If you like your history bone dry, this is the book for you! Clearly superior to a series of Wikipedia entries, so who can complain? The notes for the most part refer to secondary sources, but hey, there are an awful lot of them. Wilson has wisely included lists of the emperors and kings in the back of the book, without which most readers would be lost. Some will surely be lost anyway. There were times when I had that feeling – e.g. whenever he lumped several centuries together. Besides this tendency to generalize across the centuries, there is also that of simply piling fact upon fact, and to forego such things as narrative and chronology. The latter, Wilson writes, "would be unfeasibly long" – but is found, to a degree, in Part III (Governance) and also in the last couple of chapters of Part IV, as well as in the Appendix - but narrative only occasionally.

I am quite stubborn, which is proven by the fact that I actually did finish this book. There were times when I feared it might be my bane. It clearly has the potential at least. For in case you are not sufficiently awestruck by the Holy Roman Empire, not to worry. Wilson will do his best to try to reduce you to a dazed, trembling mess. One way he achieves this is by jumping around in time like a squirrel on amphetamine. At one point I only figured out from the footnote that he had moved a century ahead from where he was just a couple of sentences ago.

And at times he writes the strangest things:
"The Ludowinger family inherited (...) the castles of Neuburg on the Unstrut and the Wartburg, the latter made famous in 1817 as the venue for the gathering of German liberal-nationalist students." (p. 374) - Really? He’s just pulling your leg here – it most definitely was made famous around three centuries earlier – which is surely why they gathered there in the first place.
I also note that this has actually been changed in the Belknap-edition, messing it up all over again. There it reads: "...and the Wartburg, the latter made famous in 1517 when Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on its chapel door." – Wouldn’t it have been witty if Luther had ridden out to the Wartburg to invite the Burgherr to participate in the disputation? Sure! But sorry, no, he did no such thing. He arrived there only in 1521, exhausted, constipated, and most probably also rather anxious.

From this you can perhaps better see my point, when I state that in approaching "the material like an eagle flying over the Empire" (p. 5) – we often fly so high that details tend to disappear, and even emperors, princes and centuries get blurred together – and just as this reader was starting to wonder whether we would ever hear anything about the masses of people within the Empire below the ranks of, say, lesser nobility, we finally got there in Part IV. Our tour guide, Peter Wilson (a.k.a. ‘The Eagle’), here continues to be as bureaucratic in his approach as ever, and we get lots and lots of numbers. He displays his impeccable British humour only rarely, but you can sense that it is there when, to illustrate how change was also "stimulated by lordly pressures," an anecdote is offered about the bishop of Paderborn who had peasants beaten for laziness, and "once had one woman dragged on her bottom across her garden until it was clear of weeds." (p. 490) There are a couple more anecdotes in the book - but far too few. It's the same thing here as with the general lack of real narrative - there is simply very little that can help you keep all this information in your memory. The illustrations are good and helps a bit though. It seems Wilson’s mind works somewhat like a computer. Mine, alas, does not. I would happily have read twice the amount of pages if only more chronology and more good old-fashioned narrative had been offered.

Take the topic of Justice. This is treated in chapter 12 (which, by the way, offered surprisingly little about the reception of Roman Law within the Empire.) There had been ample opportunity to bring much of this up earlier, but no. Wilson is adamant. The problem is that it’s not always easy remember back and be able to connect it to those particular historical circumstances when you had a specific need for this information hundreds of pages ago. Perhaps I should have read the book backwards? - I have been moaning about this book since I first started reading it, and when I nevertheless give it a fairly good rating you may think that I have exaggerated a lot in what I’ve written. That would be a mistake. It is the most challenging book I have read in a long time.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

A beautifully designed book that is almost entirely unreadable: less a monograph than an encyclopedia. There is, no doubt, very good reason to write the history of the HRE in this order (Sections: Ideal, Belonging, Governance, Society). Wilson gets to avoid the perils of Great Man History (i.e., it's totally fatuous), and the perils of Materialist History (i.e., it's totally fatuous). He gets to privilege the very hip no-really-ideas-matter-a-lot perspective of contemporary history.

The form doesn't really help in what seems to be the main goal of this book, which is to convince people that old historiography of the HRE is wrong to see it as a doddering mess always holding back the development of nation states. It is, you'll be surprised to learn, more complex than that. All well and good; do we need to be reminded in every section? In every chapter? Every part of every chapter? Yes, because that's the only thing holding this mass of small bits together. Otherwise it is a compendium of short essays on various topics, each one very worthwhile, but on the whole utterly unreadable. A better way to hold them together would have been some sense of narrative, but that would have required a more traditionally chronological book, which would have vitiated all that great avoiding the Great Men and avoiding the Materialists stuff.

Unless that stuff isn't really all that much of a worry, when the third option is a collection of very well-researched, cutting edge wikipedia entries on, e.g., the position of the Hohenzollerns in the Prussian governance systems between 1680 and 1700, particularly when Wilson has literally one sentence structure available to him: clause, but anti-clause, at the same time synthesis clause.

Two things to note: Wilson clearly knows a lot about his subject matter, and I'd love to take a class with him on it. And there's a chronology at the back of the book, f0r mere mortals like me who can't handle the constant flipping between time periods. It's 54 pages long, detailed, but focused. If only the book had more in common with that. ( )

How do you review what is pretty clearly the work of decades? When you’re not entirely sure you understood everything, because there was just so much to understand?

About how you write such a book, I think: by compartmentalizing.

First, some explanation, though, because the Holy Roman Empire isn’t that well-known of a historical entity. Basically, we’re talking about German-speaking Europe with some extra bits—northern Italy, bits of Poland, bits of France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary—between the late 700s to the early 1800s. (Napoleon ruins everything.) The HRE was a pretty big deal in a lot of ways too, like, part of the “Holy” and “Roman” was that many Emperors either chose the Pope or protected the Pope and the Church.

As you can maybe guess by that half-joke, this doesn’t have the structure I’d expected. Wilson starts at the beginning and ends at the end, yes, but he does this multiple times, running through the changes of dynasty and ideas of kingship, the wider political structures and wars, the social order, and the justice system so that the reader gets a good sense of how one state of affairs lead directly into another, but less sense of concurrent events. For instance, he’ll discuss an emperor’s ruling style in one section, the war he was fighting in another, and the peasant uprisings he was contending with in a third. Honestly, I’m kind of impressed how well Wilson manages to remind the reader of information, but it’s not perfect and when I need to reference this book in the future, I will be very grateful for the timeline of events, the genealogies, and the index.

I’m equally impressed by the amount of research and synthesis Wilson’s done. Even if he didn’t read through all the tax records and law codes and contemporary political writings himself, he has to have all the articles and books that discuss them, and to have read a whole lot of 19th and 20th century histories of the Empire to boot—and then somehow he’s managed to write a narrative in reasonably non-academic English. It’s still pretty dense and dry, but the book gives a good overview of the Empire in all its facets without getting bogged down in details (and yes, the names of kings, emperors, and popes are frequently details, that’s how macro this book gets).

Those two points alone are enough for me to call this a solidly good history book and to recommend this to people genuinely interested in the topic, but then we come to Wilson’s thesis, which honestly? I wasn’t expecting to get. I enjoyed seeing him pointing out the more than a little biased historical readings out there, the ones that, say, apply a 19th century idea of a nation state and political identities to the past and find the 1100s decidedly lacking, and seeing him point out, at the same time, that not only was the 1100s in the HRE about the same as the neighbouring countries, but that in many ways, the fluid, flexible, “works for us” structure of the Empire gave it more stability over time than other regions of Europe. Probably Wilson comes with his own biases—he certainly is passionate about his subject—but it’s also a bias that works for me.

So those are a few of the biggest things I took away from reading this: the overall history of the Holy Roman Empire and how it was structured and run; the Empire more or less in context of the rest of European history; and the ways history can be misdirected but also interrogated. I also learned a lot about historical political systems and social orders in general, and have a better idea of what Europe looked like in the past when it wasn’t being British or, occasionally, French. There were also a number of wars and uprisings that I’d only heard vaguely of or didn’t have the historical run-up to (like the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War) which I have a much better idea of now.

If you quizzed me on any particular aspect, though, a month from finishing this and nearly three from starting it, I’d be hard-pressed to give more than a vague answer. There’s too much scope in the book for that. I was a little disappointed too that Wilson assumes the reader has a decent general understanding of European history, and will mention the Pope fleeing to Avignon or a monarch outside of the Empire or a war without filing you in on context except for how it relates to the Empire. (And that he scraps a lot of social history in favour of politics.) Can’t say I really blame him, since this book is already 1000 pages long, but all the same. It’s something to go in aware of, I think.

In sum: this book was excellent. It does everything a history book of this scale should, does little if anything such a book shouldn’t do, contains more information than a human brain can retain in one go, and is, dare I say it only having read the one book on the topic, the definitive book on the Holy Roman Empire. If you’re interested in European history, medieval history, or anything else that the HRE touches on, especially if you’re working in an academic framework, this is an important book to have. I’ll definitely be rereading sections and working through the index when that one writing project comes up on the docket.

To bear in mind: This is a heavy book, in terms of both size and content. While the sentences are always readable, the paragraphs and sections often need time to sink in, and even if you’re an actual historian of the HRE or adjacent topics, I’d highly advise giving your brain a rest at least at the end of every section. Also, I spent most of my reading time with this either held in both hands or propped up on some object or other and I definitely strained my thumb at one point, so there’s also that.

Also, fair warning: there is reasonably frequent reference to historical Muslim peoples as a “threat” or “menace”, as in “the Ottomans are threatening our borders and political stability”, and also the occasional reference to or discussion of early medieval slavery, intra-European racism, poor treatment of women and peasants, war and famine, and similar things which I’m undoubtedly forgetting now but should probably be expected in a history book. Oh, and historians and political leaders using the HRE’s existence to support their own agendas.

9.5/10 ( )

Very interesting. A wealth of information, but not easy to read. ( )

The historian facing an unmanageably large topic has a few strategies open to her. She can knuckle down and simply plough through in chronological order – in the manner of, let's say, Diarmaid MacCulloch's History of Christianity (which is great). Another solution is to do what Simon Winder did in Danubia: throw up your hands and say, ‘Fuck it, this is impossible, so here's a few choice historical anecdotes and some postcards from my city-break to Vienna.’ This can work surprisingly well, too, if you can find a suitable prose style and if you don't mind surrendering any claim to writing an objective history.

Or you can do what Peter H. Wilson does here: abandon chronology altogether, and structure your book entirely thematically. It sounds logical but having read this, I don't think it really works. Arguably, the problem of trying to maintain a working timeline in your head is even worse than the problem of trying to maintain themes in your head when reading a chronological study. What happens here is that you leap centuries from one paragraph to the next in pursuit of details relating to (for instance) the empire's interaction with the papacy, but you never stay anywhere long enough to get a sense of the personalities or societies at play.

Frederick Barbarossa, the twelfth-century emperor, should have been a shoo-in for compelling hero: a dashingly handsome, multilingual polymath who rewrote law codes and led an army on the Third Crusade. Here, he's a nonentity who shuffles vaguely in and out at intervals of several hundred pages. Similarly, I've read a fair bit about Ferdinand II in books about the Thirty Years War, and was hoping to get a fuller picture of him: he remains a complete cipher. Social convulsions like the witchcraft craze or the Black Death might as well never have happened, and even such enormities as the Reformation only seem to feature when they intersect with one of Wilson's master-themes. I am told that the Nine Years War required the calling-up of 31,340 Kreistruppen – but when it comes to who they were fighting, or where, or why, I'm completely in the dark. Incidentally, am I the only one who cannot read any reference to the Schmalkaldic League without hearing it as a Jewish dismissal? ‘Balkaldic League? Schmalkaldic League!’

On page 490 of The Holy Roman Empire, Wilson pauses to note that Bishop Meinward of Paderborn ‘once had a woman dragged on her bottom across her garden until it was clear of weeds’. It's funny to see how this detail reappears in almost every printed review of the book – because it's the only thing even vaguely anecdotal in the whole one thousand pages. There is a huge lack of first-person sources – diaries, journals, letters, something to connect the history with real life. If you have a particular area of interest, and look it up in the index, then Wilson's book is sure to be very enlightening (I was interested in how Switzerland came about, and he's great on that subject). He's enlightening and thorough and admirable on loads of subjects. But the book's structure abandons any attempt at narrative history by definition – it leaves the whole thing working fairly well in an encyclopaedic way, but not as something to read through in sequence.

Perhaps the most interesting and important sections are Part Two, which discusses the geographical entities that made up the Empire (why he delays this for so long is beyond me), and the last section where Wilson looks at the empire's reputation in subsequent historiography. Through the blunt force of repetition, his central argument is at least pretty clear: that the empire, as a decentralised entity with multiple sites of power (Germany still doesn't have a single dominant metropolis), did not fit the emerging model of sovereign states – but that it worked rather well all the same, and might be a useful study for contemporary structures like the European Union.

This is a counterargument to the traditional view, which is that it was already an inefficient and moribund dinosaur when Napoleon put it out of its misery in 1806. Adolf Hitler often talked about the Holy Roman Empire for a rhetorical contrast to his own vision of a united Germany, and at one point sent an internal memo that people should stop referring to Germany as the ‘Third Reich’ because it would put people in mind of the hopelessness of the first empire. (Which is ironic, considering that one of the things that has interfered with reassessments of the Holy Roman Empire is the fact that the very word Reich, even in German, has become tainted by Nazism.)

I think overall this book feels like a necessary, but sometimes tedious, laying-out of the groundwork, presenting a lot of otherwise inaccessible German historiography to an English audience and bringing the conversation up to date. It does a really good job of that, but I am definitely looking forward to future writers who can build on this work to do something with a bit more narrative power – because it really is an interesting story, to have this huge and very unusual ‘state’ that was right in the middle of Europe for a thousand years, and then almost completely forgotten.

Nowadays, with Brexit hurtling towards us, the debate is split between people who are ‘pro-Europe’ and people who are ‘anti-Europe’ – but both sides, Wilson points out, are ‘bound by the same understanding of the state as a single, centralized monopoly of legitimate power over a recognized territory. This definition is a European invention, retrospectively backdated to the Peace of Westphalia…’. The Holy Roman Empire was qualitatively different, and including such differences might be a crucial necessity for modern politics. It's a fascinating idea, but in the end I don't think you really need to push through this whole thing to get the point. ( )