WHAT WAS THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE OF THE GERMAN NATION?

The very name "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" hints at this polity's ambiguous, perhaps even peculiar, character. It was "Roman" but also "German"; it was an empire, but it also belonged to a specific "nation"; and somehow it was supposed to be "holy." What was it, then?

As a polity, the Empire largely escapes modern constitutional categories, and so it is far easier to say what it wasn't than to determine what it actually was. The Holy Roman Empire was neither a state nor a confederation of states. It had no systematic written constitution, it acknowledged no equality before the law — not even as an ideal — and it did not impart Imperial citizenship on its inhabitants. The Empire furthermore did not encompass a territory with clearly defined boundaries, and it possessed no sovereign, supreme authority, no central executive, no bureaucracy, and no standing army. In short, the Holy Roman Empire lacked almost all those characteristics that define modern states as such. Using modern constitutional categories to define it might consequently lead to a negative evaluation of its history almost by default. To understand what the Empire actually was, we must describe it on its own terms and refrain from using modern concepts that, throughout its long history, had always remained foreign to it.

While it existed, the Empire was most commonly imagined as a loose political body. It contained very different members, or "limbs," that formed individual ties to a common overlord, or "head" (the emperor), through oaths of personal fealty. Generally speaking, the cohesiveness of this body politic declined over the course of the Middle Ages, but around the year 1500 the Empire evolved along new lines and took more solid institutional forms. Despite rising political tensions and even outright open conflicts, the Empire lasted for another three hundred years. It ceased to exist only under the impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

In contrast to the relative independence of the political realm in modern systems of government, the political system of the Holy Roman Empire was still tightly connected to the social and religious structures of its day. Its constitution resembled less a systematic modern legal code and much more a colorful fabric woven out of both new and old threads. These threads included symbolic and ceremonial practices, formal and informal rules, some occasionally negotiated consensual decisions and contracts, a few fixed, written fundamental laws (leges fundamentales), many traditional forms of legitimacy, and a multitude of incompatible and indeed conflicting legal-political claims. Within this complex system, every rule had its exceptions and every abstract definition was restricted in practice. Moreover, different Imperial members perceived the Empire's basic structure differently, depending on their particular point of view, and these perceptions constantly changed and evolved over time. All of this makes it close to impossible to muster a clear-cut definition of the Empire. If I nevertheless attempt to do so here, the reader should take it with a grain of salt. In reality, things were always much more complicated.

A good starting point for our discussion is the Empire's very title. The complete name "The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" appeared for the first time only at the end of the fifteenth century, and it would never be the sole — let alone the official — title of the Empire. According to an often-quoted quip by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman, nor indeed an empire at all. This witticism aside, a close investigation of the individual elements in the Empire's title does reveal important clues about its composite — part medieval, part early modern — character.

Here, first of all, is the term "empire," imperium in Latin, which denotes a supreme overlordship, namely that of the emperor. During the Middle Ages, "imperium" was a common synonym for the office of the emperor himself. Its primary meaning was not a specific territory in which the emperor ruled supreme, but a universal, transpersonal authority that was not bound to a specific region or people.

The term "Roman" placed the Empire within the ancient European imperial tradition. As the first medieval ruler of the West, Charlemagne had himself crowned emperor by the pope in the year 800, thus transforming himself from a king of one Germanic tribe (the Franks) into a ruler with universal aspirations and a sacred aura. Charlemagne's empire disintegrated not long after his death. But Otto the Great, Charlemagne's distant descendant, revived the same idea in 962 when he related his east Frankish (later German) kingship to the imperial traditions of ancient Rome. From that point on, almost all German kings also possessed the title of "Roman emperor." The idea of translatio imperii — the uninterrupted passing, or "translation," of rulership from the ancient Romans to the Franks and then further down to the great medieval German dynasties — was obviously a fiction. At the same time, it was based on the symbolic act of coronation by the pope, who was the supreme head of the Roman Church. This symbolic act allowed German emperors to claim political authority over all Christians and precedence over all other European rulers. By invoking the idea of translatio imperii, medieval emperors placed themselves within the divine history of the ancient Roman empire, the political entity in which Jesus Christ lived and died and which eventually allowed for the spread of the Gospel over the entire known world. Common late antique interpretations of the Book of Daniel also viewed the Roman empire as the last of the four worldly empires, at the fall of which the Antichrist would appear and the Last Judgment take place. These biblical interpretations bolstered the idea of translatio imperii. If the world had yet to come to an end, the Roman empire must have continued to exist one way or another.

The ancient Roman empire was not called "holy" (sacrum in Latin). Only since the time of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century does one find this adjective attached to the Empire's title. It was introduced in the context of the hugely contested issue of the supposed subordination of the emperor to the pope, an argument first espoused by Pope Gregory VII in the...