Long time readers of the blog will remember that I have written, a couple of times, about the Holy Roman Empire in the past before. There’s a few reasons for this – first of all the HRE goes so hard, is very cool, and everyone should know about it. The second is that it’s one of my areas of expertise, given that I work on the Czech lands and they are very very much a part of said HRE. However, I realised recently that I’ve never actually, you know, sat down and explained exactly what the Holy Roman Empire actually is. That’s a problem.
More specifically, it’s a problem because I have realised lately that a lot of people simply don’t know what the Holy Roman Empire actually was. Or maybe they just think it’s a kinda silly weird map that “proves” that Protestantism was always going to happen. (That is just such a basic take that I will probably have to write that up some time. IT. NEVER. ENDS.) But if you are a normal person, odds are, you’ve heard the term “Holy Roman Empire”, but can’t necessarily define what it is.
In the shortest possible terms – the Holy Roman Empire was one of the most important and powerful entities in medieval Europe. It lasted for about eight hundred years, and only brought down by Napoleon (dudes rock), and it was a polity which ruled over vast swathes of western and central Europe. At times its domain stretched from Sicily to the North Sea, or from Burgundy into Poland. It was home to some of the wealthiest and most important cities in medieval Europe, and a huge percentage of the medieval population. It began under a Frankish ruler, but soon there were Germanic emperors, then Czech, then Swiss and Austrian. It was, in short, an Empire.
“Hi, I’m Voltaire and I say incredibly stupid shit about the “Dark Ages” and the Holy Roman Empire, but no one ever calls me on it because everyone is too busy patting themselves on the back for being clever while at the same absolutely refusing to do even a basic amount of research on the things that I am trash talking, so I get away with it.” – This fucking guy (essentially).
But for all its importance and prestige, many people now often can’t actually tell you what it was. Even worse, if the name Holy Roman Empire does ring a bell, odds are it is in reference to this Voltaire quip: “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, roman, nor an empire”. And while that’s a super pithy thing to whip out at a cocktail party in order to feel all superior or whatever, the trouble with it as a devastating comeback is that everything about it is wrong.
See in terms of medieval thinking “Roman” means, essentially Christian, and more specifically western Christian, aka not connected to, say Constantinople, but to the Pope or Bishop of Rome. As an institution it is specifically linked to the concept of Christendom, but drawing from the idea that the central idea of Roman-ness was its Christianity.
When we talk about the Holy Roman Empire we have to go all the way back to your boy Charlemagne (747-814), although he does not rule the Holy Roman Empire. He was, however, crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III (d. 816) on Christmas Day 800, meaning his lands are referred to as the Roman Empire. Up until the thirteenth century it will call itself things like “imperium Christianum” (Christian empire), “Romanum imperium” (Roman empire) or “Universum regnum” (Universal kingdom). And Charlegmane, and all the following emperors who followed in his footsteps, derived their power from the concept of “translation imperii” or translation of power. They viewed history as a series of transfers of power from the romans to the new Emperors, or sometimes just to local kings. So, the idea is that the Romans gave way to the Franks who settled after the “fall” of Rome, with Charlemagne at their head.
The coronation of Charlemagne, British Library Royal MS 16 G VI, f. 141v.
The imperial crown ended up passing to Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious (778-840) in 814, then to his grandson (name alert) Lothair (795-855) in 840, but the lands of the Carolingians were divided up with each heir, meaning that by 888 it broke apart after the death of Charles the Fat (839-888).
Meanwhile in East Francia, the stem duchies of Bavaria, Frankonia, Lotharingia, Saxony, and Swabia were reemerging, and they elected one of the Dukes, Conrad of Franconia (c. 881 – 918) as the King of Eastern Frankia. He died, but the idea of electoral kingship lived on as a new dynasty – the Ottonians – was on the rise.
The Ottonians came to power in 919 because Henry the Fowler (876-936) (who got his name because he was out hunting birds on the day everyone decided he should be the new King) was an incredible warrior who spent much time protecting the German lands against the Magyars. His son Otto (912-973) was eventually elected the king in Aachen – Charlemagne’s capital in 936.
The Ottonian family tree from a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Chronica Sancti Pantaleonis.
So far, so German, but in 951 Adelaide (931-999), the Queen of Italy found herself widowed and besieged by enemies, and asked Otto to come to her aid. He rode down to Italy, fought off her attackers, and married her, once again linking power over the German lands with the Italian lands – a perfect recipe for declaring himself the Emperor, just like Charlemagne. Even the Pope agreed and he was crowned Emperor by John XII (d. 936).
From this point on, the Empire began to amalgamate more land under it, and by 1002 it had absorbed the Duchy of Bohemia, compelling my personal favourite, St Wenceslaus (907-935?) to become part of the system. A few decades later in 1032, the Kingdom of Burgundy also joined. So, the Empire now consisted of Italian, French, German, and Slavic duchies but had an overarching leader in the Emperor. So there were imperial rules and laws that guided all territories, but on the whole there was still plenty of local autonomy, culture, and a local ruler who saw to the day to day business of each separate duchy or province.
As the Empire grew in importance, however, so too had the Church been growing. The Pope, who had mostly just been the Bishop of Rome but with delusions of grandure when Charlemagne brought him in to enhance his coronation, had much more power a few hundred years later. By now, the Church was becoming a sophisticated legal juggernaut. They took a dim view of the Emperor suddenly ruling so much land – and land that surrounded their own papal states more particularly.
A very healthy HRE around about 1000
They also weren’t particularly happy with the Emperor’s insistence that they were able to appoint their own bishops to positions. More to the point, they were also fairly unhappy that the Emperor had been appointing popes for a while. (Tee hee). When the great reformer Pope Gregory VII (1025-1085) came to the papal throne in 1073, he decided he would do something about it. This kicked off the Investiture Controversy where rulers across Europe squabbled with the Pope about who got to appoint people, but most particularly this took its toll on Henry IV (1050-1106).
Henry had come to the throne as a minor, and his mother had been unable to either keep control of his lands, or appoint the Popes she wanted, hence Gregory getting there in the first place. When Henry came of age, he tried to rectify this by taking back Italian lands he though of as his. Coincidentally, the papacy wanted those same lands for their own. So far, off to a bad start. This, on top of Henry’s insistence that he got to choose his own bishops was a bridge too far for Gregory, who excommunicated Henry.
To atone, Henry went to Canossa in Italy to beg forgiveness, and Gregory, a petty legend, famously made him stand for three days in the snow to receive it. The “walk to Canossa” worked as a gambit for Henry, but it established a new precedent, wherein popes could see that they were able to threaten Emperors and that they had a way to ensure that Emperors would cease to appoint their own bishops. This was formalized in the 1122 Concordat of Worms, where then-Emperor Henry V agreed that Emperors wouldn’t try to appoint their own bishops anymore, though they did get to come to any elections, intervene in disputes, and have their own special investiture ceremony after the Church one.
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Meanwhile the Empire was also codifying how it would choose emperors. This involved a formal election by the Seven prince electors (which I’ve written about before) – The Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the Duke of Saxony, the Count of the Palatinate and Rhine, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Duke of Bohemia. The requirement was that you needed the votes of all seven imperial electors. Once a candidate was chosen he became King of the Romans. Then afterwards, the Pope would crown him Emperor. Because the imperial electors were very powerful men in their own right, they tended to attempt to elect people that they thought would be easier to control. Think about it – if you are some rich guy you probably don’t want an even richer guy breathing down your neck telling you what to do, right?
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This is how the Hohenstaufens came to power. After the death of Henry V (d. 1125), instead of electing another person from the Salian dynasty, they instead focused on Lothair (1075-1137), the old and not particularly powerful Duke of Saxony in 1125. It was under this dynasty that the Holy Roman Empire was “consecrated” in 1157 as per the wishes of Frederick I Barbarosa (1122-1190). This was a part of Barbarossa’s push to emphasise the Romanness of the empire – and a direct challenge to the papacy which was also growing in power and prestige. As a part of this they claimed imperial rights based on Emperor Justinian I’s (482-565) law – the Corpus Juris Civilis, or Code of Justinian, which meant that they would be in charge of public roads, coining, establishing tariffs and collecting fees in legal manners, as well as overseeing the seating of officers across the Empire.
All of that is a very smart move on Barbarosa’s part, but the northern Italian city states such as Milan, as well as the papacy, were not particularly keen on the idea. Still, he had outplayed them one this one because the specific call to a Roman tradition was pretty persuasive.
But the Popes still had a way of getting in front of it. According to them, because Popes crowned emperors ultimately the authority of whoever was Emperor resided in them. Besides, they claimed that they had an actual receipt that proved that they were the boss of the Emperor. This was the Donation of Constantine, and it purported to be a document made by the fourth-century emperor Constantine the Great which was like “Hey homies,I know I am splitting the Roman Empire into two pieces and controlling the eastern part, but the Western part is going to be under the control of the Pope a guy I definitely see as ruling the Church for some reason.” Now that is a very cute piece of paper to have, but the trouble with it is that it was a forgery made in the eighth century by some papal bootlicker. Still, in the thirteenth century no one could conclusively prove that.
A thireteenth century fresco showing Constantine donating the Empire to Pope Sylvester I from San Silvestro Chapel at Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome
Emperors, in contrast just straight up ignored this. As far as they were concerned it was the duty of popes to crown whoever was elected Emperor, just as Charlemagne had directed the pope hundreds of years previously. They were theoretically the army of the papacy, so what was the Church gonna do? Start a war? With what army? Besides, the power and prestige of the Empire was growing all the time – how could the pope really stop them?
A part of this was the so-called Ostsiedlung – or further move into the Western Slavic states, meaning that parts of what is now Poland, such as Pomerania, as well as into modern day Austria and Slovenia. At the same time Bohemia – owing to its power, influence and money, was raised from a duchy to a Kingdom in its own right, though still under the umbrella of the empire.
By 1254 it was official – this new Roman Empire was also “Holy”, picking up the name that we associate with it today. It also marked the rise of the cities within the Empire more generally. The wealthy “burghers” who were largely skilled craftsmen and traders often managed to negotiate with the Emperor to give them increased autonomy from their local overlords in exchange for paying taxes to the imperial crown. Places such as Basel, Cologne, and Augsburg would eventually become known as the Imperial Free Cities and were considered a major asset to the crown.
By the fourteenth century there was yet another change of dynastic hands came as then Emperor Louis, or Ludwig, the Bavarian (1282-1347) was becoming a thorn in the side of the papacy. He had been excommunicated and yet refused to acknowledge it, instead creating his own Antipope, and in general giving the finger to the Church. As a result, the papacy under Clement VI (1291-1352) took matters into its own hands and elected a new King of the Romans – Charles IV (1316-1378) from the relatively unknown house of Luxembourg. Charles was as much an anti-King of the Romans as Louis’s pet pope was, having been elected by the Archbishop electors and his father – then King of Bohemia – John of Luxembourg (1296-1346) who would later ride into battle blind and be killed at the battle of Crecy. But it was a worthwhile gamble for Clement who had been Charles’s tutor and figured he was bringing in someone who would be easily controlled. Louis and the three other Prince Electors ignored him, pointing out that you needed all seven imperial votes to be elected and calling Charles “the priests’ King”. Burn. Eventually a war was planned to settle the score. Instead, Louis died of a stroke on a bear hunt in 1347 and the title of King of the Romans was Charles’s to claim. Wanting to limit his power the papacy refused to crown him Holy Roman Emperor until 1355.
The seal on the Golden Bull showing Charles IV giving it the big one.
The papacy’s worries were pretty well founded, TBH. Rather than being a lapdog of the pope, Charles was an incredibly skilled statesman and he set about going against the wishes of the papacy and attempting to codify the electoral system in his favour. The result was the Golden Bull of 1356. It established that rather than needing all seven votes to be elected, you just needed a simple majority. Moreover, it insisted that becoming Emperor was a foregone conclusion that the pope had to concede to immediately. He also insisted that every imperial elector had to learn to speak Czech, Latin, and Italian as well as German, which went down in a less popular manner. Cuz everyone is lazy and refuses to admit the beauty of the noble Czech language. You cowards.
By the fifteenth century the Empire was chafing under its old quasi-Roman laws and the realities of late medieval life. Whereas emperors had previously gained status and wealth from the imperial lands – so-called Reichsgut – when they came to power increasingly they had to draw from their own hereditary lands and finances, their Hausmarkt, to finance things. At the same time the papacy was experiencing the Papal Schism, making it difficult to establish who was meant to be crowning any elected Emperors. Even worse, Bohemia had been cut off from the Empire after the successful rise of the Hussites who were emphatically not Catholic, refused to pay anything toward an Empire that claimed its power emanated from Rome, and would absolutely kill anyone who showed up to tell them differently.
A series of reforms was enacted, including the establishment of the Reichskammergericht – a judicial institution independent of the Emperor. However, it was still established at the 1495 Diet of Worms that regardless of who heard court cases, The Roman Law still applied to anyone within the Holy Roman Empire.
Martin Luther being a cut price version of Jan Hus at the Diet of Worms, from a sixteenth-century woodcut.
At the same time a new and seemingly harmless dynasty had also come to the throne after the Luxembourg line died out – the Habsburgs. They had initially been somewhat undignified barons in Switzerland, but had managed to come to the Austrian throne through a combination of straight up theft, and good marriage with the Luxembourgs. The stage was set for one of the most powerful families ever to rule Europe to take control and make some of the freakiest chins ever seen on planet earth.
However, their transition wasn’t exactly easy. With the rise of new forms of Christianity, including the Protestants, it would for an institution reliant on Popes and elections from friendly members of the nobility to function. Moreover, as the modern period began to demand more institutional input from rulers, it was harder and harder to administrate to the satisfaction of the huge variety of peoples which the Empire encompassed.
I know that this entire post is sort of an impossible task. Trying to sum of the Holy Roman Empire – one of the largest and most influential political entities every to exist isn’t easy, but it’s name does as good a job of that as anything can. The entire point of it was that it was an empire – one that was home to many differing peoples and cultures, who were united by their Christianity (or holiness), and their adherence to laws that could trace themselves back to Rome.
And look, I get it, I’m a snarky little bimbo who wishes she was hanging around in salons just like Voltaire. And yeah, it’s nice to throw out cute little bonne mots rather than actually doing the work and learning about stuff. But if you dig into the history they lose their charm. You can hardly find anything more Holy, Roman, or Imperial. You just need to understand what that means.
For more on the Holy Roman Empire, see:
Let’s talk about Game of Thrines part 3: Holy Roman Imperial edition
On the medieval separation of Church and State: or putting the ‘holy’ in Holy Roman Empire
Ⓒ Eleanor Janega, 2023
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Going Medieval 
Typo alert – it’s “Hohenstaufen” and “Ostsiedlung”.
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THANK YOU
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On dit un “bon mot”, pas “bonne mot”….
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