The Holy Roman Empire

by

Len Scales

Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often
negative place in accounts of German nationhood. ‘In the beginning was the Reich’, declared
Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point
the Empire’s abolition in 1806.1 It was with the Empire that, in Winkler’s view fatally, ‘that
which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations
has … its origin’. Winkler’s judgement reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and
highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar
and deficient character of Germany’s pre-modern ‘state’, the Empire itself. Whereas other
European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign
power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to
universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign
powers. At the Empire’s final, allegedly unlamented demise, the German people constituted a
mere Kulturnation, a scattered population of shared language and custom, but lacking the
unifying steel of firm, centralising rule. That steel was destined to be supplied by Prussia.
This chapter is concerned with the medieval period, comprising roughly the first two
thirds of the Empire’s thousand-year history. The Middle Ages have been central to modern
narratives of the tortuous and anomalous course of German nation-making, since it was in
those early centuries that the prize of nationhood was supposedly first glimpsed and then
fatally lost. On this view, rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions of the sovereign nation-
state, nation-making in the German lands ran backwards, from early promise, under vigorous
‘German’ kings, to imperial hubris, overreach, betrayal, and a long decline into sleepy
provincialism and political impotence. In what follows, a different account of the relationship
between the Empire and collective identities is presented, setting aside ideal-typical models of
the nation-state and concentrating on the medieval evidence. To do this is important, because
how we judge the relationship between the Reich and conceptions of peoplehood and
common belonging in the Middle Ages will affect our understanding of post-medieval
German nationhood, too. More broadly, the Empire offers valuable insights into how a

1
H.A. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2000), vol. 1, p. 5.
1
relatively weak, decentralised but prestigious polity could foster durable collective identities –
in some ways, precisely on account of its apparent shortcomings.

What, then, was the Holy Roman Empire, and how did it develop during the Middle Ages?
The Empire’s origins are usually traced to the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne
(r. 768-814) by the pope in Rome on Christmas Day AD 800. This event marked the revival in
western Europe of the imperial title, defunct since the abdication of the last Roman emperor
in the west in AD 476. There is justification for this view, since commentators in the later
Middle Ages came to appeal to Charlemagne’s authority as a founder-figure. The events of
800 were also important in establishing the idea that the pope might designate a single
powerful, hegemonic ruler as a guardian for the Catholic Church and a militant propagator of
the Christian faith. But too much stress upon Charlemagne is misleading, because his
coronation did not immediately establish a stable new institution of western emperorship in
the hands of rulers from the Germanic north. That only developed, together with a supporting
body of traditions, symbols, rituals, and an official vocabulary, slowly and at first fitfully,
over the course of subsequent decades and centuries. (The term ‘Holy Roman Empire’ itself
first appeared in the twelfth century and only became widespread in the thirteenth.)
Charlemagne had ruled over a large agglomeration of territories, including much of
what later became the kingdom of France, as well as core regions of the medieval Empire in
Germany and northern Italy. His dynasty, the Carolingians, regarded monarchy as a family
affair, sharing out the rule of their accumulated patrimony between different male members.
An important moment came in AD 843 with the treaty of Verdun, which divided
Charlemagne’s territorial empire among his grandsons, establishing separate eastern and
western kingdoms, as well as a middle realm encompassing northern Italy and what came to
be known as Lotharingia. Much remained fluid until the early tenth century, when the Saxon
duke Henry was raised to the throne east of the Rhine by Frankish and Saxon magnates, to
rule (in subsequent reckoning) as Henry I (r. 919-936). Henry was succeeded on the throne by
his second son Otto, who as Otto I (r. 936-973) revived the Carolingian tradition of
involvement in Italy and in 962 was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope.
The rule of these Saxon (or Ottonian) monarchs marks a turning point since henceforth
the western imperial monarchy was to have a continuous history down to 1806, even though
not all its medieval rulers would be crowned as emperor. Henry I established the practice,
continued by his successors, of passing on his territorial power-base undivided to a single
heir. The patterns set by his son Otto, of military campaigns south of the Alps, close dealings

2
with the papacy, and the expectation of imperial coronation in Rome, likewise proved binding
in the centuries that followed. The Ottonians also continued the Carolingian tradition of war
against their pagan eastern neighbors, under an ideological mantle of upholding and
propagating the Christian faith, as well as in order to defend their frontiers and extend their
territorial power.
Over the course of successive reigns, emperors reinforced their rule over Italy, which
came to be regarded as a distinct component kingdom of the Empire, with its own crown.
Down to the fourteenth century, Italy remained an important sphere of activity for the
Empire’s rulers, some of whom led repeated expeditions to the south and spent a significant
portion of their reigns there. Only two, however, the Ottonian Otto III (r. 980-1002) and the
Hohenstaufen Frederick II (r. 1212-1250), made serious attempts to rule from beyond the
Alps: even in its central-medieval heyday, the Empire was a fundamentally northern
institution. Early in the eleventh century a Burgundian realm was added, comprising
territories in Switzerland and south-eastern France. It, too, had a crown, though few medieval
monarchs troubled to undergo investiture.
Within the Germanic-speaking core-lands in the north, the focus of power shifted over
time with successive dynasties, reflecting the changing concentration of familial lands and
resources. Under the Ottonians these lay principally in Saxony, although the old Carolingian
heartlands on the Rhine remained important. The middle Rhine provided a center of gravity
for the next dynasty, the Salians, whose members ruled down to 1125, and under whom
Speyer attained prominence as a royal burial site and a center for dynastic self-representation.
The Salians’ successors, the Hohenstaufen, who provided kings and emperors until 1254, had
their power-base in the south-west, in Swabia and Alsace. One result of this changing
dynastic focus was that for most of the Middle Ages there was no stable center of rule, let
alone anything that might be termed a capital, in the Empire’s northern lands.
Only in the final medieval centuries did this begin to change, as rulers from new
families attained the throne, and assembled the resources of dynastic power. These were no
longer to be sought in the properties and incomes that came with the imperial title, which by
the late Middle Ages were falling increasingly under the control of local and regional powers.
Nor could the new dynasties count on enjoying lasting possession of the crown, which after
the thirteenth century was in the gift of a constitutionally defined college of prince-electors.
The Luxembourg dynasty, which first gained the Empire with the election of Henry VII (r.
1308-1313), constructed over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries a large,
hereditary patrimony in east-central Europe. Charles IV (r. 1346-1378) developed Prague, the

3
chief city of his dynastic kingdom of Bohemia, as a major metropolis, which for a short time
functioned as a de facto capital for the Empire. Following the extinction of the Luxembourgs
in the fifteenth century, their place was taken by the Habsburgs, who had built a dynastic
power-bloc in the far south-east of Germany. By the end of the Middle Ages Vienna had
emerged as both a dynastic capital and an important site of imperial government.
Monarchical rule in the Empire was itinerant, and the locations for the ruler’s material
and ideological support were always plural. This principle found expression already in the
process of accession to the throne, in which election by the princes, customarily in Frankfurt,
was followed by coronation and enthronement at the old Carolingian center of Aachen. Power
was principally exercised through ritualised face-to-face encounters. Kings and emperors
summoned periodic assemblies of the ecclesiastical and secular magnates of the Empire.
These met at a variety of accustomed sites, mainly in Germany, often on the high feast-days
of the Church. In the late Middle Ages these meetings increasingly took place at urban centers
and were also attended by representatives of the imperial towns. Institutions of impersonal
government remained modest, at least when compared with the resources of central record-
keeping, justice, and taxation that developed in neighboring western-European kingdoms over
the course of the Middle Ages.
Although most of the Empire’s medieval rulers hailed from its German territories and
were raised to the throne by German princes, Italy long remained a major theatre of their
activity and relations with the papacy, on whom they depended for imperial coronation, a
long-running preoccupation and problem. The difficulties were partly ideological, since popes
and emperors were ascribed a joint headship of Catholic Christendom whose terms, however,
remained debatable, and partly material, with the emperor’s territorial claims in Italy
threatening the papacy’s jealously guarded independence. The conflicts of emperors and
popes, which were recurrent between the late eleventh and the mid-fourteenth century, proved
particularly intractable and destructive because they often became entangled with political
rivalries and princely ambitions north of the Alps. The damage which resulted was partly to
the reputation of the imperial monarchy, which became at times a focus of bitter controversy
and division. (Of the emperors who ruled during the centuries of conflict, few avoided
excommunication.) But the long absences of monarchs in the south – Frederick Barbarossa (r.
1152-1190) spent over a third of his reign campaigning in Italy – tended also to reinforce the
natural regionalism and constitutional polycentricity of their northern lands. Only in the last
two medieval centuries did these patterns change somewhat.

4
For German historians writing in the nationalist tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the medieval Empire was a source of both allure and disappointment. Their
approaches, long shaped by memories of the rise of Prussia and the founding of the German
Empire of 1871, usually regarded a strong ‘state’ as both reflecting and providing an
indispensable basis for the growth of national identity. Much attention was devoted to fixing
with precision ‘the origins of the German Reich’ in the late ninth or early tenth century.2 The
rival merits of 843, 911 (the first accession of a non-Carolingian east of the Rhine), 919, or
other purportedly axial dates were weighed, as if these marked the founding moments of a
modern-style nation-state. For Martin Lintzel, for example, ‘the will of the German Volk to
independence achieved breakthrough’ in the treaty of Verdun dividing Charlemagne’s
inheritance.3 A concern with origins and the power of kings long survived the discrediting of
German-nationalist medievalism in 1945. After mid-century, however, the task became to
explain why the German nation, which had seemingly enjoyed the same promising post-
Carolingian start as the French, subsequently failed to grow healthily within monarchical state
structures like its western neighbor.4 Implicitly or explicitly, Germany’s imperial Sonderweg,
lamented by Heinrich August Winkler, was ascribed much of the blame.
If one approach looked for a German nation-making moment antedating imperial
titles, another, often reflecting modern imperialist longings, highlighted the power of the
Empire itself, in its high-medieval heyday, as constituting proof of a strong underlying sense
of nation. Founding empires was surely what proud, self-confident nations did. Wilhelm von
Giesebrecht thus presented his Deutsche Kaiserzeit – the ‘German imperial age’ between the
tenth and the twelfth centuries, the subject of his popular multi-volume history – as the time
‘in which our people, strong in its unity, attained the fullest extent of its powers’.5 Medieval
Germans were at their most German when at their most triumphantly imperial – a view which,
while it never entirely silenced the Empire’s kleindeutsch critics, received strong affirmation
in both academic and political circles after the foundation of a new German Reich in 1933. A
handful of historians continued into the second half of the twentieth century to discern in the
Empire of the Salians and Hohenstaufen a ‘German national state’.6 The late Middle Ages,

2
See the essays in H. Kämpf (ed.), Die Entstehung des Deutschen Reiches: Deutschland um 900 (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956).
3
Cited in G. Tellenbach, ‘Wann ist das Deutsche Reich entstanden?ʼ, in Kämpf (ed.), Entstehung, p. 175.
4
See C. Brühl, Deutschland – Frankreich: Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1990).
5
W. von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 5 vols. (Braunschweig: Schwetschke, 1855-1880),
vol. 1, pp. vii-viii.
6
E.g., K.G. Hugelmann, Stämme, Nation und Nationalstaat im Deutschen Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1955).
5
when the Empire no longer dominated the European political stage, were for a long time
largely ignored by historians in search of a medieval German nation.
What these approaches often had in common was a tendency to focus on external,
objective criteria – the foundation of new polities, the assertion of imperial power – to the
relative or complete neglect of subjective expressions of medieval consciousness and
mentalities. The experience of modernity seemed to make clear both that healthy nations
existed within well-made political structures and that their vitality, and thus self-
consciousness, waxed and waned with the tides of political and military power. What more
was there to seek? The result in the German case was a concentration of studies of medieval
nationhood upon centuries in which the evidence for its existence is limited and problematic,
at the expense of other, later centuries when such evidence becomes more explicit and
abundant.

For the much-studied, supposedly formative, late- and post-Carolingian periods, the historian
has little to work with beyond names – and a meagre and unpromising tally even of those.
Titles, when used politically, often placed their stress on political multiplicity rather than on
unity. Ottonian kingship claimed to derive its legitimacy from acknowledgement by a
plurality of established peoples (‘the population of Franks and Saxons’); Otto I presented
himself on occasion as a ‘king of the Franks and Lombards’.7 The idea of the imperial
monarchy as the outcome of common action by a multiplicity of northern peoples proved
long-lasting. As late as the thirteenth century, the widely-copied vernacular law code known
as the Sachsenspiegel could still proceed directly from discussing the election of the monarch
to claiming that the Saxons, Bavarians, Franks, and Swabians, on whom his rule rested, had
once inhabited their own kingdoms.8 When a unifying political identity was sought for the
populations of the former Carolingian territories east of the Meuse and for their new rulers,
until at least the eleventh century the habitual recourse was to the well-established,
legitimising theme of Frankishness.
It is around the year 1000 and in the decades that follow that references to ‘the
Germans’ (Teutonici) start to appear in growing, if still modest, numbers. Their provenance
and contexts are revealing, since they occur mainly in writings from south of the Alps or from

7
E. Müller-Mertens, ‘Frankenreich oder Nicht-Frankenreich? Überlegungen zum Reich der Ottonen anhand des
Herrschertitels und der politischen Struktur des Reichesʼ, in C. Brühl and B. Schneidmüller (eds.), Beiträge zur
mittelalterlichen Reichs- und Nationsbildung in Deutschland und Frankreich (Historische Zeitschrift Beiheft 24,
Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997), pp. 48-50.
8
Sachsenspiegel Landrecht, ed. K.A. Eckhardt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica [henceforth MGH] Fontes
iuris Germanici antiqui, Nova Series, vol. 1.i (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1955), p. 238
6
the southern borderlands of the Empire’s cisalpine core, and they often relate to the
campaigns undertaken by the monarch, with northern military support, in Italy.9 The same
sources and contexts also yield early references to a ‘German language’ (lingua Teutonica),
purportedly common (and by implication exclusive) to the different Germanic groups united
in imperial service. A ‘German people’ therefore seems first to have become visible to
contemporaries in consequence of its rulers’ imperial turn during the tenth century and their
ventures in the south. It appears to have been southerners, responding to the incursions from
across the Alps, who did much to teach ‘the Germans’ about their common existence as a
community of imagination. But what above all transformed a collection of labels and epithets
into something more substantial was the descent of the imperial monarchy’s relations with the
papacy into bitter, protracted controversy during the second half of the eleventh century.
Nothing did more to lend salience and lasting currency to a vocabulary of common
Germanness than the campaign waged by the reforming Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) to
combat and constrain what a new generation of clerical zealots had come to regard as
unwarranted interference in ecclesiastical affairs by the emperor. The papal challenge had
partly been provoked by the development during the eleventh century of an increasingly
ambitious doctrine of Christian emperorship, which insisted on the emperor’s duty and power
to intervene at the highest levels within the Church for the general good. The papal party
sought in response to force the monarchy back within clear boundaries, which the Church
now claimed the power to define. The Empire’s ruler, the pope and his allies insisted, was a
mere German monarch, ruling over a German polity (regnum Teutonicorum), implicitly no
different from other territorial kingdoms.10
The role of the ‘Investiture Contest’, as the conflict (which focused particularly on the
monarch’s power to install, or ‘invest’, bishops) is known, as a stimulus to collective
identities in the Empire, is important in a number of seemingly paradoxical ways. The crucial
formative interventions in imperial affairs were hostile ones, by an external actor, and they
challenged some of the most explicitly universal aspects of the emperor’s titles and claims.
The conflict resulted in no imperial triumph, but rather contention and protracted instability,
which threatened the Empire’s prestige. But its effect was also to lend urgency to debates
about the nature of the imperial monarchy and to compel the taking of sides, on matters where
the salvation of souls seemed to be at stake.

9
J. Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte: Die Ursprünge Deutschlands bis 1024 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1994), pp. 20-
1.
10
E. Müller-Mertens, Regnum Teutonicum: Aufkommen und Verbreitung der deutschen Reichs- und
Königsauffassung im frühen Mittelalter (Vienna, Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 1970), pp. 388-9.
7
 The consequences for political identities in the Empire were initially complex. One
result was, in response to papal attempts at limiting the monarchy’s scope, to encourage
further emphasis by the imperialist party on the Empire’s Roman and Christian-universal
qualities. The practice, which had developed in the eleventh century, of numbering medieval
emperors in direct succession from Caesar and Augustus, became established as a widespread
and lasting convention. The monarch’s title, as employed in his formal acts of government,
now placed greater emphasis on the universal and sacral qualities of his rule. From the early
twelfth century onward, he was styled ‘by the grace of God ever-august king of the Romans’
from the time of his first coronation in Aachen.11 Over the course of subsequent decades, the
Empire itself came to be termed ‘holy’ (sacrum), as well as Roman. The official vocabulary
henceforth remained largely stable until the end of the Middle Ages. With the increasing
adoption of the vernacular by the imperial chancery in the fourteenth century, the resonant
Latin titles were translated directly into German.
Ruler and Reich were also Romanised and ascribed a general guardianship over the
Church in Latin and vernacular literature in verse and prose from the Empire’s northern lands.
References to a ‘German’ monarchy or sphere of rule, or to the monarch’s activities in
‘Germany’ or (in the vernacular) ‘the German lands’, are occasionally to be found in diplomas
and letters under the imperial seal, and more often in chronicles, political verses, and
imperialist treatises. More is said about these references below. In most such cases, however,
an encompassing, legitimising Christian-Roman framework of rule is implied, or explicitly
emphasized.

But the closer reflection upon the Empire discernible from the era of the ‘Investiture Contest’
also stimulated consideration of how its character had changed since the time of its
foundation. In particular, the fact that, titles notwithstanding, the Empire’s rulers were
patently not Roman in origin but northerners, raised to the throne by princes of Germanic, not
Latinate, speech and culture called for explanation. The idea that imperial rule had passed,
from the Romans or the Byzantine Greeks, to a new bearer-people – the Franks – had gained
currency already in the ninth century. From the late eleventh, the view began to find
expression that the Roman Empire was held by the German people.12

11
For what follows, see G. Koch, Auf dem Wege zum Sacrum Imperium: Studien zur ideologischen
Herrschaftsbegründung der deutschen Zentralgewalt im 11. Und 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna, Cologne and Graz:
Böhlau, 1972).
12
See generally W. Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der
politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958).
8
 At around the same time, a legend took shape, recounting the origins of the Germans
as a single, albeit composite, community. Significantly, this legend, which is first encountered
in a vernacular verse Life of St Anno of Cologne, portrays the ethnogenesis of the Germans
(who, however, appear only adjectivally, as ‘German’ men) as resulting from a union of the
Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, and Swabians in common military service in the south. Caesar, so
the story goes, after conquering the northern peoples, resolved to march on Rome and take
sole power. His success in the venture rested upon the combined (and thereby ‘German’)
military forces that he brought over the Alps.13 The tale was reproduced and elaborated in the
widely read twelfth-century Kaiserchronik and in a number of later vernacular histories, in
which the element of common ‘German’ achievement was given greater emphasis. It presents
the origins of the German people as contemporary with and causally inseparable from the
foundation of the Roman Empire. The unifying element is portrayed as military prowess in
service of imperial goals.
This did not, however, explain how the Empire had come into the Germans’ hands.
One explanation, advanced by influential Latin histories, maintained that the Franks were
themselves Germans and that Charlemagne, as an imperial founder-figure, had bestowed a
lasting title on his fellow-countrymen. The more developed versions of this argument made
appeal to the Trojan legend in order to claim for the Franks or Germans and the Romans a
common origin in migrant warrior bands from Troy. It was therefore only proper that two
such illustrious and interrelated peoples should between them provide the spiritual and secular
heads of Christendom: Roman popes and Franco-German emperors. On another widely-
received view, which sidestepped the problem of Frankish ethnicity, the Empire had been
translated to the Germans with the renewal of the imperial title under the Ottonians in the
tenth century.
But translated by whom? If some accounts ascribed the foundational deed to
Charlemagne, another highly influential view insisted that the initiative in the Empire’s
transfer had lain with the pope. The definitive statement on the matter was Innocent III’s
decretal Venerabilem of 1202, issued at a time when the pope was claiming the power to
judge between rival claimants to the imperial throne. Innocent’s bull explained how the Holy
See, in translating the Roman Empire from the Greeks to the Germans (Germani) in the
person of Charlemagne, had granted the princes ‘the right and power of electing the king,
afterwards to be raised to emperor’.14 Venerabilem is important in several ways. Its

13
Das Anno-Lied, ed. M. Opitz (1639, repr. Heidelberg: Winter, 1946), p. 32.
14
Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. A. Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1872-1881), vol. 2, cols. 79-82.
9
incorporation into canon law ensured that it became widely known among the learned and
was much cited to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. It asserted that the Empire had
been gained by the Germans through no mere act of force, but by the independent judgment of
an external authority – the pope, as Christ’s earthly representative – based on their suitability
as temporal protectors for the Church. It implicitly raised the prospect that what the pope had
given he might take away, and it invited reflection on the collective qualities that had earned
the Germans the Empire, and on whether their descendants still exemplified those qualities.
Importantly, it located the Germanness of the Empire not in its rulers, but in the princes who
chose them.

By the thirteenth century, the old idea that the emperor ruled by the assent and acclamation of
a plurality of northern peoples had developed into the belief that he was chosen by ‘the
Germans’, understood as a composite community formed from those same ancient peoples.
The Schwabenspiegel, a vernacular law-code, put it succinctly: ‘the Germans elect the king:
King Charles [i.e., Charlemagne] gained this for them’.15 During the thirteenth century, under
the impetus of recurrent disputed successions, and stimulated particularly by the struggles
accompanying the fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the idea of the ‘German’ princes as the
monarch’s electors was refined into a more precise body of constitutional titles and practices.
By the century’s close, the composition of the college of seven prince-electors (three prelates
and four secular magnates), whose powers and privileges would be codified in the Golden
Bull of 1356, was already largely settled.
The princes, headed by the electors, were made the subject of a Germanising political
vocabulary which, in its habitual application, contrasts with the customarily Christian-Roman
styles of the monarchs they created (though the princes too were often simply styled
‘imperial’). To the higher nobility was ascribed collective responsibility for the Germans’
continuing hold on the imperial title. Since ‘German’ identity was largely defined in relation
to the Empire, the princes became a principal repository and measure of Germanness itself.
The treatise-writer Alexander von Roes, whose works date from the 1280s, argued that the
entire German people displayed the character of nobles: they were Christendom’s militia, with
the aristocrat’s natural rapacity and love of quarrels. Their Italian and French neighbors, by

15
Schwabenspiegel Kurzform, ed. K.A. Eckhardt, MGH Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui, Nova Series, vol. 4, 2nd
edn (Hannover: Hahn, 1974), p. 182.
10
contrast, had the less bellicose attributes respectively of plebeians and clerics.16 This was
why, Alexander insisted, the Germans alone were born to possess the Empire.
That the Germans were outstanding warriors, and that they demonstrated their martial
aptitudes in the service of the emperor, above all in campaigns south of the Alps, is a
recurrent theme in writings from the Empire’s German lands.17 It rested upon interdependent
ethnic stereotypes, contrasting the masculine harshness of the Germans with the supposed
softness and submissiveness of their southern neighbors and subjects. Violence in the
Empire’s name attains an almost ritual quality in later medieval chronicle accounts. Henry
VII, for example, is described as displaying his ‘fury’ at the siege of Brescia in 1311,
overawing the rebellious citizens with ‘the invincible eagles of Germany’.18 Even the
numerically depleted and largely pacific journeys undertaken by fifteenth-century kings to
Rome for coronation were still staged at symbolically important moments as ostentatiously
military spectacle.
Later medieval writers constructed the Germans as a community of honour, based on
their possession of the Empire. But their title had constantly to be vindicated in the eyes of
their neighbors, through warlike deeds in defence of Church and faith and in order to assert
imperial rights against rebels. ‘Should the German tongue lose its right [to the Empire], its
honour will be undermined’, warned a vernacular poet in troubled times in the thirteenth
century.19 The identity of the Germans as custodians of the Roman Empire came to rest upon
the ascription to them, and specifically to their princes, of a body of imagined common
qualities that at times appear non-Roman or even explicitly anti-Roman. The chronicler Otto
of Freising imagined Barbarossa’s troops, in battle with the Roman citizenry in 1155, as
saying:

‘Take now, O Rome, Teutonic iron instead of Arabian gold. This is the price which
your prince offers you for your crown. Thus do the Franks purchase empire.’20

16
Alexander von Roes, Noticia seculi, in Alexander von Roes: Schriften, ed. H. Grundmann and H. Heimpel
(MGH Staatsschriften des späteren Mittelalters, vol. 1.i, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1958), p. 160.
17
See generally L.E. Scales, ‘Germen militiae: war and German identity in the later Middle Ages’, Past &
Present 180 (2003), 41-82.
18
Die Königsaaler Geschichts-Quellen mit den Zusätzen und der Fortsetzung des Domherrn Franz von Prag, ed.
J. Loserth, Fontes rerum Austriacarum: Oesterreichische Geschichtsquellen, vol. 1, Abtheilung 8 (Vienna: Karl
Gerold’s Sohn, 1875), pp. 342-3.
19
Politische Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters: Texte, ed. U. Müller, 2 vols. (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1972), vol.
1, p. 68.
20
Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, vol.
46 (Hannover: Hahn, 1884), p. 113. My translation follows Otto of Freising and his continuator, Rahewin, The
Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, ed. C.C. Mierow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), p. 151.
11
The Empire’s bearers were proudly transmontani: men from beyond the Alps.21 It is revealing
that, despite the Roman titles of their monarchs, the beneficiaries of the Empire’s translation
never – as did the Byzantines as custodians of the Eastern Empire – styled themselves
‘Romans’.
A problem with the anti-Roman imperial identity of the Germans, however, was that it
was not entirely of their own making. And as the Empire became mired in controversy arising
from its rulers’ Italian wars and recurrent conflicts with the papacy, and as the power and
resources of those rulers dwindled in the later Middle Ages, this came increasingly to matter.
The positive self-construction of the Germans as the fierce warrior-servants of Empire and
Church was disconcertingly similar to the negative portrayals of them by their neighbors in
the south and west, as a cruel, turbulent, and disorderly people. Both views drew upon the
same antique tropes for the barbarian: in the eyes both of their literate champions and of their
Italian victims and critics, imperial armies exemplified the ‘Teutonic fury’ (furor Teutonicus)
which Lucan (39-65 AD) had made proverbial and which Henry VII was praised for
displaying before Brescia.22
To critical observers – some of whom by the later Middle Ages were themselves
German – the collective qualities habitually cited to justify the Germans’ hold on the Roman
Empire might look more like a disqualification. After Frederick II’s imperial coronation in
1220 no more emperors were crowned in Rome for nearly a century. Frederick’s own bitter
conflict with the papacy had seen him denounced by opponents as the biblical Antichrist and
culminated in his formal deposition in 1245, at a Church council presided over by the pope in
person. Although ‘kings of the Romans’ continued during the following century to be
crowned at Aachen, none before Henry VII ventured over the Alps, and even in Germany the
power of many was limited and contested. Given that the Empire was by general agreement a
transferable dignity, possession of which was justified above all by the idoneity of its
possessors, voices were now heard urging its transfer afresh, to a more suitable people. A
candidate seemed to some readily to hand, in the kings of France, who claimed descent from
Charlemagne and his Franks, and whose reputation as devout and orthodox crusaders
appeared to contrast favourably with the Empire’s existing incumbents.
The Empire had become the subject of a lively treatise literature already during the
‘Investiture Contest’, reflecting its intimate but contested relationship with the Church and its

21
See P. Godman, ‘Transmontani: Frederick Barbarossa, Rainald of Dassel, and the cultural identity of the
German Empire’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 132 (2010), 200-29.
22
E. Dümmler, ʼÜber den furor Teutonicus‘, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin (phil.-hist. Klasse) 9 (1897), 112-26.
12
head. Tracts defending the Empire multiplied again in the years of internal strife and
weakness, French political ascendancy, and recurrent tensions and conflicts with the Curia, in
the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The majority of these were the work of
Germans, and the origins, character, entitlements, and defects of their people were often a
prominent theme. The Empire’s seeming enfeeblement and the imminent threat to what in
German eyes appeared the proper order of peoples thus stimulated close reflection on the
nature and implications of Germanness. Nothing of the kind was brought forth by the
preceding high-medieval Kaiserzeit of imperial (and to an older historical generation,
German) ascendancy in Europe. Often, such works addressed the princes, lauding the deeds of
their ancestors and reminding them of the collective honour that they would forfeit, together
with the Empire, if they continued to exemplify the vices rather than the virtues of their
people.
The importance of this treatise literature as reflecting or stimulating a sense of German
peoplehood should not be overstated. Before the fifteenth century, all major known works are
in Latin, and they often survive in very few manuscripts. Nevertheless, they clearly reflect
debates that were current in clerical circles, and there are indications that some of the
participants had connections to wider literate groups and networks. The heterogeneous,
sometimes relatively modest, origins of their authors are an indication that the ideas with
which they dealt were no preserve of rarefied court elites. Indeed, the late-medieval imperial
court played little part in the production of tracts in the Empire’s defence. Characteristically
for the political culture of the Reich, the households of prelates of the Church were an
important venue for their composition and discussion.
It was therefore natural that the Empire should have been drawn into the debates about
Church reform which became increasingly urgent during the first half of the fifteenth century.
This was a time of seemingly intractable schism in the papacy, which also saw the emergence
of other powerful elements of religious division in Europe. The great Church councils which
met on imperial soil to address these matters, at Constance (1414-1418) and Basel (1434-
1449), acted as venues for the copying and circulation of older imperial reform treatises and
the writing of new ones. Partly as a result of its own perceived failings and partly in the
context of wider plans for the reform of the Church, the Reich now came to be debated – and
debated by German-speakers, from German perspectives – as never before.

Speaking of the existence of a ‘German nation’ even as late as the fifteenth century is possible
only with much qualification. Quite a varied vocabulary of Latin names for land (Teutonia,

13
Alemannia, Germania, sometimes with the addition of the more explicitly political regnum, or
‘realm’) and people was by then well established and in fairly common use among chroniclers
and polemicists.23 Although each term had its own penumbra of meaning, they were in large
degree interchangeable. They also occur quite often in the written acts of later-medieval kings
and emperors, although seldom in the more dignified clauses of their documents. Cognate
terms are regularly encountered in vernacular writings, mostly formed from the originally
linguistic signifier tiutsch, though it is revealing here that the most common territorial form
was the plural ‘German lands’ (tiutschiu lant, occasionally tiutschiu rîche). The geographical
bounds of those lands were the subject of at least broad consensus, with the imperial frontier
north of the Alps playing an important part in their definition. ‘German tongue’ (tiutschiu
zunge) was employed to denote the Germans as an ethno-political as well as a linguistic unity.
Yet when the Germans are compared with their late-medieval neighbors, it is the
meagreness of any elements of common identity that seems initially to stand out. There was
no hereditary ruling dynasty to provide a spine for narratives of collective history or destiny,
such as we find in France and elsewhere. Only in relation to the Empire were the Germans
ascribed anything that can be termed a common history, embracing the several northern
peoples to whom that name was applied. But while the honour arising from the Empire’s
translation was often emphasized, there was, for example, no imperial saint, enjoying a
general, unifying cult among the Empire’s German populations. (Veneration of Charlemagne,
canonised in the twelfth century, remained largely confined to Aachen.) Germany experienced
nothing to compare with the patriotic wars, with their calls to common sacrifice in the holy
cause of king and kingdom, which dominated the late Middle Ages across much of western
Europe. The Empire’s late-medieval rulers avoided such adventures, for which they lacked
the means to raise forces or revenues on anything like the English or French scale.
While awareness of the monarchy was widespread among the populations of the
Empire’s northern lands, there is no reason to think that many beyond a small literate minority
gave it more than passing thought. It is true that the emperor’s links to Christian eschatology
could make him the subject of popular attention, and even wild fantasies, in times of crisis.
But from day to day, the institution which he headed touched relatively few lives. If the
concept of ‘Germanness’ was also widely (although for most people no doubt only vaguely)
familiar, other common identities – local, regional, or those deriving from subjection to a lord
or prince – were more intrusive and compelling. Only in the imperial and free towns, directly

23
For what follows, see L. Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245-1414
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 10.
14
subject to the Empire, was awareness of that institution, not least as a source of legitimacy
and protection, more pervasive. At the close of the Middle Ages there were around seventy of
these, concentrated in southern Germany and including some of the Empire’s largest urban
communities and principal communications hubs. In these towns, by the fifteenth century the
Reich and its rulers had attained a heightened symbolic visibility through depiction in public
art and sculpture. The imperial-eagle armorial was widely to be seen adorning town gates and
council chambers, while the figures of kings and emperors past and present were represented
– sometimes, in order to commemorate or invoke particular acts of monarchical favour – on
the façades of public buildings and on urban structures such as fountains. The seven
(‘German’) prince-electors were a recurrent subject for portrayal.
It is, by the same token, not without significance that by the late Middle Ages, at least
among an educated few, German identity had become a matter for debate, bound up with
ideas of possession of the Empire, with controversy, and with judgements about neighboring
peoples. Something of this contentiousness was able to infiltrate broader social strata through
the Empire’s intimate ties, in doctrine and in political reality, with the Church and its heads.
The recurrent contests of emperors and popes left their scars. The Church’s capacity to
address society at large with its messages and to touch people with its actions was unmatched
in medieval Europe. The excommunications, preaching campaigns, and suspensions of
religious services that accompanied papal-imperial quarrels had been widely felt and were not
quickly forgotten. And emperors as well as popes had their vocal popular mouthpieces among
the clergy. As late-medieval reform debates intersected with currents of popular anti-
clericalism, it was natural that some turned, however unrealistically, to the figure of the
emperor as saviour. No region of late-medieval Europe was as abundant in prophecies,
including many in the vernacular, as was Germany, and often these invoked the emperor. On
occasion, this imperial eschatology found expression in hopes that a mighty ‘German’
monarch would arise, to purge the corrupt (‘Roman’) Church and establish a new
ecclesiastical order in the north.24 The tension, discernible from the Empire’s earliest days,
between imperial Romanitas and its northern, in some ways anti-Roman, bearers was never
more widely evident than at the close of the Middle Ages.

During the fifteenth century, major structural changes took place in the Empire which by the
century’s close had reinforced its German character and significantly expanded the German

24
F. Courtney Kneupper, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German
Prophecy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 50-1.
15
‘political nation’, in size and social breadth. These developments must be understood in the
context of the Empire’s territorial contraction and the changing geographical scope of its
rulers’ activities in the late Middle Ages. Although kings of the Romans were still crowned
emperor in Rome, their expeditions south of the Alps were now shorter in duration and, after
the early fourteenth century, more modest in scale. Much more of their time on the throne was
spent in the north. Although northern Italy remained constitutionally subject to the Empire, its
rule passed into the hands of local regimes, exercising delegated powers in return for
payment. Much of the kingdom of Burgundy was lost to France in the late fourteenth century,
and part of what remained merged with the northern (‘German’) territories of the Reich. By
the late fifteenth century, regions peripheral to this northern core, notably the Swiss cantons
and the Netherlands, were also becoming detached, politically and to some extent culturally.
After 1420 Hussite Bohemia was for two decades in full-scale revolt and the object of
crusades.
Especially important were the changes taking place in the heartlands of ‘imperial’
Germany, in the south and west. There, a series of interconnected developments were under
way in society, culture, and political life, which Peter Moraw together termed Verdichtung
(loosely, ‘densification’): processes fostering the multiplication of bonds, networks, and
exchanges of diverse kinds.25 The towns especially, as trade and communications hubs and as
venues for a thriving literate culture and the sites of growing numbers of university
foundations, became vibrant centers for the exchange of knowledge and ideas. By the
century’s close, this discursive urban culture had been further stimulated by the spread of
printing with moveable type.
Political life, too, was marked by the more intensive interaction of different groups, as
well as by the growing prominence of educated specialists as advisors to princes and in the
government of towns. Stimuli to change came from the multiplication of external dangers, the
protracted absence of the monarch from the Empire’s German heartlands and, related to this,
the establishment of the Habsburgs on the imperial throne. Potent threats to imperial territory
(as well as to the Catholic faith) were posed by the armies of Hussite Bohemia and by the
Ottoman Turks. New menaces arose after mid-century from the expansionist ambitions of the
duke of Burgundy (a prince of the French royal blood, whose rich territories lay adjacent to
the imperial frontier and are not to be confused with imperial Burgundy) in the westand the
king of Hungary in the east.

25
P. Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Reich im späten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490
(Berlin: Propyläen, 1985).
16
 The incapacity of the Empire’s military and fiscal organization to meet such
challenges stimulated plans for institutional innovation and encouraged assemblies to meet,
seeking solutions.26 At a time when the monarch’s attention was often diverted to dynastic
affairs, these might be convened by the princes, even in his absence. The towns, too, were
increasingly represented. By the time of the great reforming assembly that met at Worms in
1495, it is possible to discern the existence of a Reichstag, where the estates of the Empire’s
German (but not its non-German) lands assembled to negotiate with the emperor. New
judicial and fiscal institutions, more determined efforts to enforce the public peace, and in the
early sixteenth century the division of the Empire’s northern territories into administrative
spheres, together amounted – false starts and setbacks notwithstanding – to a substantial
Verdichtung of the Reich itself.

These changes provide the context for the more varied and developed articulations of German
identity which found expression at the close of the Middle Ages and which would form a
basis for further development between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. This more
articulate sense of nation was inseparable from the Empire as an idea and from its
development as a political community. Although it drew upon new sources and developed
new themes and foci, it would have been unthinkable without the stock of established
concepts, motifs, preoccupations, and arguments, upon which writers and propagandists drew
directly and to which a wider political public now responded.27
The heightened sense of the existence of a German political community, and of its
lineaments, was expressed in various ways. The Empire itself appears to contract
conceptually, to become equated increasingly with its northern core. The growing practice of
using the vernacular ‘Reich’ to designate both Empire and German kingdom reflected and
encouraged this trend. The conflation of the Reich with its German members found visual
affirmation in the popular heraldic confection known as the Quaternionen-eagle.28 This
device, which portrayed the imperial eagle with armorials representing the Empire’s German
estates arranged on its wings, attained wide dissemination, boosted by the development of
printing. By the sixteenth century, it is to be found adorning utilitarian objects such as
drinking vessels. The vocabulary of German identity was enriched with the reception of new
terms and concepts – natio (or nation) and patria (or vatterland) – which were quickly taken

26
See generally H. Angermeier, Die Reichsreform 1410-1555: Die Staatsproblematik in Deutschland zwischen
Mittelalter und Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1984).
27
F.L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
28
E. Schubert, ‘Die Quaternionenʼ, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 20 (1993), 1-63.
17
up in imperial proclamations, broadsheets, and other widely circulating texts, as well as in
oral debates in the Reichstag and elsewhere.29 It is symbolic of the new focus that the imperial
herald, previously styled ‘Romreich’, was from 1520 known as ‘Deutschland’.30 And, in a
development that had been some time in the making, ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation’ became after 1512 firmly established as an official imperial title.31
Also new were the efforts now made by the monarch and his supporters to drum up
German patriotism in support of imperial and dynastic projects. Maximilian I (r. 1493-1519)
was a vocal champion of Habsburg interests who harnessed the cultural resources of the day,
including the printing press, to his ends.Monarchical pronouncements now spoke a more
strident language of German as well as imperial allegiance. Humanist writers with ties to the
court wrote the earliest full-blown German histories and geographies. These too reflected a
northward turn, in their quest, nourished by the rediscovered writings of Tacitus, for an
autochthonous German past, unencumbered by Trojan or Roman ties and populated by
ancient German (and anti-Roman) heroes like Arminius. But the humanists also quarried the
chronicles and polemical tracts of their medieval forebears, with their heroic accounts of the
deeds of Charlemagne and the Hohenstaufen emperors, their invocations of the honour that
the Germans gained from the Empire, and their denunciations of the jealous French and
treacherous Romans who would rob them of their prize. An expanded public for national
sentiment is now discernible. The calls, at the time of the imperial election of 1519, for a
German and no foreigner to be raised to the throne, were nothing new. More novel were the
convictions to which some gave voice, that failure to choose a German would surely provoke
popular uprisings.32

The Empire was different. As a framework for or catalyst to any form of nation-making it
appears uniquely unpromising. Its character as a medieval polity appears to contrast sharply
with its neighbors, particularly the western kingdoms. To the seemingly abundant empirical
reasons for setting the Empire aside can be added the peculiar tradition within which state-
and nation-making in Germany were for a long time studied, and which had its origins in the
years following the Empire’s abolition. Nation-making states were measured in terms of their

29
C. Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom
Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), pp. 124-74.
30
E. Schubert, Einführung in die Grundprobleme der deutschen Geschichte im Spätmittelalter (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), p. 33.
31
U. Nonn, ‘Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation: Zum Nationen-Begriff im 15. Jahrhundert‘, Zeitschrift
für historische Forschung 9 (1982), 129-42.
32
Hirschi, Wettkampf, pp. 400-1.
18
similarity to Prussia – a test constructed in order that the old Reich might fall short. The
Empire fails on every count. It was heavily decentralised, extensive rather than intensive in its
government and, at least until the reforms of c. 1500, institutionally weak. Its rulers professed
a universal Christian mission, which found expression in their official titles and the
symbolism of their rule. Although the Empire was highly prestigious to its partisans, its rulers
were repeatedly drawn into bitter conflicts with the Church and with their own subjects,
through which the Empire was further weakened. Its ‘Roman emperors’ made singularly
unconvincing Romans, as medieval observers were not shy to point out.
Yet when conventional expectations about power and medieval peoples are set aside,
many of the Empire’s weaknesses appear instead ultimately as stimuli to a conception of
nationhood. The itinerant, face-to-face character of imperial rule gave significant numbers of
the emperor’s subjects an opportunity to witness the ritual staging of emperorship with their
own eyes. The decentralised character of the Reich, combined with its longevity, left behind a
palimpsest of sites of imperial memory extending across much of the German lands, although
densest in the south and west. That the Empire’s rulers were better able to grant privileges
than impose burdens did little to harm their standing in the eyes of their subjects. The
dissonances between the Empire’s official Romanism and facts on the ground, which
appeared to invite different conclusions, stimulated reflection. The widespread understanding
of the imperial title as elective rather than hereditary encouraged the view of it as borne
collectively – by a whole people, rather than a single family – and invited examination of the
character and qualifications of its bearers. The special role ascribed to the emperor in the
Church made the recurrent clashes with the papacy appear especially significant, and in need
of explanation. The Church’s unrivalled communications resources helped to keep its imperial
competitor in the public eye.
By the early sixteenth century, the Reich was widely understood as a German polity.
This perception had not arisen out of the blue. The north-south polarities, with their
underpinning bodies of stereotype and accumulated grievance, which Luther was to exploit,
had medieval antecedents in a tradition of reflection on the wrongs done to the Roman Empire
and its German custodians. The national histories and polemics of the humanists exploited
and built upon a medieval tradition. Particularly the later Middle Ages, the time of apparent
weakness and crisis in the Empire, furnished an extensive and influential literature of imperial
German nationhood. If the nation-making potential of the medieval Reich was indeed in some
ways limited, in others it was to prove uniquely rich and potent.

19
Further Reading

F.L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1971)

C. Brühl, Deutschland – Frankreich: Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne and Vienna:
Böhlau, 1990)

J. Ehlers (ed.), Ansätze und Diskontinuität deutscher Nationsbildung im Mittelalter

J. Ehlers, Die Entstehung des deutschen Reiches (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994)

C. Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism: an Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early
Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

F. Courtney Kneupper, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval
German Prophecy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)

L. Scales: ‘Late medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation?’, in L. Scales and O. Zimmer,

L. Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245-1414 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012)

J. Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. 1 (From Maximilian I to the Peace of
Westphalia 1493-1648) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

P. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (London: Allen
Lane, 2016)

20