The Other Great Institution: The HRE

Present consensus appears to be that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) extended in time from the coronation of Otto I, Duke of Saxony, as Emperor of the Romans, in 962, to the dissolution of the HRE by Francis II, emperor of Austria, in 1806, after his defeat in the Battle of Austerlitz by Napoleon. In this view the Carolingian empire is labeled as a “forerunner.”

I prefer another version I found in the 1956 Encyclopedia Britannica, “Empire.” That version sees the HRE as beginning with Charlemagne, whose coronation took place in 800. The HRE is there seen in large part as an institution that existed in parallel with the papacy for 1007 years and was seen, by the popes, as the secular counterpart to the sacred rule of the Church.

Another way to put that is to say that the HRE was an ideal, expressed as an institution, an institution that only gave this ideal a very modest embodiment. For secular rulers the title of emperor was either a well-deserved honorific the reality of which they more or less already possessed, or a title that gave them titular rights to influence realms they did not really control. In a practical sense it was a tool by which the papacy could motivate rulers to defend an often threatened papacy.

In any case Voltaire’s famous quip, calling the HRE “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire” is quite accurate. In that sense the HRE much resembles every other projected idealization that humanity has tried but has not quite succeeded in making real.

To illustrate this. The Carolingian was a genuine empire only while Charles I ruled it. Thereafter it fell apart physically. And the realm that came into being with the election of Otto I might be labeled the United States of Germany. Otto controlled some but not all German duchies—and, at his elevation, became King of Italy. The Emperor’s powers were always quite limited; the states that made up the later HRE had quite real sovereignty of their own—much more so than the states of the USA. But the Emperor had moral suasion, so long as he was firmly on the job, which was not always the case. After 911 the Office itself became elective, the electors being kings and dukes.

I present above a complete list of Holy Roman Emperors treating HRE as a singular phenomenon. I’ve marked the periods in which no Holy Roman Emperor ruled at all. The major dynasties that held this office are marked in different colors. Most worthy of note is that the longest period without an Emperor (37 years) came between what was left of the disintegrating Carolingian legacy and the coronation of a Germanic Emperor Otto. That gap would seem to justify the dualistic view—but only if we viewed the HRE as a genuine, coherent political-military power, which it was not.

Worth noting further is that the other gaps that appear do so at times when one dynastic power waned before a new one managed to take hold. The sway of these dynasties also ensured that the electors continued to stick with a successful house while its power lasted. And other emperors that surfaced briefly were often selected for practical reasons. Two such were Louis the Blind, ruler of Provence, right next door to Italy in France, and Berengar of Friuli, a region just north of Venice and Trieste. I show an inset map of Friuli, showing how small Berngar’s real base was in actuality—but well-placed to hold off the Magyars. Both men, indeed, were honored with the title in attempts to recruit and to incentivize them to fight Magyar invasions from the East. When you cannot endow people with real authority, sometimes a title is useful.

Another way to view the HRE is using a lens from the future—how the major nations of Europe were formed. Charlemagne actually controlled the future France, Germany, Austria, and half of Italy. The empire under his grandchildren was split in three parts (see map) at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, with the future border between France and Germany already set as the Rhine (in the earlier Oaths of Strasbourg, 842). Until the Ottonian dynasty took over, Holy Roman Emperors came from the green and orange regions, thus from France or Italy. Thereafter fragmentation and weakness in the West—Norman invasions and Magyar incursions—shifted stability to Germany, specifically the ruling power of Saxony, as shown in the next map.

The solid black lines above indicate the extent of Otto’s realm in 972, thus ten years after his coronation. The HRE still controls significant elements of France. The following series of maps next shows the evolution of the HRE over time, the marked areas shown overlapping modern boundaries.

Note the successive changes, particularly in the west and south, as French power gradually works its way all the way to the Rhine, as the Nordic emperors lose Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire becomes, eventually, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The thought also occurs, staring at these maps, that the slowly shrinking extent of the HRE represents the inverse of Europe’s gradually establishing coherent and stable nation states—with the HRE remaining, well past the date of its dissolution, a realm of competing duchies and principalities. The actual formation of a coherent German state had to await Bismarck and the year 1871—which takes us way, way past the end of the Middle Ages.

Two closing notes. The careful reader of the table will note that dates of some individuals overlap. The explanation is that such individuals co-ruled with their predecessor—having been elected while the predecessor still held power and, while doing so, could ensure his own succession.

The French-German divide was first symbolically marked when two grandsons of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald who ruled West Francia and Louis the German, ruler of East Francia, pledged allegiance against their brother, Lothair who, ruling Middle Francia, which also included the papal states, claimed overall dominion over them. He was, after all, the Holy Roman Emperor. (For the layout of their realms, see the second map shown in this post.) The documents were prepared in Old French and Old German, and each brother swore in his own language. Medieval Latin was also used to record the oath, perhaps to make them official. The oatha were sworn in Strasbourg in 842 and they set the Rhine as the border between the two brothers’ respective claims to dominance. Prophetic, that, although much sand had to run through the clocks before it was realized.

This famous event reminded me of a visit once to Strasbourg. I was stationed near there as a soldier of the U.S. Army. I went to see a popular movie one evening. Two teenage girls in front of me, waiting in line, had a lively dialogue, one speaking German, the other French. At one point they switched languages quite spontaneously, quite unaware of the fact that they were doing so. What comes around goes around. I bet that it’s still happening…
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Image credits:

Timeline of HRE: dates and names largely from Encyclopedia Britannica.
Map of Friuli: Google Maps.
Three-fold division of Carolingian Empire: Robert Sewel (link).
Otto's Realm in 972: Wikipedia (link).
Images of HRE over time: Wikipedia (link).

Middle Ages Posts:

Attila and the Great Wall

Augustine and the Visigoths and Vandals

Theodoric and Encircling German Arms

Arius and His Converts

Justinian and an Attempted Restoration

Saint Benedict and Western Monasticism

Iberia Absorbs the Visigoths

Saint Lucy and Light in the Middle Ages

Frankish Victory: From Clovis to Charlemagne

The Papacy in the Middle Ages

Charlemagne and the Quest for Order

Women in  the Middle Ages

From Attila to Osman
Plagues: The Other Invaders

The Two Races

Having mentioned Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychotherapist, yesterday I’ll follow it up with a quote from him:

In Wirklichkeit gibt es aber nur zwei Menschenrassen, nämlich die “Rasse” der anständigen Menschen und die “Rasse” der unanständigen Menschen. Und die “Rassentrennung” verläuft quer durch alle Nationen und innerhalb jeder einzelnen Nation quer durch alle Parteien.

In reality there are only two human races, namely the “race” of the decent people and the “race” of the indecent people. And “racial segregation” runs crosswise through all nations and within each nation crosswise through all parties.

Viktor Frankl, in a speech given on March 10, 1988, in Vienna, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi Annexation of Austria.

That “annexation” is commonly known as Der Anschluß. It took place officially on March 12, 1938. While the Nazis get “all the credit,” this movement predated the Nazis and really began immediately after the Holy Roman Empire disappeared in 1806. Thereafter advocates of a Small Germany and a Great Germany competed, the latter hoping to revive the HRE—which itself had been an attempt to revive the SPQR, the Roman Empire….

For a While, We Lived in SRI

I like to play with titles, so please indulge me. This post is really about the HRE, but since English was not commonly spoken there, the appropriate abbreviations for this space are HRR (taken from German), IRS (taken from Latin to please our tax collectors), and SRI (based on the Italian). That last is meaningful to me because I also, for a while, worked at MRI, and SRI was one of our formidable competitors. Well, stop playing in the mud, Arzénka.

All of those acronyms are for the Holy Roman Empire. It extended in time from 962 to 1806 and included (going top left down and then top right upwards) what are today the Netherlands, Belgium, a slice of France, Switzerland, most of Italy, Slovenia, much of Austria, the Czech Republic, a bit of Poland, and Germany in the center. Here is a nice map (clicking will enlarge it, going to the source, below, produces a detailed version):

The map (Wikipedia, link) is from a German source and identifies this region as the Ottonian and Salian dynasties that ruled the HRE; their predecessors were the Carolingians. The abbreviations briefly: HZT means Herzogtum, duchy. KGR means Königreich, kingdom. MGFT means Mark Grafschaft; the Mark is a march, now an obsolete English word meaning boundary, therefore a border region; the Graf is a count and a Grafschaft is a county.

Brigitte was born in Poland out of reach of the HRE; I saw the light in Hungary, also beyond the pale. But two of our children were born within the late Holy Roman Empire, Barbara to the Northeast, Monique almost in the center. Our third child, Michelle, now lives in Paris, which was beyond the HRE’s borders too; but she was born in a place no geographer could find in the year 1000, the date of this map.

I came across this splendid map yesterday in one of my efforts to correct my biases about the past. I looked first at the eleventh and then the eighth centuries. In the eighth Charles Martel fought the Battle of Tours; with that he stopped Saracen expansion into Europe and also, if indirectly, laid the foundations of what would ultimately become the HRE. Michelle, who spent some years in Tours as an exchange and later as a college student, may have been born far from the shores of HRE, but she was, as it were, in on the beginnings.

When we go as far back as the eighth, it becomes evident that Europe was very much still in the process of organizing itself. Tribes and bands held sway on its edges, regions which the Roman power of old had not yet civilized. These were being gathered into very rough kingdoms that treated war as a means of wealth-assembly. To be living in some parts of Europe then was not unlike living in certain parts of Africa now—and not as an American, European, or Asian there to trade or to do good works, but as a native. The establishment of ever larger regions of uniform and stable administration was a powerful trend in Europe then and carried out by violent means. In that process the formation of the HRE was one of the marvels although, as Voltaire is invariably quoted, it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Mind you, the process is still going on. It is the formation of a United Europe, presently at a rocky state because one of the countries on its economic “marches,” Greece, is acting unruly.

Now for those abbreviations. HRR is Heiliges Römisches Reich, although the full name added Deutscher Nation, thus “of the German nation.” IRS is taken from the Latin Imperium Romanum Sacrum. The SRI is Italian: Sacro Romano Impero. Our modern, American SRI is Stanford Research Institute, and I worked for Midwest Research Institute, MRI.

Nürnberg

My brother Baldy sent along a brief brochure explaining the etchings, by Johann Adam Deselbach, that illustrate a box of gingerbread from the firm E. Otto Schmidt of Nuremberg in Germany. A friend of his had gotten the box and wished to know what the sheet said. We got to talking about the city, one of the great places in Bavaria where we’d begun our life as immigrants just after World War II. “Around here,” Baldy said, “it’s only known as the place where the Nuremberg Trials were held.” That’s probably right on—and it suggested to me that it might be well to say something more about this very splendid medieval city. It was founded around 1000 AD; the illustration I am showing is dated 1493, but the modern place remains as splendid to this day as it appears to be from the fifteenth century image.

Curious place, Nuremberg. In a way it has always been quite central in Germany without being in any way, officially, its governing center. It was part of the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806) and a favorite residence of its emperors. Kaiser Friedrich II established it as a free imperial city in 1219. The Imperial Diets were regularly held at its castle—and for that reason the city came to be known as the “unofficial” capital of that famous realm. For this reason, evidently—Hitler’s ego here played a part—the city came to be the place for massive Nazi propaganda events, held annually from 1927 through 1938, the Nuremberg rallies. And for that reason later, when the Allies had overcome the Third Reich—and because the Palace of Justice in the city was large, suitable, and undamaged by allied bombing, plus having ample prisons attached—it was chosen as the right symbolic location for the trials. Nuremberg today has 500,000 inhabitants, so it isn’t some small place hidden among pines, only its crumbling towers showing above the tree-line.

I for one, having my own peculiar perspectives, have always viewed Nuremberg as Albrecht Dürer’s place of birth, a great artist whose work transcends all that other stuff. Come to think of it, he was also a great etcher, so this business begins and ends with references to the copper plate.

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Images from Wikipedia (link). I think that the tower in the modern image corresponds to the right-most tower in the central cluster of the old illustration shown above it.