Holy Roman Empire

A thousand-year attempt to be the Roman Empire, which Voltaire dismissed as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, and which nevertheless organised central Europe until Napoleon. Its origin was Charlemagne's coronation in Rome in 800 and its practical foundation the coronation of Otto I in 962, after which the imperial title was attached to the German kingship. The emperor was elected, not born - from 1356 by seven and later nine prince-electors under a written constitution, the Golden Bull, which is why the Habsburgs had to be chosen each time even when the choice was a formality. That elective character is the key to the whole institution: emperors bought support with privileges, and the cumulative effect over centuries was to make the princes, bishops and free cities effectively sovereign while the emperor's own power rested on his family lands. The empire fought the papacy for two centuries over who appointed bishops, and lost enough of that argument to matter. The Reformation split it permanently, and the Thirty Years War, fought largely on its soil, killed perhaps a third of the German population. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 confirmed the princes' sovereignty. What remained was a legal framework, with imperial courts that small states genuinely used against large ones. Francis II dissolved it in 1806 rather than let Napoleon take the title. It had lasted 844 years. Its fragmentation is why Germany unified only in 1871. At its widest the empire covered Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Switzerland, the Low Countries and northern Italy. It contained several hundred separate territories. Its formal style from the fifteenth century was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The imperial regalia are kept in Vienna.

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