatic League operated. The Hanseatic League was far more closely allied to Scandinavia and the Baltic than the rest of Germany.
• German historiography nowadays often views the Holy Roman Empire as a well balanced system of organizing a multitude of (effectively independent) states under a complex system of legal regulations. Smaller estates like the Lordships or the Imperial Free cities survived for centuries as independent entities, although they had no effective military strength. The supreme courts, the Reichshofrat and the Reichskammergericht helped to settle conflicts, or at least keep them as wars of words rather than shooting wars.
• The multitude of different territories with different religious denominations and different forms of government led to a great variety of cultural diversification, which can be felt even in present day Germany with regional cultures, patterns of behavior and dialects changing sometimes within the range of kilometres.

Successive German Empires

After the unification of Germany as a nation state in 1871, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was also known as the Old Empire (First Reich) while the new empire was known as the New Empire, second Empire, or Second Reich. Adolf Hitler called his regime the Third Reich .

• ↑ thus, the spiritual and the temporal were equal and symbolically the Caliph represented both
• ↑ The Pope claimed to be temporal and spiritual leader, delegating temporal leadership to the Emperor, spiritual to the Bishops as Lords-spiritual
• ↑ The term for the Empire, in other languages that historically were spoken within its confines are: Czech: Svatá říše římská, later Svatá říše římská národa německého ; Dutch: Heilige Roomse Rijk, later Heilige Roomse Rijk der Duitse Naties/Volkeren ; French: Saint Empire Romain Germanique ; Italian: Sacro Romano Impero ; Slovene: Sveto rimsko cesarstvo, later Sveto rimsko cesarstvo nemške narodnosti.

References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Angermeier, Heninz. Das Alte Reich in der deutschen Geschichte. Studien über Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren, München: Campus 1991 ISBN 9783593371009
• Bryce, James. The Holy Roman Empire New York, Schocken Books, 1967 ISBN 0333036093
• Criswell, David. The Rise of the Holy Roman Empire. Charleston, SC: Fortress/Adonai Press, 2003 ISBN 9781591097303
• Hartmann, Peter Claus. Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches 1648 bis 1806. Wien: Böhlau, 2001 ISBN 9783205993087
• Heer, Friedrich. The Holy Roman Empire. New Haven, CT: Phoenix Press, 2002 ISBN 978-1842126004
• Schmidt, Georg. Geschichte des Alten Reiches. München: C.H. Beck, 1999 ISBN 9783406453359
• von Aretin, Karl Otmar Freiherr. Das Alte Reich 1648-1806. 4 vols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993-2000. ISBN 9783608941746
• Zophy, Jonathan W. (ed.), The Holy Roman Empire: A Dictionary Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. ISBN 9780313214578

External links

All links retrieved July 18, 2024.

• The Holy Roman Empire in 1648
• The Holy Roman Empire in 1789 (Interactive map)

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The holy roman empire and the habsburgs, 1400–1600.

Margaret of Austria

Jean Hey (called Master of Moulins)

Saint Maurice

Lucas Cranach the Elder and Workshop

Mars and Venus United by Love

Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari)

Lukas Spielhausen

Lucas Cranach the Elder

Friedrich III (1463–1525), the Wise, Elector of Saxony

Armor of Emperor Ferdinand I (1503–1564)

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Johann I (1468–1532), the Constant, Elector of Saxony

Johann (1498–1537), Duke of Saxony

Double-Barreled Wheellock Pistol Made for Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519–56)

Daniel, Archbishop of Mainz

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Maximillian II, Holy Roman Emperor (1527–1576)

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Diana and Actaeon

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Portrait of Rudolph II

Aegidius Sadeler II

Jennifer Meagher Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2002

Background on the Empire On Christmas day in the year 800—more than three centuries after the abdication of the last Roman emperor—Charlemagne, the Carolingian king of the Franks, was crowned Emperor of the West by Pope Leo III. This act was seen as a revival, or transference, of the Roman empire ( translatio imperii ), prophesied to be the last of four earthly kingdoms preceding the Apocalypse. The imperial title, which asserted symbolic authority over all Christendom but had little concrete political significance, was passed to Charlemagne’s Carolingian successors. It was, however, the German emperor Otto I (r. 962–73) who, by military conquest and astute political policy, placed the territorial empire of Charlemagne under German rule and established in Central Europe the feudal state that would be called, by the thirteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire. From the time of Otto’s coronation until the official dissolution of the empire in 1806, the imperial title was held almost exclusively by German monarchs and, for nearly four centuries, by members of a single family.

Although most German kings attained imperial coronation, there were often several candidates for the throne. A body of princes, called electors, selected by majority vote both the German king and emperor; the crown, however, was only officially conferred by the pope, who occasionally claimed ultimate authority in the election. Over time, tensions mounted between the emperors and electors who, as one of the three representative groups in the Imperial Diet (or parliamentary body), kept the power of the monarch in check. The culmination of these tensions came with the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century: while the emperors adhered to Roman Catholicism, the electors generally supported the Reformation. It was, in fact, an elector—Frederick III (the Wise) of Saxony—who gave refuge to Martin Luther upon his excommunication.

The Habsburg Emperors Rudolf I (died 1291), the King of the Germans, came from a noble family of Swiss origin and rose to power in 1273. His defeat of King Otakar II of Bohemia (r. 1253–78) five years later gained significant territorial holdings for the Habsburgs in Austria, the cornerstone of their empire. By the sixteenth century, the imperial title was long regarded as hereditary, allowing the Habsburg dominion to expand dramatically over continental Europe not only through military conquest but also through carefully chosen marriage alliances.

Meagher, Jennifer. “The Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs, 1400–1600.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/habs/hd_habs.htm (October 2002)

Further Reading

Zophy, Jonathan W., comp. An Annotated Bibliography of the Holy Roman Empire . New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Additional Essays by Jennifer Meagher

• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Genre Painting in Northern Europe .” (April 2008)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ The Pre-Raphaelites .” (October 2004)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Italian Painting of the Later Middle Ages .” (September 2010)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Gerard David (born about 1455, died 1523) .” (June 2009)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Petrus Christus (active by 1444, died 1475/76) .” (December 2008)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Still-Life Painting in Southern Europe, 1600–1800 .” (June 2008)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art .” (October 2004)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Botanical Imagery in European Painting .” (August 2007)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Commedia dell’arte .” (July 2007)
• Meagher, Jennifer. “ Food and Drink in European Painting, 1400–1800 .” (May 2009)

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The Ideology of the Holy Roman Empire

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"The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman , nor an empire ," wrote Voltaire , and this interpretation still dominates the popular imagination, so the Holy Roman Empire is treated as a bad joke, a pale parody of the glory of Rome . But was Voltaire right? Here we will explore the ideology that explains, and perhaps justifies, the name.

Renewal of the Roman Empire

The Franks were one of the many peoples who had migrated into Europe in the waning centuries of the Roman Empire. In the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire , people carved out kingdoms, fought brutal wars, and rose to greatness—and fell from it—with bewildering speed. In the middle of the 8th century, Pepin the Short (r. 751-768), joined in the scrap when he usurped the throne of the Franks

Importantly, Pepin sought and got the blessing of the pope in order to get legitimacy for the new Carolingian Dynasty . As the bishop of Rome and the heart of the missionary movement, the pope had enormous prestige and influence over the other bishops to the north and west. He was the most prominent figure of the medieval church in western Europe, and with prominence came danger, so partnership with a great lord was very beneficial. However, the dynasty that Pepin founded is known by the name of his son, Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus , or as he is commonly known Charlemagne (l. 742-814).

Charlemagne extended what was already the greatest kingdom in western Europe until it encompassed (roughly) modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, western Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, and northern Italy . On top of that, he was keen to spread Christian and classical teaching, in Latin, throughout this vast realm. After Charlemagne had defeated the pope’s enemies, the Lombards of Italy, the pope took their alliance one stage further. On Christmas Day 800 CE, Pope Leo III crowned him Emperor of the Romans. The story goes that Charlemagne was shocked and humbled by such an honour, but very likely this was a shrewd political move by both him and Leo to cement the prestige of the Church and the Crown.

The lands of the Franks fractured on the death of Charlemagne’s son. The Treaty of Verdun, in 843, divided the Carolingian Empire among Charlemagne's grandsons. In theory, the northern Italian section continued to be the site of the imperial throne, but the eastern section—East Francia, covering much of what we now call Germany—was the most powerful. The Pope had long had problems with their northerly neighbours, and just as Leo had called in Charlemagne to conquer the Lombards in exchange for the imperial title, Otto the Great, ruler of East Francia, came and conquered northern Italy in 961. A year later, in 962, he was Holy Roman Emperor and a revitalised Holy Roman Empire came into being with its heartland in Germany.

Here the deal between pope and emperor became more than a bit of back-scratching. The partnership of a glorious lord and the leader of the church in the West underpinned a new civilisation , what today we call medieval Europe. Pope and emperor became known as the Two Swords, the symbolic leaders of Northern and Western Europe, or Latin Christendom. The pope would represent the shared religious life while the emperor would represent the political world they shared.

Emperor was not just some fancy title. It meant being the heir to mighty Rome, whose history sat heavily on the shoulders of Europe. To understand this, we need to look at the Old Testament Book of Daniel. Daniel prophesied that there would be four world empires before the Apocalypse. Translatio imperii was the name for how one world empire’s mantle was taken up by the next. In Late Antiquity, Christian interpretation of this prophecy was that each empire had shifted a little west, culminating in the Roman Empire. Given the world had not yet ended, as far as anyone could tell, this concept of translatio imperii could inspire and legitimise the renovation of a Christian Roman Empire, here in the post-imperial kingdoms of the far West. The revived Roman Empire was simply a continuation of the final earthly empire, and the people of Europe would see in the Apocalypse under its guidance.

The Byzantine Empire still claimed to be the Roman Empire, but the Latin West had an increasing sense of separation from the Greek East. Although the eastern and western churches were not yet formally divided in Charlemagne’s time, their cultures and associations had grown far apart. The western church, importantly, was dominated by the pope in Rome, while according to the East, he was only one bishop among many. The idea of a separate, western, Latin Christian-Roman civilisation made sense to the people who lived there. They tended to describe their state as the Renewal of the Roman Empire ( Renovatio imperii Romanorum ) rather than the Holy Roman Empire - that term took over in the 1100s - but the concept is the same.

Understood in this light, the light in which people at the time would have seen it, the combination of terms makes sense:

• Holy, the true Christians, the right-believers who uphold God ’s truth in a world of heretics and heathens;
• Roman, the heirs of the Roman Empire and centred on the spiritual primacy of the city of Rome, whose bishop is representative of our shared religious life;
• Empire, led by an Emperor, the one ruler recognised by all the civilisation as the highest in rank and first in precedence, whose special authority represents common civilisation.

Interestingly the Eastern Roman Empire would later follow the same idea on different tracks. The Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic Churches are considered to have officially split when the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicated one another in 1054. The peoples who would become the East Slav had long been heavily influenced by the Greek Orthodox culture emanating from the Byzantines. After 1453: the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire , Moscow would claim the translatio imperii and call itself the ‘Third Rome’ with a caesar ( Tsar ) at the head.

Conflict between Pope & Emperor

This image of the Two Swords, pope and emperor as the ruler-representatives of Latin Christendom, was a rather dubious interpretation of a passage in Luke: "The disciples said, 'See, Lord, here are two swords.' 'That is enough,' he replied." (22:37-38). If it was built on shaky biblical foundations, the political ones soon cracked, too, and the Two Swords started to clash against each other.

First, reform movements in the 1100s energised the Church. They saw the Church as too lax, riddled with sin, and wanted to clamp down on priests getting married and monks living in luxury. The great Cluniac reforms sought to purify the daily life of medieval monks , and Pope Gregory VII wanted to impose good order and morality on all his priests, not just monks living in a medieval monastery . Now the church could not accept being a mere legitimising deputy to whoever happened to be in power, and because of its new, strict, hierarchical organisation, it had the power to fight for its influence.

Second, the Normans had entered Italy at the beginning of the 1000s. These warriors of fierce reputation had the power to fight for the pope and, as newcomers, craved the authority the church could give them. They did not always get along, but they always had the option of allying with the pope, who could now have a lordly protector other than the emperor.

The most famous example of a conflict featuring the pope against the emperor is the so-called Investiture Controversy . In 1076, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) excommunicated Henry IV , Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1084-1105) after they disputed who could choose the bishop of Milan. It might seem like a very disproportionate action to a petty dispute, but the right to invest the bishops within the empire with the symbols of their office was deeply important to their authority. Unfortunately for Henry, his excommunication was the green light for a number of disaffected nobles to rise against him. He diffused the situation marvellously when he walked to Canossa, where Gregory was staying, and knelt barefoot in the snow until Gregory agreed to absolve him.

However, the question of investiture rumbled on, many more battles were fought, many more people died. The Concordat of Worms was a patch-up compromise in 1122, but the underlying tension between these two pre-eminent figures remained. Neither could quite fully assert their authority over the other, and conflict flared up again and again. Pope John XXII and Emperor Louis IV’s struggle in the 14th century is memorably depicted in Umberto Eco’s bestselling novel The Name of the Rose .

So the Two Swords stayed at each other's throats. It never worked seamlessly or, frankly, even particularly well. However, conflict should not be interpreted as failure . There was so much controversy precisely because the issue mattered to those involved. The Pope and the Emperor were like two boxers fighting in an arena they had built for a trophy they had invented. They were bickering over their place and relative power within the framework they had set up. It was very hard—and not at all in their interests—to think outside of that framework. The fact that they fought so hard is indicative of how important it was to them to claim the symbolic leadership of the new civilisation they had founded.

Sovereignty: Both Swords Broken

Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire began to lose its pre-eminence among the powers of Europe. The Two Swords concept gradually faded in relevance. For sure, there were mighty emperors like Frederick I Barbarossa (r. 1155-1190) and his grandson Frederick II (r. 1220-1250), who conquered Sicily and even briefly liberated Jerusalem in the Sixth Crusade . Occasionally they received direct homage from other kings, as when Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1191-1197) captured Richard I of England , (aka Richard the Lionheart, r. 1189-1199) in 1193. Of course, Richard did this under duress, but the fact it was possible is important. King Richard could not have legally given submission to any other monarch in Europe because no other monarch in Europe had a title that outranked. However, the claim to universal dominion was limited to occasions like this.

Beyond the lands they held with their kingly titles, like Germany and northern Italy, the emperors had little authority. They held court and raised their armies more in their capacities as Kings of Germany rather than Holy Roman Emperors. Philosophers began to argue for the sovereignty of monarchs and cities . That means that each king, queen, and city-state was free to rule as they wished within their realm over temporal matters, without reference to the emperor. In spiritual matters, they still had to respect the church, of course. Some scholars argued that this was a right as a member of the universal empire, some that the Roman Empire had never been restored at all, and others that it sprang from the special laws and customs of each people. Whatever the details, the effect was the same: the rejection of imperial authority by Europe outside the empire.

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The emperor’s vassals in Germany continued to assert their independence. In 1078, during the Investiture Controversy, the strongest of these vassals had responded to Gregory’s excommunication of Henry IV by electing a new king. Their ‘anti-king’ died within two years, and Henry had regained the initiative by then, but the legacy of that action was that the most prominent German princes reserved the right to decide who the next king of Germany would be. Candidates now had to placate and bribe these electors and so they stayed very commanding and autonomous. They even broke the link between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor when they declared, in 1356, that the imperial title would be assumed automatically by whoever they elected as King of Germany. This made successions smoother, and the electors more influential, but damaged the idea that the empire might represent the Latin Christian world.

Europe’s shared civilisation was changing. Voltaire called it "a sort of great Republic divided into several states" of which the empire was only one. It had, at best, ceremonial precedence, a first among equals kind of title. Even when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1519-1556) united the Holy Roman Empire with Spain and its vast overseas colonies and it looked as if a universal empire was once again possible, the states of Europe jealously guarded their sovereignty. Henry VIII of England ’s (r. 1509-1547) 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, part of his break with the Catholic Church, begins by stating that "this Realm of England is an Empire". The point of this flourish was to assert that England would respect no law but its own. It was explicitly rejecting the idea that anyone was above the king. Of course, this was directed at the pope. The medieval concept of sovereignty had rejected the emperor, now Henry VIII was taking the logical next step and rejecting the pope, too. In the duel of the Two Swords, both lost.

However, the Holy Roman Empire was not just another European state. Outsiders may not have paid its imperial trappings much mind by the Early Modern Period (from about 1500 onwards), but its peculiar, imperial history gave it special features and special meaning to the people who lived in its boundaries.

Charlemagne changed Europe forever when he was crowned in Rome on Christmas Day 800, so too did a German monk named Martin Luther when he fixed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral on Halloween 1517. Luther set in motion a chain of events that we now called the Protestant Reformation . This was the context to England’s break with Rome, and that was only one of many revolutionary events sparked by reformers like Luther.

Religion tore apart the empire for a hundred years . The very word Protestant comes from those Lutheran princes who protested a Catholic decision in the Reichstag (the meeting of all the rulers in the empire) of 1529. Those Protestants formed the Schmalkaldic League and negotiated the Peace of Augsburg (1555) in which, despite their defeat in war, they got official privileges to practice their religion. As the Spanish Netherlands and France descended into civil war, Catholic and Lutheran princes alike rallied around the empire as a neutral framework in which they could practice their religions. The settlement broke down as certain influential princes converted to Calvinism, another form of Protestantism not accepted by the Peace of Augsburg, and the different denominations bickered over whose candidates would control the lucrative prince-archbishoprics. These tensions exploded while the emperor was distracted fighting the Ottomans. Many historians consider the subsequent Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) as the real breakup of the Holy Roman Empire, a time when the whole edifice descended into horrifying butchery and, afterwards, was nothing but a hollow shell. Indeed, Voltaire wrote his famous quotation in the period after the Thirty Years’ War.

For the people of the Holy Roman Empire, though, all of these were civil wars into which external powers (controversially) intervened. People were fighting inside their empire over disagreements about what it should become. Unlike Anglican England, Lutheran Sweden, or Catholic France, the empire accepted several Christianities and could do this because it was not the property of a single dynasty or dominated by a single group. It remained a non-ethnic, non-religious, overarching identity that could embrace many particular and local identities. Where people stood inside that framework was perpetually the source of conflict, on and off the battlefield, but the framework itself survived. The final death of the empire in the first years of the 19th century was the omen of new, very different ideas about empires.

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• Nature of the empire

Religious origins

Political origins.

• Coronation of Charlemagne as emperor
• The Carolingian Empire
• The Ottonian Empire
• The Investiture Controversy
• The Hohenstaufen emperors
• The effect of the Reformation
• The end of the empire
• Holy Roman emperors

• How was the Holy Roman Empire formed?
• Why did the Holy Roman Empire fall?
• What did Charles V try to accomplish during his reign as Holy Roman Emperor?
• What were the greatest threats to Charles V’s empire?
• Why did Charles V abdicate his rule?

Origins of the empire and sources of imperial ideas

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There was no inherent reason why, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 and the establishment there of Germanic kingdoms, there should ever again have been an empire , still less a Roman empire, in western Europe . The reason this took place is to be sought (1) in certain local events in Rome in the years and months immediately preceding Charlemagne’s coronation in 800, and (2) in certain long-standing tendencies that made this particular solution of a difficult situation thinkable. These long-standing tendencies are to be regarded as preconditions rather than causes of the coronation; they do not account for it, but without them it is difficult to imagine how it could have taken place.

The first is the persistence, despite the fact that it was no longer a political reality west of Italy , of the idea of the universal and eternal Roman Empire. The importance of this tradition may easily be exaggerated. After the establishment of the Germanic kingdoms, kings such as Clovis in Gaul and Theodoric the Great in Italy were glad to accept Roman titles from the Byzantine emperor, who sought to maintain the formal unity of the Roman Empire by treating them as his vicars and lieutenants; but this was a short-lived expedient. By the 8th century any sense of belonging to the empire, by then confined to eastern Europe, had disappeared in the West.

Far more effective in the minds of the barbarian peoples of the West was the idea of the Imperium Christianum, or “Christian Empire,” which took shape after the conversion of Constantine the Great and the reconciliation between Christianity and the Roman Empire. Not only did the Christian church become a state church, including in its liturgy prayers for the empire and the emperor, but it also brought the Roman Empire into the framework of Christian eschatology (doctrine of last things), as the last of the world monarchies whose end would mark the inception of the kingdom of God. Through Christian iconography and through the liturgy the church’s view of the empire as a vehicle of God’s will, for the Christianization of the world, became prevalent. It was expressed with peculiar force in the letters of Charlemagne’s adviser Alcuin .

Apart from the persistence of the idea of a Christian Roman Empire, a third precondition for the establishment of an empire in the West was the existence of a candidate of sufficient power and standing in the person of the Frankish king. The Frankish kingdom expanded until it comprised most of western Europe, and it acquired the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy in 774. The importance of the ties forged by Charlemagne’s immediate predecessors with the papacy are obvious. Though it is scarcely true that Charlemagne’s accession to the empire was simply a consequence of this expansion, his outstanding position was evidently a precondition of his elevation to the imperial throne.

When one turns from the preconditions to the causes of the events of 800 and from the realm of ideas to that of political facts, one enters another world. It is the world of the Byzantine (or Eastern) Empire, of which the pope was a subject, confirmed in his bishopric like other bishops by the Byzantine emperor. By the 8th century, however, the imperial position in Italy, centred in the Exarchate of Ravenna, was crumbling. Confronted by the power of Islam , the empire concentrated on the problems of the East and was unable to defend its Italian lands from the Lombards , who had entered Italy in 568. Furthermore, the Byzantine emperors of the Isaurian dynasty , of whom the first was Leo III (717–741), were estranged from the papacy by the Iconoclastic Controversy . Hitherto fear of the Lombards had kept the popes faithful to the Byzantine emperor and to the exarch in Ravenna, but the situation changed. When the Lombards renewed their advance southward, taking Ravenna in 751 and driving out the exarch, the pope appealed in vain to the Byzantine emperor . He then, in an epoch-making turn to the West, sought assistance from the Frankish king Pippin III the Short, who invaded Italy and reduced the Lombard king Aistulf to submission (754). Returning in 756, Pippin bestowed on the papacy the territories belonging to the exarchate. Thus was born both the temporal power of the papacy and the close alliance between the papacy and the Frankish monarchy .

Particularly significant of the anomalous position that had arisen in Italy was the action of the pope in conferring on the Frankish king the title of patrician, which could legally be conferred only by the emperor; in the form the pope gave it ( patricius Romanorum ), the title was meant to authorize its possessor to defend and support the Holy See against its foes. Even so, the papacy was reluctant to break its constitutional links with the imperial system, and this was particularly so under Pope Adrian I (772–795), after Charlemagne had in 774 defeated the last independent Lombard king, Desiderius, and taken his kingdom. As king of Lombardy the defender might become as dangerous to the pope as those against whom he had provided defense.

The events briefly related show, first, the growing estrangement between East and West; second, the difficult position of the pope between the Byzantine emperor and the Frankish king; third, the tenuousness of the imperial hold over Rome and central Italy. After the expulsion of the exarch in 751, the pope himself, in de facto possession, probably hoped to become the emperor’s successor in the West. Whether the document itself belongs to the 750s or not, this was the sense of the forged Donation of Constantine , in which the emperor Constantine I is represented as having conferred on Pope Sylvester I the imperial palace of the Lateran, the imperial insignia, and “all the provinces, places and cities of Italy and the western regions.” Such ambitions, however, proved illusory when Charlemagne became king of the Lombards. When it was even rumoured that Charles intended to depose Adrian and set up a Frankish pope in his place, it would have been folly for the pope to think of formal severance from the existing empire. Nevertheless, the empire’s shadowy titles were unlikely to be respected long in Italy unless the Byzantine emperor took action. From 781 papal documents were no longer being dated by the emperor’s regnal year, and the pope was minting his own coins.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Holy Roman Empire 1300–1650

Introduction, general overviews.

• Primary Sources
• Interpreting Imperial Political Culture
• Political Identity and the “German Nation”
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Holy Roman Empire 1300–1650 by Duncan Hardy LAST REVIEWED: 22 September 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 22 September 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0472

Between the High Middle Ages and 1806, much of Central Europe was encompassed by an entity called the Holy Roman Empire ( Heiliges Römisches Reich in the German spoken by most of its inhabitants). The polity’s name derived from the claims of its rulers—elected as “kings of the Romans” and sometimes subsequently crowned “Roman emperors”—to be successors of Charlemagne and ultimately of antique Rome, and to be the defenders of the Catholic Church and Christendom. Debates continue about when exactly the “Holy Roman Empire” began. Both the 9th-century Carolingian and 10th-century Ottonian realms are contenders, although the Latin term sacrum Romanum imperium did not gain widespread currency until the 13th century. In the period c . 1300–1650, the focus of this bibliography, the Empire exhibited important differences from most other realms in Europe, notably in its elective system of monarchical succession, its residual claim to universal authority (to be co-exercised, in theory, with the papacy), and its exceptional fragmentation among increasingly autonomous principalities, bishoprics, lordships, and cities (often called “territories”). It also notionally housed emerging polities in their own right, such as the Swiss Confederation and the kingdom of Bohemia; their relationship with the premodern Reich remains a contentious historiographical issue. At the same time, it shared some basic characteristics with neighboring kingdoms, being a monarchy that governed in concert with an aristocratic community of estates at emerging representative institutions (the diets, or Reichstage , as they were known by around 1500), and a polity that came increasingly to be identified with a national community (the deutsche Nation ). Recent decades have therefore seen lively debates about how the Empire ought to be defined and categorized, and how its “constitution” ( Reichsverfassung )—or, in another idiom, its political culture—operated. While several ambitious long-term histories of the Holy Roman Empire have attempted to synthesize the unwieldy evidence, it is important to keep in mind the challenges of generalizing about such a large entity over many centuries. As well as exhibiting considerable diversity across space, the Empire changed substantially over time in several respects. A phase of dynastic competition in high politics before 1437 gave way to a near-monopoly of control over the imperial office by the Habsburgs thereafter. A “monistic” imperial government, theoretically coordinated top-down by monarchs, developed into a “dualistic” conception of power in which the imperial estates shared in governance via collective institutions. In some regions, a landscape of utterly fragmented and intertwined jurisdictions held by myriad competing actors was gradually replaced by more clearly defined and centralized territories arranged hierarchically under princely families. Finally, the division of the estates between Catholics and various Protestant confessions in the course of the 16th and early 17th centuries contributed both to calamitous conflict (the Thirty Years’ War) and to the reshaping of the imperial constitution to manage the new confessional configuration (the 1555 “Religious and Profane Peace” of Augsburg, the 1648 Treaty of Osnabrück). The long and rich tradition of regional history ( Landesgeschichte ) in the German-speaking lands has enabled these changes to be studied at the local as well as the central level, and recent scholarship has made clear that both perspectives are indispensable to understanding the Holy Roman Empire’s complex structures and dynamics.

Throughout the Holy Roman Empire’s existence, chroniclers narrated its long history, typically embedding it in the Carolingian and Roman past. A more secular and critical approach arose after the Reformation, giving rise to unfavorable comparisons with more powerful and centralized neighbors, most infamously in Samuel von Pufendorf’s 1667 characterization of the Empire as irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile . After the Empire’s dissolution, German nationalist historians throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries tended to portray the “Old Reich ” of the late medieval and early modern period as an anachronistic obstacle to nation-state formation, harking back instead to the putative golden age of the medieval Hohenstaufen monarchs. After 1945 the study of the Empire as a polity fell out of favor, to be rejuvenated by a new generation of late medievalists and early modernists beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, including Moraw 1985 and Rabe 1989 . This generation held a much less negative and nationalistically freighted view of the premodern past. Their approach expanded the parameters of constitutional history to include social structures and prosopographical studies. Recent German-language overviews that fall within this period, such as Boockmann and Dormeier 2005 , by and large maintain the scholarly orthodoxies established by that generation, including Moraw 1985 , which presented the concept of a late medieval “open constitution” giving way to “configured consolidation,” while incorporating some of the insights of more recent cultural and economic studies. Additionally, recent decades have witnessed an intensification of the debate over whether the Empire of the 16th through 18th centuries can be categorized as a state, with Schmid 1999 and Stollberg-Rilinger 2018 offering prominent arguments for each side of that debate. The 21st century has also seen a rapid expansion in Anglophone scholarship on the Empire, which had previously been extremely scarce. This has included Wilson 2016 , a major synthesis for general audiences, and Whaley 2012 , a detailed reappraisal of the Empire’s early modern history.

Boockmann, Hartmut, and Heinrich Dormeier. Konzilien, Kirchen- und Reichsreform, 1410–1495 . Gebhardt – Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 8. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005.

This entry in the “new Gebhardt” series (see Hesse 2017 ) covers the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century: the reigns of Sigismund, Albert II, Frederick III, and the early years of Maximilian I. The book focuses especially on the projects for reform of both the Church and the Empire mooted at the general councils of the first half of the 15th century.

Hesse, Christian. Synthese und Aufbruch, 1346–1410 . Gebhardt – Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 7b. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2017.

This book is part of the “new Gebhardt” multivolume history of Germany, a series which seeks to provide a widely readable but authoritative overview of each period it encompasses, anchored in a political narrative but also covering social, economic, and cultural themes, and incorporating the latest historiography. Hesse’s entry is a succinct yet nuanced guide to the reigns of Charles IV, Wenceslas, and Rupert of the Palatinate.

Moraw, Peter. Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Reich im späten Mittelalter, 1250 bis 1490 . Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 3. Berlin: Propyläen, 1985.

The third volume in the authoritative “Propyläen History of Germany,” this book remains the standard overview of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire. As well as summarizing the state of knowledge about the German social and economic history of this era in the 1980s, it proposed an influential conceptual framework for political change, whereby the Empire developed from a medieval “open constitution” to an early modern “configured consolidation” in a dualistic crown-and-estates configuration.

Prietzel, Malte. Das Heilige Römische Reich im Spätmittelalter . 2d ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010.

This is a textbook aimed at the undergraduate level which helpfully summarizes key political events and developments between the 13th and early 16th centuries, all the while incorporating the main historiographical insights and debates up to the time of its publication.

Rabe, Horst. Reich und Glaubensspaltung: Deutschland 1500–1600 . Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989.

This is an accessible overview of political, social, religious, and economic history in the 16th-century Holy Roman Empire. It reflects the emerging consensus in the 1980s about the crystallization of an “imperial constitution” around 1500 and its shaping by confessionalization in the course of the 16th century.

Reinhard, Wolfgang. Probleme deutscher Geschichte, 1495–1806: Reichsreform und Reformation, 1495–1555 . Gebhardt – Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 9. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001.

This volume of the “new Gebhardt” series (see Hesse 2017 ) offers a brisk account of the institutional reforms experienced by the Holy Roman Empire under Maximilian I and Charles V, along with the events of the early Reformation. Other thematic chapters range across social, economic, and regional political history in the same time period.

Schmid, Georg. Geschichte des Alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der Frühen Neuzeit 1495–1806 . Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999.

This is a deft summary of the Holy Roman Empire’s early modern history. Schmid argues controversially that the Empire was imbued with “complementary statehood,” bound up with the emerging notion of the German nation and the territories and estates, beginning with the “reforms” of 1495–1512 and iterating through constitutional landmarks in 1555, 1648, and beyond. This places his interpretation at one end of the debate over whether the Empire can be considered a “state.”

Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History . Translated by Yair Mintzker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvc778tr

Originally published in German under the more accurate title Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation: Vom Ende des Mittelalters bis 1806 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006), this is a popular summary of the prolific Stollberg-Rilinger’s insights into the early modern Holy Roman Empire’s operation. Opposing Schmid’s ( Schmid 1999 ) language of statehood, Stollberg-Rilinger emphasizes the Empire’s uniqueness as an association of personally interrelated and hierarchical princes and estates, whose ritualized interactions were in and of themselves constitutive of the Reich as a body politic.

Whaley, Joachim. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire . Vol. 1, Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493–1648 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

This is the first of two volumes in a monumental, thematically comprehensive history of the Holy Roman Empire between 1493 and 1806. It is not merely a summary of the German historiography of various early modern themes. Throughout the volume, Whaley harnesses the topics under discussion to a broader argument about the ongoing vitality of the Empire and the adaptability of its institutions to the myriad social, religious, diplomatic, and military challenges it faced in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Wilson, Peter. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

DOI: 10.4159/9780674915909

This is a breathtakingly ambitious distillation of a millennium of European history into a readable 900-page thematic overview of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a valuable introduction to the major topics in the Empire’s history by an expert early modernist, although it inevitably does not take into account many geographical and chronological specificities, particularly in the medieval period.

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What did it mean to belong to the Holy Roman Empire?

• September 23, 2022

Peter Wilson

The Holy Roman Empire was neither a nation state nor indeed a conventional empire. Instead, its inhabitants were unified through a web of legal rights.

T his essay originally appeared under the title ‘Identity and belonging in the Holy Roman Empire ‘  in  Nation, State and Empire: Perspectives from the Engelsberg Seminar,  published by  Bokförlaget Stolpe  in collaboration with the  Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit , 2017.

The Holy Roman Empire  sprawled across much of Europe for over a millennium, encompassing what are now Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, much of Italy, and parts of France, Denmark, and Poland. This geographic heterogeneity is reflected in how the empire’s history has been written, as that of a loose confederation with little binding it together beyond a vague sense that the empire embodied the fading ideal of a single Christendom. Even this was denied by some sceptical observers, notably  Voltaire, who famously dismissed the empire as ‘neither holy, Roman, nor an empire’ in 1756 . Others, like the political  philosopher Samuel Pufendorf  a century earlier, described the empire as ‘resembling a monstrosity’ because it did not conform to any of the recognised categories of state. He argued that  the empire  had declined from a ‘regular kingdom’ into an ‘irregular’ one, suggesting that its political development somehow ran opposite to that of other European states by becoming progressively weaker and more decentralised.

Later writers have been even more critical, accusing successive emperors of neglecting state-building in favour of pursuing the chimera of  imperial power and prestige . Increasingly, after its dissolution in 1806, the empire was regarded as a purely ‘German’ project as the other states emerging from it fashioned their own stories of national emancipation from foreign rule. The empire was reduced to Germany’s Middle Ages and early modernity, leaving its history to be written as a sorry story of repeated failure to forge a strong, centralised nation state. The received interpretation reduces the empire’s history to a narrative of high politics, and conveys the false impression that it was only inhabited by princes and aristocrats. This chapter argues that the empire’s inhabitants did identify with it as their homeland, but did so in ways that often differed from those in other states.

Multi-centred identity

The first key point is that identity in the Holy Roman Empire was always multi-centred as there was no stable heartland, nor a single dominant people. The conventional modern definition of an empire impedes our understanding of the Holy Roman Empire. Most modern scholarship equates empire with hegemony, and explains imperial expansion and rule in terms of a  core/periphery relationship.  The core expands by conquering and absorbing various more distant peripheral lands. The relationship between core and periphery is characterised by exploitation, with resources being extracted from the periphery for the benefit of the core, as was obviously the case in the  European colonial empires  of the late fifteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. This exploitative character of empire hinders a common sense of belonging. Imperial governance is akin to a ‘rimless wheel’: each peripheral territory is connected to the core, but the imperial centre deliberately disrupts connections between the various subjugated areas to reduce the risk of mass opposition.

The Holy Roman Empire only briefly and imperfectly matched this model. The  expansion of the Frankish  kingdom during the later eighth century certainly saw the conquest of the Lombards and other peoples, as well as their assimilation and often  forced Christianisation . However, Frankish rule remained decentralised even once their king,  Charlemagne , had been crowned emperor on Christmas Day, 800. The empire was founded in an age which did not think in modern constitutional terms, and the parameters of power were not clearly defined in written documents. Contemporaries used the same terms, loosely translating as ‘realm’ for both empire and kingdom. They lived in the post-Roman world with the ancient legacy mediated by their reading of the Bible and Christian commentary. For them, there was only one civilisation — and that was their own Christian world. Just as there was only one God in heaven, earthly political and spiritual authority were also singular, though commentators often disagreed on which power was superior to the other, and how.

This thinking influenced how the empire was governed. Hereditary succession and elective  monarchy  were not seen as clear alternatives, and imperial politics blended both. The leading lords acclaimed one of themselves as king, who assumed the full prerogatives of power for the entire empire, and it was perfectly possible for him to rule without being crowned emperor by the pope. However, actual governance always depended on convincing the lordly and clerical elite to cooperate. It was this that made imperial coronations politically significant. A core part of the Roman aspect of the empire was that the imperial title signified responsibility for all of Christendom’s security, well-being and peace. Coronation elevated the emperor above all other rulers, including kings, regardless of whether his actual authority extended across their possessions. More immediately, it enabled him to outrank members of his own family, including his sons who might provide rallying points for malcontents.

Acclamation suggested an element of election, but there were no formal procedures for casting votes before the fourteenth century and it was perfectly possible for the assembled lords to choose the son of the previous ruler. In fact, of the twenty-four German kings between 800 and 1254, twenty-two came from just four families — the Carolingians, Ottonians, Salians, and Staufers — and sons followed fathers directly on twelve occasions. The next seven kings — between 1254 and 1347 — came from six families, but it became increasingly obvious that only a few princely dynasties had both the desire and the resources to be serious candidates. By 1300 it was clear that only the  Wittelsbachs ,  Luxembourgs  and  Habsburgs  remained serious contenders. The desire to exclude both the papacy from interference, as well as partisans of rival families, led to the consolidation of the empire as an elective monarchy, notably in the Golden Bull of 1356 which restricted the right of selecting each emperor to seven leading princes (known as ‘electors’). After the Luxembourgs’ extinction in 1437, the  Habsburgs  remained the only viable choice, not least because the growing Ottoman threat meant that whoever became emperor would need considerable resources to defend the eastern frontier. The  Habsburgs ’ own core possession of Austria lay directly in the Ottomans’ path, especially once the sultan had conquered most of Hungary in 1526. Meanwhile, astute dynastic marriages had led to successive inheritances during 1477–1526, greatly expanding Habsburg possessions which now totalled a third of the entire empire. Unsurprisingly, the Habsburgs provided seventeen of the next eighteen monarchs (the exception being the Bavarian Wittelsbach,  Charles VII, 1742–45 ).

Thus, despite evolving as an elective monarchy, the empire enjoyed considerable political continuity, with the centre of political gravity shifting with each great family — beginning with the  Frankish Carolingians , then the  Ottonians  from Saxony around 919, then the  Salian family from the Rhineland  in 1024, followed by the Staufers from Swabia (and later Sicily) in 1138. Though no great dynasty immediately replaced the Staufers after 1250, imperial politics was far from chaotic. The onset of a fairly continuous line of Luxembourg monarchs after 1347 saw imperial rule based in Prague. With the Habsburgs’ succession in 1438, power moved southwards to Vienna. Each shift changed the configuration of high politics, since each family had different local roots and kinship networks. However, the change of dynasty did not bring a different ethnic group to power. Rather, the gradual perambulation of imperial rule left a trail of palaces, castles, hunting grounds, manors, towns, monasteries and cathedrals, all with imperial associations. These places and the rights and identities of their inhabitants were forever linked to the monarch who had founded them and endowed their privileges.

The empire never had a single, fixed imperial capital. Rome was important, but was only briefly considered as the emperor’s primary residence in the late tenth century, and early medieval emperors always used other residences like Aachen as well. Its politics — and as a consequence its identities also — were always multi-centred, reflecting the underlying imperial ideology as well as the practical exigencies of governing such a vast space. The empire claimed to be the direct continuation of the Christian Roman empire of late antiquity because  Pope Leo III  used the excuse of an inter-regnum in Byzantium to ‘translate’, or switch the imperial title from a distant and increasingly ineffective patron in Constantinople and instead bestow this dignity on Charlemagne, the Frankish warlord, who appeared to offer more immediate and effective protection for the church. Of course, Leo lacked any clear authority for his action, which left a problematic legacy since it suggested the pope was superior to the emperor. The actual balance of power lay with the emperor into the later eleventh century when  Pope Gregory VII  challenged Henry IV’s powers over bishops. The resulting Investiture Dispute (1075–1122), and its second, somewhat different round in the century after 1150, severely damaged both imperial and papal power, and accelerated the trend among Europe’s royalty to claim they were ‘emperors in their own kingdoms’, and thus subordinate to no one. This process was gradual and protracted, but served to demarcate the empire as a distinct political space in the heart of Europe, rather than as encompassing the entire Latin west.

However, the idea that (Catholic) Europe was a single political order proved surprisingly durable. Byzantium survived until the Ottoman capture of  Constantinople , but neither the pope nor the Holy Roman emperor accepted the eastern emperor as fully imperial, calling him instead the ‘king of the Greeks’. Though it became clear that Europe’s other kings, such as those in France, Spain or England, were not the emperor’s vassals, none of these monarchs was presumptuous enough to assume an imperial title. The Habsburgs were forced to accept that the sultan was akin to an emperor in 1606, and they made the same arrangement with the tsar in 1726 to obtain a Russian alliance. They reluctantly accepted  Napoleon’s  declaration of himself as ‘emperor of the French’ in 1804, but adopted their own Austrian hereditary imperial status to maintain parity while still claiming that the Holy Roman imperial title outranked everyone. Francis II’s dissolution of the empire in August 1806 was primarily motivated by the desire to prevent Napoleon usurping its  imperial prestige  to bolster French influence in Germany.

Being multi-centred also suited the practicalities of medieval governance. The empire was a vast, sparsely-inhabited territory, in which literacy remained restricted to the small clerical elite prior to the fourteenth century. The emperor reversed the standard pattern of European royalty. Rather than expecting his lords and vassals to visit a single royal capital at his expense, he travelled to them, staying either at his own strategically located palaces, or lodging in abbeys or monasteries at the cost of the church. This itinerant monarchy continued even after the significance of royal lands declined in the thirteenth century, because the emperor founded new, autonomous imperial cities which were required to lodge him and his retinue in return for their privileges. Indeed, far from being threatened by their vassals’ growing autonomy, twelfth and thirteenth-century emperors deliberately expanded the lordly elite, adding new distinctions by raising some to  princely rank . This rebalanced the relationship between emperor and lords along more recognisably feudal lines and represented a deliberate division of labour. Princes, lords and cities all remained the emperor’s direct vassals. Their privileges were intended to enable them to look after the problems of daily life within their jurisdictions, and leave the emperor free to get on with his task of upholding justice and protecting the church.

These arrangements were institutionalised during the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as imperial politics increasingly shifted from face-to-face meetings to written communication and formalised negotiations. The immediate vassals were now identified as imperial estates, sharing governance of the empire as a mixed monarchy in which the emperor remained sovereign, but shared the exercise of important prerogatives with a complex hierarchy of princes, lords and cities. The new institutions, such as the  Reichstag (Imperial Diet) , the two imperial supreme courts and various other agencies also remained itinerant into the seventeenth century. This left multiple locations with long associations with the empire through having hosted the emperor, or important meetings or institutions, at some time in the past.

Meanwhile, the gradual demarcation of distinct territories within the empire was not a process of progressive fragmentation of a once unified state as suggested by Pufendorf, but instead a co-evolution on multiple levels of locality, territory, region and empire. The empire emerged from the Frankish realm (Francia) which had recently incorporated the kingdom of Lombardy, conquered by Charlemagne in the 770s. The Frankish elite had always been turbulent and soon resumed internecine conflicts around a decade after Charlemagne’s death in 814. These struggles resulted in a series of partitions, notably the Treaty of Verdun (843) which separated East and West Francia, and founded a straggling middle kingdom called Lotharingia. Lotharingia subsequently split, creating what became Burgundy (a kingdom that covered what is now the Netherlands and parts of the Rhineland), Lorraine (that the Germans still call Lothringen), and Italy.

Later generations interpreted these partitions as the ‘birth’ of modern nations, especially France (from West Francia) and Germany (from East Francia). In fact, that process took centuries. Though the Franks recognised distinct kingdoms ( regna ), they acted as if all belonged to a common political order. That order was the  Holy Roman Empire,  which never had precisely defined outer limits because it regarded itself as a singular, universal order encompassing all of Christendom. West Francia was considered fully distinct by the early tenth century, but its king was regarded as inferior to the emperor. All the Frankish kings saw themselves as potential candidates for the imperial title, even after the different Carolingian lines died out and were replaced by other families, notably the Ottonians, who became kings of East Francia after 919.

The spectacular victory of the second Ottonian king,  Otto I,  over the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955 cemented his reputation as a great warrior and provided the basis to bid for the imperial title. Having intervened in Italy and deposed a local rival, Otto was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. Otto’s power and that of his immediate successors firmly established the empire as composed of three principal kingdoms in hierarchical status and significance. Foremost was East Francia, now called Germany, ranked ahead of Italy and Burgundy, both of which were now firmly distinct from former  Lotharingia . By the 1030s it had become established that whomever was chosen as German king automatically became Italian and Burgundian king as well, and was the primary candidate among all European monarchs to be crowned emperor.

Bohemia was the largest of the Slavic  areas incorporated as the empire gradually expanded eastwards. It was recognised as a kingdom in 1085, but always remained subordinate to the German king and thus to the empire as a whole.  Austria  and Brandenburg were former militarised border zones originally established to protect the empire against Slavic and Magyar raiders. Despite their subsequent importance as the hereditary possessions of the Habsburgs and  Hohenzollerns  respectively, neither became a kingdom. The Habsburgs shelved plans to elevate Austria to a kingdom in the 1620s, while Brandenburg always remained an electorate. Prussia emerged from the possessions of the  Teutonic Order  (itself autonomous from the empire), and remained outside the empire, despite being inherited by the Hohenzollerns in 1618. It was Prussia’s distinct status that provided the basis for a separate Hohenzollern royal identity after 1700: something that set them apart from other German princely families and a major factor in their growing rivalry with the Habsburgs. Other princely houses were linked to royal titles through ‘personal unions’: notably Saxony-Poland 1697–1763, and Hanover-England 1714–1837. Switzerland and the northern Netherlands only slowly separated from the empire during the seventeenth century. There was no formal date of independence in either case, despite what international relations textbooks claim for the  Peace of Westphalia  in 1648. For example, it was not until the late seventeenth century that the emperor stopped referring to the Swiss as his ‘loyal subjects’. Thus, the empire remained embedded within the history of much of Europe. Its frontiers were never entirely clear, a legacy of its ideological origins in the belief in a single Christendom.

The German and Italian kingdoms were subdivided into imperial fiefs held by dukes or counts as royal vassals. Fief-holding was hereditary, but succession always formally depended on the emperor’s recognition. Lordly families could hold several fiefs at once, and gradually these conglomerates of duchies and counties became identified as ‘territories’ around 1500. By that point, many leading families had been granted princely titles, further distinguishing them from the more numerous counts and barons. Thirty-five of these families (including the Liechtensteins) survived the empire’s dissolution to become fully sovereign rulers after 1815, grouped into the German Confederation. A key element in legitimating their survival was the visual depiction of their long heritage through cartographic conventions. Historical atlases showed the area of the former empire as divided into the possessions of the dynasties which survived its demise, thus establishing the practice of showing Central Europe and Italy as colourful mosaics, whereas countries like France or Spain are always shown as solid blocks of colour despite the fact they had always been subdivided into historic kingdoms and provinces. By contrast, maps produced while the empire was still in existence generally show the boundaries of the regions ( Kreise ) established in imperial law in 1500–12 as an intermediary political level to coordinate action among the imperial estates.

Princely dynasties were important, but their possessions’ status and rights always depended on their relationship to the empire. For instance, the  Hohenzollerns  had several princely and counts’ votes in the Reichstag thanks to holding the relevant fiefs, but they had no vote for Prussia because that was outside the empire. Likewise, Denmark and later  Sweden  were represented in the Reichstag not as foreign monarchies, but because their kings held German lands recognised as imperial fiefs. The Hohenzollerns were at the forefront of fostering a separate sense of loyalty among their subjects, for example by banning the traditional prayers for the emperor and forbidding their subjects to refer lawsuits to the imperial supreme courts. However, all princes recognised that their authority and prestige derived ultimately from their continued membership of the empire, and even the Hohenzollerns refused an offer from Napoleon to become ‘Emperor of North Germany’ in October 1804. Two years later, the Swedish king lodged a diplomatic protest at Francis’ dissolution of the empire.

Multi-layered identity

This leads to a second major point. Identity in the empire was always multi-layered, matching the corporate character of society and the diffusion of political, spiritual, legal, and economic rights across different levels and locations of authority: household, community, territory, region, empire. Though the empire was the most distant in this sequence, it was valued because it guaranteed local distinctiveness and autonomy. It worked because localities could generally seek redress from higher authorities over the heads of their more immediate lords. It also appealed to those without distinct home territories, most notably the Jews who had enjoyed specific imperial protection since the eleventh century. Though not always successful in preventing pogroms, these protections were widened around 1500 and Jews were far more likely to appeal to the imperial courts than Christians — and often successfully.

Much has been made of the  addition of ‘the German Nation’ to the formula ‘Holy Roman Empire’ which first appeared in 1474 . Contrary to popular belief, this never became an official designation and was rarely used in formal documents. Most often, the empire was simply ‘the Empire’. The German national associations largely post-date the empire when its history was reduced to that of medieval and early modern Germany. For example,  Louis II, who ruled East Francia  after the Treaty of Verdun, only acquired the sobriquet ‘the German’ in  Heinrich von Bünau’s  history published in 1739, which reinterpreted the Frankish partition treaty as the ‘birth’ of Germany.

Medieval and early modern writers certainly identified factors like language, culture and clothing as part of a ‘national’ identity. German was already an important administrative language in the empire by the early thirteenth century and its use by the imperial court chancellery did as much to standardise grammar and spelling as  Luther’s more famous German Bible . Imperial institutions, like the Reichstag, were quick to exploit the  new print media  developing around 1500 to disseminate legislation, mandates and news. However, there was no attempt to impose German as a single national language. The famous  Golden Bull of 1356  specified German, Latin, Upper Italian and Czech as imperial administrative languages and within a few years the imperial chancellery adopted the practice of communicating in the language of the intended recipients. Sixteenth-century humanists certainly debated the origins of different languages, and several advocated adopting distinctive Germanic dress to emphasise Germans’ alleged moral superiority over other peoples, including Italians and Burgundians who were also imperial subjects. However, these elements always remained secondary in discussions about the empire, not least because humanists were unable to agree on what German fashion looked like or, more broadly, what German cultural achievements actually were, beyond the invention of printing.

German  identity was essentially political. First, it was the  Germans’ entitlement to the imperial title  that distinguished them from other Europeans. Secondly, identity coalesced around a distinct ideal of multiple freedoms and liberties, rather than abstract, universal ‘Liberty’. Rights were particular to each locality and social group, and expressed the identity and autonomy of each. This ideal of ‘German freedom’ was boosted by the humanists’  rediscovery of Tacitus’  Germania  in the mid-fifthteenth century.  Writing in 98 AD, Tacitus presented the Germans as a free, unconquered people who had  defeated the Romans at Teutoburg Forest.  The humanists read this work through the legacy of many centuries of political development, and the contemporaneous emergence of institutions like the Reichstag. This fostered the belief that liberties derived from the imperial constitution rather than from underlying ‘natural’ or ‘common’ laws, as in the case of France or England. Thus, German freedom depended on belonging to the empire, not emancipation from it. This was a crucial factor in blunting the Reformation’s potential to become a separatist movement in the early sixteenth century because few Protestants were prepared to defy imperial authority altogether.

The language of local, particular rights bound together the multiple political and social centres and layers. All were mutually dependent in maintaining the empire as the collective guarantor of their own special status. By the eighteenth century, the word ‘ German ’ was used as shorthand for ‘imperial’ when discussing the empire. Of course, Bohemians, Burgundians, Italians and others in the empire did not feel ‘German’, but they nonetheless identified with the empire because it also guaranteed their rights and autonomy. The empire was valued precisely because it was distant. Its institutions might not always be swift or particularly effective, but they demanded relatively little in the way of taxes or other requirements,  yet remained useful to legitimate and protect cherished local liberties.

Political rather than cultural

The preceding two points suggest a third: we should reject the nineteenth-century idea of Germany being a land of poets and thinkers, rather than a state. On the contrary, it was the other way around. The empire was the German state. It was a small group of poets and thinkers who were dissatisfied with this, but not without reason. The  eighteenth-century empire  had serious problems, not least the demographic and economic changes which were eroding the hierarchical corporate social order. Whereas the full impact of these underlying trends was not felt until the  1848 revolutions,  those living in the eighteenth century were fully conscious of the disproportionate growth of Austria and Prussia as distinct European great powers. This became more pronounced as both joined Russia in  partitioning Poland between 1772 and 1795 . By 1795, Brandenburg-Prussia encompassed over 309,000 sq km, more than double its size in 1740 and nearly three times as large as it had been in 1648. Its population meanwhile had grown tenfold. The Habsburgs’ own hereditary possessions vastly expanded with the reconquest of Hungary from the Ottomans between 1683 and 1699 and the subsequent acquisition of additional Ottoman and former Spanish territory during the next two decades. Their participation in the partitions of Poland pushed their total empire to over 710,000 sq km. Both Prussia and Austria now ruled far more land outside the empire than within it, while combined, their possessions within the empire accounted for over half its total territory. The growth in Austro-Prussian military power was even more dramatic. Whereas the armies of the other imperial estates accounted for half the 343,000 men under arms in 1710, combined, these numbered only 106,000 in 1790, compared to 497,700 Austrian and 195,000 Prussian personnel.

The shift in real power threatened to unbalance the empire and made a mockery of the formal constitutional order. For example, the elector of Mainz remained the premier imperial prince, yet ruled only 336,000 subjects in 1795 compared to 26 million in the Habsburg lands, and 8.2 million in those of Prussia. It seemed obvious to many that the empire faced a ‘Polish future’, as imperial institutions appeared powerless to prevent Austria and Prussia dictating its affairs, which is precisely what happened after the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792 — when the two forced the other imperial estates to declare war on France.

Austro-Prussian rivalry had religious overtones, accentuating differences between Catholics and Protestants present since the Reformation.  Friedrich Carl von Moser  termed this the ‘double Fatherland’ of divided political and religious loyalties. While most writers still favoured his recommendation to live within the existing framework, more radical thinkers around 1760 began demanding a new kind of  Romantic national identity  based on essentialist criteria, like language and culture. These ideas gained ground amid the renewed warfare of the 1790s when some believed it was necessary for the empire to die in order for Germany to be reborn. Their ideas had little practical impact on events which were determined by the exigencies of warfare. However, they rapidly gained ground during the debate on Germany’s political future after 1815, when liberal nationalists demanded a single German identity in place of the previous multiple and multi-layered identities.

Discussions of identity lurched down the self-destructive path inherent in all modern nationalisms which rely on  us/them distinctions  that are always contested. Attempts to define who belongs to the nation always entail exclusion and cannot escape the vicious, ever-decreasing circle this imposes. Homogenous purity invariably proves elusive, and efforts to articulate identity based on essentialist criteria generally fragment populations into ever smaller groups. It was this that proved so explosive during the 1860s when restricting ‘Germanness’ to language and culture forced the political partition of central Europe, and ultimately resulted in a ‘little German’ solution of a Prussian-dominated Germany excluding Habsburg Austria and their non-German subjects. Even this Little Germany was a fiction, because Prussia continued to rule millions of Poles and Lithuanians.

Conclusions

The Holy Roman Empire certainly never conformed to the model of a nation state defined by centralised, unitary sovereign government and inhabited by a culturally homogenous population. However, neither was it a conventional empire possessing a stable metropolitan core inhabited by an imperial people dominating and exploiting subjugated peripheral lands and populations. Instead, it was a multi-centred and multi-layered entity in which no single area or people dominated all the others. Its inhabitants identified with it through a web of legal rights rooted in a hierarchical corporate social order. This fostered genuine sentimental attachment, but it is questionable whether these bonds would have endured for much longer, given the political, social and economic pressures already developing prior to the empire’s demise in the  Napoleonic Wars.

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The Holy Roman Empire in the Eighteenth Century

Peter h. wilson  |  university of hull.

The Holy Roman Empire was eighteenth century Europe's largest state, not counting Russia, which many Europeans still regarded as entirely separate. 1  The Empire was founded in 800, ostensibly as a direct continuation of the ancient Roman empire in its final, Christian form. The ideal of Empire and papacy as twin pillars of a common Christian order had long faded, but the emperor was still formally recognised as Europe's pre-eminent monarch, even after the tsar's assumption of an imperial title in 1721. Since the early sixteenth century, emperors assumed full imperial dignity and prerogatives immediately from their election as German king, and longer required coronation by the pope. By the eighteenth century, the Italian lands associated with the Empire, known as 'imperial Italy', had contracted to Lombardy, Genoa, Tuscany and a few smaller northern principalities, with Savoy (raised to a kingdom through possession of Sardinia by 1720) formally being part of Germany. Burgundy had long ceased to be considered a kingdom, and had contracted to the area occupied by modern Luxembourg and Belgium, known at the time as the Netherlands, or 'Flanders' to British diplomats. The suffix 'of the German nation' was sometimes attached to the words 'Holy Roman Empire' after the late fifteenth century, but this was never an official title. Outsiders increasingly regarded the Empire as 'Germany' by the eighteenth century. Definitions of what it meant to be 'German' changed significantly, especially from the 1770s, but remained largely related to politics, not culture or language prior to the nineteenth century. To most of its inhabitants, 'Germany' remained the Empire which provided a political and legal framework for a dense and diverse network of different communities, religious and cultural groups. The Austrian Habsburg dynasty held the position of emperor continuously between 1438 and the Empire's dissolution in 1806, except for the brief rule of Charles VII 1742-5 who came from the Bavarian branch of the Wittelsbachs. 2  The Habsburgs acquired Spain and its overseas empire in 1516, but split into Spanish and Austrian branches after 1558. Hereditary possession of Austria, Bohemia and some enclaves in southwest Germany gave the Habsburgs direct control of one-third of the Empire. They acquired further lands beyond imperial frontiers, largely through the reconquest of Hungary from the Ottoman Turks 1683-99. The extinction of their Spanish cousins in 1700 precipitated the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14), in which Austrian attempts to obtain the entire inheritance were thwarted by a combination of French opposition and Anglo-Dutch reluctance to see a recreation of the sixteenth century global Habsburg empire. Nonetheless, the Austrian Habsburgs acquired the Netherlands (Burgundy), which, while remaining formally part of the Empire, had been ruled by Spain since 1548. Austria also obtained Lombardy (Milan), which had been Spanish since 1536, as well as Spain's possessions in Naples and (by 1720) Sicily. The extinction of the Medici family in 1737 allowed the Habsburgs to claim this too, as an escheated fief. Though Naples and Sicily were lost in 1735, Austria made considerable gains at Poland's expense after 1772. Already by 1773, the Habsburgs had more than twice as much land outside imperial frontiers as within them, while their total possessions were roughly the same size as the entire Empire. This material power lessened their reliance on the imperial title to sustain their international prestige. The Habsburgs had already consolidated the legal and political autonomy of their Hereditary Lands in Austria and Bohemia during the first half of the seventeenth century, placing them almost entirely beyond the reach of imperial institutions. They continued the privileges already granted to Spain's possessions, once they obtained these following the War of Spanish Succession. However, their dealings with the rest of the Empire remained bound by the imperial constitution which had been formalised around 1500. The constitution rested on a feudal network of around 220 larger imperial fiefs and many more smaller ones, all ranked in a complex and increasingly rigid hierarchy. All larger fiefs were formally directly subordinate to the emperor, and each change of ownership (including sons succeeding fathers in hereditary principalities) required imperial permission for the new owner to exercise legal and political powers. Though the emperor could not dispute actual possession, his feudal powers helped the Habsburgs influence imperial politics. There were always far more fiefs than political units, because the leading princes each owned many fiefs. Alongside the Habsburgs, four other families dominated imperial politics. The Brandenburg Hohenzollerns were the most important, as their possession of Prussia beyond imperial jurisdiction gave them a separate kingdom. Whereas the centre of Hohenzollern power remained in Brandenburg, the attention of their rivals, the Hanoverian Guelphs, switched to Britain after their succession there in 1714. The Saxon Wettin family also acquired a royal title, thanks to their successive election as Polish kings between 1697 and 1714. By contrast, neither the Palatine nor the Bavarian branch of the Wittelsbachs had managed to obtain one, despite heavy involvement (on opposing sides) in the War of Spanish Succession. Wittelsbach resentment was a major source of tension within the Empire into the 1740s. Beneath this power elite was a middling rank of around ten secular principalities, of which Hessen- Kassel, Württemberg and Brunswick were the most important. Together with the big four, these possessed the majority of the Empire's secular fiefs, with the remainder held (mostly individually) by around 50 minor princes and counts. The remaining 60 or so fiefs belonged to the imperial church as ecclesiastical territories ruled by prince-bishops, abbots and priors, each elected by their cathedral or abbey chapter. These churchmen held the same political powers as secular rulers in their own territories, as well as spiritual jurisdiction over their own inhabitants and those of neighbouring Catholic territories. The Protestant secular principalities controlled their own state churches, including deciding theological matters. Their Catholic counterparts also controlled their own clergy, but accepted varying degrees of spiritual jurisdiction from the imperial bishops within the wider framework of what still claimed to be a universal church. Thus, ecclesiastical authority was as decentralised as political power throughout the Empire. Finally, there were around 50 self-governing imperial cities, most of which had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants and often very little territory outside their walls. Politics were simplified in one sense by Austria and Prussia's clear preponderance, with the two monarchies together directly controlling nearly half the Empire, in addition to their substantial lands outside it. Another 18 per cent was held by Hanover, Saxony, Bavaria and the Palatinate, meaning that the majority of the Empire's autonomous units were squeezed into only a third of its surface area, principally along the Rhine and Main rivers. Politics were characterised by a tension between the formal constitutional hierarchy and the actual distribution of power and resources. Though individually small, the middling and smaller principalities mattered, because they held the bulk of the formal representation in the common institutions established around 1500 to resolve internal problems and organise collective defence. These institutions included the Reichstag, or Imperial Diet, which remained permanently in session after 1663 in the imperial city of Regensburg, as well as the ten Kreise, or imperial circles, which grouped virtually all the Empire's German and Burgundian lands on a regional basis and which also had their own assemblies. Representation in the Kreis assemblies did not always match that in the Reichstag, as many smaller fiefs were excluded from the latter, or only possessed partial rights. Nonetheless, representation made the fiefs (or more directly, their owners) 'imperial Estates', or constituent members of the Empire, sharing important powers with the emperor. The Empire was thus a mixed monarchy, with the emperor as sovereign overlord, but obliged to negotiate with the imperial Estates through imperial institutions to reach binding decisions in key matters, including military mobilisation. Formally, the leading imperial Estates were the six secular and three ecclesiastical electors who alone were entitled to choose who should be emperor. 3  They could wait until an existing incumbent died, as in 1740, or they could chose a successor designate, known as the king of the Romans, during an emperor's lifetime, as in 1764. The Habsburgs were the natural choice as the richest of all the Empire's families, since the imperial Estates expected the emperor to discharge his responsibilities largely from his own resources. The concentration of Habsburg possessions in the Empire's south-eastern corner was another factor, because this gave them a direct interest in opposing the Ottomans who remained a potent threat into the mid-eighteenth century. The Habsburgs saw the imperial title as essential to their international standing and useful in competing for the military support of the German princes. The latter had established their own permanent armies during the late seventeenth century, partly to discharge their responsibilities under the Empire's system of collective defence which had been reformed in 1681-2. 4  However, their militarisation was also a direct consequence of their ambiguous international status. The peace settlement ending the War of Spanish Succession confirmed that Europe was composed of independent states, though it remained disputed whether these could interact as equals. German princes were not independent. They could make international alliances and even engage in foreign wars on their own account, but such activity was subject to constitutional restrictions not to harm the Empire or emperor. This was no mere formality. Emperor Joseph I sequestrated Mantua, Bavaria and Cologne for backing France during the War of Spanish Succession. Though Bavaria and Cologne were eventually restored as part of the peace settlement in 1714, Austria kept Mantua for itself. Even Brandenburg-Prussia deferred to the legal order until 1740 and the Empire continued to matter to the Hohenzollerns long after that. 5 The princes' uncertain status made imperial politics highly competitive. Since the sixteenth century, internal conflicts (including the Thirty Years War 1618-48) repeatedly exposed the risks of trying to seize land and influence by force. The Empire consolidated internal checks, greatly circumscribing princely action. Only Prussia managed to expand through violence, conquering Silesia 1740-5, but only then at the cost of lasting Habsburg enmity. The emergence of this open Austro-Prussian rivalry increased the interest of other European powers in preserving the Empire's internal order to prevent either German great power from controlling the resources of the remaining principalities. Consequently, imperial politics focused on minor adjustments to status, often considered irrelevant by outsider observers (and many historians), but crucial to those involved. Britain's relations with the Empire ran through the secretary of state for the Northern Department which oversaw the appointment of envoys and diplomatic correspondence. 6  British secretaries of state and diplomats varied considerably in their knowledge of imperial politics and their sympathy for German princely goals. Their papers remain an understudied source for the articulation of national prejudices and identities. Britain's diplomatic relations reflected both the Empire's decentralised structure and the tensions between material power and the formal constitutional order. The Empire lacked a single 'national' capital, necessitating the presence of several British diplomatic missions simultaneously. The envoy to the Habsburg court in Vienna was the most important and responsible for the bulk of the surviving paperwork (SP80/31-240). The presence of a separate envoy in Antwerp or Brussels was a consequence of the historic connections of the Netherlands to Spain before 1700, as well as their strategic and commercial significance (SP77/63-112). Envoys were also initially maintained in Regensburg where they were accredited to the Reichstag (SP81/143), 170-6); SP105/33-47), while others were despatched to individual princely courts when required, such as to negotiate George III's marriage to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1761 (SP81/178). Outside these high-political missions, Britain maintained an envoy in Hamburg which was the main conduit for trade between Germany, Britain and its colonies (SP82/32-103). As Hamburg was also a centre for news across northern Germany and the Baltic, this correspondence is useful for other topics too. Envoys were also present in imperial Italy, notably in Tuscany after 1737 (SP105/281-329). The correspondence with envoys in Vienna and Brussels reflect Britain's dealings with Austria as a great power, more than the Habsburgs' capacity as emperors, though reports from Vienna do contain valuable information about imperial politics. Correspondence into the early 1720s is dominated by efforts to secure the settlement ending the War of Spanish Succession, notably the Barrier Treaty which allowed the Dutch to garrison fortresses in the Austrian Netherlands at Habsburg expense. Here, students should consult the papers of Britain's envoy in The Hague (SP84; SP101/130-5) as well as those in 'Flanders' (SP77) and Vienna (SP80). 7  A key element in these negotiations from Britain's perspective was the recognition of Hanover's acquisition of much of Sweden's former German possessions at the end of the Great Northern War (1700-21), as well as that electorate's general security. To this end, Britain paid Hessen-Kassel to keep its army ready to defend Hanover in case of war (SP81/118-24). 8  Religion played a prominent role at this point, with Britain supporting Hanover's efforts to defend perceived Protestant interests during a crisis triggered by pro-Catholic policies in the Palatinate (SP81/120-1, 179; SP82/36). 9 Anglo-Austrian relations deteriorated with the mutual expulsion of ambassadors in 1727 (SP80/60-1). 10  Britain also failed to back Austria against France during the War of Polish Succession (1733-5), though its diplomats' correspondence includes useful material on the Habsburg war effort (e.g. SP80/227). Britain did, however, support efforts to preserve the Austrian possessions intact for Charles VI's daughter, Maria Theresa. This was contested by France, Spain, Bavaria and Prussia during the War of Austrian Succession (1740-8) for which there is a wealth of diplomatic and military material (see esp. SP81/158 parts 1 and 3 SP87/8-26). A key element was Britain's support for the election of Maria Theresa's husband, Francis Stephen, as emperor in 1745 (SP81/92-3; SP105/24-5). This led to the establishment of what became a permanent envoy to Cologne (SP81/125-42, 144-57). Subsequently, British diplomats sought to persuade the electors to choose Maria Theresa's son, Joseph, as king of the Romans to ensure continuity of Habsburg rule (SP81/158 part 2, SP105/33-8). 11  These efforts were accompanied by further treaties for German troops to protect Hanover in case of war, necessitating, among other things, negotiations with Ansbach-Bayreuth (SP 81/180). 12 This policy changed dramatically in 1756 with the collapse of the so-called Old System of Anglo-Dutch support for Austria against France. Austria secured French backing against Prussia which meanwhile allied with Britain. The result was the Seven Years War (1756-63) which saw the despatch of a substantial British contingent to support German auxiliaries in defending Hanover (SP87/27-48). The Franco-Austrian alliance persisted for nearly thirty years after the war, reducing British interest in imperial institutions, since there was little point in assisting Habsburg imperial management. Most British diplomats now believed the Empire was in decline and incapable of reform. 13  One sign of this was that Britain's representative to the Reichstag generally combined this role with envoy to the Bavarian court in Munich, where he generally stayed rather than visiting Regensburg (SP81/94-116, SP105/39- 47). Interest in the Empire temporarily revived with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, but was entirely dominated by British efforts to recruit auxiliaries from Hessen-Kassel and other middling principalities (SP81/181-97). 14

1  For an overview of historical debates on the Empire and how it functioned, see P.H. Wilson,  The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806  (2nd ed., Basingstoke, 2011). More detailed coverage in J. Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (2 vols., Oxford, 2012).

2  C.W. Ingrao,  The Habsburg monarchy 1618-1815  (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2000).

3  The three (Catholic) ecclesiastical electorates of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, three secular Protestant electorates of Saxony, Brandenburg and Hanover, plus their Catholic counterparts in Bohemia, Bavaria and the Palatinate.

4  For this see P.H. Wilson,  German armies. War and German politics 1648-1806  (London, 1998).

5  P.H. Wilson, 'Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire 1700-40',  Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London , 36 (2014), 3-48, and 'Prussia's relations with the Holy Roman Empire, 1740-86', The Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 337- 71.

6  Though dated, chapters 5-7 of D.B. Horn,  Great Britain and Europe in the eighteenth century  (Oxford, 1967) essentially offer a précis of the correspondence with the Empire contained in the SP series.

7  D. McKay,  Allies of convenience. Diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Austria 1714-1719 (New York, 1986); R. Hatton, Diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the Dutch Republic 1714-1721 (London, 1950).

8  See also J. Black, 'Parliament and foreign policy in the age of Walpole. The case of the Hessians', in idem (ed.),  Knights errant and true Englishmen  (Edinburgh, 1989), pp.41-54.

9  A.C. Thompson,  Britain, Hanover and the Protestant interest, 1688-1756  (Woodbridge, 2006).

10  J. Black, 'When "natural allies" fall out. Anglo-Austrian relations 1725-1740',  Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchiv , 36 (1983), 120-49.

11  J. Black, 'The British attempt to preserve the peace in Europe 1748-1755', in H. Duchhardt (ed.), Zwischenstaatliche Friedenswährung un Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit  (Cologne, 1991), pp.227-44.

12  C.W. Eldon,  England's subsidy policy towards the continent during the Seven Years War (Philadelphia, 1938), and 'The Hanoverian subsidy treaty with Ansbach (1755)', Journal of Modern History, 12 (1940), 59-68.

13  P.H. Wilson, 'The old Reich', in William Doyle (ed.),  The Ancien Regime  (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.540- 55.

14  R. Atwood,  The Hessians. Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American Revolution  (Cambridge, 1980).

CITATION: Wilson, Peter H.: "The Holy Roman Empire in the Eighteenth Century." State Papers Online, The Eighteenth Century 1714-1782 , Cengage Learning EMEA Ltd, 2015  

Any views and opinions expressed in these essays are those of the author in question, and any views or opinions from the original source material are those of the publication in question. Gale, part of Cengage Group, provides facsimile reproductions of original sources and do not endorse or dispute the content contained in them. Author affiliation and information within them are correct as of the original publication date.

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire Essay

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Introduction

The Roman Empire exemplifies the lives of the people that lived during the era of Western civilization. Like other cultural affiliations, the Romans wanted to dominate Europe and other parts of the world thereby, new strategies were devised including investment in military and use of diplomatic relations to rise to power. However, differences in interests and power among few elites caused divisions that led to the fall of the empire. The purpose of this essay is to examine the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, including the influence of the Catholic Church and Kings in the secular and religious activities of the Europeans.

Strong military power and economic expansion were the major contributing reasons for the rise of the Roman Empire. After the difficult transition from monarchy to republican government embarked on a course of military expansion that led to the conquest of the Italian peninsula. The soldiers were committed to the course as they persisted even after the loss of an army or fleet. The Romans invested heavily in new armies and machinery that gave them leverage against their threats. Secondly, the Romans had a practical sense of economic and policy strategies that increased its power. By 264 B.C.E, they had established fortified towns at all strategic locations which provided adequate human and financial resources to help the colonies spur economically, giving Romans adequate power to make demands and expand territories. In addition, the Romans were excellent in diplomatic relations. They extended citizenship and autonomy to foreigners, increasing movements into the territory for a stronger empire.

The jostling for power by a number of powerful individuals and civil war contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. Senate was the governing body of the Roman state. Notably, it comprised a select three hundred men drawn from the landed aristocracy and remained senators for life. As the empire grew, some elite families started to dominate senate and magistrate affairs, leading to a long-standing scramble for power. In the lecture on the problems that faced the Roman Empire, Santelli noted the nobles governed through intimidation and coercion, to maintain their hold over the magistrates and senate. The selfish interests of the few elite families fueled conflicts that resulted in civil wars. These wars disrupted the peace and military strength held by the state. Some powerful individuals, such as Pompey who took advantage of the internal troubles facing Rome to establish punitive reforms, such as putting equities back on the jury courts, and gain more power to control empire. Internal wrangles led to an increase in the number of invasions and civil wars. This caused a decline in population and economy, weakening the military power and the state’s ability to establish its authority against invaders.

The Influence of the Catholic Church and European Kings on the lives of Europeans

The Catholic Church and European kings exerted power and influence in both secular and religious lives of Europeans by using the bible and their power over the masses to make and impose new reforms. During the Carolingian times, the Catholic Church changed the attitude of the population on sexuality, family life, and childbearing. Marriage was a civil arrangement, and while wives were expected to remain faithful to their husbands, men could keep concubines, either slaves or free women. The church influenced this aspect of the European community by emphasizing monogamy and permanence. In 789, A Frankish church council stipulated that marriage was indissoluble and condemned divorce. Moreover, the church introduced and started to enforce clerical celibacy, and condemned all forms of procreation and homosexuality.

In addition, the Bishops used converted powerful men into Christianity and used the opportunity to change the secular and religious beliefs of the people. For example, Augustine, a monk from a monastery in Rome, visited Kent and persuaded King Ethelbert to become a Christian. Most of the king’s subjects became Christians and started following traditions of the Catholic Church, including pursuing celibacy and committing to a monogamous family. Pope Gregory emphasized persuasion rather than force or intimidation to convert the pagans. This approach made it for the Catholic Church to dominate the Europe and most of the temples were converted to churches. Similarly, pagan feasts were given new names and incorporated into the Christian calendar. For example, the community started the Christmas celebrations, which were held on December 25, the day the pagan celebration of the winter solstice was previously held.

The Catholic Church served as instrument of political power, influencing policies and the way of life other Europeans. Monasteries were major beneficiaries of grants from kings and gifts from people who wanted religious favors. These gifts increased the wealth of individual monasteries, giving them power to rule in the political space. Through these positions, the church influenced a change education and other social activities, including observance of justice, purity, devotion, charity, and other virtues that impacted their everyday security and religious activities.

The rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the early influence of the Catholic Church through the Middle Ages are critical in understanding Western civilization. The changes that happened in the society led to the development of art, culture, and enduring ideas that are prevalent in the current society. What is evident in these two discussions is the fact that powerful people and institutions have a great influence on the culture and the rise and fall of societies.

Works Cited

Santelli, Lecture notes.

Spielvogel, Jackson J. Western civilization . Cengage Learning, 2020.

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Bibliography

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