Holy Roman Empire

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‘Ce corps qu’on appelle et qui s’appelle encore le Saint-Empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire’
— Voltaire (1756)

Metadata

Name: Holy Roman Empire (Sacrum Imperium Romanum, 800 - 924 / 962 - 1806)
Predecessors (800):

  • Kingdom of the Lombards (774)
  • Kingdom of the Franks (843)

Predecessors (962):

  • East Francia

Successors:

  • Austrian Empire (1804)
  • Confederated States of the Rhine (1806)
  • Kingdom of Prussia (1806)

Holy Roman Empire in 1337

LUDWIG IV THE BAVARIAN — EMPEROR WITHOUT A POPE

Ludwig of Wittelsbach wears the imperial crown in open defiance of the Church: excommunicated for a decade, he marched to Rome anyway and had himself crowned by the city’s laymen, then appointed his own antipope for good measure. Avignon thunders; Ludwig shrugs, sheltering the pope’s cleverest enemies — Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham — at his court in Munich. Now the wider board is shifting. Edward of England, hungry for allies against France, comes bearing gold, and this year Ludwig names him imperial vicar as the great war between England and France begins. At home, the prince-electors weary of papal meddling and edge toward a momentous declaration: that the man they elect is emperor by their choice alone, and God’s — no pope required. Can the electors make the empire’s crown truly its own? Or will the Wittelsbach habit of collecting territories for the family unite every other prince, and the Luxembourgs, against him?

TL;DR

The Holy Roman Empire was founded when Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish King Charlemagne1 as Emperor of the Romans in 800 AD. The Holy See had long been trying to move the religious and power center from Greece back to Western Europe, and the vacancy (vacante imperio) of a legitimate Basileus in the Eastern Roman Empire gave the Pope a perfect reason2.

The empire lapsed in 924 when the Carolingian dynasty ended, but the server was rebooted when the Pope crowned Otto I in 962. From there, the history became a centuries-long tug-of-war between the Emperor and the Pope over who was actually in charge3. The Golden Bull of 1356 eventually patched the system, turning it into an elective monarchy run by seven Prince-Electors.

By the late stages, the Habsburg dynasty 4 monopolized the throne through strategic marriages rather than conquest. The Empire survived the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, but it couldn’t survive Napoleon. In 1806, after a thousand-year run, Francis II dissolved the empire to prevent Napoleon from hijacking the title5.

Electoral Monarchy

Unlike the rest of Europe who struggled with succession crises for centuries, Holy Roman Empire deploys a very advanced (or very primitive) succession system known as elective monarchy. The process was chaotic and usually led to civil wars whenever an emperor died until the terms were codified finally in the Golden Bull of 1356, with the most notable change being the removal of the Pope’s involvement. Seven designated Prince-Electors (Kurfürsten) had the sole power to vote for the next emperor:

  • Archbishop of Mainz (Primate of Germany)
  • Archbishop of Trier (Arch-Chancellor of Burgundy)
  • Archbishop of Cologne (Arch-Chancellor of Italy)
  • King of Bohemia (Arch-Cupbearer)6
  • Count Palatine of the Rhine (Arch-Steward)
  • Duke of Saxony (Arch-Marshal)
  • Margrave of Brandenburg (Arch-Chamberlain)
    The system then lasted until Napoleon, though the Habsburgs eventually broke the game mechanics by simply having enough money to buy the election every single time for 300 years7.

The Famous Debate

Despite sounding like a divine restoration of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire was the geopolitical platypus of history. Everyone knows the famous roast from Voltaire in 1756:

“This body which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”

By Voltaire’s time, the empire was indeed far from any of those three adjectives. A more faithful name for the state would be the “Excommunicated German Confederation”8.

Wait, why was he right?

Here is the breakdown of why the name was a lie by the 18th Century:

  • Not Holy: After the Protestant Reformation and the Peace of Augsburg, the Empire was split between Catholics and Lutherans/Calvinists. It was no longer a unified “sword of the Church.” In fact, the Pope and Emperor spent most of the Middle Ages fighting each other.

  • Not Roman: It was fundamentally German. The title claimed lineage from Charlemagne (who was a Frank) and the “Transfer of Rule” (Translatio imperii) from the Greeks. But by the 1700s, Italy had mostly left the chat, and the Emperors were Habsburgs sitting in Vienna, not Caesars in Rome.

  • Not an Empire: An Empire implies a centralized state. The HRE was a loose confederation of hundreds of independent principalities (The “Border Gore”). The Emperor was elected and had almost no authority to tell the princes what to do.

Credits: r/AskHistorians

Footnotes

  1. The dude’s name is actually Charles (Carolus). Instead of joining the overcrowded “The Great” lounge, he simply embedded “The Great” (Magnus) directly into his name (Carolus Magnus → Charlemagne). That is branding efficiency. ↩

  2. Well, not that perfect. The Byzantium had a legitimate Basileus Irene of Athens. But Leo III didn’t want to wait until he had a better excuse than gender bias, so he declared the throne “vacant” because a woman couldn’t hold it. ↩

  3. This peaked during the Investiture Controversy, where Emperor Henry IV had to stand barefoot in the snow for three days at Canossa just to get the Pope to reply to his DMs. ↩

  4. The Habsburg motto was “Let others wage war, you, happy Austria, marry.” This strategy gained them half of Europe but cost them their chins. Jokes aside, Habsburg chin is actually a thing. ↩

  5. As every other emperor who had to give up the throne, Francis II already proclaimed Empire of Austria 2 years earlier. ↩

  6. “There is a traitor among… wait, why do we all have different title ranks?” The confused King of Bohemia may ask. Bohemia was the only territory inside the Empire allowed to be a “Kingdom,” which made team meetings with the Dukes and Margraves incredibly awkward. ↩

  7. You could bribe the seven electors once to get the throne, then use the tax money to bribe them more for your son… eventually, the “election” just became a formality. ↩

  8. Ironically, the Pope (who created the Empire) was its biggest hater. Popes and Emperors fought for power so often—see the Investiture Controversy—that being excommunicated became a standard part of the job description for a “Holy” Emperor. ↩