Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 941 pp., $39.95.

 

IT SAYS something about the power of historical memory that, 132 years after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, it still exerted a strong emotional pull on the German imagination. So much so that, in the days immediately preceding the Anschluss, Adolf Hitler’s military annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938, a Nazi agent was tasked with preventing Austrian patriots from making off with the coronation regalia of the Holy Roman emperors before the incoming Germans could confiscate it.

Waffen SS Maj. Walter Buch—an early Hitler acolyte, rampant anti-Semite and something of a goofy mystic when it came to Germanic holy relics—checked into a small Viennese hotel incognito. Once the Anschluss was launched, he donned his uniform and, toting a loaded Luger, proceeded to the Kunsthistorisches Museum where the imperial regalia were housed. Like the incoming columns of German troops, Buch encountered no serious Austrian resistance and was able to present his plunder to a gratified Hitler when the führer made his triumphant entry into Vienna.

The trophies were packed off to Nuremberg, which, in its days as a proud imperial city, had housed the crown regalia between coronations of Holy Roman emperors. The same city had become a hotbed of Nazi support and the scene of the mammoth Nuremberg Rallies recorded on film by Leni Riefenstahl. In a final irony, after World War II it would also be the site of the Nuremberg Trials prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Walter Buch, who besides his other Nazi credentials was also Martin Bormann’s father-in-law, would serve time as one of them. In 1949, faced with further charges, he committed suicide. Taking no chances—and with a distinctly Teutonic thoroughness—he slashed his wrists before drowning himself in the Ammersee. Three years earlier, after rescue from a Nazi bunker, the crown regalia had been returned to a once-more independent Austria. With any luck, they have found their permanent resting place there, displayed in the Hofburg Palace, home of the dynasty that ruled the empire for almost all of its last three centuries.

The Holy Roman Empire was the first of three Reichs in German history. The second was the Hohenzollerns’ formidable, Prussian-dominated empire forged by Bismarck out of victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Despite making a newly unified Germany the dominant economic and military power on the European continent, it only lasted from 1871 to 1918. The third German Empire, Hitler’s vaunted “Thousand-Year Reich,” enjoyed an even shorter run, from 1933 to 1945. There had, however, been a real Thousand-Year Reich. The Holy Roman Empire, constantly ebbing, flowing and morphing in size, shape and composition, occupied the heart of Europe from 800 to 1806, a millennium spanning from the Age of Charlemagne to the Age of Napoleon. Old enough to predate any of Europe’s modern nation-states, in some of its most important aspects it foreshadowed the ideals, if not the realities, of today’s European Union.

 

AFTER A long period of historical neglect, of treatment as an extinct specimen from a distant and irrelevant past, the empire has finally found a modern chronicler to do it justice and bring it back to life for contemporary readers. Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, has produced a magisterial work that tackles a complex subject with both erudition and lucidity, a combination of qualities that few academic historians manage to balance. The result is a big book but not a heavy one. Heart of Europe has almost as many pages as its subject’s lifespan, including 686 pages of central text, extensively detailed notes, a glossary, a chronology, appendices, imperial genealogies, thirty-five illustrations and twenty-two maps. Each of the maps, if not the pictures, is worth a thousand words, graphically depicting in black and white—and many appropriate gray areas—the amoeba-like changes in boundaries, the rise and fall of dynastic influences, and the shifting hubs of power in the European heartland.

It’s a massive book for a massive subject. As Professor Wilson explains in his introduction, understanding the history of the Holy Roman Empire “explains how much of the [European] continent developed between the early Middle Ages and the nineteenth century,” and reveals “important aspects which have become obscured by the more familiar story of European history as that of separate nation states.” Moreover, he writes,

The Empire lasted . . . well over twice as long as imperial Rome itself, and encompassed much of the continent. In addition to present-day Germany, it included all or part of ten other modern countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. Others were also linked to it, like Hungary, Spain and Sweden, or involved in its history in often forgotten ways. . . . More fundamentally, the east-west and north-south tensions in Europe both intersect in the old core lands of the Empire between the Rhine, Elbe and Oder rivers and the Alps. These tensions were reflected in the fluidity of the Empire’s borders and the patchwork character of its internal subdivisions.

He concludes, “The Empire’s history is not merely part of numerous distinct national histories, but lies at the heart of the continent’s general development.” This is especially true on the cultural plane. Because the core of the empire in what became modern Germany was divided into so many semisovereign principalities—still over three hundred of them in its final years, ranging in size from tiny imperial estates to large-scale princely and royal domains with formidable armies and financial resources such as Bavaria, Saxony and Prussia—the imperial landscape teemed with independent universities, independent centers of cultural patronage, and independent bases for crafts and commerce. The result was a centuries-long, mostly peaceful competition that produced magnificent music, scholarship, jurisprudence, art, architecture and technological progress; Goethe’s poetry and philosophy, Gutenberg’s printing press, and the myriad compositions of the Bachs, Mozarts and countless lesser masters spring to mind.

To this day, the central European landscape is checkered with former princely capitals as large as Munich and Dresden or as small as a provincial backwater like Bayreuth, where each German princeling sponsored his own theater, opera house, art collection and often a university as well. The same was true of the great Baltic trading ports of the Hanseatic League. Each developed a wealthy patrician merchant class with its own tradition of cultural patronage, not unlike that of the aristocratic Venetian Republic in its golden age.

The saga of the Holy Roman Empire begins and ends with the coronations of two extraordinary men: Charlemagne and Napoleon. Charlemagne, a Frankish warrior king who could neither read nor write, but who surrounded himself with learned churchmen and was able to speak several languages, had long dreamed of uniting and expanding Christian Europe under a central monarchy, a successor state to the Roman Empire. By 800 he had conquered much of central and western Europe and had made several visits to Rome, cultivating a role as protector of the mother church. The contemporary pope, Leo III, was, to put it mildly, less than universally popular with the populace. As described in The Oxford Dictionary of Popes,

On 25 April 799, as he was riding in procession to mass, a gang violently attacked him, attempting without success to cut out his eyes and tongue; after a formal ceremony of deposition he was shut up in a monastery. Helped by friends, however, he made his escape to . . . [Charlemagne], at Paderborn, who received him with solemn courtesy.

Each man had something to offer the other. Charlemagne had the armed power to restore Leo to the papacy. And Leo, as pope, was uniquely empowered to recognize Charlemagne as the new Roman emperor, the paramount monarch of Christendom, and in that sense a holy Roman emperor. After some hesitation—and quite probably some astute horse trading on both sides—Charlemagne restored Leo as pope. The favor was returned on Christmas Day, 800.

As the Christmas mass was beginning and [Charlemagne] rose from praying before St. Peter’s tomb, the pope placed an imperial crown on his head; the assembled crowd acclaimed him emperor, and Leo knelt in homage (the first and last obeisance a pope was to offer a western emperor). In spite of the chronicler Einhard’s report that the coronation came as an unwelcome surprise to [Charlemagne], everything indicates that the ceremony . . . had been carefully prearranged.

Charlemagne died in 814 and by 843 warring descendants had divided his empire into three kingdoms, with further splintering to follow. But the imperial title and concept survived as, over time, emperor succeeded emperor and dynasty succeeded dynasty, often with imperial claims to temporal power conflicting with papal claims to spiritual supremacy.

Through it all, the region we now think of as Germany, along with peripheral territories in parts of Italy, Burgundy and modern-day Netherlands, developed thriving economies and cultural lives under the relative stability of the imperial umbrella. Over the years an electoral system evolved, standardized by the so-called Papal Golden Bull of 1356. Henceforth, emperors would be chosen by an electoral college consisting of designated electors from a handful of powerful ecclesiastic and secular rulers within the empire. In theory, any prince of the empire could be elected emperor—just as, in theory, any child born in present-day America could grow up to be president. In practice, the title usually fell to one of the more powerful rulers within the empire and tended to be passed on to other members of the same dynasty for extended periods. This made perfect sense at the time since, as Professor Wilson points out,

It is important to remember that until the late Middle Ages contemporaries did not regard “elective” and “hereditary” monarchies as sharply defined constitutional alternatives. Even English kingship contained elective elements in that the aristocracy’s consent was required for a succession to be legitimate, while hereditary rule in France was achieved in practice by many kings crowning their sons as successors during their own lifetime. . . .

The Empire got “the best of both worlds,” because its monarchy was theoretically elective but often hereditary in practice. Nobles and the population generally preferred sons to follow fathers as this was interpreted as a sign of divine grace. Of the 24 German kings between 800 and 1254, 22 came from four families, with sons following fathers 12 times.

The empire officially remained elective in form to the very end, but for all practical purposes, the crown became hereditary after the election of Habsburg Maximilian I in 1508. From then on, with the exception of a brief interregnum and short reign by a Bavarian rival in the 1740s, every remaining emperor would be a Habsburg. As a result, imperial interests would sometimes be subordinated to those of the growing territories outside the empire that were part of the Habsburgs’ ancestral domains, ultimately embracing large chunks of Poland, Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia and the Venetian Republic, to mention just a few. As Edward Crankshaw put it in The Hapsburgs: Portrait of a Dynasty,

The revival of the Roman Empire, created by Charlemagne as part of his dream of uniting all Christendom under one temporal head, and to become known as the Holy Roman Empire, had long ceased to mean much in terms of power. But the Emperor was still vested with a quasi-mystical authority, even though he was now little more than an elected figurehead, or King, of the German peoples.

All of which has contributed to the dismissive attitude of most modern historians writing during or after the empire’s decline and ultimate dissolution. “The Empire’s demise coincided with the emergence of modern nationalism as a popular phenomenon,” Wilson writes,

as well as the establishment of western historical method, institutionalized by professionals like Leopold von Ranke who held publicly funded university posts. Their task was to record their national story, and to shape it they constructed linear narratives based around the centralization of political power or their people’s emancipation from foreign domination. The Empire had no place in a world where every nation was supposed to have its own state. Its history was reduced to that of medieval Germany, and in many ways the Empire’s greatest posthumous influence lay in how criticism of its structures created the discipline of modern history.

. . . For many, especially Protestant writers, the Austrian Hapsburgs wasted their chance once they obtained the imperial title . . . [by] pursuing the dream of a transnational empire rather than a strong German state. . . .

The Empire took the blame for Germany being a “delayed nation,” receiving only the “consolation prize” of becoming a cultural nation during the eighteenth century, before Prussian-led unification finally made it a political one in 1871. . . . Only after two world wars had discredited the earlier celebration of militarized nation states did a more positive historical reception of the Empire emerge.

 

AND THEN there is the question of what exactly makes an empire an empire. The year following Hitler’s annexation of Austria and acquisition of the imperial regalia, the Nazi high command ordered all official organizations to stop referring to the regime as the “Third Reich.” In effect, the Nazis were declaring the First Reich a nonempire on the grounds that it was too holy, too Roman and not German enough by half. Ergo, it wasn’t really an empire at all—a grotesque but logical extension of von Ranke’s less rabid critique at an earlier, less brutal phase of German nationalism.

Wilson makes a reasoned and convincing counter case. He suggests three basic yardsticks for evaluating an empire: size, longevity and hegemony. The least useful of these, he argues, is size. “Canada,” he points out,

covers nearly 10 million square kilometres, over 4 million square kilometres larger than either the ancient Persian empire or that of Alexander the Great, yet few would contend that it is an imperial state. Emperors and their subjects have generally lacked the obsession of social scientists with quantification; on the contrary, a more meaningful defining characteristic of empire would be its absolute refusal to define limits to either its physical extent or its power pretensions.

There is something more to be said for the second element, longevity. Historical significance of an empire depends on its passing

the “Augustan threshold”—a term derived from Emperor Augustus’s transformation of the Roman republic into a stable imperium. This approach has the merit of . . . identifying why some empires outlived their founders, but it should be recognized that many which did not nonetheless left important legacies, such as those of Alexander and Napoleon.

Hegemony is the third element and perhaps the most ideologically charged. Some influential discussions of empire reduce it to the dominance of a single people over others. Depending on perspective, the history of empire becomes a story of conquest or resistance. Empires bring oppression and exploitation, while resistance is usually equated with national self-determination and democracy. This approach certainly makes sense in some contexts. However, it often fails to explain how empires expand and endure, especially when these processes are at least partially peaceful.

For all of its many failings, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed a large territory that was also prime real estate at the time; lasted over a thousand years, which qualifies as longevity by any reasonable imperial standard; and maintained a comparatively peaceful and benevolent “hegemony” over a region that made impressive developmental strides economically and culturally long before the modern concept of nationalism and the nation-state even existed.

Even at its weakest, the empire provided a unified postal service and other useful institutions plus a judicial framework for mediating and settling disputes that could otherwise have led to violent conflict within and between its member entities. Its very weakness—the limits on its practical authority as the paramount power within a federation of principalities—led to long periods of peace within the empire in much the same way that large and small fish of different species can coexist in a carefully balanced aquarium. In this respect, the empire was prenational and postnational, the harbinger of later and, in some cases, ongoing attempts to create benevolent, voluntary structures that overarch national boundaries, such as the British Commonwealth, the Organization of American States and the European Union.

In this context, the empire’s weakness can almost be viewed as a strength, a structure based on shared values and traditions that served a positive purpose without imposing an authoritarian central power on diverse member states and peoples. This was a tradition carried on by the Habsburgs in their sprawling domains after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire.

 

WHAT BEGAN in the year 800 with the crowning of one warrior ruler, Charlemagne, as an emperor ended, for all intents and purposes, in 1804. In that year, another brilliant but rough-edged conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, in the presence of Pope Pius VII, crowned himself “Emperor of the French.” In doing so, he invoked the spirit of the thoroughly Germanic Charlemagne as a dubious precedent. Even the crown used at Napoleon’s coronation, a hastily improvised stage prop in pseudoantiquarian style, was spuriously dubbed “The Crown of Charlemagne.” The Holy Roman Empire managed to limp along until 1806, but the handwriting was on the wall. Revolutionary France had already annexed the Austrian Netherlands and western German states. Having assumed the imperial purple himself, Napoleon would soon create a series of German satellite states, further undercutting what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Francis II, its last ruler, saw it coming and, possibly anticipating a Napoleonic attempt to supplant him on the true throne of Charlemagne, created a new fallback position for himself. Already the Habsburg King of Hungary and Archduke of Austria, he elevated his Austrian title to “Emperor.” When Austria suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz—and some of the most powerful princes within the Holy Roman Empire, most notably Bavaria and Württemberg, had allied themselves with Napoleon—Francis abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor, and patiently waited to fight another day. As Edward Crankshaw put it,

[Francis’s] gentleness in the family circle, his lethargy, his refusal to fuss, his celebrated lack of pretentiousness, his habitual projection of an amiable, easy-going cynicism, provided not so much a protective shield as a convenient camouflage for one of the toughest and most determined figures in Hapsburg history. He would cut his losses with a display of equanimity that at times seemed frivolous. But he knew what he was doing, and why. And he never confused shadow with substance. Thus when, in 1806, after the Treaty of Pressburg, the Holy Roman Empire was solemnly abolished under pressure from Napoleon, Francis blandly laid down the Imperial crown, which was never to be worn again. But two years before, seeing the way the wind was blowing, he had given himself a new Imperial style and had himself proclaimed Emperor of Austria, and it was thus as His Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, that he survived Napoleon’s fall and, as the senior monarch, welcomed the majesties and highnesses of Europe to the Congress of Vienna.

Long before its closing chapter was written, people had been filing the empire’s obituary. In 1787, speculating on what form of government the newly independent American colonies should adopt, James Madison built part of his case for a strong federal union by pointing to what he considered the feeble example of the Holy Roman Empire, “a nerveless body; incapable of regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers; and agitated with unceasing fermentation in its own bowels.” Its history, said Madison, was little more than a catalogue “of licentiousness of the strong, and the oppression of the weak . . . of general imbecility, confusion and misery.” By then, the empire had survived for 976 years and was understandably infirm. Given the rather frayed state of the American union after a mere 240 years of independence, one can’t help but wonder what sort of shape—if any—it’ll be in at age 976.

Professor Wilson has made a major scholarly contribution by providing an informed, unclouded view of one of history’s great anomalies. It’s a pity that Western naturalists had not reached Australia in the early years of the Holy Roman Empire. If they had, they could have suggested the perfect animal to support its heraldic crest: the platypus. With its duck’s bill and webbed feet, its beaver-like fur coat and tail, and its hybrid status as an egg-laying mammal, the platypus is as much of an oddity in the animal kingdom as the empire was in the geopolitical realm. The empire lasted a thousand years and the platypus is still with us. Both of them remind us that what seems awkward, inefficient and absurd at first glance may yet contain a hidden value and vitality.

Unlike the platypus and the empire, the structure of Professor Wilson’s definitive work is almost too logical. By organizing his text to consider the empire from four different perspectives—its idealistic origins, its physical composition, its governance and its social structure—he has divided one large narrative into four subsections, each of which could form a short book in itself. This makes a simple, chronological account impossible, but offers the reader multiple perspectives of a complex and fascinating subject. And it is a subject that may still have relevance to a Europe that seemed to leave it behind in 1806. The author concludes,

Like current practice within the EU, the Empire relied on peer pressure, which was often more effective and less costly than coercion, and which functioned thanks to the broad acceptance of the wider framework of a common political culture. However, our review of the Empire has also revealed that these structures were far from perfect and could fail, even catastrophically. Success usually depended on compromise and fudge. Although outwardly stressing unity and harmony, the Empire in fact functioned by accepting disagreement and disgruntlement as permanent elements of its internal politics. Rather than providing a blueprint for today’s Europe, the history of the Empire suggests ways in which we might understand current problems more clearly.

Perhaps the only new lessons history has to offer are the old ones we’ve forgotten.

Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan and as a member of the National Council for the Humanities. His writing on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts has been widely published in the United States and overseas.

Image: François Gérard’s The Battle of Austerlitz. Wikimedia Commons/Public domain