From Charlemagne's coronation in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800 through the Ottonian dynasty, the Investiture Controversy and Canossa, Barbarossa and Frederick II, the Golden Bull and the rise of the Habsburgs, Luther's Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, the relief of Vienna, the rise of Prussia, and the enlightened absolutism of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, to the dissolution of the Empire by Francis II in 1806. Slide across the centuries to read the major events of the thousand-year Reich of princes, prelates, and free cities.
On Christmas Day, Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor in St Peter's Basilica. The Carolingian empire he assembled — Francia, Saxony, Lombard Italy, the Spanish March, Bavaria — becomes the first medieval rebirth of a Roman emperor in the West.
From Charlemagne's coronation in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800 through the Ottonian dynasty, the Investiture Controversy and Canossa, Barbarossa and Frederick II, the Golden Bull and the rise of the Habsburgs, Luther's Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, the relief of Vienna, the rise of Prussia, and the enlightened absolutism of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, to the dissolution of the Empire by Francis II in 1806. Slide across the centuries to read the major events of the thousand-year Reich of princes, prelates, and free cities.
On Christmas Day, Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor in St Peter's Basilica. The Carolingian empire he assembled — Francia, Saxony, Lombard Italy, the Spanish March, Bavaria — becomes the first medieval rebirth of a Roman emperor in the West.
The three surviving grandsons of Charlemagne — Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald — partition his empire. Louis takes East Francia, the German-speaking lands east of the Rhine; the political map of medieval Germany is born.
On the death of the last Carolingian king of East Francia, Louis the Child, the German stem dukes — Saxons, Franconians, Bavarians, Swabians, Lotharingians — elect Conrad of Franconia as king. The German throne becomes elective.
Outside Augsburg, Otto the Great destroys a great Magyar army that had ravaged Bavaria for half a century. The Hungarian raids on western Europe end forever; the survivors settle in the Carpathian basin and, within a generation, accept Christianity.
In St Peter's, Pope John XII places the imperial crown on Otto's head. The Carolingian title, vacant in the west for nearly forty years, is revived as a permanent dignity attached to the German kingship. The Holy Roman Empire is born.
On the extinction of the Ottonian line, the princes elect Conrad of Franconia, a great-great-grandson of Otto the Great through the female line. The Salian dynasty he founds will rule the Empire for a century — and crash headlong into the reform papacy.
Excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII for asserting the right to invest bishops, the German king Henry IV crosses the Alps in mid-winter and stands for three days barefoot in the snow outside the castle of Canossa, begging absolution. Gregory grants it — but the political damage is done.
After almost fifty years of war, antipopes, and rival kings, Henry V and Pope Calixtus II sign the Concordat of Worms. The emperor renounces investiture with ring and staff; the pope concedes that bishops in Germany are still elected in the emperor's presence and may receive their temporal regalia from him.
The Hohenstaufen Frederick — nephew of the previous emperor Conrad III, but also kin through his mother to the rival Welf dynasty — is elected at Frankfurt. He will spend thirty-eight years trying to make the imperial idea a reality again in Italy and Germany.
The Hohenstaufen Frederick II — king of Sicily, ward of Pope Innocent III, fluent in Arabic and patron of Aristotelian philosophy — is crowned emperor in Rome. Contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the wonder of the world.
After the death of Conrad IV, two foreign candidates — William of Holland, Richard of Cornwall, Alfonso of Castile — claim the imperial title without effective power. For two decades there is no recognised emperor in Germany. The princely confederations and city leagues fill the vacuum.
The electors choose Rudolf, count of Habsburg in the upper Rhine, to end the Interregnum. He never bothers to journey to Rome for imperial coronation, but he wins Austria from Ottokar of Bohemia at Marchfeld in 1278 — and so plants his family in the Danube basin where they will rule for six and a half centuries.
At Nuremberg and Metz, the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV promulgates the Golden Bull — the imperial law that fixes the seven Electors who alone may choose a German king and locks the procedure of imperial elections into stone for the next 450 years.
At the Council of Constance convened by the emperor Sigismund to heal the Western Schism, the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus — promised an imperial safe-conduct — is condemned for heresy and burned at the stake. The Hussite Wars that follow shake the Empire for two decades.
On the death of the Luxembourg emperor Sigismund, his son-in-law Albert of Habsburg is elected king. Apart from a brief Wittelsbach interlude in 1742-45, the imperial crown will remain in Habsburg hands for the rest of the Empire's existence.
At the Diet of Worms in 1495, the emperor Maximilian I and the imperial estates inaugurate the Reichsreform — establishing a perpetual public peace (Ewiger Landfriede), an imperial supreme court (Reichskammergericht), and a common imperial tax. The Empire is given its first early-modern administrative architecture.
On the eve of All Saints, the Augustinian friar Martin Luther — professor at the new university of Wittenberg in electoral Saxony — circulates ninety-five Latin propositions against the sale of indulgences. The pamphlet, translated and reprinted across Germany within months, ignites the Reformation.
At the Diet of Worms, the twenty-one-year-old emperor Charles V demands that Luther retract his books. Luther refuses: 'Here I stand, I can do no other.' Charles places him under the imperial ban with the Edict of Worms, but Elector Frederick the Wise spirits him away to the Wartburg.
After Charles V's defeat in the Schmalkaldic War's second round, his brother Ferdinand negotiates the Peace of Augsburg with the imperial estates. The treaty enshrines the principle cuius regio, eius religio: each prince decides whether his territory shall be Catholic or Lutheran.
On 23 May, Bohemian Protestant nobles throw two Catholic regents and their secretary from a window of Hradschin Castle in Prague. They survive — saved, the Jesuits said, by the Virgin's intercession; the dung-heap they fell into, said the Protestants. Within months the rebellion has become the Thirty Years' War.
After five years of negotiation in Münster and Osnabrück, the Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War. The German territorial princes are recognised as effectively sovereign; France acquires Alsace, Sweden takes Pomerania, the Dutch and Swiss are confirmed as independent, and Calvinism is admitted alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism.
On 12 September, the imperial relief army under Charles V of Lorraine and the Polish king Jan Sobieski sweeps down from the Kahlenberg and breaks the Ottoman siege of Vienna. Within fifteen years the Habsburgs will reconquer Hungary; their centre of gravity decisively shifts to the Danube.
At Königsberg, with imperial permission, the elector of Brandenburg crowns himself King in Prussia (Frederick I). A Hohenzollern royal title outside the Empire gives the Brandenburg-Prussian state a footing equal to the Austrian Habsburgs in European protocol.
On the death of Charles VI, his daughter Maria Theresa inherits the Habsburg lands by the Pragmatic Sanction; in the same year Frederick II succeeds his father in Prussia. Within months, Frederick invades Silesia. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) and then the Seven Years' War (1756-63) transform Prussia into a great power at Austria's expense.
The new emperor Joseph II, son of Maria Theresa, issues the Patent of Toleration, granting freedom of worship to Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox Christians across the Habsburg lands; the next year he abolishes serfdom and dissolves the contemplative monastic orders. The age of Enlightenment reaches the imperial throne.
Under Napoleonic pressure after the Peace of Lunéville (1801), the Imperial Diet's Reichsdeputationshauptschluss abolishes nearly all the ecclesiastical states and free imperial cities of the Empire. Some 112 territories vanish from the map; the surviving secular states, above all Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg, are vastly enlarged.
On 6 August, after Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz and the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine, the emperor Francis II — fearing that Napoleon would seize the imperial title himself — abdicates the imperial crown and dissolves the Empire. One thousand and six years after Charlemagne's coronation, the Holy Roman Empire is no more.