# Resolved: The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 6, 2008, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299 "2008-09-06T04:36:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/21 "2008-09-08T00:54:42Z")
> [@5-HT](#): > > Debate is the only arena in which Americans use “resolved” in this way. And that was how I used it, this being Great DEBATES. Yeesh. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/22 "2008-09-08T01:13:19Z")
From John J. Reilly’s [ur=[http://www.johnreilly.info/thre.htm](http://www.johnreilly.info/thre.htm)]review of _The Holy Roman Empire,_ by Friedrich Heer: > [@](#): > > **The Empire was not a state, but a system of dispensing justice.** > > We find that lucid formula near the end of this sprawling book by Friedrich Heer (1916 – 1983), the great Austrian authority on intellectual history. The formula is welcome, since there has always been some mystery about what the Holy Roman Empire was, as well as about what it was supposed to be. However, just as the formula comes late in the book, so it best applies only to the final phase of the empire, when the emperors were preoccupied with the defense of their solid Habsburg possessions in Austria and Hungry, and the empire was a sort of German United Nations that functioned through the Perpetual Diet of Regensburg and through the imperial courts. Even in the 18th century, however, the empire never lost its connection to the days when the emperors were priest-kings, who reflected an even more primordial past. > > \ > > There are key dates and events in the political history of the thousand-year empire, naturally. The Roman imperial title was revived, or created, for Charlemagne in 800, and survived the rapid disintegration of his empire. Eventually it passed to Otto I, who was crowned in 962, which in many ways was the real beginning of the Holy Roman Empire. It was a largely, but not exclusively, German league of princes, bishops, and municipalities. All were under the authority, if never quite the control, of a nominally elective king. The fundamental constitutional text of the empire was the Golden Bull, issued by Charles IV in 1356. Among other things, the Bull fixed at seven the number of imperial electors, the college of lay and ecclesiastical lords who elected the emperor; their number eventually rose to nine. In 1555, at the end of the reign of Charles V, the first round of the wars of religion ended in the long truce of the Peace of Augsburg. Through a combination of malice and stupidity, the truce collapsed into the Thirty Years’ War in the next century. The war (wars, really) ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which made it possible for Catholics and Protestants to co-exist in the empire. The cost was a broad and precise definition of the rights of the German principalities that prevented the formation of a national German state. The empire was dissolved, under pressure from Napoleon, by the Emperor Francis I in 1806. Heer repeatedly assures us that the dissolution was beyond the emperor’s power, and illegal; he’s probably right. > > The difficulty with telling the story of the Holy Roman Empire is that all the verbs and adverbs are attached in every generation to different nouns. The empire’s center of gravity was generally in Germany, or Austria, but sometimes the emperors identified more with their possessions in Burgundy or the Netherlands, or in Bohemia. Charles V, the first ruler on whose domains the sun never set, was as Spanish as he was Burgundian or Austrian (though the Spanish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire were coincident only in Charles’s person). The hold of Charles’s family, the Habsburgs, on the imperial office was almost secure in the last few centuries of the empire. The various branches of the Habsburgs perfected the art of being everywhere present and nowhere a foreigner. The fact of being cosmopolitan did not make the Austrian Habsburgs chiefly concerned with protecting their most cosmopolitan title, however. They cared for the empire, just as they cared for their other possessions. At the end, though, they could let it go without diminishing their house’s real power or influence. > > Nonetheless, the empire does have a history, because there were constants. Heer tells us that the Ottonian conception of the empire characterized it to some degree until the very end: > > > [@](#): > > > > “What could be finer, what more right and proper, than a Holy Empire conceived as a great federative league, based on trust rather than subjection, composed of friends from within and without (at their head the Pope, both as bishop of Rome and the king’s friend), the whole under the leadership of the Emperor-king?” > > Despite the empire’s protean geography, there were some basics that all emperors struggled to retain. They all protected the jurisdiction of the imperial courts, for instance, and they all tried to secure communications through imperial territory. There was a small number of imperial rights they insisted on keeping, and to a remarkable extent they succeeded. > > Political theory is relevant to the study of the empire, obviously, but the empire stays in our minds because it is where all those emperors in European fairy tales come from. Heer does not cease to remind us that the symbols and the functions of the emperors go back 5,000 years, to the first city-states with their eagle emblems and god-kings. The emperor was in some sense a universal ruler, in dignity if not in fact. His archetypical claim to deference had nothing to do with his power. > > They emperors always did certain things. They hunted. They cured by touch, at least reputedly. They protected the Church. They made peace. More precisely, they had the duty to give peace. Also, the emperors, and the empire as a whole, were the restrainers of Antichrist. (Curiously, Heer does not cite II Thessalonians 2:7.) The German emperors played this role when they defeated a Magyar invasion of the West in 955 at the Battle of Lech, and thereby created the sense of “Germanness.” They played the same role six centuries later, when they were the only European rulers to offer serious, systematic, and ultimately successful resistance to the Turkish jihad aimed at central Europe. According to persistent myth, when the Emperor of the Last Days lays down his crown at Jerusalem after finally defeating Babylon, then the Antichrist will appear. > > Sometimes, of course, the emperor was Antichrist, at least in the opinion of the pope. The tension between holy empire and holy church, both claiming divine sanction, runs right through the history of the West. Heer points out that the largely successful campaign by the popes of the 12th and 13th centuries to desacralize the empire was the basis of every other claim of right that would ever be made against the state. It also meant that the Church, the City of God, would eventually become just another political body: society as well as the state was ultimately desacralized. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/23 "2008-09-08T01:26:06Z")
[Fixed above link.](http://www.johnreilly.info/thre.htm) ---
**Author:** ![5-HT](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/5/f19dbf/32.png) [@5-HT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/5-HT)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/24 "2008-09-08T02:43:16Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > And that was how I used it, this being Great DEBATES. > > Yeesh. Um, yeah I know. His wording made it sound like he thought this was the standard definition as used by Americans. It’s not, so I posted that. Maybe he didn’t mean it that way, in which case, all I did was add some unneeded info. The funny part is that even if that was the case, my post still wasn’t as worthless as yours. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/25 "2008-09-08T04:28:36Z")
> [@Mr.Kobayashi](#): > > I would accept your argument if Germany was ever a part of the Roman Empire. > > Greek land was assimilated by the Romans, just as in you analogy Seminole lands were taken over by the US, whereas there was a fine line between Roman lands and Germania. > > The HRE, simply put, wanted to sponge off the glory that was Rome. All of these arguments are semantic. The various Germanic peoples all provided taxes, soldiers, and material support to the empire. You cant say that people who go to war under the orders of the same leaders, and all pay taxes to the same authorities are not in fact part of the same country. The Germanic people were as much a part of the Western Roman empire as Spain and North Africa were. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Kobayashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4af34b/32.png) [@Mr.Kobayashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Kobayashi)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/26 "2008-09-08T06:03:09Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > All of these arguments are semantic. The various Germanic peoples all provided taxes, soldiers, and material support to the empire. You cant say that people who go to war under the orders of the same leaders, and all pay taxes to the same authorities are not in fact part of the same country. The Germanic people were as much a part of the Western Roman empire as Spain and North Africa were. Surely the whole argument is semantic - the right of the HRE to call itself Roman? Granted, the composition of the legions toward the end was comprised of a great many Germanic peoples. But that invites the question - did they see themselves as Germans or Romans? There’s also another point - are the Germans in service to Rome, i.e. Germans within Rome’s own borders granted foederati status or through force (Franks, Goths, Vandals) the same Germans that made up the HRE? I would say no for the fact that they had been assimilated into Rome’s borders and not merely stayed in Germany. The Franks taking over Gaul, Goths moving into Noricum, Vandals settling into North Africa, etc. You could say that Germans ‘Germanified’ the Roman Empire to such an extent that it was no longer the Roman Empire; which by the end it wasn’t. So you have the situation that rather than Germans becoming Romans, you have Romans becoming German. Again, that may sound like a merely semantic argument, but that’s the point. Everything you say is true, and I’m not disputing that. But the argument isn’t about whether Germanic peoples up to the 4th-5th centuries were Roman, but whether the Holy Roman Empire was. Even if Germans in the 10th century did identify with their wayward brethren, did this mean they were Roman? I would argue no; since the WRE had been defunct for nigh-on 6 centuries, they left it a little late to say the least - the Germans who could call legitimately themselves Roman had long since moved on. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2008, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/27 "2008-09-08T15:39:21Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > All of these arguments are semantic. The various Germanic peoples all provided taxes, soldiers, and material support to the empire. You cant say that people who go to war under the orders of the same leaders, and all pay taxes to the same authorities are not in fact part of the same country. The Germanic people were as much a part of the Western Roman empire as Spain and North Africa were. Well, some were, some weren’t. Many Germans migrated south of the Rhine, accepted Roman rule, paid taxes, served in the legions, absorbed Roman culture to some extent, converted to Christianity, etc. But other Germans remained north of the Rhine, outside the Empire, and hostile to Rome – which they intended to reach as conquerors, not immigrants. Wars in that period often involved pitting “our” Germans against the others. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/28 "2008-09-09T14:12:46Z")
> [@Brainglutton](#): > > Well, some were, some weren’t. Many Germans migrated south of the Rhine, accepted Roman rule, paid taxes, served in the legions, absorbed Roman culture to some extent, converted to Christianity, etc. But other Germans remained north of the Rhine, outside the Empire, and hostile to Rome – which they intended to reach as conquerors, not immigrants. Wars in that period often involved pitting “our” Germans against the others. Which is irrelevant to whether or not the Holy Roman Empire should have called themselves that. The way I sees it, they saw themselves as inheritors of the traditions of Rome, they thought of the Empire as Holy, and it _was_ definitely an Empire. In fact, the ironic thing is that the Western Empire might not have fallen at all save for a twist of fate. “Emperor” Magnus tried a coup with his northern legions and tripped the border garrisons for his march on Rome. When this happened, the barbarians came pouring across and there was nobody across most of Europe to stop them. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/29 "2008-09-09T14:47:44Z")
My 0.02 dinarii - The Holy Roman Empire was Roman because all Christian empires are Roman. Basically, the general philosophy back then was that Christendom could only have two emperors - Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, and Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. By Charlemagne’s time, the eastern crown was firmly in the hands of the Byzantines, but the Western one was up for grabs. Thus, “Roman Empire”. The title of “Emperor” without the title of “Roman” before it wouldn’t have made any sense to them. It helps if you think of “Western Roman Empireship” as an actual, physical object. The Romans held it, lost it, and a couple of centuries later the Germans had it. Similarly, the Eastern Roman Empireship was held at Constantinople, and once that fell, it was picked up by the Russians, who immediately started calling their kings Caesars - or as they said it, Tsars. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/30 "2008-09-09T23:17:42Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Which is irrelevant to whether or not the Holy Roman Empire should have called themselves that. The way I sees it, they saw themselves as inheritors of the traditions of Rome, they thought of the Empire as Holy, and it _was_ definitely an Empire. > > In fact, the ironic thing is that the Western Empire might not have fallen at all save for a twist of fate. “Emperor” Magnus tried a coup with his northern legions and tripped the border garrisons for his march on Rome. When this happened, the barbarians came pouring across and there was nobody across most of Europe to stop them. No way. Oh, I suppose the Empire might have limped on a few more years - but honestly, it was already pretty much dead by then. The economy had failed, the military was falling apart, the government was non-functional. There were far too many systemic problems for the Western Roman Empire to endure much longer than it did. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2008, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299/31 "2008-09-09T23:38:38Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > No way. Oh, I suppose the Empire might have limped on a few more years - but honestly, it was already pretty much dead by then. The economy had failed, the military was falling apart, the government was non-functional. There were far too many systemic problems for the Western Roman Empire to endure much longer than it did. Actually, they were in a strong recovery period. The borders of the Empire (save for its division) had not really shrunk, and previous waves of barbarians failed to break the empire. Its fortifications were as strong as ever, and given the troops to man them (which were present before the disaster) they could stop nearly anything. Some of these fortifications were on the level of High Medieval era. Economically, too, the western empire was on the mend. Its economy didn’t really collapse until after the barbarians broke through, and even then pockets of resistance and economic strongholds stayed alive for centuries. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/resolved-the-holy-roman-empire-was-neither-holy-nor-roman-nor-an-empire/462299.md?page=1)