Holy Roman EmpireGerman Heiliges Römisches Reich, Latin Sacrum Romanum Imperiumthe varying complex of lands in western and central Europe ruled over first by Frankish and then by German kings for 10 centuries, from Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 until the renunciation of the imperial title in 1806. (For histories of the territories governed at various times by the empire, see France, history of; Germany, history of; Italy, history of.)
Nature of the empire





Origins of the empire and sources of imperial ideas

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.

Religious origins

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, 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.

Political origins

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 Islām, 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.

Coronation of Charlemagne as emperor

By comparison with Adrian, Pope Leo III (795–816) was a man of inferior calibre. Where Adrian had tried to maintain independence by balancing the Byzantine emperor against the Frankish king, Leo from the first showed subservience to the latter. Both in Constantinople and in Rome the situation was unstable. In Constantinople, after troubles reaching back to 790, the empress Irene had her son Constantine VI blinded and deposed in 797 and took his place, the first woman to rule the empire in her own right. Her constitutional position was thus doubtful; Alcuin in the West, in 799, regarded the imperial throne as empty. Meanwhile, in Rome the hostile nobility exploited the opportunity to attack Leo, who in 799 fled across the Alps to his protector, Charlemagne, at Paderborn. Though unfavourably impressed by the Pope, Charlemagne was persuaded by Alcuin to send him back to Rome with a commission, which adjudged the complaints against him false and arrested and deported his accusers. The situation, however, was still uncertain. In view of the plight of both pope and Byzantine emperor, “the whole salvation of the church of Christ” rested (so Alcuin wrote) in Charlemagne’s hands, and in the autumn of 800 he set out for Rome “to restore the state of the church which was greatly disturbed.” On December 23 Leo solemnly purged himself of the charges against him. Two days later, on December 25, a large gathering assembled in St. Peter’s, where the Pope was to consecrate Charlemagne’s son as king. Suddenly, as Charlemagne rose from prayer, Leo placed a crown on his head and, while the assembled Romans acclaimed him as “Augustus and emperor,” the Pope abased himself before Charlemagne, “adoring” him “after the manner of the emperors of old.”

It seems clear that this coronation was the work of the papacy, not of the Frankish king, who is said to have been surprised and angry at it. The immediate beneficiary of the coronation was the pope, whose position henceforth was secure. Charlemagne was left to face its momentous consequences and, particularly, to secure that recognition from Constantinople without which his title was legally invalid. This, according to the chronicler Theophanes, he sought to do by offering marriage to the empress Irene, hoping thus “to reunite east and west.” If so, a revolution in Constantinople and the deposition of Irene in 802 brought the plan to nothing. In any case, the coronation of Charlemagne was an extralegal, indeed an illegal and revolutionary, proceeding. The pope had no right to make him emperor. Nor did the coronation create a new western by the side of the existing eastern empire. A usurper in the eyes of the Byzantines, Charlemagne had not the least prospect of succeeding to the throne of the Caesars. The only imperial territories on which he laid hands were the duchy of Rome and the former exarchate. Otherwise he remained, as before, king of the Franks and of the Lombards. In view of the fact that in 806 he made arrangements to divide his territories among his three sons, one may doubt whether Charlemagne’s empire would have survived had not the two elder sons died before him, leaving the undivided inheritance in 814 to the third son, Louis I the Pious.

Although the immediate context of the imperial coronation of 800 was limited, it had wider connotations. In the first place, the separation between East and West had become an accomplished fact in the political sphere; for, though the intention in 800 was not to divide the empire, this was the practical outcome. In 812, after unsuccessful war and wearisome negotiation, the Byzantine emperor Michael I recognized Charlemagne’s imperial title. It was still a personal title, and Charlemagne was recognized merely as emperor, not as emperor of the Romans; in other words, the emperor in Constantinople maintained his claim to be the only true successor to the Roman Caesars. Furthermore, the recognition was grudgingly given, and later, when Byzantium was stronger and the Carolingians weaker, Michael’s successors refused to extend it automatically to Charlemagne’s successors. Thus the second consequence of the act of 800 was a rivalry with Constantinople, which remained an important factor in imperial history at least until 1204. In the third place, Charlemagne’s coronation involved him and his successors ever more deeply in the ecumenical pretensions of the papacy.

The relationship between the papacy and the Frankish rulers, close for nearly 50 years before 800, was intensified when the Roman see became the first metropolitan church of Charlemagne’s dominions. Religious emperors and their ecclesiastical advisers would henceforward see as the main function attaching to their imperial dignity the promotion of Christian unity. Furthermore, the fact that the pope had crowned Charlemagne emperor—rightfully or not—could not but impress. It was the pope who had taken the initiative. Had he not, in fact, constituted Charlemagne emperor? In Innocent III’s time it was to be argued that Pope Leo III had transferred the empire from the Greeks to the Germans and that his successors could transfer it elsewhere if they so wished. This was a later doctrine; but already to Charlemagne the dangers were evident. Hence when, in 813 after his agreement with Michael I, Charlemagne decided to associate his surviving son, Louis, in the exercise of imperial power, he framed his actions accordingly. The ceremony took place not in Rome but in the imperial chapel at Aachen; the pope was not present; the constitutive act was the acclamation of the gathered Frankish nobility; and Louis either received the diadem from his father or took it with his own hands from the altar. The contrast with the Roman ceremony of 800 was deliberate. Henceforward the conflict between the two contrary views or theories of the empire—the papal and the Frankish—was to be a dominant theme.

Charlemagne’s successors
The Carolingian Empire

Louis I the Pious (814–840) was a man in every way different from his father. For him the word empire was to be the unifying idea holding together his various dominions, and accordingly he abandoned his separate royal titles. This was the underlying notion of the Ordinatio imperii of 817; by this, Louis made his eldest son, Lothair Lothar I, emperor with him, while the younger sons, Pippin and Louis the German, received the subordinate kingdoms of Aquitaine and Bavaria. Louis I’s ideas, however, aroused the conservative opposition of the Frankish nobility, and soon the Frankish lands were involved in civil war. Furthermore, internal dissension helped the papacy, which increased its influence by favouring one party or the other. Already in 816 Pope Stephen IV (or V) had persuaded Louis to receive unction at his hands at Reims and also to be recrowned, thus repairing the defect of 813; and though Lothair Lothar I had been raised to the imperial dignity in 817, as Louis had been in 813, without papal intervention, he also saw fit to strengthen his title by being crowned by Paschal I in Rome in 823. Thus the empire, instead of becoming an appendage of the Frankish kingship, was drawn back into the papal sphere. Lothair’s Lothar’s son Louis II was crowned by the pope in 850, to be sole emperor from Lothair’s Lothar’s death in 855 to his own in 875; his uncle Charles II the Bald was emperor from 875 to 877; then Charles III the Fat was crowned emperor in 881. But the imperial title, without power to support it, was a mere name, and with the dislocation of the Carolingian realm, culminating in the deposition of Charles the Fat by the East Frankish magnates in 887, its decline was rapid.

From 888 France, Germany, and Italy were separate states, with the kingdom of Burgundy and Lorraine (Lotharingia) as debatable lands. Who, in these circumstances, was to be emperor? The nominee of the pope, himself a puppet of Italian aristocratic factions? Or Charlemagne’s rightful heir, whoever he might be? Or simply the strongest king of western Europe? For the moment, the first solution prevailed, and there followed a series of emperors chosen from the Italian nobility, starting with Guy of Spoleto (891–894) and his son Lambert (894–898), in concurrence with the East Frankish king Arnulf, who was also crowned emperor in 896 (and died 899). But such men were of little use to the papacy; and the papacy, in the depths to which it had sunk, was little use to them. Louis III, crowned in 901, was deposed in 905 by Berengar of Friuli, who was himself crowned by the pope in 915, but on Berengar’s death in 924 the powerful Roman family of the Crescentii, determined to keep authority in its own hands, stepped in and suppressed the imperial title. Thus the empire created in 800 disappeared, ineffective and unmourned.

The Ottonian Empire

While in Italy the empire was in process of dissolution, north of the Alps imperial ideas persisted, but not in the form associated with the papacy. The Frankish tradition of empire looked back to Charlemagne; amid the divisions of the dying 9th century it reflected the notion of Frankish unity. It was also seen as the expression of power and hegemony and of rule—as Charlemagne had ruled—over a number of different countries. Thus the West Frankish king Charles II the Bald had been proclaimed emperor and Augustus when he invaded Lorraine in 869—six years before he was crowned emperor in Rome—because he was now ruler of two kingdoms. The first Saxon king of Germany, Henry I, was acclaimed emperor (the chronicler Widukind relates) because of his victory over the Hungarians in 933, as was his son, Otto I, after the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. This is a Frankish idea of empire that has nothing to do with Rome. Indeed, the successor-states that are called France and Germany remained Frankish—the West Frankish and the East Frankish kingdoms, though the latter was ruled by a Saxon. As such, it was their ambition to succeed to the Frankish inheritance, and it was inevitable, in view of the anarchic state of Italy, that the ruler of the one or the other, when strong enough, would cross the Alps. In fact, it was the East Frankish kingdom that recovered first from the 9th-century anarchy, not least because its kings knew how to use the Frankish church for their ends.

In this Otto I, who succeeded to the East Frankish throne in 936, was the true heir of Charlemagne; he made churchmen his ministers and established missionary bishoprics on the Elbe River to spread Christianity among the Wends. In the west the Carolingian Louis IV of France was his protégé, and only Otto’s support kept the young king of Burgundy, Conrad, on his throne. In 951 Otto descended on Italy, married the late king’s widow, and forced the new king, Berengar of Ivrea, to hold his kingdom as a vassal of the German crown. Ten years later, summoned by the pope when Berengar was on the point of taking control in Rome, Otto returned to Italy. He was crowned emperor by Pope John XII on Candlemas day 962.

Once again, as in 800, it was the pope who took the initiative; his need for protection was the immediate cause of the coronation. But Otto’s empire was more limited in scope than Charlemagne’s, its pretensions less universal. In the intervening period the import of the title imperator augustus had shrunk, so that by Otto’s time it scarcely extended beyond protection or “advocacy” of the Roman church. Likewise the extent of the empire, territorially, had decreased. Neither Otto I nor his successors made any claim, as heirs of Charlemagne, to rule over the West Frankish lands. Henceforward what came to be known as the empire meant simply a union of Germany and northern Italy (and after 1032 the kingdom of Burgundy) under a single rule. This was far from the ecumenical pretensions of Rome, and though, partly because of the extent of their territories, partly because of their special connection with the papacy, the Ottonian and Salian emperors enjoyed preeminence among the rulers of western Europe, they certainly did not seek to exercise world dominion. Nor did they seek to challenge the Byzantine emperors in their rule over the empire of the East. Nevertheless the problem of the relations of the two empires necessarily reasserted itself, for the Byzantine Empire had made rapid recovery and was preparing, under Nicephorus II Phocas and Basil II Bulgaroctonus, to embark on expansion and reconquest. Fears of Byzantine interference in Roman politics and conflicting claims in southern Italy soon brought the two powers into rivalry, and the conflict proved to be the spur for a major development—the romanization of the western empire. Whereas Otto I had laid no claim to the Roman title, Otto II (co-emperor 967; sole emperor 973–983), to bolster his claims against Basil II, proclaimed himself Roman emperor. From this it was only a short step to describing the empire itself as the Roman Empire, and this change occurred in Conrad II’s reign 1024–39; crowned 1027). It was reinforced, from 1040, by the introduction of the title “king of the Romans” for the emperor-elect before his coronation, or for the emperor’s designated successor. It is noteworthy, however, that these formal changes were the result not of claims to the heritage of ancient Rome or of universal pretensions but simply of rivalry with Byzantium.

In this development the reign of Otto III (983–1002; crowned 996) forms an interlude. The son of a Greek princess, imbued with Byzantine traditions, Otto III drew on Roman, Carolingian, and Christian strands to form a new synthesis combining the heterogeneous elements in the imperial idea. Rome was to be his capital, the pope his lieutenant in the spread of Christian dominion. How much of this would have survived, if Otto had lived longer, remains doubtful. In fact, distance alone made unified imperial rule over Germany and Italy impossible. Otto himself lost Rome shortly before his death. What did survive, as the characteristic feature of the empire from Otto I to Henry III, was the close subordination of pope to emperor. Otto I deposed John XII and Benedict V; Otto III nominated his cousin, Gregory V, and his tutor, Sylvester II; and after neglect of Italian affairs under Henry II (1002–24; crowned 1014) and Conrad II, Henry III (1039–56; crowned 1046) deposed Benedict IX and Sylvester III, and compelled Gregory VI to abdicate. This was not oppression or force but the fulfillment of the emperor’s supreme duty—to watch over the welfare of the church. The iconography of the time shows the emperor, not the pope, as the representative of St. Peter and often standing alone as God’s vicar on earth. The period from 962 to 1046, in fact, saw the empire at its zenith. No other kingdom of Europe was its match; while the papacy, except when under imperial protection, was the degraded tool of Roman factions. Morally, also, the empire had the support of the greatest reformers of the age—the abbots of Cluny, for example—who looked to the emperor rather than to the pope as the effective head of Latin Christendom.

Empire and papacy

From the middle of the 11th century the situation began to change. One cause was the rapid progress of European economic recovery, which brought shifts of power detrimental to Germany. More immediately important was the revival of the papacy, which the emperors had done so much to further. After Henry III’s death in 1056 the initiative passed into papal hands. It was favoured by the long minority—until 1065—of Henry IV (crowned 1084; died 1106), which enabled the papacy to act without fear of intervention from north of the Alps, and by the appearance of allies—particularly the Normans of the Kingdom of Sicily, who for their own purposes supported the papacy against the empire. As they reached maturity the peoples of Europe turned to the pope as leader of Christendom. Even within the imperial frontiers the emperor’s power meant more to the Germans than to the inhabitants of Burgundy or of Italy, for whom it betokened subjection to German rule. Furthermore, only Otto III—and he for less than four years—made Rome the seat of empire; all the rest, from Charlemagne onward, concentrated their efforts north of the Alps. In practice, therefore, the empire was a very imperfect realization of the ideal of an imperium Christianum; and as soon as it was in a position to vindicate its independence, the papacy found many adherents.

The Investiture Controversy

Under Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) the papal theory of the empire, as formulated in the 9th century, was revived, but on broader and firmer foundations. The result was the conflict, from 1076 until 1122, known as the Investiture Controversy, ostensibly centring on the question of whether lay overlords had the authority to “invest” bishops and abbots within their domains—that is, to appoint them and formally give them the symbols of their office. The real issue, however, was not the investiture of bishoprics and abbacies but the place of the emperor in Christian society and his relations with the papacy. Only the pope, Gregory VII asserted, might use the imperial insignia; he might lawfully depose emperors but should himself be judged by none (these lapidary statements are among the 27 included in the Dictatus papae of 1075 and were set down in Gregory’s register). Thus the claim to independence turned rapidly into a claim to superiority. In particular, the sacred character of the emperor was challenged, as was his claim to be responsible directly to God. Instead, on the basis of the Donation of Constantine and a papal interpretation of the coronation of 800, it was argued that it was for the pope to convey the imperial dignity and, if he thought fit, to withhold or withdraw it. The Investiture Controversy was brought to a close by compromise in the Concordant of Worms of 1122 between Pope Calixtus II and the emperor Henry V; but Gregory VII’s claims were taken up again by popes Alexander III, Innocent III, Innocent IV, and Boniface VIII, in a series of conflicts that shook the empire to its foundations.

The Hohenstaufen emperors

The challenge thrown out by Gregory VII forced the emperors to seek new foundations for their position. Gregory’s great opponent, the emperor Henry IV, had still asserted the traditional rights of his father. His successors in the 12th century, Henry V (1106–25; crowned 1111), Lothair Lothar II (1125–37; crowned 1133), Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90; crowned 1155), and Henry VI (1190–97; crowned 1191), shifted their ground. To counter the arguments of church lawyers they grasped the weapons provided by the revival of Roman law. A new and more exalted conception of the empire was the result. Best known was the addition by Frederick I Barbarossa, in 1157, of the word sacrum to the name of the empire, which then became the Sacrum Imperium (Holy Empire) as a counterblast to the Sancta Ecclesia (Holy Church). Equally characteristic was the canonization of Charlemagne by Frederick’s antipope Paschal III in 1165. In this way Frederick emphasized continuity with the Frankish past and asserted his rights as Charlemagne’s successor. They derived, he argued, not from conferment by the pope or by the Roman people but from Frankish conquest.

Unlike earlier emperors, who had based their position on their special relation with the church, the Hohenstaufen emperors emphasized its secular foundations. Against Pope Innocent III’s claims to confer the imperial crown, imperial lawyers asserted that “he who is chosen by the election of the princes alone is the true emperor, even before he has been confirmed by the pope.” Nor is it surprising that, confronted with the universal claims of the papacy, the Hohenstaufen emperors asserted rights no less universal. Though in day-to-day politics, in their relations with the kings of France or of England, for example, there is no sign that they were seeking world dominion, nevertheless the new imperialism soon called forth protests from all sides—from England and France, from Denmark and Hungary. “Who,” asked John of Salisbury, “appointed the Germans to be judges over the nations?”

Meanwhile, the conflict with the papacy and the desire to restore the territorial basis of imperial power, which the Investiture Controversy had shattered, drew the emperors more and more into Italy, where they encountered the same national reaction. Unable to defeat the Lombard League, a northern Italian urban coalition, Frederick I patched up the Peace of Constance in 1183. His ultimate sovereignty was recognized, but his power in Italy was fatally compromised. After his son, Henry VI, had through marriage inherited the kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily, the power of the Norman kingdom was used to restore the imperial position in Italy. It was a grandiose policy but overstrained. The papacy, fearing that Rome would be engulfed, reacted violently.

Pope Innocent III, profiting from German dissensions after the early death of Henry VI (1197), played upon the German factions (Otto IV, not established as king until 1208, was crowned emperor in 1209). Henry VI’s son Frederick II (1212–50; crowned 1220), by the Privilegium in favorem principum ecclesiasticorum (1220) and by the Statutum in favorem principum (1232), made far-reaching concessions to the German princes in order to ensure their support for his Italian policy, but in vain. In spite of his striking victory at Cortenuova in 1237 Frederick II failed to crush the Lombards and was excommunicated in 1239 and deposed in 1245. His death in 1250 marked the effective end of the medieval empire. In Germany a long interregnum (from 1250 to 1273) brought down the imperial structure. In Italy, to ensure that there could be no restoration, the papacy called in Charles of Anjou, a younger son from the French royal house, who conquered the south and became King Charles I of Naples and Sicily (1266–85). When Rudolf I of Habsburg succeeded as German king in 1273, he was only the head of a federation of princes, while in Italy he abandoned all claims over the centre and south, and he retained only titular rights in Lombard.

The empire after Frederick II

It is characteristic of the new situation that Rudolf I of Habsburg, though he made a number of attempts, never formally achieved the imperial dignity. Henceforward the title of emperor, though it continued, usually did not have the sanction of personal crowning by a pope or papal legate. For a century after Frederick II’s death the only “true” emperor was Henry VII (king from 1308 to 1313), who was crowned in Rome in 1312 by legates of the Avignon pope. Thereafter until the end of the empire there were in all only four emperors who were duly crowned: Charles IV, crowned by a legate in 1355; Sigismund, by the pope in 1433; Frederick III, in 1452; and Charles V, by the pope but at Bologna, in 1530. If the empire and imperial title continued to exist, it resulted partly from the force of tradition, partly from the exigencies of German politics, and partly from fear of the dangerous conflict of interests that any plan for its abolition would necessarily involve.

The Germans, naturally, were unwilling to surrender hope of regaining something of the empire’s former power: both Henry VII and Louis IV (king from 1314 to 1347; his Roman coronation in 1327 was by representatives of the people) sought to revive the Italian policies of the Hohenstaufen. But the balance had swung against them. France was already striving for the imperial position that Napoleon was ultimately to secure, and France determined that the Germans should not recover the imperial prerogatives. Moreover, in Germany itself, civil war had undermined the power of the kingship, and the elective monarchy was effectively controlled by the princes through the college of electors definitely established soon after 1250. French pretensions to leadership in Europe provoked a last tardy revival of imperialist sentiment both in Germany (Alexander of Roes at the end of the 13th century, Engelbert of Admont at the beginning of the 14th) and in Italy (Marsilius of Padua and Dante), but the emperor Charles IV, a sober realist, drew the necessary conclusions. By then the axiom that “the king is emperor in his kingdom” was firmly established; it marked the end of any universalist dream. Charles set out accordingly to make the empire a specifically German institution. By agreement with Pope Clement V, he formally abandoned Italy; he would enter Rome only on the day fixed for his coronation and leave again the same day. This he did on April 5, 1355. Then he turned to the definition of the German constitution, particularly the rights of the electors, in the Golden Bull of 1356. The change was reflected in the final evolution of the empire’s title: Sacrum Romanum Imperium Nationis Germanicae (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation). This title, which appears under Frederick III (king from 1440, emperor from 1452 to 1493), indicates that the emperor’s powers were limited to his German lands. In 1508 Frederick’s successor Maximilian I, unable to go to Rome, assumed with papal consent the style “elected emperor” or “chosen emperor” (Latin imperator electus; German erwählter Kaiser).

The empire in modern times

The history of the empire after the promulgation of the Golden Bull may be treated briefly, because from that time it is essentially a part of German history. It is true that memories of an imperial past continued to have an influence on German thinking and that in the Habsburg lands there was a sense of belonging to a multinational empire. A few emperors—Sigismund in the 15th century, Charles V in the 16th—may even have thought to recover part of the old imperial prerogative. It was also possible to make something of the empire’s leadership of Christendom against the Turks. But institutionally the role of the empire was almost continuously whittled away. After the failure of the project of imperial reform sponsored in 1495 by the elector of Mainz, Berthold of Henneberg, the hope vanished of endowing the empire with permanent institutions effective beyond the limits of the different principalities. The Reformation entrenched the princes firmly in their rights and accentuated their autonomy.

When Charles V, opening the Diet of Worms in 1521, declared that “the empire from of old had not many masters, but one, and it is our intention to be that one,” he was shutting his eyes to the realities. The extent of his dominions was imposing, but they were a weak dynastic agglomeration; and though Charles championed the Roman Catholic Church against the Reformation, his empire was neither in spirit nor in fact a revival of the medieval empire. When he accepted the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and abdicated in 1556, the change that was begun with the accession of Rudolf I of Habsburg was completed. With Germany split into two religious camps, the emperor was little more than the head of a religious faction. Furthermore, after Sigismund’s death (1437), with one short intermission for Charles VII from 1742 to 1745, the imperial crown, though in theory elective, was hereditary in the Habsburg dynasty of Austria; and this fact produced a cleavage of interests between emperor and empire.

The end of the empire

From 1556 until its end under Francis II in 1806 the empire meant little more than a loose federation of the different princes of Germany, lay and ecclesiastical, under the presidency of the House of Habsburg. After the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), no emperor again attempted, as Charles V had done, to reestablish a strengthened central authority; and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked the empire’s final organization on federal lines. Yet, even at the end, the empire had loyal adherents, particularly among the small knights and noblemen of western Germany, who regarded it as their safeguard against princely absolutism; and its role was not so entirely negative as is sometimes thought. Its loose structure still suited to some degree the cosmopolitan spirit of the 18th century. But with the French Revolution, and the intensified nationalism that followed, it became an anachronism.

As far back as the end of the 13th century, French kings had been scheming to annex the title as well as to absorb the outlying territories of the empire. With Napoleon’s rise to power this ambition came within reach. Posing as the new Charlemagne (“because, like Charlemagne, I unite the crown of France to that of the Lombards, and my empire marches with the east”), he resolved in 1806 to oust Francis II from his title and to make the Holy Roman Empire a part of the Napoleonic “new order.” He was anticipated, however, by Francis II, who in 1804 had assumed the title “hereditary emperor of Austria” and who, resolving that no other should wear the crown that he was powerless to defend, resigned the old imperial dignity on August 6, 1806.

So perished the Holy Roman Empire. The extent and character of its influence will always be a matter for debate, but it left a deep imprint on Europe. Nor did it cease to be influential after its extinction. The debate about the medieval empire was an ideological background to the creation of the Second Reich, or German Empire, in 1871, and even Hitler’s Third Reich drew sustenance from memories, often thwarted and perverted, of Charlemagne and Otto the Great and Frederick II.

The classic account in English is that of James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, new ed. (1904, reprinted 1978). Further broad studies include Geoffrey Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe: The Ninth and Tenth Centuries in European History (1976), and The Mediæval Empire: Idea and Reality (1950, reissued 1964), somewhat critical of Bryce; and Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century (1969, reissued 1980; originally published in French, 1953), with bibliography. The best bibliographic resource is Jonathan W. Zophy (compiler), An Annotated Bibliography of the Holy Roman Empire (1986).

The components of the imperial idea are explained in Fedor Schneider, Rom und Romgedanke im Mittelalter (1925, reprinted 1959); H.X. Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique, 2nd rev. ed. (1955, reissued 1972); Carl Erdmann, Forschungen zur politischen Ideenwelt des Frühmittelalters (1951); and John G. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality (1980). The intellectual climate of the early period is covered in Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders (1991; originally published in German, 2 vol., 1984). Relations between the eastern and western empires are chronicled in Werner Ohnsorge, Das Zweikaiserproblem im früheren Mittelalter (1947); Franz Dölger, Byzanz und die europäische Staatenwelt (1953, reprinted 1976); and George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, rev. ed. (1969, reprinted 1980; originally published in German, 1940). The Carolingian empire is treated in Karl Heldmann, Das Kaisertum Karls des Grossen (1928, reissued 1971); and Louis Halphen, Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire (1977; originally published in French, 1947). The period of the Investiture is discussed in Élie Voosen, Papauté et pouvoir civil à l’époque de Grégoire VII (1927); and Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (1940, reissued 1991; originally published in German, 1936). Walther Holtzmann, Das mittelalterliche Imperium und die werdenden Natione (1953); and Hans Joachim Kirfel, Weltherrschaftsidee und Bündnispolitik (1959), treat the Hohenstaufen empire. R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (1989, reissued 1992), covers topics ranging from confessionalism to popular culture during the Reformation. The empire after the interregnum is analyzed by Friedrich Bock, Reichsidee und Nationalstaaten (1943); James Allen Vann, The Making of a State: Württemberg, 1593–1793 (1984); and M.j. Rodríguez-Salgado, The Changing Face of Empire: Charles V, Philip II, and Habsburg Authority, 1551–1559 (1988). The classic account of the imperial constitution after the Thirty Years’ War is a contemporary work in modern translation by Samuel Pufendorf, Die Verfassung des deutschen Reiches, trans. from Latin (1976).