All That: The Holy Roman Empire

It all began on Christmas Day, 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor, giving the King of the Franks a fancy title in thanks for saving his bacon in a local Italian crisis. Charlemagne was an emperor, but it was just a personal title and didn't mean the Frankish realm was considered an empire. When his grandsons split the realm in three in 843, they weren't "dismembering" a nation with any historical identity, they were just dividing the family inheritance fairly between them; the title of Emperor was simply one part of the legacy (and went with the middle kingdom).

Of the three new kingdoms, the western realm went on to eventually become France. The central kingdom was divided again a generation later, into Lorraine, Burgundy, and Italy; the title of Emperor went to the Italian line, and then disappeared as that line split into feuding local families. As the Carolingian dynasty dissipated so did Frankish authority, and Italy fragmented into civil war.

When the last descendant of Charlemagne in the eastern kingdom died in 911, the local Frankish dukes felt a need for continued royal authority (what with Magyar and Viking incursions, etc.) and so elected a new king from amongst their number. The new king, Conrad of Franconia, so alienated the dukes that when he died they were just as deliberate in choosing his replacement. They chose the strongest of the dukes, Henry of Saxony. By this point, the kingdom had become more German than Frankish in nature.

The next king of Germany, Henry's son Otto, moved into Italy to restore (or impose) order; in a move seen by all as repeating Leo's crowning of Charlemagne (and for much the same reason: the establishment of security and firm authroity again saved the Papacy), Otto was crowned emperor by Pope John XII in 962. And so there was peace and order for a while, as pope and emperor worked together on what they explicitly called a renewal of the Roman Empire. Together they claimed a primacy for the Emperor over all other monarchs in Europe, just as the Pope was primate of all the church (they claimed it, but it never really got beyond the rhetoric). Together they began a deliberate policy of converting and colonizing the Slavic lands to the east, bringing them into the German cultural sphere, a process that continued to the end of our period and beyond. The "Ottonian revival," much more than the coronation of Charlemagne, was the real beginning of the medieval Empire.

In time, there was enough stability that the popes didn't need the emperors for protection, and the emperors had enough of a secular administration that they didn't need the church in order to run things. Inevitably the partnership began pulling apart, in two centuries of power struggles between popes and emperors. The first phase was what's called the "Investiture Controversy" (1075 to 1125, roughly), and can be seen as a struggle over primacy within the partnership, over which side created which; each raised antipopes and rival emperors against the other.

The second phase came about as the emperors of the Hohenstaufen family (roughly 1150-1250), having lost the first round, tried to re-cast the Empire as a feudal, secular state. Because the emperors continued to include Italy within their aspirations (besides the partnership with the Papacy and the Carolingian imperial title's passing to Italy, the wealth of the Italian city-states was a strong draw), the popes led the opposition in this secular contest, too. It was in this conflict that the word "Holy" was added to the name of the Empire, in 1157, paradoxically in order to distinguish Empire from Papacy: the idea was that the Empire was itself intrinsically sacred, it didn't depend on the Pope's blessing of the German king.

As pope and emperor competed for political allies within the Empire, all sorts of other interests became players, gaining position and power at the expense of any central authority. Even going into the Investiture Controversy, the Empire was a decentralized state; by the end, after the death of Frederick II in 1250, it was a total mess, with no effective authority above the local level - so the emperors lost the second round, as well. This was the Empire as it remained for the rest of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: "no longer a single state but a loose alliance of princes under the vague suzerainty of an elected king." (Sidney Painter) In fact, the first use of the full name "Holy Roman Empire" came at this point, in 1254. (The qualifier "of the German Nation" was added in the 14th century, when all pretensions to Italy and the rest of Europe were finally given up.)

Geographically, the Empire was the largest country in western Europe, but it was not a state even by feudal standards: it had no capital, no central administration, not even a royal family. Politically, the word "patchwork" is an understatement: there were up to 25 feudal principalities, and about 70 ecclesiastical; the greatest of these rulers formed the class called the "princes," who could make or break emperors, and were supreme in their own domains. There was a huge class of minor nobility who held land directly from the Emperor, making them effectively autonomous of the princes. About 80 city-states had significant degrees of autonomy and ruled territory outside their walls. Some princes ruled territories outside the Empire, and foreign nobility often held fiefs inside. Kings of other countries were often candidates for emperor, and were sometimes elected.

And about the elections: during the contests with the Papacy, any sufficiently large number of princes could elect an Emperor (which is how popes could easily raise up anti-emperors). During the 13th century a system started to coalesce, and in 1356 seven princes were designated as the permanent Electors: the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Markgraf of Brandenburg, the King of Bohemia, and the Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier.

Other things being equal, the Electors would often prefer a son of the previous emperor, as something of a known quantity, so what developed was a series of "mini-dynasties" for a few generations at a time, changing whenever an emperor was especially unpopular or a new candidate had lot of especially rich backers. (Foreign money regularly poured in to influence the elections.) All that most emperors tried to do with the position from this point on was to increase the feudal holdings of their own families, since those were lasting while the crown might only be for one generation.

A prime example of this tendency was Rudolph of Hapsburg, elected emperor in 1273 specifically because he was a relative nobody, ending an interregnum of 19 years without any emperor at all. He ruled for almost 20 years, and the only significant thing he did in that time was to acquire the duchy of Austria for his family. By a series of strategic marriages more than by conquest, the Hapsburg family grew in power and influence over the centuries. By 1450 the election of a Hapsburg as emperor was practically automatic. By the time Charles V was crowned in 1519, he was ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, sizable Austrian territories outside the Empire, Spain, the Netherlands, and all of southern Italy. Fascinating story, Charles V; I'll do an essay on him someday.

Eventually, Hapsburg dreams of centralization within the fragmented Empire and of achieving real European hegemony set off the Thirty Years War in 1618, which left the Empire an empty, pointless wreck. I generally feel 1650 is too late a cut-off date for our period in many respects, but the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 does decisively mark the end of this particularly medieval institution.

So to get back to Voltaire. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation didn't start out Holy, Roman, an Empire, or even distinctively German; it started with just the title of Emperor for a Frankish king. It came to be called an "Empire" because that's what you call the lands ruled by an emperor, "Holy" to distance it from the Pope, "Roman" to connote universal European primacy, and "German" when it gave up being "Roman."

In the Current Middle Ages
The Board of Directors once upon a time styled themselves the "Imperial Electors" in persona, presumably because they were a committee of roughly the same number and they liked the sound of "Imperial." A better analogy might be that the Board is to the Kingdoms, to the SCA "in-game," as the popes were to the emperors: an interdependent partnership, providing spiritual guidance to the day-to-day, temporal side. In practice, the Board Crisis of 1994 revealed an Investiture Controversy-like rift over which side was the "real" SCA, and which could make or unmake the other.

And (I know I've brought it up before) here's another period case of an elected monarchy. When Louis the Child died in 911, there were several ways the German dukes might have gone: they could (possibly) have offered the crown to Charles the Simple of France as senior surviving Carolingian, or they might (very likely) have split up into separate, independent little kingdoms. Rather than do either, they decided to choose a new king from among their number. And instead of choosing by seniority of bloodline, or civil war, or single combat, it seemed appropriate to them to choose their new king by election - and they continued doing so for 700 years, right through the end of our period. It's hard to say the idea is "unmedieval."

Further Reading
Bear in mind that the history of the Holy Roman Empire is inextricably bound up in the question of the making, indeed the meaning of Germany, and that this question has been an extremely volatile one for the last 200 years of history-writing. Interpretations vary wildly, and my few recommendations here don't begin to address the whole range.

The Crucible of Europe: the ninth and tenth centuries in European history, by Geoffrey Barraclough, covers the beginning of the Empire: the coronation of Charlemagne, the splitting up of the Carolingian realm, and the Ottonian revival. Barraclough advances the interesting suggestion that, the legitimacy of Empress Irene in Constantinople being questionable at the time, Pope Leo could be seen not just as granting Charlemagne a nifty new title, but also as raising a usurper to the Byzantine crown.

For the fascinating, messy Empire of the High Middle Ages, there's Germany in the Late Middle Ages, by Joachim Leuschner (translated by Sabine MacCormack). The book really covers what I wanted to do here, but could only touch on.

On a different tack, there's Boyd Hill's Medieval Monarchy in Action: the German Empire from Henry I to Henry IV, a collection of documents - diplomas, charters, and chronicles - from 919 to 1075. A long introduction relates the early history of the Empire in the context of these documents; the texts themselves might be of interest to someone writing charters, or scrolls other than the most standard awards.