The Holy Roman Empire

DeCarlo, Carolyn. The Holy Roman Empire. Part of the Empires in the Middle Ages series. 2018. 48p. ISBN 978-1-68048-782-4. Available at 943.02 HOL on the library shelves.

An idea more than anything else, the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, yet it exerted a significant influence Europe for more than a thousand years. Born from the desire of Charlemagne to restore the Roman Empire and claim its trappings and authority, the Holy Roman Empire evolved into a coalition of German states with an elected Emperor nominally in charge of a decentralized multi-ethnic state stretching from France to Poland and from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. The Empire never evolved an overarching system of law or governance, but instead remained dependant on the goodwill of those entities which were supposedly vassals of the Empire.

As a structure, the Holy Roman Empire supported the Pope and acted as a bulkward against both the Orthodoxy of the Byzantium Empire, and the subsequent expansion of the Ottoman Empire and of Islam. Eventually, the rise of Napoleon and his wars of conquests rang the death knell of the Holy Roman Empire, which was finally dissolved in 1806 and replaced by a loose coalition of German states. Never fully implemented, the Holy Roman Empire continues to intrigue and spark conversations of whether the Roman Empire could have been resurrected in the West under more favorable circumstances.

Titles in the Empires in the Middle Ages series include:

• The Byzantine Empire
• The Crusades
• The Islamic Caliphate
• The Mongol Empire
• The Ottoman Empire