The Holy Roman Empire

A loose federation of kingdoms, duchies, prince-bishoprics and free cities in Central Europe, beginning when Pope John XII crowned the East Frankish king Otto I as Emperor in Rome on 2 February 962, reviving the imperial title in the West that had lapsed since 924. It was never a centralized state: from 1356 the Golden Bull formalized election of the Emperor by seven, later more, Prince-Electors, and real governing power lay chiefly with its constituent territories rather than with the Emperor, whose authority the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) and the imperial courts constrained rather than executed. From the fifteenth century the crown was held almost continuously by the Austrian House of Habsburg. Voltaire's often-quoted judgment, in his 1756 Essay on Customs, that the polity was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, captured an Enlightenment view of its fragmented, largely ceremonial character in its final centuries, though the line undersells the real constitutional order the Golden Bull and the Diet gave it. The Empire dissolved on 6 August 1806, when Emperor Francis II, who had already declared himself hereditary Emperor of Austria two years earlier, abdicated the imperial title under pressure from Napoleon's formation of the rival Confederation of the Rhine.