Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire serves as an extended historical warning about the limits of a confederacy whose central authority acts through sovereign members rather than directly upon the people. Its constitutional machinery appeared formidable: a representative Diet, an emperor with executive powers, and two supreme judicial tribunals. Yet the empire’s laws and requisitions depended on the very princes and states they were meant to govern, leaving it vulnerable to internal war, incomplete compliance, and outside interference. The contrast between an impressive catalogue of powers and persistent political impotence is the account’s decisive point.

Origins and Constitutional Structure

The account presents the Germanic body as an existing institution founded on a principle comparable to that of the American confederation. Its origins lie in the feudal order. Germany had once been divided among distinct peoples without a common chief; after Charlemagne conquered the region and incorporated it into his dominions, it became a separate empire when his sons divided those lands. Charlemagne and his immediate descendants possessed the reality of imperial authority, but hereditary vassals and national diets gradually acquired sovereign jurisdiction and independence. As imperial power weakened, private wars among princes and states eroded public order. The account contrasts emperors’ full sovereignty in the eleventh century with their largely symbolic authority by the fifteenth.

The later federal structure distributed authority among three principal institutions. The Diet represented the members; the emperor served as executive magistrate and could veto its decrees; and the Imperial Chamber and Aulic Council exercised supreme jurisdiction over disputes concerning the empire or arising among its members. The Diet could legislate, make war and peace, contract alliances, assess quotas of troops and money, build fortresses, regulate coinage, admit new members, and impose the ban of the empire on disobedient members. That sanction could strip a member of sovereign rights and possessions.

The members were also subject to restrictions intended to protect the common order. They could not make compacts prejudicial to the empire, impose tolls on mutual commerce without the emperor’s and Diet’s consent, alter the value of money, commit injustice against one another, or shelter disturbers of the peace. The ban could be invoked against violators. Members of the Diet were answerable to the emperor and Diet in their public capacity, and to the Aulic Council and Imperial Chamber in private matters.

The emperor’s prerogatives included the exclusive right to propose measures to the Diet, veto its resolutions, appoint ambassadors, confer titles, fill vacant electorates, found universities, grant certain privileges, receive and apply public revenues, and watch over public safety. In some cases, electors formed a council to assist him. But the imperial title did not itself provide him with territory or revenue within the empire; his dominions and income came from his other hereditary positions. The institutional design thus combined a wide list of shared and imperial powers with a political reality in which independent members retained the ability to frustrate their exercise.

Sovereignty and the Failure of Collective Government

The central defect, in the account’s analysis, was not an absence of formal powers but the principle on which they rested: the empire was a community of sovereigns, its Diet represented sovereigns, and its laws were addressed to sovereigns. This made the federation a “nerveless body,” unable to regulate its members reliably or protect itself securely. Its history was consequently marked by wars between emperors and princes, conflicts among the members, the strong oppressing the weak, foreign intervention and intrigue, and demands for men and money that were ignored or only partly met. Attempts to compel obedience failed or produced slaughter and devastation that also struck the innocent.

Conflict repeatedly exposed how little the federal institutions could command. In the sixteenth century, the emperor fought with one part of the empire against another, and in one conflict he was put to flight and came close to capture by the elector of Saxony. The late king of Prussia also repeatedly challenged his imperial sovereign and commonly proved the stronger. The account describes the German annals as crowded with wars among members, and recalls that before the Peace of Westphalia, a thirty-year war pitted the emperor and half the empire against Sweden and the other half. Foreign powers eventually negotiated and dictated the peace; the treaty’s articles, to which those powers were parties, became part of the Germanic constitution. The settlement thus testified not only to internal division but to foreign influence over the empire’s fundamental arrangements.

Even when self-defense offered a shared purpose, the process of acting together was too slow. Jealousy, pride, distinct interests, and clashing claims prolonged military deliberations until an enemy might already be in the field; by the time federal troops were ready, the campaign season could be ending. The small national force maintained in peacetime was poorly supported: it was inadequately kept up and paid, affected by local prejudices, and financed through irregular, disproportionate contributions. A nominal capacity for common defense did not amount to timely or dependable action.

Enforcement, Abuse, and Precarious Survival

The empire tried to address its inability to maintain order by dividing itself into nine or ten circles, giving each an internal organization and responsibility for enforcing laws against delinquent members. In the account’s judgment, this experiment revealed rather than repaired the basic defect. Each circle reproduced the disorder of the wider system: circles failed to carry out their commissions or enforced them with the devastation of civil war. Some defaulted altogether, worsening the very problem they were intended to solve.

The enforcement of the ban against Donauwörth shows how coercive authority could be diverted into private advantage. After the people of the free imperial city committed public outrages against the Abbe de St. Croix, who held certain immunities, the city was placed under the ban. The Duke of Bavaria obtained authority to enforce it, although he directed another circle. He arrived with ten thousand troops and used the occasion to revive an old claim that his ancestors had suffered Donauwörth to be separated from their territory. He seized the city in his own name, disarmed and punished its inhabitants, and annexed it to his domains. A remedy meant to compel obedience to federal law had instead enabled a powerful member to enlarge his possessions.

Several forces nevertheless kept the empire from collapsing entirely. Most members feared exposure to the mercy of foreign powers; even the principal members were weak beside the formidable states around them. The emperor’s separate hereditary dominions gave him substantial weight, while family pride and his position as Europe’s first prince tied his interests to preserving the existing system. These conditions sustained a weak and precarious union, but they did not make it capable of reform. The same sovereign independence that helped keep the members apart from foreign rule continually obstructed consolidation, while neighboring powers had reasons to resist a transformation that might give the empire greater strength and preeminence. The account’s broader comparison places the German example among historical cases used to examine the consequences of confederacies, but emphasizes that the empire’s longevity should not be mistaken for effective government. Its continued existence depended on mutual vulnerability and external circumstances, not on reliable internal authority.