Voltaire’s joke still haunts Europe’s elected empire
The Holy Roman Empire—after 1512 often “of the German Nation”—was a decentralized Central European polity headed by an elected emperor. Leo III crowned Charlemagne Roman emperor on Christmas 800; the title lapsed by 924 and revived with Otto I in 962, lasting until Francis II’s abdication on 6 August 1806.
The empire started as a revival. More than three centuries after the western empire ended in 476, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as Roman emperor on 25 December 800. The title had lapsed again by 924, and Pope John XII restored it in 962 by crowning Otto of Saxony, who as Otto the Great counted as Charlemagne's heir. For about three centuries it ranked among Europe's strongest monarchies, though it always depended on emperors getting along with powerful vassals. The Hohenstaufen pushed it to its greatest reach in the mid-thirteenth century, an overstretch that ended in partial collapse.
It was never a single kingdom. At first it bound together Germany, Italy and, from 1032, Burgundy under one overlord, but by the fifteenth century its grip on Italy and Burgundy had largely gone and government centred on Germany. The emperor was chosen by a small group of mostly German prince-electors, including archbishops, and in diplomacy he was treated as first among equals of Catholic kings. For most of its life its lands covered today's Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and the Low Countries, plus large parts of eastern France, northern and central Italy and western Poland.
The name grew in layers. Contemporaries at first simply said Roman Empire, or used phrases such as Christian empire; the emperor's claim rested on inheriting the authority of ancient Rome. Frederick Barbarossa added holy in 1157 to back his ambitions over Italy and the papacy, and the full phrase Holy Roman Empire appears from 1254. As the southern and western lands slipped away, German identity took over: around 1500 people often just called it Germany, and after the Diet of Cologne in 1512 it officially became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a form first seen in 1474. Voltaire later quipped that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Imperial Reform around 1500 created institutions that lasted to the end. That came on 6 August 1806, when Francis II abdicated and dissolved the empire after Napoleon organised pro-French German states into the Confederation of the Rhine.
Source: Holy Roman Empire
