The Holy Roman Empire, also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, was a polity comprising and controlling much of Central Europe and Western Europe, headed by the Holy Roman Emperor and characterized by a decentralized political structure. It developed in the Early Middle Ages (beginning in either 800 or 962), and lasted for a millennium until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. Initially, it consisted of three constituent kingdoms—Germany, Italy, and (from 1032) Burgundy—held together by the emperor's overlordship. By the 15th century, imperial governance had become concentrated in and upon the Kingdom of Germany, as the empire's effective control over Italy and Burgundy had largely disappeared.
On 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne (the Frankish king) as Roman Emperor, reviving the title more than three centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The title had again lapsed by 924 but was revived again in 962 with the crowning of Otto of Saxony as emperor by Pope John XII. Otto the Great (as he became known), was King of the Germans but as emperor he became Charlemagne's successor, ruling in lands that had been first brought together as the Carolingian Empire. From 962 until the 13th century, the empire was one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe. It depended on continuing cooperation between emperors and still relatively powerful and independent vassals. The empire reached its apex in terms of territorial expansion and power in the mid-13th century, under the House of Hohenstaufen, but this was an overextension and led to a partial collapse.
The imperial office was traditionally elected: mostly by a handful of (predominantly German) prince-electors and electors-spiritual (archbishops). In theory and diplomacy, the emperors were considered first amongst equals of Europe's (at least its Catholic) monarchies.
A process of Imperial Reform in the late 15th and early 16th centuries transformed the empire, creating a set of institutions which endured until its final demise in the 19th century. On 6 August 1806, Emperor Francis II abdicated and formally dissolved the empire following the creation by French emperor Napoleon of the Confederation of the Rhine from German client states loyal to France. For most of its history, the Empire primarily consisted of the entirety of the modern countries of the Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Switzerland, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, and large swathes of what is now eastern France, northern and central Italy, and western Poland.
Name and general perception
Initially, following Charlemagne's coronation in 800, the realm was simply referred to as the "Roman Empire". The term sacrum ("holy", in the sense of "consecrated") in connection with the medieval Roman Empire was used beginning in 1157 under Frederick I Barbarossa ("Holy Empire"): the term was added to reflect Frederick's ambition to dominate Italy and the Papacy. The form "Holy Roman Empire" is attested from 1254 onward.
The exact term "Holy Roman Empire" was not in use until the 13th century, before which the empire was referred to variously as universum regnum ("the whole kingdom", as opposed to the regional kingdoms), imperium christianum ("Christian empire"), or Imperium Romanum ("Roman empire"), but the Emperor's legitimacy always rested on the concept of translatio imperii, that he held supreme power inherited from the ancient emperors of Rome.
From the mid-13th century onward, the Holy Roman Empire came to be more firmly associated with a German (deutsch) identity. By around 1500, contemporary sources often referred to it simply as "Germany", reflecting its identification as a specifically German polity. In a decree following the Diet of Cologne in 1512, the name was changed to the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" (German: Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, Latin: Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Germanicae), a form first used in a document in 1474. The adoption of this new name coincided with the loss of imperial territories in Italy and Burgundy to the south and west by the late 15th century, but also to emphasize the new importance of the German Imperial Estates in ruling the Empire due to the Imperial Reform. The Hungarian denomination "German Roman Empire" (Hungarian: Német-római Birodalom) is the shortening of this.
By the end of the 18th century, the term "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" fell out of official use. Contradicting the traditional view concerning that designation, Hermann Weisert has argued in a study on imperial titulature that, despite the claims of many textbooks, the name "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" never had an official status and points out that documents were thirty times as likely to omit the national suffix as include it. Similarly, Peter Wilson states that "of the German Nation" was "appended more frequently after 1512 without becoming the Empire's official title – despite numerous later claims to the contrary", and that "German historians are far more likely to refer to [the Empire] as 'of the German nation' than were its actual inhabitants." Still, the full name including "of the German Nation" was used in official documents and by contemporary chroniclers alike.
In a famous assessment of the name, the political philosopher Voltaire remarked sardonically: "This body which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." In the modern period, the Empire was often informally called the "German Empire" (Deutsches Reich) or "Roman-German Empire" (Römisch-Deutsches Reich). After its dissolution through the end of the German Empire, it was often called "the old Empire" (das alte Reich). Beginning in 1923, early 20th-century German nationalists and Nazi Party propaganda would identify the Holy Roman Empire as the "First" Reich (Erstes Reich, Reich meaning empire), with the German Empire as the "Second" Reich and what would eventually become Nazi Germany as the "Third" Reich.
David S. Bachrach opines that the Ottonian kings actually built their empire on the back of military and bureaucratic apparatuses as well as the cultural legacy they inherited from the Carolingians, who ultimately inherited these from the Late Roman Empire. He argues that the Ottonian empire was hardly an archaic kingdom of primitive Germans, maintained by personal relationships only and driven by the desire of the magnates to plunder and divide the rewards among themselves but instead, notable for their abilities to amass sophisticated economic, administrative, educational and cultural resources that they used to serve their enormous war machine.
Until the end of the 15th century, the empire consisted of three major blocks—Germany, Italy and Burgundy. Effectively, the Kingdom of Germany became the sole remaining component. The Burgundian territories were lost to France. Although the Italian territories were formally part of the empire, the territories were ignored in the Imperial Reform and splintered into numerous de facto independent territorial entities. The status of Italy in particular varied throughout the 16th to 18th centuries. Some territories like Piedmont-Savoy became increasingly independent, while others became more dependent due to the extinction of their ruling noble houses causing these territories to often fall under the dominions of the Habsburgs and their cadet branches. Barring the loss of Franche-Comté in 1678, the external borders of the Empire did not change noticeably from the Peace of Westphalia – which acknowledged the exclusion of Switzerland and the Northern Netherlands, and the French protectorate over Alsace – to the dissolution of the Empire. At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, most of the Holy Roman Empire was included in the German Confederation, with the main exceptions being the Italian states.
History
Early Middle Ages
Carolingian Empire
As Roman power in Gaul declined during the 5th century, local Germanic tribes assumed control. In the late 5th and early 6th centuries, the Merovingians, under Clovis I and his successors, consolidated Frankish tribes and extended hegemony over others to gain control of northern Gaul and the middle Rhine river valley region. By the middle of the 8th century, the Merovingians were reduced to figureheads, and the Carolingians, led by Charles Martel, became the de facto rulers. In 751, Martel's son Pepin became King of the Franks, and later gained the sanction of the Pope. The Carolingians would maintain a close alliance with the Papacy. In 768, Pepin's son Charlemagne became King of the Franks and began an extensive expansion of the realm. He eventually incorporated the territories of present-day France, Germany, northern Italy, the Low Countries and beyond, linking the Frankish kingdom with Papal lands.
Although antagonism about the expense of Byzantine domination had long persisted within Italy, a political rupture was set in motion in earnest in 726 by the iconoclasm of Emperor Leo III the Isaurian, in what Pope Gregory II saw as the latest in a series of imperial heresies. In 797, the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VI was removed from the throne by his mother, Empress Irene, who declared herself sole ruler. As the Latin Church only regarded a male Roman emperor as the head of Christendom, Pope Leo III sought a new candidate for the dignity, excluding consultation with the patriarch of Constantinople.
Charlemagne's good service to the Church in his defense of Papal possessions against the Lombards made him the ideal candidate. On Christmas Day of 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor, restoring the title in the West for the first time in over three centuries. This can be seen as symbolic of the papacy turning away from the declining Byzantine Empire toward the new power of Carolingian Francia. Charlemagne adopted the formula Renovatio imperii Romanorum ("renewal of the Roman Empire"). In 802, Irene was overthrown and exiled by Nikephoros I and henceforth there were two Roman emperors.
After Charlemagne died in 814, the imperial crown passed to his son, Louis the Pious. Upon Louis' death in 840, it passed to his son Lothair, who had been his co-ruler. By this point the territory of Charlemagne was divided into several territories (cf. Treaty of Verdun, Treaty of Prüm, Treaty of Meerssen and Treaty of Ribemont), and over the course of the later 9th century the title of emperor was disputed by the Carolingian rulers of the Western Frankish Kingdom or West Francia and the Eastern Frankish Kingdom or East Francia, with first the western king (Charles the Bald) and then the eastern (Charles the Fat), who briefly reunited the Empire, attaining the prize.
In the 9th century, Charlemagne and his successors promoted the intellectual revival, known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Some, like Mortimer Chambers, opine that the Carolingian Renaissance made possible the subsequent renaissances (even though by the early 10th century, the revival already diminished). After the death of Charles the Fat in 888, Carolingian rule in the Roman Empire came to an end. According to Regino of Prüm, the parts of the realm "spewed forth kinglets", and each part elected a kinglet "from its own bowels". The last such emperor was Berengar I of Italy, who died in 924.
Post-Carolingian Eastern Frankish Kingdom
Around 900, East Francia's autonomous stem duchies (Franconia, Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony, and Lotharingia) reemerged. After the Carolingian king Louis the Child died without issue in 911, East Francia did not turn to the Carolingian ruler of West Francia to take over the realm but instead elected one of the dukes, Conrad of Franconia, as Rex Francorum Orientalium. On his deathbed, Conrad yielded the crown to his main rival, Henry the Fowler of Saxony (r. 919–936), who was elected king at the Diet of Fritzlar in 919. Henry reached a truce with the raiding Magyars, and in 933 he won a first victory against them in the Battle of Riade.
Henry died in 936, but his descendants, the Liudolfing (or Ottonian) dynasty, would continue to rule the Eastern kingdom or the Kingdom of Germany for roughly a century. Upon Henry the Fowler's death, Otto, his son and designated successor, was elected king in Aachen in 936. He overcame a series of revolts from a younger brother and from several dukes. After that, the king managed to control the appointment of dukes and often also employed bishops in administrative affairs. He replaced leaders of most of the major East Frankish duchies with his own relatives. At the same time, he was careful to prevent members of his own family from making infringements on his royal prerogatives.
Formation of the Holy Roman Empire
In 951, Otto came to the aid of Queen Adelaide of Italy, defeating her enemies, marrying her, and taking control over Italy. In 955, Otto won a decisive victory over the Magyars in the Battle of Lechfeld. In 962, Otto was crowned emperor by Pope John XII, thus intertwining the affairs of the German kingdom with those of Italy and the Papacy. Otto's coronation as emperor marked the German kings as successors to the empire of Charlemagne, which through the concept of translatio imperii, also made them consider themselves as successors to Ancient Rome. The flowering of arts beginning with Otto the Great's reign is known as the Ottonian Renaissance, centered in Germany but also happening in Northern Italy and France.
Otto created the imperial church system, often called "Ottonian church system of the Reich", which tied the great imperial churches and their representatives to imperial service, thus providing "a stable and long-lasting framework for Germany". During the Ottonian era, imperial women played a prominent role in political and ecclesiastic affairs, often combining their functions as religious leader and advisor, regent or co-ruler, notably Matilda of Ringelheim, Eadgyth, Adelaide of Italy, Theophanu, and Matilda of Quedlinburg.