Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 25th of December in the year 800, a Frankish king rose from his knees in Rome as the first Holy Roman Emperor. Pope Leo III had just crowned Charlemagne, ruler of the Franks, though another emperor already sat on a throne in Constantinople. Why would a pope create a rival Roman emperor when one already existed? How did that single crowning turn, over the centuries, into a title German princes chose by vote? Why did later rulers need the pope's blessing to use the name at all, and what eventually made that requirement fall away? And why, after roughly a thousand years, did the final holder of the title give it up within months of a single lost battle? Those questions shape everything that follows.

• 2. Rome's Missing Emperor

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  Primus inter pares, first among equals, is how medieval diplomacy ranked the Holy Roman Emperor among Europe's Catholic monarchs. The Catholic Church treated the empire as the only true successor of the Roman Empire, through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. That claim needed a backstory, because the office of Roman emperor in the West had not simply continued in an unbroken line.

  Julius Nepos, the last Western Roman emperor, died in 480, and no one held the Western title afterward. The barbarian kings who ruled former Roman territory kept nominally recognizing the Eastern Emperor for roughly another century. Justinian I later reconquered parts of the Italian Peninsula for the Byzantines, restoring an imperial presence there. His reconquest also revived old religious tensions, since the Papacy wanted authority over the Church of Constantinople for itself.

  By the close of the 8th century, the Papacy still nominally recognized Constantinople's ruler as Roman emperor. Byzantine military support in Italy, though, kept shrinking. That decline pushed the popes to look instead to the Franks for protection, a shift that put Pope Leo III in Charlemagne's debt.

• 3. A Convenient Pretext

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  In 797, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI was deposed, and his own mother Irene took his place on the throne in Constantinople. Pope Leo III treated Irene's rule as illegitimate simply because she was a woman, and used that pretext to call the imperial throne in the East vacant. The idea invoked was translatio imperii, the notion that imperial authority could transfer entirely from one ruler to another.

  Charlemagne wasted no time adopting his new rank in writing. His coins carried the Latin phrase Karolus Imperator Augustus, Charles Augustus Emperor. His documents used the longer formula Imperator Augustus Romanum gubernans Imperium, emperor Augustus governing the Roman Empire.

  Constantinople eventually accepted Charlemagne and his heirs as emperors too, but only as Frankish or German ones. The label Roman, the East insisted, belonged to its own throne alone, a distinction that would outlast Charlemagne's own reign, which ended in 814.

• 4. Naming the Empire

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  The word 'holy' entered the imperial title only in 1157, added under Frederick I Barbarossa. Barbarossa was among the first to call the realm 'the holy empire,' a phrase that stuck for the rest of its existence. The full formal style became Romanorum Imperator Augustus, August Emperor of the Romans, the standard designation used for the office.

  German-language historians use a different label altogether, calling the office Römisch-deutscher Kaiser, or Roman-German emperor. That term keeps the position separate from two other things: the ancient Roman emperor, and the later German emperor, known as Deutscher Kaiser. That German-emperor title belongs to the 19th and 20th centuries, not the medieval office. English speakers did not settle on 'Holy Roman Emperor' until the interbellum period, the 1920s and 1930s. Before that, English writers sometimes called the office the 'German-Roman emperor' instead.

  Whichever name was used, only Germany's prince-electors could decide who was entitled to wear it.

• 5. Choosing a Caesar

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  In 911, the German dukes elected Conrad I as king after Louis the Child, the last Carolingian ruler of Germany, died without an heir. That election meant the German kingship, unlike the kingship of England, was never fully hereditary, even when one family held it for generations. Candidates had to make concessions to keep the electors on their side, a practice known as Wahlkapitulationen, or electoral capitulation.

  Exactly when the right to elect settled on seven specific princes is not recorded. Pope Innocent III's 1202 decree Venerabilem was addressed to Berthold V, Duke of Zähringen. It describes an election run by unnamed princes of the realm, with the pope reserving the right to approve candidates. A letter from Pope Urban IV in 1263 was written during the disputed election of 1256 and the interregnum that followed. It refers to seven princes choosing the king by what it calls 'immemorial custom.'

  By the 13th century, the prince-electors had formalized into a body of seven, three bishops and four secular princes. The Golden Bull of 1356 finally named them. The three archbishops were from Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. The other four were the king of Bohemia, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, and the margrave of Brandenburg.

  Bavaria's duke received the elector palatine's seat in 1621. The Thirty Years' War reversed that, and the palatine was restored in 1648 as an eighth elector. Hanover became a ninth elector in 1692, a status the Imperial Diet confirmed in 1708. By 1803, Germany's mediatization reshuffled the whole college to ten electors, just three years before the empire's dissolution.

• 6. Crowned Without Rome

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  Tradition required an emperor to be crowned by the pope in Rome. Without that ceremony, no king could call himself emperor, however powerful he was. That gap produced kings who ruled in fact but never claimed the title. Conrad I and Henry the Fowler in the 10th century styled themselves as such without a coronation. So did Conrad IV, Rudolf I, Adolf, and Albert I during the interregnum of the late 13th century.

  The interregnum is dated from Pope Innocent IV's deposition of Frederick II in 1245. Some accounts instead start it from Frederick's death in 1250, or Conrad IV's death in 1254. It lasted until Rudolf I of Germany was elected in 1273, though Rudolf himself was never crowned emperor. The next man to actually receive the crown was Henry VII, crowned on the 29th of June 1312 by legates representing Pope Clement V.

  In 1508, Pope Julius II let Maximilian I take the imperial title without ever traveling to Rome. He was styled instead as Electus Romanorum Imperator, elected Emperor of the Romans. Maximilian's predecessor, Frederick III, had been the last emperor actually crowned in Rome. Maximilian's own successor, Charles V, became the last pope-crowned emperor of any kind, crowned in Bologna in 1530 rather than Rome. After Charles V, his successor Ferdinand I simply adopted the title 'Emperor elect' in 1558, and every emperor after him did the same.

• 7. Divine Right, Disputed Faith

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  Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII fought the 11th century's bitterest church-state conflict, known as the investiture controversy. Emperors were widely seen as ruling by divine right, yet that same claim put them on a collision course with Rome again and again. No woman ever ruled as empress in her own right across the empire's history. Two women, though, shaped it from close to the throne: Theophanu and Maria Theresa. The position was consistently viewed as a defender of the Catholic faith throughout its history.

  Protestant electors sometimes dominated the electoral college for short stretches, and each elector generally voted his own political interest. Even so, the emperor elected was always a Roman Catholic, including in the years after the Reformation. That religious consistency held even as the crown passed between very different ruling families over the centuries.

• 8. Houses That Held the Crown

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  Berengar I of Italy died in 924, and no one held the imperial title for decades afterward. Otto the Great was finally crowned on the 2nd of February 962. That gap marks, by modern convention, the shift from the old Frankish Empire to the Holy Roman Empire proper. Before it, the Carolingian era from 800 to 924 had been something close to an autocracy. By the 13th century the office had become a genuine elective monarchy instead.

  Three royal houses became its de facto hereditary holders in turn. The Ottonians held it from 962 to 1024, the Salians from 1027 to 1125, and the Hohenstaufen from 1138 to 1254. A crisis in late medieval government then opened the door for the Habsburgs. They held the title, with only one interruption, from 1452 to 1806. Their own cadet branch, the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, held it for the final stretch, from 1765 to 1806.

  A devastating defeat at the hands of Napoleon, at the Battle of Austerlitz, brought that long line to an end. Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, dissolved the empire in 1806 following that defeat. By then, Francis already held a separate title of his own: Emperor of Austria.