Everyday life in the Holy Roman Empire

Ever since I saw this map while working through the history of Switzerland and the Savoy I’ve been wondering what the deal was with the Holy Roman Empire. Peter Wilson’s book, The Holy Roman Empire, is a fantastic introduction and I hope to write up something about it once I finish its many hundreds of surprisingly compelling pages.

Wilson adds to Voltaire’s quip that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire by pointing out that it didn’t even call itself the Holy Roman Empire. What happened was: the vacuum left after the Roman empire bothered everybody, especially because there should be a guy who was in charge of like Christendom. In the year 800, Pope Leo II declared that Charlemagne was like the new Roman emperor. For the next few hundred years, there was a delicate game between the Pope and whoever could gather the right combo of force and legitimacy and political support to get himself named the Emperor. The Emperor would travel around – a stop at Charlemagne’s spot in Aachen was mandatory. The Empire itself was quite fractured but seems to have held together pretty well.

I put my search for a good Holy Roman Empire book to Twitter and user Max S. recommended this one:

It’s a dense one, and I haven’t consumed all of it, but there are some vivid snapshots of life in this era. The world post the calamitous 14th century:

The career of Tommy Platter:

And a different path:

a smart roundup on witch trials, which we’ve considered before:

Agree that witch trials will never yield their secrets to the historian’s tools. Anyway: pleasing way to pass some time in a lethargic summer in Hollywood.