Indholdsfortegnelse for Holy Roman Empire i All About History

Forged by the iron will of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire’s birth in 800 CE signalled the beginning of a new era in a Europe that had been stumbling in the dark for centuries. By means of conquest, alliances and marriage, the continent's new power would come to encapsulate much of Western Europe, morphing into a disjointed network of states within which ruthless wars and reformations would be waged. But who where the empire’s key figures? How did they rule? And why did this ambitious project ultimately fail? Turn the page to explore a realm that shaped Europe for over 1,000 years and left a legacy that still influences it today. This bookazine is printed on recycled paper. It’s important that we care about our planet and make a difference…

Charlemagne was 24 when he first attacked the Saxons but he was 56 by the time the Saxon Wars ended, starting a French fashion for fighting long wars. Part of the problem was that Charlemagne only campaigned intermittently. He would move through Saxony, defeating various tribes and securing their lands as he went, but he frequently became distracted by other conflicts, such as with Lombardy. He left fortresses behind to maintain order during his absences, but the Saxons took advantage and raided them while he was gone. Charlemagne was then forced to return to squash the uprisings, forcing the Saxons to submit and convert to Christianity all over again, triggering a vicious cycle. If Charlemagne had remained focused on conquering Saxony, perhaps he could have conquered it a lot sooner.…

From the moment of his coronation, Otto had chosen to associate himself with divine power. The king wore a crown decorated with 12 stones to represent the 12 tribes of Israel alongside images of biblical kings and prophets. Anointed by a bishop in Aachen Cathedral, the new king was sanctified (chosen by God) and so beyond earthly criticism. Beyond merely symbolically allying himself to the Church, Otto sought to use ecclesiastical appointments to strengthen his power. With a fractious band of dukes proving ever ready to rebel, Otto’s policy was to empower bishops. Bishops and archbishops were not hereditary appointments, so each newly appointed spiritual lord was chosen by Otto directly, unlike the nobles. By appointing loyal men he bolstered his position without actively challenging the rights of the dukes.…

When Charles became king, he also became the first person to ever rule Castile and Aragon at the same time. To many, this made Charles the very first king of Spain. When he was elected Holy Roman Emperor after the death of Maximilian, his grandfather, his power grew enormously. It was the closest Europe had come to a universal monarchy since Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, all the way back in the 9th century. Charles greatly desired to rule many of the territories he had inherited with a monarchy that would extend from Spain to Germany to the New World. The idea that Charles could become the new Charlemagne was greatly promoted by his Chancellor, Mercurino di Gattinara, and Charles was hungry to make this dream of universal monarchy…

Margaret was only three years old when it was arranged that she would marry the future Charles VIII of France, who was then 13 years old. Such childhood betrothals amongst royalty were far from uncommon, with neither the bride nor groom involved in the negotiations. Margaret was sent to France to be raised as its future queen, meeting her fiancé for the first time on 22 June 1483 and marrying him the next day. When her father-in-law, Louis XI, died two months later, she became queen of France, although due to her extreme youth she spent her time in the royal nursery. Although a very young child, Margaret was treated with the respect due to her rank in France. As well as being addressed as queen, she was attended by…

In all probability, there was no philosophical basis for Rudolf’s worldview. He was a dabbler, an angler in the pool of ideas, an encourager of avant-garde thinkers who loved to have scholars and artists around him opening windows on esoteric and even forbidden knowledge. Of all the belief systems that appealed to him, none was more engaging than Renaissance hermeticism. The schema, supposedly set down in the dawn of time by Hermes Trismegistus, predated the world religions of Rudolf’s day and offered a ‘root theology’ (prisca theologia) purer and more comprehensive than Judaism, Islam or the competing brands of Christianity. It proposed a heliocentric view of the universe where man was a microcosm of the cosmos and the cosmos was a macrocosm of man. By embracing Trismegistus’ Corpus Hermeticum, the…

Gustav II Adolf – known to history as Gustavus Adolphus – ascended to the Swedish throne in 1611. Gustavus inherited a poor country and an even poorer army, but he swiftly morphed his peasant farmer conscripts into one of Europe’s most elite fighting forces. Aware that his cavalry was a weakness, he reorganised his army to maximise the firepower of his infantry and artillery. He packed his frontline full of musketeers and drilled them to alternate their volleys for maximum firing efficiency. Each infantry regiment was additionally equipped with a small, mobile artillery battery that could be moved with the men across the battlefield as required. Gustavus also placed musketeers among his cavalry ranks, where they’d drive off enemy charges with point-blank volleys. Adolphus hardened his professional army in the…

By the 1640s Europe had been tearing itself apart for three tumultuous decades in a series of wars of supreme destruction and bloodshed that had left millions dead and enveloped a myriad of countries and states. What had erupted as a religious conflict between the Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire soon embroiled all of the continent's superpowers: France, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Russia, England, Scotland and the independence-seeking Netherlands and Switzerland. Each had their own cause for entering the fray, so the Thirty Years’ War soon concerned not only religion but shifting alliances, bitter rivalries, commercial interests and political aspirations. The war was a conflict of such complexity and scope that in her seminal 1938 work, the 20th-century English historian Dame Veronica Wedgwood described the period as…

TROOPS: 137,000 approx. CANNON: 300 GRAND VIZIER KARA MUSTAFA LEADER Adopted into the family of Sultan Mehmed IV as a child, the loyal Mustafa was hell-bent on plucking the ‘golden apple’ of the Habsburg capital for his ruler. JANISSARIES KEY UNIT Formed into ortas (battalions) of 300 men, these superbly trained soldiers would have been forcibly recruited as children. Each man was tattooed with the number of his unit and entitled to a salary for life. YATAGAN KEY WEAPON This curved sword was the signature weapon of a Janissary and proved to be an effective weapon in the hand-to-hand fighting that the Ottomans specialised in.…

When did the empire’s decline begin? Was there a specific event that in hindsight proved to be the point of no return? The empire’s history is generally written as one of terminal decline from at least 1648, if not already from the demise of the Staufer around 1250. The idea of ‘decline’ assumes degeneration from a ‘complete’ or at least better condition to a worse one. In the empire’s case, this is usually presented as a descent from a centralised state to a decentralised, fragmented one. Yet Charlemagne’s regime was never centralised, and it is better to see the empire’s history as a succession of different forms of imperial rule in which the emperor’s power waxed and waned. In terms of ‘decline’ relative to the empire’s end in 1806, we…

For over 300 years Europe had been shrouded in darkness. With the power of the pope waning and the once-mighty Roman church beset by enemies on all sides, the legacy of the Western Roman Empire toppled as steadily and as surely as the Caesars had themselves, stability withdrawing like overstretched legionnaires and knowledge fading away like the crumbling Roman roads that crosshatched the continent. Europe needed a strong leader to pull it back from the precipice, and it got a brace of them in the form of the Carolingian dynasty, a family of self-made kings who stabilised their lands by force, expanded their frontiers with terrifying aggression and ensured the primacy of the Christian church at the point of the sword. Yet from this crucible of violence emerged a Western…

Louis’ death in 840 set off another bout of civil strife. Lothair, his eldest son and the man who had once been intended to rule as emperor after Louis’ death, declared himself emperor, claiming authority over the lands controlled by his brother, Louis the German, and his halfbrother, Charles the Bald. Lothair further stirred the pot by supporting the claim of Pepin II, the son of his deceased brother Pepin, to Aquitaine, which was under the control of Charles the Bald. Unsurprisingly, Lothair’s siblings refused to acquiesce. The armies of the contending sons met at the Battle of Fontenoy on 25 June 841. The battle ended with the defeat of Lothair and Pepin II amid great slaughter. Although Lothair attempted to continue the struggle, he had lost too many men.…

John XII was the pope who crowned Otto as emperor in 962 CE, and together they produced the Diploma Ottonianum, which set out what the relationship was to be between popes and emperors, as well as agreeing to which lands were under papal control. Yet within a year John XII was scheming with Magyars and the Byzantine Empire to fight against Otto, even as the emperor was clearing Italy of the enemies of the pope. Otto returned to Rome, drove out John XII and called a council to elect a new, hopefully more pliable, pontiff. When they elected Leo VIII in his stead Otto considered the matter settled. The Roman populace did not, however, and Leo was forced to flee the city, allowing John to return to St Peter’s. When…

MARTIN LUTHER’S DEFIANCE Luther posts his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg in protest at some of the Church’s practices, including the sale of indulgences as a means of raising money. A COLLISION COURSE WITH ROME Luther publishes and circulates a damning pamphlet in which he discusses the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, as well as openly criticising both the Church and the pope. JOHN CALVIN John Calvin publishes his version of reform, Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Catholic Church is now under attack from different factions of reformers with very differing views. DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES For all monasteries with a revenue of less than per year £200 THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE Thomas More refuses to accept Henry as Head of the Church and is executed.…

Early modern printing was an imperfect process. The paper used for pamphlets was of poor quality, copy-editing protocols were often sloppy, and printers usually rushed works through the presses to steal a march on their competitors. In 1525, Luther addressed a preface to “my dear printers, who so openly rob and steal from each other”. He would have been willing to tolerate the fraud and theft within the industry if only they “did not corrupt and ruin my books so badly in the process”. Texts were churned out so quickly “that when they come back to me I no longer recognise them”. Something was always “missing in that place; that bit has been transposed; that part has not been corrected”. Luther was also alert to widespread piracy and insisted on…

From the beginning, Isabella was a woman who knew what she wanted – to marry a king. Charles V to be precise. Daughter of King Manuel I of Portugal and Maria of Aragon, Isabella was born to be a queen. When she found out that Charles was considering a marriage with Mary Tudor of England, Isabella laid herself bare, proclaiming she would either marry him or enter a convent. Her determination won out, and her union with Charles created an alliance of power and wealth. However, when the two met it became much more than that. Charles and Isabella possessed the rarest of things in royal betrothals – genuine affection. Charles trusted his wife immensely, and Isabella’s intelligence led her to be a very capable regent queen of Spain during…

1279 Construction begins An archetypal medieval keep, with four turrets and a moat, is built. This would eventually become known as the Swiss Wing. 1552 Schweizertor One of only a handful of Renaissance monuments in Vienna, this wing is built to house the Imperial treasury. 1558-65 The Stallburg Construction begins on a residence for Archduke Maximilian, later becoming an art gallery and finally the site of the famous Lipizzaner stallions. 1660S Leopoldine Wing The wing that connected many separate buildings into a single entity and became the royal living quarters is masterminded by Emperor Leopold I and built in the 1660s. 18TH CENTURY A Baroque extension The famous Habsburg architect, Joseph Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, begins work on some magnificent extensions to the palace. After his death, his son would…

The Habsburg family, which had emerged as a great European power in the medieval period, were famous for their ability to marry well. They acquired many of the titles and territories they held through marriage, including their claim to the Netherlands. The Dukes of Burgundy, who ruled the Netherlands in the medieval period, were famous for their wealth as well as the splendour and culture of their courts. When Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, died in 1477, he left only a daughter – Mary – to succeed him. Mary of Burgundy was the richest heiress in Europe and immediately caught the attention of the French King Louis XI, who coveted the inheritance and invaded the duchy. Concerned by the threat to Burgundy’s independence, Mary married Maximilian of Austria, who…

Rudolf’s collection of artworks included masterpieces by many of the leading artists of the Renaissance. As well as the great Italians such as Caravaggio, Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto, he acquired pieces by leaders of the northern Renaissance – Bosch, van Eyck, Bruegel, Holbein and Dürer. But his acquisitions often owed more to the emperor’s ‘basic’ tastes than to aesthetic appreciation. One of his favourite court painters was Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn, of whom little is now known. He came from a family of painters in the Hague but joined Rudolf’s entourage early on and remained a fixture there until the emperor’s death. De Quade created numerous works, largely of allegorical subjects, but all featuring nubile nudes, such as Venus Riding A Satyr, above. In other paintings the artist brought…

“The Peace of Westphalia may well remain the foundation of our political system forever.” So said the great Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1761, well over a century after the treaties that ended the Thirty Years’ War had been signed. By granting the individual states of the Holy Roman Empire sovereignty, the treaties would be heralded as the foundation of the modern state system. The principle of international relations that has been attributed to and taken the name of Westphalia declares that every state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs. They are all equal, no matter how large or small, and all must be free of interference from external powers. Despite the reputation of the Westphalian system, the importance of the 1648 peace to international relations has been…

He was not the obvious choice as Archbishop of Reims. Reims was the foremost bishopric in the Frankish empire. Its bishop, having to deal with and live among kings and barons, was expected to come from nobility. But Ebbo, the putative archbishop, was of German peasant stock. Ebbo’s mother was recruited as wet nurse for the baby of Hildegard, wife to Emperor Charlemagne himself. Ebbo was already three years old when his mother started feeding the little child that the empress gave birth to. He was a boy, named Louis by his father, and little Louis became fast friends with Ebbo. At the request of Louis, Charlemagne rendered Ebbo free from his serfdom and paid for his education. That meant, for a boy who was not of noble birth, entry…

As far as family trees go, the one that baby Frederick of Swabia was born into was impressive. The future Frederick I Barbarossa was the descendent of two of Germany’s most powerful families: the Hohenstaufens on his father’s side, and the Welfs on his mother’s. His father, also called Frederick, was Duke of Swabia, while his mother Judith was a daughter of the Duke of Bavaria. Moreover, the young Frederick was a grand-nephew of Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick’s illustrious lineage was a curse as well as a blessing. The Hohenstaufens and the Welfs were rivals who vied for power in Germany, and conflict between them broke out in 1125, when Frederick was still a toddler. When Henry V died without a legitimate son, Frederick’s father desired the…

In the history of world rulers, with all facts on paper, Charles V should rub shoulders with the greatest. Charles was not only head of the influential House of Habsburg, but his dominions over Europe extended from Germany to Spain to northern Italy, and even Austria and the Low Countries – modernday Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. All these dominions combined with the Spanish colonisation of what would become known as the Americas prompted his realms to be labelled the very first ‘empire on which the sun never sets’. Despite the staggering reach of his power, the pedigree of his name and the huge number of crowns balancing atop his head, Charles V never quite achieved the legendary status this empire should have ensured. Charles’ reign was one not only…

For most of his adult life Charles V had faced his biggest threat: the Protestant reformation or, more specifically, Lutheranism. For Charles, this fight was not only about religion, it was about power. Though the Schmalkaldic League had begun as a religious group, their ambitions had quickly become political, and the resistance presented a very real threat to his empire. Unlike many religious groups, they had a considerable military force to back up their ambitions. Even so, initially it seemed that Charles would succeed over his enemies. Despite their superior numbers, the League suffered from inferior leaders and a lack of effective battle tactics, and they were thoroughly thrashed by Charles at the Battle of Mühlberg. With victory in his grasp, Charles forced his enemies to concede in the Augsburg…

Although little remembered today, Margaret of Austria was one of the most remarkable women within the political realms of early 16th-century Europe. Born in Brussels on 10 January 1480, Margaret was the only daughter of Maximilian, Archduke of Austria and his heiress wife, Mary, Duchess of Burgundy. She was named after her mother’s beloved stepmother, Margaret of York (who also stood as her godmother), but with an elder brother, Philip, already in the nursery, her birth was of little dynastic consequence. As a woman, Margaret’s mother, Mary, had struggled to hold her rich inheritance following the death of her father, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1475. Burgundy, which was one of the wealthiest and most cultured states of late-medieval Europe, had already drawn the jealous eye of the…

Being born into the 16th-century Habsburg dynasty carried with it great political power, territorial responsibility and, unfortunately, genetic problems. The problems were the direct result of trying to safeguard the power and the responsibility – put simply, the Habsburgs believed that one way to remain the leading European dynasty was intermarriage. They couldn’t know that inbreeding over time would produce physical and mental disorders. Rudolf was born in Vienna, Austria on 18 July 1552 to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II and Maria of Spain and was a victim of this policy of deliberate consanguinity. In his mother’s family, an incredible 80% of marriages were between closely related partners, including Rudolf's parents, who were both grandchildren of Joanna ‘the Mad’ of Castile. Did Joanna merit her moniker? It’s an issue that…

TROOPS: 20,000 CAVALRY: 20,000 CHARLES V, DUKE OF LORRAINE LEADER Experienced in battle, this courageous Austrian statesman convinced the relief army to take the shortest route and devised the approach to battle. POLISH HUSSARS KEY UNIT The fabled ‘winged’ hussars of the Polish cavalry were an elite shock force built to charge the enemy and pave the way for their comrades to sweep in behind and finish the job. KOPIA KEY WEAPON Draped with a silk banner, this 16-foot lance had an iron point, with metal strips layered below it to support the head and protect the top.…