Holy Roman Empire

None of the three words

formationDrafted from Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016)

Voltaire's line — that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire — is the best-known thing anybody has said about this polity and it is a joke made by a man arguing for something else. It has also shaped the reading of eight hundred and forty-four years, and Wilson's book is substantially an argument against it.

The objection to the joke is not that the empire was holy, Roman and an empire. It is that the test is wrong. Voltaire is measuring against the centralised territorial state that France was becoming, finding this polity is not one, and concluding it was nothing. What it actually was is a framework — a legal order covering central Europe, with a head, a supreme court, a diet and a body of constitutional law, inside which several hundred territories of wildly different size and status governed themselves and mostly did not fight each other.

By the standard of not being conquered, it outlasted every centralised state around it. By the standard of doing what a state does, it never began.

Imperial Treasury, Vienna · Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Otto

Otto I was king of East Francia, one of the three pieces the Carolingian empire had been divided into at Verdun in 843. He was a Saxon — from the people Charlemagne had spent thirty-two years conquering and baptising at spearpoint — and in 962 he was crowned emperor at Rome, seventy-four years after the last Carolingian emperor had been deposed.

That was a claim rather than a continuation, and it is worth insisting on the difference. Nothing had survived from 888 to be revived. There was no institution in abeyance, no line of pretenders, no body of officials waiting. What there was, was a title with two hundred years of prestige attached to it and nobody currently using it in the west.

The doctrine that grew up around this was translatio imperii: the Roman empire had passed from the Romans to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the Franks, and from the Franks to the Germans, and the German king crowned at Rome held it. That is a theory of transmission constructed after the fact to explain why a Saxon in Aachen was the heir of Augustus. It convinced a great many people for eight hundred years, which is a fair working definition of a successful political idea.

Why it was worth having

The title conferred no territory, no revenue and no additional power over anybody. Wilson's answer to why men wanted it anyway is precedence: the emperor was the senior secular ruler in Christendom, outranked nobody's army but everyone else's protocol, and held a set of reserved rights — creating nobles, legitimising bastards, chartering universities, granting the right to mint — that were worth money and were sellable.

It was also, for most of its length, the property of one family. The Habsburgs held it with two brief gaps from 1438 to 1806, and the honest account of why is that a dynasty with its own large territorial base could afford an office that paid nothing, and nobody else could.

We hear say

formationDrafted from Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930)

Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome on 2 February 962 by Pope John XII, who was about twenty-five and had inherited the papacy from his father along with the city. Within a year the pope had made an alliance with Otto's enemy in Italy and Otto had come back. Liudprand, bishop of Cremona, was present for what followed and wrote it up, and it is the earliest detailed account of how the revived empire actually worked.

Liudprand is not a neutral witness. He was Otto's diplomat, he wrote the account for Otto's court, and the chapters are a brief for the prosecution. That is not a reason to discard them. It is a reason to notice which details he thought helped his case.

The oath

When the emperor camped near Rome, the pope and his ally left the city together and the citizens let Otto in — promising again to be loyal, and adding, under a strong oath, that they would never elect or ordain a pope except with the consent and approval of the emperor and his son.

That single sentence is the constitutional content of the revival. Whatever translatio imperii meant in theory, in practice what a German king got by being crowned in Rome was a veto on who crowned him.

The synod

Three days later a synod met in St Peter's, and Liudprand lists the attendance the way a man does when the length of the list is the argument: archbishops from Milan and Ravenna, bishops from Saxony and France, the Italians, and then the Roman bishops one after another — Albano, Ostia, Porto, Palestrina, Velletri, Tivoli, Sutri, Narni, Anagni, Orte, and a dozen more. The Roman church was being convened against its own head in its own basilica.

Magdeburg, Germany · Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

The charges were then given in order. A cardinal priest testified that he had seen the pope celebrate mass without himself communicating. Two others said they had seen him ordain a deacon in a stable, and at the wrong time of year. The cardinal deacons said he had been paid for consecrating bishops and had made a ten-year-old a bishop at Todi. On the sacrilege, they said, no inquiry was needed: knowledge of it was a matter of eyesight, not hearsay. On the adultery they had no visual information but knew for certain about four women including his own niece, and that he had turned the palace into a brothel. He had hunted publicly. He had blinded his spiritual father, who died of it. He had castrated a cardinal subdeacon, who died of it. He had set houses on fire and gone about in sword, helmet and cuirass. Everybody present, clergy and laity, accused him of drinking wine for love of the devil; at dice he called on Jupiter and Venus; he did not say matins or cross himself.

Then Liudprand records the thing that gives the whole scene away. The emperor had to answer, and could not, because the Romans could not understand his native Saxon and he had no Latin — so he told the bishop of Cremona to get up and say it for him.

The heir of Augustus needed an interpreter to address a synod in Rome.

The letter

The synod wrote to the absent pope, politely, saying that his sons the Roman clergy had brought out such foul and filthy tales that they would be ashamed of them even if told about actors, and begging his paternal highness to come and clear himself, with an oath that nothing would be done contrary to the canons.

He replied. Liudprand gives the whole of it, and the whole of it is three sentences:

Bishop John, servant of God's servants, to all the bishops. We hear say that you wish to make another pope. If you do, I excommunicate you by Almighty God, and you have no power to ordain no one or celebrate mass.

The Latin is bad and Liudprand reproduces the badness deliberately; it is the cheapest and most effective thing in his account. But the reply is not stupid. It identifies, in one line, the only question that mattered — whether a synod convened by a foreign king can unmake a pope — and answers it with the one weapon the papacy had.

John was deposed and Leo VIII elected in his place. Otto went north. John came back into Rome, held a synod of his own, and undid everything; he died a few months later. The Romans then elected somebody else without asking the emperor, who came back a third time, and Liudprand records the successful candidate being asked in open synod by what authority he wore the pontifical robes, and whether he denied swearing that no pope would be elected without imperial consent, and answering: Have mercy upon my sin.

What was founded here

Not a state. What Otto founded in these three years was a relationship, and its terms were set in public: the emperor makes the pope, and the pope makes the emperor, and neither can do his half without the other's city.

It worked for a century, in the sense that emperors appointed popes and nobody successfully objected. Then somebody did.

Three days at the gate

expansionDrafted from Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (1896)

For a century after Otto, emperors appointed popes and invested bishops with the ring and the staff, which was how a state with no tax paid its officials: the imperial church held a large share of the land in Germany, and the men who held it were the emperor's men because the emperor had put them there.

In 1075 a pope decided to end that, and the documents of the quarrel survive almost complete, which for the eleventh century is extraordinary.

Canossa, Italy · Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (1896) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 2.5

The claims

Gregory VII's position was set out in a memorandum of twenty-seven propositions, each of one line. Among them:

That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal.

That he alone may use the imperial insignia.

That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet.

That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors.

That he himself may be judged by no one.

That the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity.

The German bishops answered for the king. Their letter is addressed to brother Hildebrand — the pope's own name, with no title — and accuses him of having invaded the helm of the church, of tearing the members of the church with proud cruelty and cruel pride, of taking from bishops the power divinely conferred on them, and of filling the church with the ill odour of a grave charge concerning his living with a strange woman: all the decrees of the apostolic see, they say, have been set in motion by women, and the whole circle of the church is administered through this new senate of women. Then the sentence the document exists for: we renounce the obedience which we never promised to thee.

Gregory's reply, five weeks later, is addressed to somebody else entirely. It begins O St Peter, chief of the apostles, incline to us, I beg, thy holy ears, and it is a report to a superior — that the Roman church drew him to its helm against his will, that he would rather have died a pilgrim than seized the throne, and that the power of binding and loosing has been granted him. Then:

I withdraw, through thy power and authority, from Henry the king, son of Henry the emperor, who has risen against thy church with unheard of insolence, the rule over the whole kingdom of the Germans and over Italy. And I absolve all Christians from the bonds of the oath which they have made or shall make to him; and I forbid any one to serve him as king.

That last clause is the weapon, and it was aimed past Henry at the German princes. A king whose subjects' oaths have been cancelled is a king whose great men may lawfully stop obeying him, and the German magnates had wanted a reason for years.

Canossa

Henry went to Italy in the winter of 1076–77 to get the sentence lifted before the princes could act on it, and Gregory — who had been heading north to meet those same princes — found himself at the castle of Canossa in the Apennines with the king outside.

The account of what happened is Gregory's own, in a circular letter to the German princes, and it has to be read as what it is: an explanation to the people he had been about to join, of why he had let their quarry off.

He came at length of his own accord, with a few followers, showing nothing of hostility or boldness, to the town of Canossa where we were tarrying. And there, having laid aside all the belongings of royalty, wretchedly, with bare feet and clad in wool, he continued for three days to stand before the gate of the castle. Nor did he desist from imploring with many tears the aid and consolation of the apostolic mercy until he had moved all of those who were present there, and whom the report of it reached, to such pity and depth of compassion that, interceding for him with many prayers and tears, all wondered indeed at the unaccustomed hardness of our heart, while some actually cried out that we were exercising, not the gravity of apostolic severity, but the cruelty, as it were, of a tyrannical ferocity.

Conquered, he says, by the persistency of the king's compunction and the supplications of everyone present, he loosed the chain of the anathema.

Then he spends the rest of the letter telling the princes it changes nothing. The whole question at issue is as yet so little cleared up that his coming and their unanimity remain extremely necessary; they are to continue in the faith in which they have begun; and he is not otherwise bound to the king except that, by word alone as is his custom, he has said Henry might have hopes from him.

A pope who had just won the most famous submission in European history spends three-quarters of his account of it reassuring his allies that he has not sold them out. Which is the correct reading of Canossa: Henry, by performing penance, had forced a priest to do what priests exist to do, and had thereby taken the princes' legal ground away from under them. He was excommunicated again three years later and this time it did not work at all.

What it settled

The quarrel ran another forty-five years and ended in a compromise so narrow that it reads like a drafting exercise. At Worms in 1122 the pope granted that elections of German bishops and abbots should take place in the emperor's presence, without simony and without violence, and that the man elected should receive the regalia — the lands and secular rights of the office — from the emperor, by the touch of a lance. The emperor for his part remitted to God and the apostles all investiture through ring and staff, and granted canonical election and free consecration in all the churches of his empire.

Two objects and two ceremonies. The ring and the staff, which are the bishop's spiritual office, come from the church; the lance, which is the land, comes from the emperor. The empire kept the estates and lost the men.

That was the end of the arrangement Otto had built. An emperor could no longer staff his own church, and the imperial church had been the nearest thing to an administration the empire had. Everything afterwards — the elective monarchy, the princes, the empire that could not tax and had to litigate instead — follows from a settlement about which of two objects a bishop receives from whom.

One word

expansionDrafted from Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (1896)

In October 1157 Frederick Barbarossa was holding court at Besançon when two papal legates arrived with a letter. By the end of the second day the German princes were on the point of killing them, and the emperor had to put a stop to it personally.

The quarrel was about a noun.

Cappenberg, Germany · Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (1896) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

The letter

Adrian IV's letter is mostly a complaint. An archbishop returning from Rome had been seized in Germany by impious and godless men who rose against him with drawn swords and took everything he had, and the emperor had let the outrage pass without the vengeance that was fitting: the sword given him by divine concession to punish evil-doers ought to have raged above the neck of the impious. The pope is entirely ignorant of the cause of this negligence, having always loved the emperor as a most dear and special son.

Then, working round to the reproach, he reminds Frederick what he owes:

Thou should'st, oh most glorious son, bring before the eyes of thy mind how graciously and how joyfully thy mother the holy Roman church received thee in a former year; with what affection of heart she treated thee; what plenitude of dignity and honour she granted thee; and how, most willingly conferring upon thee the distinction of the imperial crown, she strove to cherish in her most bountiful lap thee at the summit of thy sublimity.

And he would rejoice, he adds, if the emperor had received from his hand even greater beneficia, if that were possible.

Beneficium means a kindness. It also means a fief — land held of a lord, on terms, by a man who is the lord's vassal. Frederick's chancellor read it out in the second sense.

The manifesto

The emperor's circular to the German church is the fullest statement anybody ever made of what the imperial title was supposed to rest on, and it was provoked by a translation dispute.

The legates, he writes, came asserting that they brought a message from which the honour of the empire should receive no little increase; they were honourably received on the first day; on the second, sitting with his princes, he heard what they had brought — that he should always keep before his mind's eye how the lord pope had conferred upon him the distinction of the imperial crown, and would not regret it if his Highness were to receive from him even greater benefices.

Of a truth at that word, blasphemous and devoid of all truth, not only did the imperial majesty conceive a righteous indignation, but also all the princes who were present were filled with such fury and wrath that, without doubt, they would have condemned those two unhallowed presbyters to the punishment of death had not our presence prevented them.

Searching the legates' baggage produced blank sealed forms to be filled in at their discretion, which Frederick reads as a plan to strip the German churches; they were sent back the way they came.

Then the constitutional claim, in one sentence:

Inasmuch as the kingdom, together with the empire, is ours by the election of the princes from God alone, who, by the passion of His Son Christ subjected the world to the rule of the two necessary swords … whoever shall say that we received the imperial crown as a benefice from the lord pope, contradicts the divine institutions and the teaching of Peter, and shall be guilty of a lie.

He would rather incur danger of death, he ends, than sustain the shame of so great a disaster in his own day.

What was actually at stake

Both halves of that sentence matter, and the second half is the one that shaped the next six hundred years.

From God alone is the answer to Canossa: the empire is not held of the papacy, and nobody can depose its holder for disobedience. That argument had been running since Gregory VII and would run until the Reformation.

By the election of the princes is the concession hidden inside the defiance. In order to say that the crown did not come from the pope, the emperor had to say where it did come from, and the only available answer was the men in the room. Frederick's manifesto puts the electing princes between God and the emperor as a matter of public doctrine, in a document circulated to every bishop in Germany, and signed by a man arguing that his own authority was unlimited.

Two hundred years later the Golden Bull would write that principle down as procedure, name the seven men who did the electing, and make the papal role disappear entirely. The princes who nearly lynched two priests over a Latin word at Besançon were defending an empire that, by defending it in those terms, they were acquiring.

The cities that would not kneel

expansionDrafted from Kington, 2 vols (1862)

Frederick Barbarossa spent much of his reign after Besançon trying to make the imperial claim over northern Italy something more than a title. He destroyed Milan outright in 1162 after a long siege, holding a diet at Roncaglia to reassert imperial rights over the Lombard cities' own coinage, tolls and justice - rights the cities had spent a century treating as their own.

Milan, Italy · Kington, 2 vols (1862) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

An army broken at Legnano

The cities did not accept it. Milan was rebuilt within years, and by 1167 a coalition calling itself the Lombard League - Milan, Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and eventually more than a dozen others - had formed against him, with the backing of a papacy already locked in its own long quarrel with Frederick over a disputed election. Years of grinding warfare in northern Italy ended in 1176 at Legnano, where the League's own carroccio-anchored infantry and a reserve of mounted knights broke Frederick's army so completely that the Emperor himself was unhorsed and, for a time, given up for dead. It was the first outright battlefield defeat of his reign, and it settled the argument Roncaglia had tried to close by force: the Lombard cities could not be governed as a Roman province by an army that could be beaten.

A peace that wrote the defeat down as law

Frederick made his peace with Pope Alexander III at Venice the following year, ending the papal side of the conflict, but the Lombard cities held out for formal terms of their own. The Peace of Constance in 1183 gave them what Roncaglia had denied: full self-government, the right to make war and peace among themselves, and control of their own regalia in exchange for a nominal oath of fidelity to the Emperor and a fixed tribute. It was, in substance, an admission that the empire's Italian claim would from now on be a formality the cities purchased rather than an authority they obeyed.

A crown married into Sicily

Frederick spent his final years securing the dynasty rather than Italy directly. In 1186 he married his son and heir Henry to Constance, the aunt and heiress of the Norman kings of Sicily - a match that promised to fold the wealthiest kingdom in the Mediterranean into Hohenstaufen hands, and that would, within a decade, make a Sicilian childhood normal for a future emperor rather than a German one. Frederick himself never saw the fruits of it: he led a massive German army on the Third Crusade in 1189 and drowned fording a river in Cilicia the following year, leaving Henry VI to inherit both the empire and, after a hard-fought conquest of the island, the Sicilian crown his father's marriage had won on paper.

An empire with no revenue

expansionDrafted from Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016)

The Holy Roman Empire had no taxes worth the name.

What it had was matricular contributions: quotas assessed on the member territories according to a register, voted by the Diet, and expressed in units called Roman Months, because the original assessment was what it cost to keep an army in Italy for a month. The imperial cities paid dues directly, and so did the Jewish communities, both being under the emperor's immediate protection. There were imperial tolls on the Rhine, most of which the princes along it had appropriated.

That is the whole of it, and it was never enough for anything.

Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016) · Eighteenth-century engraving · Public domain

The money that actually paid for imperial policy came from somewhere else entirely: the emperor's own dynastic lands. A Habsburg emperor funded his wars out of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, which he held as a territorial ruler and not as emperor at all. The empire's finances and the emperor's finances were different things, and only one of them worked.

What a state does instead of taxing

It litigates.

The Reichsreform of 1495 declared a perpetual public peace outlawing private war, and created the Reichskammergericht, a supreme court staffed by the estates rather than by the emperor. It voted a general tax at the same time, the Common Penny, which was not collected. The court worked.

For the following three centuries the empire's members largely sued each other. A small imperial county with a grievance against a large neighbouring duchy did not raise troops it did not have; it filed, and the case took decades, and the duchy frequently lost. Wilson's argument is that this was the empire's actual function: it kept several hundred entities of wildly unequal power inside one legal order in which the weak had somewhere to go.

It is also why an imperial county of four thousand people could exist at all in the seventeenth century, in the middle of a continent of consolidating monarchies, and why so many of them did.

The army that was mocked

From 1681 the Reichsarmee worked on a quota system: each of the imperial circles owed a fixed number of horse and foot, raised and paid by its own princes, and assembled when the Diet declared an imperial war.

It was slow to gather, unevenly equipped, commanded by whoever the circles could agree on, and a standing joke. It was also the only army in Europe that a polity with no revenue could put in the field, and it fought the Ottomans and the French for a hundred and twenty years without ever being usable for anything its members did not agree on — which, from the point of view of the smaller members, was the entire point.

The new Justinian

peakDrafted from Kington, 2 vols (1862)

Frederick II grew up in Sicily rather than Germany, orphaned young and crowned King of Sicily as a child under a series of regents while German princes elected him King of the Romans in absentia. The kingdom he came into as an adult, once he had finally subdued its rebellious barons and Muslim strongholds in the island's interior, became the testing ground for an idea of royal government that had no real parallel anywhere else in thirteenth-century Europe.

Andria, Italy · Kington, 2 vols (1862) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

An army from an unlikely source

Having crushed a long Saracen revolt in Sicily rather than exterminate its population, Frederick took an unusual path: he transported some twenty thousand able-bodied Muslims from the island to the mainland and resettled them at Lucera in Apulia, emptying the town of its Christian inhabitants to make room for them, turning its cathedral into a mosque, and ringing it with one of the largest citadels in Italy. In Sicily the Saracens had been a chronic security problem, reinforced from time to time by kinsmen from North Africa; transplanted to the mainland and cut off from that support, they became some of Frederick's most reliable soldiers - troops with no religious scruples at all about being turned against the Pope himself when it came to that.

A code of law without sixty different customs

In 1231 Frederick issued the Constitutions of Melfi, a single comprehensive law code for the whole kingdom that superseded local custom outright and made royal authority the sole source of justice. His own chroniclers contrasted the result directly with contemporary France, where royal power still had to bargain with sixty-odd different regional legal customs, nobles who coined their own money and fought their own private wars, and towns still groaning under episcopal lordship. Melfi's preamble styled Frederick the source and guardian of law in language modeled on Justinian's own Roman codes, and its substance backed the claim: distinct civil and criminal courts, royal officials answerable to the crown rather than to local lords, and a bureaucracy that ran on written record rather than feudal custom - a state apparatus so far ahead of its northern counterparts that later historians would call Sicily under Frederick the first modern administrative kingdom in Europe.

A war that outlasted popes

None of it reconciled Frederick with Rome. Innocent III's successors regarded a single ruler holding both the empire and the kingdom that surrounded the Papal States on two sides as an existential threat, and the conflict between Frederick and a sequence of hostile popes - excommunicated once by Gregory IX for delaying his crusade, and again for making peace with the Sultan on terms Rome considered insufficiently belligerent - ran for the rest of his reign. Frederick answered papal propaganda with his own, styling himself in official documents as a divinely appointed reformer of a corrupt Church rather than its rebellious son. Neither side ever fully won the argument; it outlasted Frederick himself and consumed his own dynasty within a generation of his death.

A crown taken under interdict

peakDrafted from Kington, 2 vols (1862)

Frederick had sworn to go on crusade as early as 1215, and delaying it repeatedly for reasons of state gave Pope Gregory IX the pretext to excommunicate him in 1227. Frederick sailed for the Holy Land the following year regardless - an excommunicated man leading a crusade, a contradiction the papacy never let him forget and one he pointedly ignored.

Kington, 2 vols (1862) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

A treaty instead of a battle

Rather than fight the campaign Christendom expected, Frederick opened negotiations with Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt, who had his own reasons to avoid a war on a second front. The resulting Treaty of Jaffa in 1229 handed Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and a corridor connecting them to the coast back to Christian control for ten years, in exchange for Frederick's promise to help defend the Sultan against his own Muslim rivals and to leave the Temple Mount's mosques under Muslim administration. It restored more of the old Kingdom of Jerusalem than Richard the Lionheart's or Philip Augustus's armies had managed by force during the Third Crusade, and it did so without a single major battle - a result that scandalized the Latin East's own establishment as much as it satisfied Frederick.

A coronation with no priest willing to perform it

Because Frederick was still under excommunication, no bishop would crown him in Jerusalem, and the Patriarch placed the city itself under interdict the moment he arrived. Frederick went to the Holy Sepulchre anyway, and in a scene his own Teutonic Knights described in careful detail, simply lifted the crown from the altar with his own hands and carried it to his throne without any religious ceremony at all - the Grand Master Hermann von Salza delivering a speech in Frederick's honor in both German and Latin in place of a coronation Mass. Genoese crossbowmen, Pisan sailors and German knights filled the church; a few Templars and Hospitallers, loyal to the Patriarch's faction, watched in open disapproval, storing up details to report to Rome. Frederick had recovered Jerusalem for Christendom while formally cut off from the Christian sacraments himself - the strangest coronation any crusader king had staged in the city since Godfrey de Bouillon had refused a crown there altogether more than a century before.

A war waiting at home

News that a papal army under the exiled former King of Jerusalem, John de Brienne, had invaded Frederick's own Apulian territory reached him within weeks of the coronation, cutting short whatever advantage the treaty might otherwise have built. Frederick spent barely a fortnight more in the Holy Land before sailing home to fight the Pope's own army on Italian soil - a war fought, on both sides, by Christian forces while the crusader-king who had just reclaimed Jerusalem without spilling blood was formally still an excommunicate in his own Church's eyes.

See if my crowns are lost

peakDrafted from Kington, 2 vols (1862)

Frederick's final war with the papacy escalated past excommunication in 1245, when Pope Innocent IV convened a general council at Lyon, far outside imperial reach, and had Frederick formally declared deposed as both Emperor and King of Sicily. It was a sentence with no means of enforcement behind it - Frederick still held his armies, his kingdom, and most of Germany's loyalty - but it committed the papacy to his destruction in terms no earlier excommunication had.

Lyon, France · Kington, 2 vols (1862) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

A crown held up in defiance

Frederick heard the news of his own deposition at Turin. According to the chroniclers, he scowled at his courtiers and demanded his treasure coffers be brought and unlocked; lifting one of his crowns and placing it on his own head, eyes flashing, voice shaking with rage, he declared he had not yet lost his crown, and that it would cost the Pope and his Council a bloody struggle before they took it from him. The five years that followed were exactly that - a grinding war on multiple fronts across Italy and Germany, fought by a king in his fifties against an opponent who could depose him on paper but not unseat him in the field.

A death that ended the century's first half

Frederick died at Fiorentino in December 1250, still uncrowned by any reconciliation with Rome. His body was carried to Taranto for shipment to Sicily under guard of two hundred Saracen soldiers and six troops of cavalry, mourned by wailing crowds in every town the procession passed through, and buried at Palermo beside his father, grandfather and first wife in a porphyry tomb still supported by four carved lions. When the tomb was opened centuries later, his body was found still crowned, a golden orb in one hand, a jewel-set ring on his finger, and a red silk cross embroidered on his shoulder marking him as the crusader-king who had taken Jerusalem without a battle twenty years before.

An emperor who would not stay dead

Frederick's death was so hard for his own contemporaries to credit that followers of the prophet Joachim of Fiore insisted for months that their prophesied Antichrist could not really have died, citing a Sibylline verse that he was "alive, and yet is not alive." A beggar on Mount Etna claimed to be the returned Emperor, grew out his beard, and gathered noble backers before Frederick's own son Manfred had him executed; a second impostor appeared in Germany decades later and was burned alive by the reigning king, Rudolf of Habsburg. As late as 1290, forty years after Fiorentino, Germans were still laying wagers that the great Hohenstaufen would return with an army. No emperor before or after him was mourned and feared in quite the same measure - the last ruler, his own biographers judged, whose authority Germans and Italians alike had once accepted without serious question.

The Golden Bull

peakDrafted from Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016)

For three centuries the imperial election was the empire's central weakness. The crown was elective in principle and the principle was unwritten: who had a vote, how many were needed, where the vote happened and whether the pope could confirm or reject the result were all disputed, and each dispute produced a rival emperor and a war.

In 1356 Charles IV settled it. Seven electors, named by office — the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, the king of Bohemia, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony and the margrave of Brandenburg. Election at Frankfurt within a month of a vacancy. A majority sufficient. Coronation at Aachen. The electoral territories declared indivisible and passing by primogeniture, so that the college could not multiply. And no papal role of any kind, which is the clause the document is really about.

It held for four hundred and fifty years.

Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

Who writes one of these

Very few polities ever set down in writing how the next ruler is to be chosen, and the ones that do have a pattern in common.

Telipinu legislated the Hittite succession after a century of kings murdering each other. Esarhaddon made the Assyrian nobility swear to his arrangements after a civil war caused by his father's assassination. The Venetians designed their ten rounds of lot and ballot having watched every other city in Italy lose its constitution to a family.

Charles IV belongs in that company. He legislated after three hundred years of disputed elections, papal vetoes and the civil wars that followed them, several of which his own family had fought and one of which had produced two emperors at once. A succession rule written down is almost always a scar.

The elector's calculation

The Golden Bull did not make the empire strong and was not meant to.

Seven men choosing an emperor will not choose a strong one. What they chose, repeatedly, was a candidate with enough of his own resources to be useful and not enough to be dangerous, and they charged for the vote — electoral capitulations, sworn undertakings extracted from each new emperor before the election, which accumulated conditions over the centuries in the same way the Venetian doge's oath of limitations did.

So the empire acquired, by 1519, a written constitution assembled out of a succession law, a public peace, a supreme court and a set of promises no emperor could refuse to make. It is a genuinely unusual object: a constitutional monarchy arrived at not by revolution or theory but by four hundred years of people extracting concessions at the only moment an emperor could not say no.

The tree

contractionDrafted from Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus the Vagabond (1912)

The empire's purpose, on the most favourable reading of it, was to stop its members going to war with each other. Between 1618 and 1648 it failed completely, and the best account of what that failure looked like at ground level was written by a man who had been a boy on a farm when the soldiers came.

Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus the Vagabond (1912) · Jacques Callot, Les Grandes Misères de la guerre · CC0

Grimmelshausen was carried off in the war and spent most of it in and about armies. Twenty years after it ended he published a picaresque novel whose hero begins as an illiterate peasant child in the Spessart, and its fifth chapter is the most famous piece of German prose of the century. It is fiction, and a satire, and it is also the only sustained account of that war from inside it by somebody who was not an officer, a diplomat or a chronicler.

The farm

The troopers come. They do not loot in the sense of taking valuables; they dismantle a household.

Houseware of copper and tin they beat flat, and packed such vessels, all bent and spoiled, in with the rest. Bedsteads, tables, chairs, and benches they burned, though there lay many cords of dry wood in the yard. Pots and pipkins must all go to pieces, either because they would eat none but roast flesh, or because their purpose was to make there but a single meal.

The manservant is tied down, gagged, and a pail of filthy water poured into him — by this, which they called a Swedish draught, they forced him to lead a party of them to another place, where more people and animals were taken and brought back to the same farm.

Then the interrogation, and the boy narrating it has not yet learned what he is looking at. The flints are taken out of the pistols so the peasants' thumbs can be screwed in their place. One man is put in the baking oven and a fire lit under him, although he had as yet confessed no crime. Another has a cord twisted round his head with a stick until the blood comes out of his mouth and nose and ears. In a word each had his own device to torture the peasants, and each peasant his several torture.

The narrator's father gets what the boy takes for the best of it, because he is the householder: bound before the fire, the soles of his feet smeared with wet salt and a goat brought to lick it off, until he nearly bursts with laughing.

And this seemed to me so merry a thing that I must needs laugh with him for the sake of fellowship, or because I knew no better.

In the middle of the laughing the father tells them where the money is, and it is richer in pearls and gold than anyone would have expected of peasants. Of what happened to the women the child says only that the soldiers would not let him watch, and that he heard them screaming in various corners of the house.

That night, hiding in a thicket, he can hear the shrieks of the tortured peasants and the song of the nightingales, which birds regarded not the peasants either to show compassion for them or to stop their sweet song for their sakes; and he lies down and falls asleep.

The tree

Some chapters later, cold and hungry in the woods, he works out a theory. He can see no explanation for the enmity between soldiers and peasants except that there must be two races of men in the world and not one descended from Adam — wild and tame, like unreasoning beasts, and therefore hunting one another.

Then he dreams the image the book is remembered for. Every tree around him turns into an army. A trooper sits on each treetop; the trunks are hung, instead of leaves, with pikemen, musketeers, halberdiers, flags, drums and fifes, all neatly distributed and each according to his rank. And the roots:

The roots, moreover, were made up of folk of little worth, as mechanics and labourers, mostly, however, peasants and the like; and these nevertheless gave its strength to the tree and renewed the same when it was lost: yea more, they repaired the loss of any fallen leaves from among themselves to their own great damage: and all the time they lamented over them that sat on the tree, and that with good reason, for the whole weight of the tree lay upon them and pressed them so that all the money was squeezed out of their pockets, yea, though it was behind seven locks and keys: but if the money would not out, then did the commissaries so handle them with rods (which thing they call military execution) that sighs came from their heart, tears from their eyes, blood from their nails, and the marrow from their bones.

That is a description of the war's actual financing. There was no treasury capable of paying these armies. They were raised on credit against the promise of contributions levied where they stood, and the technical term for collecting a contribution by force was execution. The tree is not a metaphor for injustice. It is an organisational chart.

What the framework was for

The settlement that ended the war is usually discussed as a turning point in the history of sovereignty, and there is a real argument about whether it dissolved the empire's constitution or repaired it. Grimmelshausen's book is the other half of that argument, and it is the half that explains why the repair was worth making.

For the century and a half that the empire had left, its members did not do this to each other again. They litigated instead, in a court that took decades and frequently found against the powerful, and the tedium of that procedure is usually offered as evidence that the institution had become absurd. The farm in the Spessart is what the procedure was an alternative to.

A framework for not fighting

contractionDrafted from Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016)

Luther posted in 1517 and by 1530 a substantial part of the empire's princes and imperial cities were Lutheran, in a polity whose head was Catholic and whose central claim was that it was the secular arm of Christendom.

The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 settled it by territorialising it: each ruler determined the confession of his own lands, subjects who disagreed were free to emigrate, and the imperial framework held above a religious division it had stopped trying to resolve. It is usually summarised as cuius regio, eius religio, a phrase coined sixty years later by a lawyer.

It lasted sixty-three years and then failed, and the failure was the Thirty Years' War: a confessional civil war inside the empire that drew in Denmark, Sweden, Spain, France and the Dutch, and killed something in the region of a fifth of the German population.

Augsburg, Germany · Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Westphalia

The settlement of 1648 is conventionally read as the empire's death certificate — the moment the territories became sovereign, the emperor became a figurehead, and the modern state system began.

Wilson reads it as a restoration, and the disagreement is real enough to leave standing rather than settle. His case is that the treaties confirmed the constitution rather than dissolving it: the territories got the right to conduct their own foreign policy but not against the emperor or the empire, the imperial institutions were repaired and went on working, Calvinism was added to the recognised confessions, and the framework then held for another hundred and fifty-eight years across two more general European wars.

An institution that survives the worst war in European history to that date, and functions afterwards, is not obviously dead. What is true is that after 1648 the empire was manifestly a framework and not a state, and had stopped pretending otherwise.

What the framework did

It is easy to describe an empire with no revenue, no army of its own, no capital and no common language as an absence. What Wilson's account adds is what the absence made possible.

Several hundred territories — electorates, duchies, bishoprics, abbeys, counties, free cities, and about fifteen hundred imperial knights holding a village apiece — existed inside it with legal standing. A ruler who attacked a neighbour broke the public peace and was liable in a court that could and did find against him. A subject with a grievance against his own prince could appeal past him to an imperial court, and after 1648 they increasingly did.

Almost no other European polity was arranged that way, and the ones that came after it were not. A ruler who attacked a neighbour anywhere else in Europe was answerable to nobody but the other man's army. Inside the empire he was answerable to a court, and the court took decades and frequently found against him, and the decades were the point: a lawsuit that grinds on for thirty years is a war that does not happen.

That is the whole case for the thing, and it is not a small one. Fifteen hundred imperial knights holding a village apiece, and abbeys, and free cities, and counties the size of a parish, survived into the age of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great because there was a legal order above them that the large states had agreed to be bound by. When it went in 1806 they went with it inside a decade.

1806

endDrafted from Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016)

Napoleon beat the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz in December 1805. Seven months later sixteen German princes left the empire and formed the Confederation of the Rhine under French protection. On 1 August the French envoy at Regensburg informed the Diet that his master no longer recognised the empire's existence. Five days later Francis II laid down the imperial crown and released the estates from their obligations to it.

Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (2016) · Johann Baptist Lampi · Public domain

He had already given himself a replacement. In 1804, watching Napoleon crown himself emperor of the French, Francis had proclaimed himself hereditary emperor of Austria — manufacturing a title out of his own hereditary lands so that when the older one went he would not find himself outranked by a Corsican.

The abdication was calculated to prevent Napoleon from taking the imperial title himself, which he had considered and which the Confederation of the Rhine had put within reach. Eight hundred and forty-four years of an institution ended in a pre-emptive resignation.

What kind of ending that is

Almost nothing else in European history ends this way.

Nobody conquered it. The French pressure was real and it was indirect: Napoleon never took Vienna's imperial crown off anybody, and the sixteen princes who seceded did so voluntarily, having calculated that French protection was worth more than an imperial court that could no longer protect anything. What killed the empire was that its members stopped wanting it and its head decided that abolishing it was cheaper than losing it.

It is also, characteristically, an ending by document. This polity's history had been made by written settlements — Worms, the Golden Bull, the Reichsreform, Augsburg, Westphalia — and not one of its five great hinges is a battle. It finished the way it had run: somebody drafted a text, and the text was the event.

The last century

The other thing worth saying is that it was not moribund when it went.

The eighteenth-century empire had a supreme court that was still hearing cases, a Diet sitting permanently at Regensburg, an active body of constitutional law, and a membership that still used all of it. Small territories were still litigating against large ones and still winning. What the empire could not do was fight France, and by 1800 that was the only test anybody was applying.

Wilson's point is that an institution can be perfectly functional at what it does and be abolished anyway, because the world has started measuring something else. The empire was designed to stop its members going to war with each other, and it was destroyed by a war it had no mechanism for.

The tradesman's circular

afterlifeDrafted from Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (1889)

James Bryce opens his history of the Holy Roman Empire with the observation that the people who read about its end in the English newspapers in August 1806 probably did not notice what they were reading:

Of those who in August, 1806, read in the English newspapers that the Emperor Francis II had announced to the Diet his resignation of the imperial crown, there were probably few who reflected that the oldest political institution in the world had come to an end. Yet it was so.

He is entitled to the sentence. He also, several hundred pages later, has an opinion of the document itself. The instrument of abdication, he says in a footnote, is in no way remarkable — except for its ludicrous resemblance to the circular in which a tradesman announces the dissolution of an old partnership, solicits a continuance of his customers' patronage, and hopes by close attention to merit it, the business henceforth to be carried on under the name of, and so on.

That is what the end of the oldest political institution in Europe reads like on the page: a change-of-management notice.

Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (1889) · Nicolas de Largillière · CC0

The insignia in the shop window

There is a story about Napoleon that Bryce prints and then dismantles, and it is worth both halves.

Napoleon said on one occasion that he had succeeded not to Louis XIV but to Charlemagne. His secretary Bourrienne says that in 1804, shortly before his own coronation, he had Charlemagne's imperial insignia brought from Aachen and displayed in a jeweller's shop in Paris alongside the regalia that had just been made for him.

Bryce points out that this cannot be right, because Austria had removed the insignia from Aachen in 1798. So either Bourrienne misremembered, or — and Bryce allows the possibility without pressing it — Napoleon put something in the shop window and let people believe it was Charlemagne's.

Either way the anecdote is exact about the thing itself. What the empire had to offer by 1804 was a set of objects and a genealogy, and a man building a new throne wanted to be photographed next to them.

The crown offered and refused

The empire's most curious afterlife is that people kept trying to restart it.

When Napoleon's own arrangements collapsed and the old landmarks reappeared, it was widely assumed the empire would simply be put back — Hanover, speaking for Britain, was among those who wanted it. What went up at Vienna instead was the German Confederation, which Bryce calls a feeble shadow.

Then came 1848. The Federal Diet dissolved itself in favour of a national parliament, which met at Frankfurt in May, appointed an Austrian archduke as administrator of the empire — Reichsverweser, a title straight out of the old constitution — and drafted a scheme for a federal Germany under a hereditary emperor advised by responsible ministers. On 28 March 1849 it offered the imperial crown to the king of Prussia.

He took a month, and refused it. Twenty-nine princes had already approved the scheme; Frederick William IV feared the jealousy of the others, disliked parts of the constitution, and by Bryce's reading was entangled in notions of divine right and various other medieval whimsies. The refusal split the liberals and destroyed their hope of material backing, and within two years the Confederation was back on its old footing with its old powerlessness for good and its old capacity for mischief.

An elected assembly offered a crown; a king declined it on the ground that an assembly had no business offering one. It is the last time anybody was asked to be a German emperor on those terms.

The offspring

Twenty-two years later Bryce added a supplementary chapter to his book, because there was a German empire again.

In 1806 the Holy Empire died and was buried and to all appearance soon forgotten. No outworn shape of the past could have seemed less likely to be ever recalled to life … Then suddenly there arises from these cold ashes a new, vigorous, self-confident German Empire, a State which, although most different, as well in its inner character as in its form and legal aspect, from its venerable predecessor, is nevertheless in a very real sense that predecessor's representative.

He goes further: the new empire is, in a moral and intellectual sense, the offspring of the old one, and but for the pre-existence of the other could never have come into being at all.

It is a striking thing for a Liberal Englishman to write in 1871, and it is worth saying plainly that the polity he was writing about did not share his account of itself. What was proclaimed at Versailles was a Prussian king made emperor by other German princes, in a hall belonging to France, at the end of a war. Its constitution was Bismarck's and it owed nothing to the Golden Bull. The continuity Bryce felt so strongly was a continuity of name and sentiment, which is the kind that persuades people.

And the persuasion was the whole of the empire's own method for eight hundred years. A Saxon king in 962 claimed to be resuming Charlemagne, who had claimed to be resuming Augustus, on a doctrine invented afterwards to explain how the office had travelled. A German empire in 1871 counting itself the second and this one the first is the same operation performed one more time.

Bryce was not being sentimental. He was describing, from the inside and without quite noticing, the one thing the Holy Roman Empire was unambiguously good at.