‘Travels in a vanished empire’ melds popular history with travel writing to explore the hidden past of twelve European cities, and the pivotal role they played in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Empire was created through conquest around 800 AD by ‘Europe’s founding father’ Charlemagne, but evolved into the continent’s most unique political entity, a pseudo-federalist elective monarchy at the head of a dense, fascinating and often wonderfully idiosyncratic jigsaw puzzle of princely territories, imperial free cities, and ecclesiastical fiefs. These dominions ranged from principalities hundreds of kilometres in size - the origin of today’s nation states - to tiny landholdings consisting only of a few villages and a castle, yet granted outsized judicial and political status due to the anachronistic bequest of a long-dead ruler. Many existed for centuries only to vanish without trace in the modern era.
Over the course of its thousand year history, the Empire covered all or parts of eleven modern European countries: Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Czechia, Italy, France, Poland and Denmark. However, its influence stretched much wider, and countries as varied as Hungary, Spain, Mexico and Croatia were linked closely to it through the personal domains of its elected emperors: most notably the Hapsburg family, which took almost permanent possession of the imperial title between the early modern period and the dissolution of the Empire under the threat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1805.
The story of the Empire is the story of Europe: the Crusades, the Reformation, colonisation, great power rivalry, the rise of nationalism and the age of revolutions. But the Empire is also intertwined with hundreds of lesser known stories which developed in its unique crucible of ancient liberties and fragmented political landscape: the cultural exchange with the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim Near East, which had a lasting impact on Balkan Europe; the debate of ideas between rationalists and romantics in Germany’s free-thinking universities; or life as a territorial pawn between rapacious neighbouring rulers.
This book aims to provide a glimpse into both the familiar and unanticipated narratives of the Holy Roman Empire through the lens of twelve European cities. Inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor and Simon Winder, it uses these locations - some still major capitals, others now almost unknown provincial towns - as a lens to view particular periods in the Empire’s history. In doing so, it captures the immediacy, charm and idiosyncrasies of the past, whilst reflecting on how our towns and cities evolve, grow and yet remain in many ways constant, over centuries of human activity.
Chapter 1: Aachen - 'Origins’ 300-800.
Aachen, now an attractive provincial town on the borders of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, was once Charlemagne’s capital, the ‘new Rome’ for the first imperial state since the end of the Western Empire. This chapter explores Aachen’s role as it evolved from a Roman spa town to a Carolingian royal palace, to becoming the cultic coronation site for 23 German Kings. The chapter traces how many of the themes of what would become the Holy Roman Empire were evident in the Carolingian period, most notably the conception of the emperor as the spiritual and moral leader of the newly emerging Christendom.
Chapter 2: Magdeburg - ‘Frontier’ 900-1150.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Empire pushed east, mounting Slavic conquests and Wendish crusades from the Elbe marches. Magdeburg was the epicentre of this new frontier both physically and ideologically: a fortified border redoubt, the source of christianising missions, and, perhaps most influentially, the archetype of the free imperial city: with the Magdeburg Charter of 1107 granting metropolitan autonomy and rights that would be used as a model throughout the mediaeval empire. Magdeburg has had a catastrophic history since its millennial heyday: destroyed by fire in 1207, infamously sacked and razed by imperial forces during the Thirty Years War, and finally flattened by RAF bombers during the Second World War. Today, much of the city’s skyline is defined by modern architecture, belaying Magdeburg pivotal historical role, and provoking a discussion about the continuity of human settlement and the former ‘lives’ of our urban centres.
Chapter 3: Milan - ‘Chivalry’ 1100-1300.
Thirteenth century Italy was a landscape of feuding city states and local oligarchies who played off the Emperor against the Pope in a fluid and complex game of aristocratic thrones. Dominated by two of the most iconic rulers in the Empire’s history: Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ and Frederick II ‘stupor mundi’ (‘the wonder of the world’), this chapter views the battle for control of the Mediterranean through the lens of its spoils of war - the city of Milan. It also places the papal-imperial competition within a wider nexus of the Crusades, and explores the role that the Italian city states played in the campaign for the Holy Land.
Chapter 4: Vienna ‘Dominion’ 1273-1520.
Thirteenth century Italy was a landscape of feuding city states and local oligarchies who played off the Emperor against the Pope in a fluid and complex game of aristocratic thrones. Dominated by two of the most iconic rulers in the Empire’s history: Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ and Frederick II ‘stupor mundi’ (‘the wonder of the world’), this chapter views the battle for control of the Mediterranean through the lens of its spoils of war - the city of Milan. It also places the papal-imperial competition within a wider nexus of the Crusades, and explores the role that the Italian city states played in the campaign for the Holy Land.
Chapter 5: Augsburg ‘Reformation’ 1520-1560.
The Reformation upended the religious, political and social order of Christendom and helped forge the modern European continent. It also helped bring about a codification of the institutional structures of the Empire: its regional and federal representative bodies and its courts a way of mediating between increasingly divergent interests. Rather than recount the grand sweep of the Reformation narrative in full, chapter five zeroes in on a single moment: the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, which negotiated a fragile religious and political settlement which nevertheless preserved peace in the Empire until 1618.
Chapter 6: Prague ‘Portents’ 1575-1612.
At the turn of the seventeenth century Prague was the largest city in central Europe, a polyglot city of Czechs, Germans and Jews known for its religious plurality. Under the reign of the reclusive, esoteric emperor Rudolf II, it became capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a magnet for scientists, mystics, artists and quacks. This chapter explores Prague as a mecca for the new ideas of the Renaissance, as well as a focal point for the gathering storm clouds of the Thirty Years War, which was triggered with the Defenestration of Prague in 1618.
Chapter 7: Heidelberg ‘Disaster’ 1600-1650.
Heidelberg’s ruined castle perches atop a bluff above the Neckar river, the perfect symbol of the disaster of this prosperous region in the Thirty Years War and under French attack in the later seventeenth century. I consider Heidelberg’s history as a centre for religious and academic innovation, its calamitous entry into the Bohemian revolt and experience during the Thirty Years War, and its final destruction and loss of influence in the campaigns of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
Chapter 8: Budapest ‘Ottoman’ 1520-1700.
Hungary was never a formal part of the Holy Roman Empire, though was closely tied with it through its rulership by the Hapsburg dynasty of emperors. However, Budapest is the perfect lens through which to explore the ancient, troubled, but often intertwined relationship between the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. The city was under Ottoman occupation for 150 years, leaving a cultural legacy which survived both the nationalist whitewashing of the Hungarian independence movements of the 19th century, and the communist era of the 20th. The author explores this relationship both as it manifested in Budapest, and as a microcosm of the Empire as a whole.
Chapter 9: Wroclaw ‘Rivalry’ 1725-1760.
The 18th century was the era of great power rivalry in Europe, with the ‘balance of power’ delicately maintained through endless territorial wars of succession. But what was it like to be a pawn in the great power game? This chapter looks at the era of Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa from the perspective of Wroclaw (then Breslau), the capital of the forgotten province of Silesia, which has changed ‘ownership’ from Poland, to Bohemia, to Austria, to Prussia, narrowly missed being part of the Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and then became Polish after WW1.
Chapter 10: Mainz or Jena - ‘Conquest ’ 1780-1806.
The last decades of the eighteenth century saw established political, societal and philosophical norms trampled underfoot in the quest for liberty and progress. The French Revolutionary Wars sparked new ideas and political models, such as the short-lived Mainz Republic, whilst rationalism battled romanticism in the new universities across the German territories. In 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte changed Europe forever when he forced the dissolution of the Empire, established the Confederation of the Rhine, and raised the major princes to kingdoms, slashing through the complex web of mutually interdependent liberties that had held the Empire together for a thousand years.
Chapter 11: Berlin - ‘Nation’ 1848-1871.
In the new post-Napoleon Europe, the old certainties and orders had changed. The Empire had been dissolved, but the struggle for domination of the German world continued, and the stage was set for a showdown between Bismark and Metternich: the Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa of the era. Berlin was transformed from a nowhere town in the midst of the Brandenburg wilderness to the capital of the new “German nation”. This chapter explores how the idea of the Holy Roman Empire was harnessed, twisted and transformed as the wildfire ideology of nationalism took hold across the contingent, and how Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismark seized the moment to make Berlin the epicentre of nineteenth century Europe.
Chapter 12: Trieste - ‘Fragmentation’ 1860-1914.
As the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire moved into the Balkans, the Hapsburgs were on the precipice of reestablishing their Great Power status along the modern model: a naval empire. But as the Empire struggled to absorb the riot of new peoples, languages, ethnicities, rivalries and histories of this divergent region, its expansion became the cause of its equally rapid demise. Trieste, the Adriatic port city that briefly became the hope and dream of a new Austrian Navy, is the perfect symbol of this fruitless, final, pursuit of glory. Now a dreaming backwater annexed awkwardly onto the edge of Italy and overshadowed by its neighbour ports, its faded glories provide an apt mirror to reflect on our perceptions around the Empire as a whole.
