History
The Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a complex political entity in central Europe that existed from 962 to 1806. It was not a centralized state but rather a loose confederation of territories ruled by an emperor, often in conflict with the papacy and various princes. The empire's power and influence fluctuated over time, and it ultimately dissolved in the early 19th century.
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3 Key excerpts on "The Holy Roman Empire"
eBook - PDFThe Roman Predicament
How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire
- Harold James(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
It lasted until it was dissolved in 1806 in the wake of the defeat of the last emperor (Francis) by Napoleon’s armies. Throughout its history it had a judicial system, albeit one that functioned often rather slowly and imperfectly (but in this it was quite characteristic of most early modern states); a system for electing an em- peror by the votes of the seven, and later eight, most important territo- rial rulers; and an implicit (but sometimes violated) understanding that parts of the empire should not go to war with each other. The compo- nent parts of the empire varied in size from micro-states, which in some cases comprised only half a village, to quite powerful states such as Brandenburg-Prussia, Saxony, or Bavaria. From the Peace of West- phalia (1648), the larger states liked to think of themselves as fully sov- ereign, and Prussia in particular evolved an alliance system to oppose that of the Austrian territories, whose ruler in practice was by now al- ways elected as Holy Roman Emperor. For Central Europeans, The Holy Roman Empire is what preceded the modern nation-state, which was brought about in part by and in part as a reaction against the French Revolution and Napoleon. It remained a mental map or template against which the present could be judged. This ideal was revived at moments when the nation-state was felt to be inadequate. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many com- mentators started to argue that the nation-state was the product of a A H O L Y R O M A N E M P I R E 121 particular moment of social organization, when the ideas of the French Revolution established national citizenship, and when railroads created national markets. But as people moved across national frontiers, and as markets became broader, in short as the very powerful late-nineteenth- century form of globalization developed, the nation-state looked con- fining, and ambitious planners looked to wider areas.
eBook - PDFDoes War Make States?
Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology
- Lars Bo Kaspersen, Jeppe Strandsbjerg(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The view that it, being an empire, belongs to another class of units has inhibited comparisons with other countries. The main differences between the HRE and France con- cerned how the political community was constructed. When monopol- istic state-structures began to be erected during the Early Modern era, the differences in the political construction of the realm goes a long way in accounting for the divergence between our three examples. Thus, placing the HRE at the centre rather than at the margins of the historical narrative makes a number of research questions visible. Medieval Polities Did Not Conform to Modern Definitions of Statehood Tilly defines his concept of the state as organizations other than lineage systems and clans. The fit of the label “lineage system”, for example, coalitions of clans, families and tribes, to describe the dominant mode of social formation in Europe is certainly more valid the further back one goes into history, for example, into the late antiquity in Gaul and Ger- mania. These coalitions were transitory and impermanent. It is not possible to discuss in full here how early kingdoms like the Merovingian one (c. 500–751) or the seventh-century Visigothic king- doms in Spain distinguished themselves from lineage systems. 38 How- ever, for a long time the character of loose groupings of clans remained a salient feature alongside more permanent structures. Tilly begins his inquiry around 900 and the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire, which had achieved a territorial extent and a modi- cum of permanence and organizational density remarkable for its time. When formal structures of power disintegrated, the Empire did not disintegrate into any kind of primaeval “lineage system”. Instead, it 38 Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 111–29. The Realm as a European Form of Rule 167 became a form of rule that was polycentric but nonetheless held together.
eBook - PDF- R. Taras(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
In their turn, the masses were still far from experiencing any sense of larger community. Becoming a nation was to be very much a random process, with little or no path dependence evident. The very understanding of the word natio was confused or inconsistent, referring in succession to a group of foreigners, a community of opinion, an elite, a sovereign people, and a unique people. 34 It was only with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that an international state system came into being, and it was only with the French Revolution 14 Liberal and Illiberal Nationalisms and its slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity that quintessentally na- tional goals were identified. To conclude this section on nation formation during The Holy Roman Empire, brief consideration needs to be given to the role of empires in nation-building (a subject discussed at length in Chapter 3). Conventional wisdom has it that empires are the graves of many nations because they annex, absorb, and assimilate many different peoples. But Hertz has made the case that early empires were in fact the cradles for, and even nourished, emergent nations: Modern national and democratic opinion is apt to judge Empires severely as destroyers and oppressors of free, peacable nations, actuated by lust of power. Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that it was the empire-builders who probably first created territorial states and political institutions which became the cradles of nations. 35 The view of empires as the cradle of nations was exemplified in the twenti- eth century by systems as different from each other as the Habsburgs and the Soviet Union. But in the late Middle Ages it was not the establishment of rival imperium but the centralization of power by monarchs that marked an irreversible break with the universalism proclaimed by the Roman church. Centralizing monarchies were to serve as cradles of nations.
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