Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire was a sprawling and decentralised complex of territories in central Europe that endured for over eight centuries and dominated much of medieval and early modern German and Italian history.

Its conventional founding is dated to 962 CE, when Pope John XII crowned the East Frankish (German) king Otto I as emperor in Rome, reviving the imperial title that had lapsed after the Carolingians and binding the German monarchy to the leadership of Latin Christendom and the protection of the papacy. The empire was never a centralised state in the modern sense but a patchwork of hundreds of kingdoms, duchies, ecclesiastical principalities, free cities, and lordships, loosely united under an emperor who was elected rather than strictly hereditary. Much of medieval imperial history was shaped by the tension between emperor and pope, most dramatically in the Investiture Controversy over the appointment of bishops, and by emperors' often frustrating efforts to assert authority over the wealthy and fractious cities of northern Italy, as under Frederick Barbarossa of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. From the fifteenth century the imperial crown became effectively hereditary in the House of Habsburg, and under Charles V in the sixteenth century the empire was bound up with a vast global Habsburg inheritance. This same era brought the Protestant Reformation, which fractured the empire along religious lines and led to prolonged conflict, culminating in the catastrophic Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). The Peace of Westphalia that ended it confirmed the near-sovereign autonomy of the empire's constituent princes, leaving the emperor with limited real power over an increasingly loose confederation, famously characterised by Voltaire as 'neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.' The empire persisted as a framework of German politics for another century and a half before it was overwhelmed by the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleon. After military defeats and the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine under French influence, Emperor Francis II formally dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, ending its long existence.

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