The Holy Roman Empire (Empires in the Middle Ages)
From Christmas Day in 800 CE until August 6 1806 there existed in Europe a peculiar political institution called the Holy Roman Empire though this is a bit of a misnomer The name of the empire as it is known today did not come into general use until 1254 It has been said that this political arrangement was not holy Roman or an empire Any holiness attached to it came from the claims of the popes in their attempts to assert religious control in Europe It was Roman to the extent that it tried to revive without success the political authority of the Roman Empire in the West as a coun terweight to the Byzantine Empire in the East And it was an empire in the loosest sense of the word at no time was it able to establish unchallenged political control over the vast territories it pretended to rule In fact there was no central government no unity of language no common system of law and no sense of common loyalty among the many states within it And over the centuries the empire’s boundaries shifted and shrank drastically How did this oddly named institution last for over a thousand years 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N
The sprawling ninth-century empire of Charlemagne covered a great part of Europe Less than thirty years after his death however it was partitioned into three weak kingdoms The original Roman Empire ended in Italy and Western Europe in 476 CE when the last emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed Political power passed to Constantinople now Istanbul Turkey the capital of the Byzantine Empire Theoretically Constantinople included all of Europe in its domain Realistically however this proved impossible as barbarian kingdoms were established throughout Western Europe The only figure in the West who had 5 IntroductIon
A modern photograph of Istanbul includes the iconic Galata Tower built by the Genoese in 1348 with the Bosphorus Strait visible in the foreground any claim to universal authority was the pope in Rome but legally he was the bishop of Rome confirmed in his position by the Byzantine emperor By the eighth century Byzantine control of Italy had vanished The Lombard kingdom of northern Italy had driven out the emperor’s representative in Ravenna in 751 There were also strong religious differences between the pope and the church in Constantinople differences that would lead to a com plete break in 1054 Confronted with this situation the Roman popes sought political protection from the only 6 the holy roman empire
Pippin the Short in a nineteenth-century chromolithograph 7 introduCtion
