The Holy Roman Empire in the 18th Century

To the east must be added some 1000 Imperial knights  claiming equal "immediacy" in the derivation of their authority, but ruling altogether over a total of not more than 200,000 subjects.  Not merely, however, was the Empire fragmented, but the fragments of which it was composed with themselves fragmented to.  Geographical integrity of the possessions united under a single princely dynasty was the exception rather than the rule.  From the 17th century Brandenburg Prussia, for example, had ruled several territories on the lower Rhine near the Dutch border, and one in Württemberg in the southwest. The Archbishop of Mainz, at the confluence of the Main and the Rhine Rivers, down river from Frankfurt, was also the overlord of the Eichsfeld 200 miles to the northeast, on the edge of the Harz (Hartz) Mountains, and an island of Catholicism to the present day.  The Duchy of Weimar, in Goethe's time, consisted of four separate territorial units, with a total area of 700 square miles.  The result and complexity of frontiers, custom dues, and transport may be left to the imagination.

Apart from the person of the Emperor, the institutions unifying this magnificent chaos were few and shadowy.  The Reichstag, the Imperial Diet, at Regensburg, though divided into three chambers of Electors, other princes, and free cities (the Imperial Knights were not represented), was not so much an assembly as a standing conference of ambassadors.There were no debates and business was conducted in writing.  The Imperial Supreme Court, the Reichskammergericht, which from 1693 was housed in Wetzlar, northeast of Frankfurt, was very expensive -- the fee alone for injuring an appeal was 1,500 guilders -- and slower by far than Dickens's Chancery: in the middle of the 18th century there were over 16,000 cases still outstanding. The Imperial Tribunal, the Reichshofrat, in Vienna, was a rival appeal court whose competence was never adequately defined.  Certain towns, finally, had a special relationship to the Imperial office: the crown jewels were kept in Aachen and Nuremberg, and Frankfurt was the town in which the election and coronation of a new emperor had to take place, in accordance with an elaborate ceremonial lay down in the Golden Bull of 1356. On the other hand, there was no empire wide system of taxation, nor even a currency, and certainly no standing Imperial Army.  Norcross was there a single state church.  The Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 and put an end to the terrible devastation of the Thirty Years' War, while confirming the three churches, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, in depositions of the "normative year" of 1624, had laid down the principle that each territory should have its own established religion, that of the local sovereign, with a sort of limited right of persecution of the other two.

It would, however, be a mistake to regard the holy Roman empire as a hollow sham simply because it did not have the characteristics of the modern nation state.  It provided a historical, emotional, and juridical framework which, in the 18th century alone, survived a major war is fought on German soil, and even at the political level it was a diplomatic mechanism through which a certain necessary balance of power could be maintained.  For "Germany" was not lacking in ambitious, and thus rival, forces aiming precisely at the establishment of such a modern state or states, nor enforces the two anxious to resist these ambitions.

In addition to Prussia and Austria under Joseph II (Emperor with Maria Theresa from 1765, and soul and Perot from 1782-1790) and there were the Electorates of Saxony and Bavaria, the Duchy of Württemberg and the Landgraviate of Hesse (Hessen) Kassel, all substantial powers aiming at their own unification, expansion, and in enrichment. In the great palms of the holy Roman empire, the smaller territories, the Imperial Knights, and the free cities where the carp or the minnows in this world of pike.  The only protection was the imperial power, and the historic order that the Empire sanctioned.  Frederick the Great was of course very willing to assist the city councilors of Frankfurt when they quarreled with the Emperor about constitutional matters, but his true opinion of the city's traditional freedoms was indicated rather by his arbitrary arrest, through his Frankfurt agent, of the departing Voltaire, who may happen to wish relieved of certain compromising manuscripts.  The old Emperor and the ramshackle Empire were the natural patrons of those who had nothing to hope for from the expansion of the busily centralizing enlightened autocracies with their splendid new geometrical palaces and parks, showcases of absolute power, dominating the court residence cities,  -- Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, and with its street plan, like its rulers, the most brutal of all Kassel (Cassel).  Kassel is situated in a broad valley," at one end by steep hills.  Halfway up this natural rampart stands the huge and somber palace of the Landgrave.  Down from its main entrance of broad swath is caught in a straight line through the town across the entire valley.  Above the palace rise, along the same axis, the terrace gardens which culminate in a stone spire, the highest point for miles around, surmounted by a colossal statue of Hercules -- with the club.

In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation formally came to an end. Large parts of Germany had suffered from the Napoleonic wars and French occupation. Prussia, which played a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, was the clear winner of the Congress of Vienna (1815). It vastly increased its territory in all directions. The states of Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria, which sided with Napoleon that switched sides in time before the defeat of France, kept the territorial gainsmade on the Napoleons command. Bavaria alone, for example, doubled in size. Saxony, which was on the losing side, supporting Napoleon to the bitter end, had half its territory annexed by Prussia.

The former Holy Roman Empire was replaced by the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund). It had around 40 member states, but never achieved much.it was a very loose confederation and the attempts in Frankfurt starting in 1848 to draw up a constitution and form a liberal parliamentary democracy failed. Although it was agreed to form a small German solution with Prussia as the anchor, rather than a larger German solution led by Austria, the Prussian King refused the terms under which he was offered the crown.