The Holy Roman Empire

James Bryce

Viscount James Bryce Bryce

The Holy Roman Empire

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The object of this treatise is not so much to give a narrative history of the countries included in the Romano-Germanic Empire – Italy during the middle ages, Germany from the ninth century to the nineteenth – as to describe the Holy Empire itself as an institution or system, the wonderful offspring of a body of beliefs and traditions which have almost wholly passed away from the world. Such a description, however, would not be intelligible without some account of the great events which accompanied the growth and decay of imperial power; and it has therefore appeared best to give the book the form rather of a narrative than of a dissertation; and to combine with an exposition of what may be called the theory of the Empire an outline of the political history of Germany, as well as some notices of the affairs of mediæval Italy. To make the succession of events clearer, a Chronological List of Emperors and Popes has been prefixed[1 - The author has in preparation, and hopes before long to complete and publish, a set of chronological tables which may be made to serve as a sort of skeleton history of mediæval Germany and Italy.].

The present edition has been carefully revised and corrected throughout; and a good many additions have been made to both text and notes.

Lincoln's Inn,

August 11, 1870.

DATES OF SEVERAL IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE of EMPERORS AND POPES

[2] Reckoning the Anti-pope Felix (A.D. 356) as Felix II.

[3] Crowned Emperor, but at Bologna, not at Rome.

[†] The names in italics are those of German kings who never made any claim to the imperial title.

* Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY

Of those who in August, 1806, read in the English newspapers that the Emperor Francis II had announced to the Diet his resignation of the imperial crown, there were probably few who reflected that the oldest political institution in the world had come to an end. Yet it was so. The Empire which a note issued by a diplomatist on the banks of the Danube extinguished, was the same which the crafty nephew of Julius had won for himself, against the powers of the East, beneath the cliffs of Actium; and which had preserved almost unaltered, through eighteen centuries of time, and through the greatest changes in extent, in power, in character, a title and pretensions from which all meaning had long since departed. Nothing else so directly linked the old world to the new – nothing else displayed so many strange contrasts of the present and the past, and summed up in those contrasts so much of European history. From the days of Constantine till far down into the middle ages it was, conjointly with the Papacy, the recognised centre and head of Christendom, exercising over the minds of men an influence such as its material strength could never have commanded. It is of this influence and of the causes that gave it power rather than of the external history of the Empire, that the following pages are designed to treat. That history is indeed full of interest and brilliance, of grand characters and striking situations. But it is a subject too vast for any single canvas. Without a minuteness of detail sufficient to make its scenes dramatic and give us a lively sympathy with the actors, a narrative history can have little value and still less charm. But to trace with any minuteness the career of the Empire, would be to write the history of Christendom from the fifth century to the twelfth, of Germany and Italy from the twelfth to the nineteenth; while even a narrative of more restricted scope, which should attempt to disengage from a general account of the affairs of those countries the events that properly belong to imperial history, could hardly be compressed within reasonable limits. It is therefore better, declining so great a task, to attempt one simpler and more practicable though not necessarily inferior in inte