Holy Roman Empire

A

The Luxemburg Emperors (1347-1437)

After a series of continuing conflicts with the papacy over the choice of emperor, the imperial electors decided in 1338 that henceforth, the candidate receiving the majority of votes would be king of the Germans. The king would also automatically become the Holy Roman emperor without being crowned by the pope. The emperor at the time, the rather unpopular Louis IV, correctly perceived this as a threat to imperial power and attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate with both the princes and the pope.

At the same time, Pope Clement VI responded to the potential reduction of his own influence by sponsoring Charles of Moravia, the king of Bohemia, as an imperial candidate. The pope hoped that Charles would be easy to control, and upon Louis’s death in 1347, Charles was chosen emperor by five of the seven electors. In 1355 he was crowned as Charles IV in Rome by a papal representative.

Despite Clement’s hopes that Charles would reverse the electors’ decision, the emperor diplomatically evaded the question of the papal role in imperial elections altogether. In the Golden Bull of 1356, Charles specified the seven electors as the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; the count palatine of the Rhine; the duke of Saxony; the margrave of Brandenburg; and the king of Bohemia. Though all of these princely rulers had traditionally exercised this role, Charles’s bull formalized the entire process and excluded some claimants from electoral status. The large duchy of Bavaria was the most notable of these exclusions, and the power of its rulers diminished somewhat as a result. The bull also made the seven electors’ lands indivisible, granted them monopolies on mining and tolls, and secured gifts from all imperial candidates. As a result, these seven rulers became the strongest of all German princes.

In a departure from all his predecessors, Charles finally accepted two unalterable facts about the Holy Roman Empire: the futility of imperial claims in Italy, and the political sovereignty of German cities and princely territories. The bull itself also provided some legal constitution to an empire that Charles himself recognized as an anachronism with little real power. The Golden Bull signaled a new focus for imperial ambitions. Charles began building a powerful state in the east by entrenching his own dynasty in Bohemia; buying Brandenburg and adding it to his kingdom; taking Silesia from Poland; and establishing an impressive court in his capital of Prague (in present-day Czech Republic).

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Charles’s son Sigismund, who continued to rule from Prague, attempted to reassert the emperor’s role as the secular head of Christendom by trying to resolve the Great Schism (1378-1417) of the papacy. Since 1378 the church had been torn by the rival claims of two and later three would-be popes. In 1414 Sigismund successfully forced one of the papal claimants, John XXIII, to call the Council of Constance (1414-1418) in an attempt to resolve the crisis. Due largely to the emperor’s careful and extensive diplomacy, the council did eventually end the Great Schism of the papacy.

The council also served another of Sigismund’s goals. Sigismund saw himself as the defender of Christianity and was concerned about the popular Czech preacher and religious reformer, Jan Hus (John Huss), who was gaining popularity in the region. Huss was invited to the council to state his views and was immediately condemned as a heretic, imprisoned, tortured, and executed. His death was considered a martyrdom by many local Bohemians and led to a series of confrontations with the emperor known as the Hussite Wars (1419-1436).

B

Habsburg Line Restored

When Sigismund died without an heir, the electors unanimously chose his Habsburg son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who became emperor as Albert II in 1438. From that time on, with the exception of the short period from 1742 to 1745, the imperial crown was hereditary in the Habsburg line. Because the political fragmentation of the empire had rendered imperial control essentially impossible, Albert and his successor, Frederick III, directed most of their energies toward defending the empire’s eastern frontiers against the encroaching Ottoman Empire and its allies.

Frederick’s son Maximilian I enthusiastically laid many plans for revitalizing the empire, but these plans never materialized. He established an imperial court and an imperial tax to fund it, but neither had much impact. The same is true of his continued attempts to establish a perpetual truce within the empire, as well as the 1512 division of the empire into ten administrative districts known as circles. Rather, his chief success was in arranging marriages to benefit his family. The most notable of these was the union of his son Philip of Burgundy with Joanna of Castile, the daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. The office of emperor meanwhile became an increasingly symbolic position, used in the next five centuries primarily to further Habsburg dynastic ambitions.

The process of imperial disintegration was so advanced by the beginning of the 16th century that even Maximilian’s powerful successor Charles V was unable to reverse it. The son of Philip of Burgundy and Joanna of Castile, Charles gradually inherited a vast assortment of territories, stretching from Netherlands, to Austria, to Spain and its holdings in the Americas. In 1519 he was elected Holy Roman emperor. Though he personally ruled more territory than any European leader since Charlemagne, Charles’s legacy at his 1556 abdication was a Holy Roman Empire more politically fractured by religious and other rivalries than at any time since the Great Interregnum of the 13th century. He was also the last emperor crowned by the pope, which was by this time a largely symbolic gesture.

Charles’s lifetime ambition was to reestablish a united Christian empire, but this was consistently frustrated by three sometimes-allied foes—the ruling Valois dynasty of France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Protestant princes and cities in Germany. In the early part of his reign, he was forced to fight a lengthy conflict with France, which was alarmed by the extensive territory Charles governed and the power it gave him. This conflict consumed a great deal of time and money, but was ultimately indecisive. After peace was finally made in the late 1520s, Charles was forced to defend his empire. The Ottomans were advancing in the east and already had conquered much of Hungary and were approaching Austria. This conflict, like that with the French, was also long, costly, and indecisive. It ended in a truce in 1545.

Charles’s biggest challenge, however, was Protestantism, to which he was firmly opposed. The Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther in 1517 had made much progress in Germany. Many of the German princes saw the cause of religious freedom espoused by the Reformation as a vehicle for their own territorial and political independence from the empire, and supported it wholeheartedly.

Despite this, the emperor did not make a final break with the Lutherans until after the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which stated the religious doctrines of the Lutherans and sharply criticized the Catholic church. Following the Augsburg Confession, the Lutherans, who were now called Protestants, formed a military alliance, the Schmalkaldic League. War ensued, and in 1547 Charles won a major victory at Mühlberg in Saxony. Conflict continued to build, however, until the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 finally established peace among the empire's feuding Protestant and Catholic princes, and maintained it for over half a century.

The Peace of Augsburg, in the fashion of previous imperial concessions, allowed the empire’s princes to choose Catholicism or Lutheranism as the official state religion for their areas. After this point, Charles’s successors to the imperial throne largely gave up any notions of a universal empire and instead concentrated on centralizing the administration of their dynastic holdings in Austria.

By 1618, however, the religious peace collapsed, resulting in a series of destructive conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years' War. The long war ended in a draw, finalized by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. By the terms of the treaty, reminiscent of the Peace of Augsburg, each prince could determine the religion of his German state, choosing among Lutheran, Catholic, or Calvinist. More significantly, the sovereignty and independence of each of the 350-odd states of the Holy Roman Empire was now at last formally recognized, making the emperor powerless. Despite a few fiscal and diplomatic prerogatives, the Holy Roman Empire thus continued mainly in name, having lost all claims to universality or effective centralized government. In practice, it was now little more than a title passed on by the Habsburg rulers of one German state—Austria—with its future tied to the fate of the Habsburg dynasty.

VIII

The End of the Empire

During most of the 18th century, the Habsburg emperors were mainly concerned with the power struggles between their own Austria and Prussia, the two most prominent German states. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, however, they were forced to confront the threat posed by a French invasion. From 1792 to 1802, Austria and Prussia joined forces with other German states in wars of defense against revolutionary France. All the wars ended in defeat, and France continued to expand its territory.

In the face of the successes of Napoleon I, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II modified his title to a more modest hereditary emperor of Austria in 1804. Two years later, however, Napoleon organized the states of the Holy Roman Empire that he had conquered into the Confederation of the Rhine. The 17 members of the confederation then broke away from the empire, prompting Francis II to resign the title of Holy Roman emperor altogether. On August 6, 1806, the Holy Roman Empire was formally dissolved.

IX

Legacy of the Empire

In truth, the empire had long existed more in the realm of ideas than as a political or administrative reality. The ancient obsession with Italy, the costly conflicts with the papacy, and the continuous resistance of German nobles to any strong central authority had made the empire essentially ungovernable for over five centuries. Many nationalist historians of the 19th and 20th centuries agonized over the so-called failure of Germany to unify as France and England had done, and regretted the political and economic impotence that was legacy of this lack of unity.

Yet despite its ignominious decline and end, the Holy Roman Empire continued to exercise a great influence on the imaginations of later German imperialists. When Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian king William I established the German Empire in 1871, they explicitly encouraged the title Second Empire for the new state, so as to borrow some of the glory and power enjoyed by the Holy Roman Empire at its peak. Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist supporters similarly appropriated the legacy of the First Empire by dubbing their own regime the Third Empire and pledging another thousand years of German hegemony. Both regimes of course proved considerably briefer than the original empire during its peak, although for a time they were equally as dominant in the politics of western and central Europe.

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