The Rise and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire

Until Pius XII's reforms in 1955, the Roman Missal still contained Prayers for the Emperor on both Good Friday and in the Exultet on Easter Eve.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

Oremus et pro Christianissimo imperatore nostro [Nomen] ut Deus et Dominus noster subditas illi faciat omnes barbaras nationes ad nostram perpetuam pacem….

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, in cujus manu sunt omnium potestates, et omnium jura regnorum: respice ad Romanum benignus imperium; ut gentes, quae in sua feritate confidunt, potentiae tuae dexterae comprimantur. Per Dominum.

Let us pray also for the most Christian Emperor [Name] that the Lord God may reduce to his obedience all barbarous nations for our perpetual peace….

O almighty and eternal God, in whose hands are all the power and right of kingdoms, graciously look down on the Roman Empire that those nations who confide in their own haughtiness and strength, may be reduced by the power of Thy right hand. Through the same Lord…

—Good Friday Collect

Respice etiam ad devotissimum imperatorem nostrum (Nomen) cujus tu, Deus, desiderii vota praenoscens, ineffabili pietatis et misericordiae tuae munere, tranquillum perpetuae pacis accommoda, et coelestem victoriam cum omni populo suo.

Regard also our most devout Emperor [Name] and since Thou knowest, O God, the desires of his heart, grant by the ineffable grace of Thy goodness and mercy, that he may enjoy with all his people the tranquility of perpetual peace and heavenly victory.

—“Exsultet,” Holy Saturday

The growth of the “Restore the ‘54” Movement amongst traditionally-minded Catholic laity has led to a rediscovery of the above “Prayers for the Emperor” during the Traditional rites of Holy Week.  Now, as with so much else, Dom Guéranger in his Liturgical Year gives us some important information on these prayers:

The words here put in parentheses are only said in those countries, which are subject to the Emperor of Austria in the following ‘Prayer,’ had in view the Emperor of Germany, who was formerly the head of the Germanic confederation, and, in the Middle Ages, was entrusted by the Church, with the charge of propagating the Faith among the northern nations. This ‘Prayer’ is now omitted, excepting in those countries, which are subject to Austria. 

On his coverage of Holy Saturday, he adds “The words here put in parentheses are only said in those countries, which are subject to the Emperor of Austria.”

This sounds dismissive; but Dom Gueranger speaks a great deal more about the Holy Empire in another place:

Monarch as he is, Peter’s successor would be at liberty to choose from amongst the kings of the West (all of whom gloried in being his sons), one prince to whom he might confide the office of protector and defender of Holy Church. Head as he is of the whole spiritual army of the elect, Porter of heaven’s gates, Depository of grace and of infallible truth, he could invite the said prince to the honor of his allegiance. Sublime indeed would such an alliance be, the legitimacy whereof bears the palm over that of all treaties ever concluded between potentates. Such an alliance, inasmuch as it is intended to guarantee the rights of the King of kings, in the person of His representative, would entail solemn obligations, it is true, on the recipient; but at the same time, it would single him out to lofty privileges. Intrinsically vain and powerless are nobility of race, vastness of territory, glory of arms, and brilliancy of genius, to exalt a prince above his peers; such a greatness merely springs from earth and outstrips not man’s limits. But the ally of Pontiffs would possess a dignity touching upon the heavenly; for such are the sacred interests whereof he would assume the filial guardianship. Without in the least encroaching on the domain of other kings, his compeers in other respects, or derogating from their independence, he must hold it his right, as accredited protector of his mother, the Church, to carry the sword, whithersoever the spiritual authority is aggrieved or requires his concurrence, in the accomplishment of the divine mission of teaching and saving souls. In this sense, his power must be universal, because the mission of Holy Church is universal. So real this power, so distinct from every other, that to express it a new diadem must needs be added to the regal crown already his by inheritance; and a fresh anointing, different from the usual royal unction, must manifest in his person, superiority over all other kings, chieftainship of the Holy Empire, of the Roman Empire renewed, ennobled and limitless, as the earthly dominion assigned to Jesus Christ by the Eternal Father.[1]

This passage well sums up the theory of the Holy Roman Empire.  In 380 AD, the Emperor Theodosius the Great had made the Empire Catholic with the Edict of Thessalonica.  Baptism became the entrance to Roman citizenship as well as the Church; in a sense, from that time on the boundaries of the Holy Roman Church were those of the Empire – and vice versa.  Theodosius divided the Empire in two – East and West –  at his death; but these were seen to be nevertheless part of one realm.  The various barbarian tribes began settling in the Western Empire – Franks, Visigoths, and the rest – who nevertheless claimed that the kingdoms they were founding on Imperial soil remained part of the Empire; the same would be true of the Slavic tribes who would later enter the Balkans.  In 476 AD, the last Western Emperor was deposed, and the barbarian king who did so sent the imperial diadem to Constantinople, declaring that henceforth there was again but one Emperor, to whom he and all his colleagues owed allegiance.  This was the origin of the Byzantine Empire.

 The Popes recognized the Byzantine Emperor as the head of the Holy Empire – who in turn acted as temporal protector of the Holy See.  But the invasions of the Lombards into Italy and the Muslims into the Near East, and the acceptance of the Iconoclast heresy by successive Emperors at Constantinople forced the Popes to look elsewhere for aid.  The Frankish Kings rose to the challenge, and in 800 Pope St. Leo III crowned Bl. Charlemagne as Emperor.  The Western Empire – in time dubbed the “Holy Roman” – was revived.

At the height of the Middle Ages, the Empire was seen as consisting of several concentric rings.  Since it became elective, there were first and foremost whatever lands the Emperor had inherited in his own right before being elected; then there were the free cities and abbeys, duchies and principalities held by other, lesser authorities and princes that made up the Empire proper in Central Europe and northern Italy; and lastly, all other Christian realms and kingdoms.  Although this latter was often denied by certain Kings  such as France – it was underlined in 1517 by the Imperial election of that year, when Kings Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England ran against Charles I of Spain, grandson of Emperor Maximilian I.  The last-named won, and as Emperor Charles V came the closest to fulfilling the universal aspirations of the Empire as anyone had in centuries.

But in his time, the Protestant revolt arose, and plunged Europe into a series of vicious civil wars.  When these ended in 1648, the unity of Western Christendom and the Imperial idea were in shambles.  The Catholic Habsburgs retained the Imperial throne and their own possessions.  But the coronations at Rome were over; each new Emperor went through the ceremony of election at Frankfurt,  then (what was formerly the preparatory coronation as King of the Romans) at Bl. Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen. Later, this was seen as being too close to the French border, and so the coronation moved to Frankfurt as well.  There was no question of the submission of either France or the Protestant nations to the Imperial Crown; even within the shrunken Empire (having lost Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, its boundaries were the Austrian part of the Habsburg possessions, roughly the Germany of 1919, and Belgium), Prussia constantly challenged Habsburg supremacy in a series of wars.  So things stood in the year 1789.

The French Revolution would ultimately doom the venerable old Imperial edifice.  By 1795, Revolutionary France had annexed Belgium and the Left Bank of the Rhine.  The martyred Marie Antoinette’s brother, Francis II, had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1792.  In an attempt to shore up Germany against the French menace, Francis allowed the annexation of hundreds of smaller German states by the larger ones.  It was hoped that the score that remained would be better able to resist the foe, now ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte.  But the defeat of the Second Coalition in 1804 led Napoleon, who had begun to speak of himself as the new Charlemagne, to have himself crowned Emperor of the French.  At the ceremony in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, Napoleon took the crown from the hands of a startled Pope Pius VII, and crowned himself with it.  This in turn led Francis to suspect that Napoleon wished to make himself Holy Roman Emperor.  In response, he created a new crown and entity over which to reign: the Hereditary Empire of Austria.

Made up only of the hereditary Habsburg Lands, this new creation still featured the Double Eagle – the symbol of the Christian Empire that through long use had become associated with the Habsburgs.  In 1806, Francis led his country into another conflict with France, the War of the Third Coalition.  Defeated at the Battle of Austerlitz, he was forced to sign a treaty with Napoleon that greatly weakened Austria.  In August, Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, into which he compelled Bavarian and fifteen of the other larger German States to enter – while withdrawing from the Holy Roman Empire.  On July 22, Napoleon issued an ultimatum ordering Francis to abdicate as Holy Roman Emperor by August 10.  He did so, but declared the bonds tying the estates to him and so each other dissolved – in effect, dissolving the Empire.

It had endured 1006 years since Bl. Charlemagne was crowned.  In 1815, there was an attempt to revive it; but Emperor Francis I (as we must call him in his role as Emperor of Austria) was against this idea.  In its place, the Germanic Confederation, a loose grouping of the German States, was erected with the Austrian Emperor as president.  In 1848, a German Empire was briefly revived, but collapsed ultimately through the then-impossibility of including both Prussia and Austria in one centralised nation.  Bismarck solved the issue in 1866 by driving Austria militarily out of Germany, as a prelude to the creation of the German Empire in 1871. Comparing it to the Holy Roman Empire, Dom Guéranger observed rather caustically in his entry on St. Boniface: “Upon its ruins, like a woeful mimicry of the Holy Empire, Protestantism has raised its false Evangelical Empire, formed of naught but encroachments, and tracing its recognized origin, to the apostasy of that felon knight, Albert of Brandenburg.”

In any case, that empire too, alongside those of Austria and Russia (which in token of its claim to represent Byzantium also used the Double Eagle) fell in the horrors of World War I.  That horrible war led to the second, which saw Europe subjected to the American-Soviet Dyarchy.  Afterwards, the Christian Democratic leaders of Europe – as well as Otto von Habsburg, rightful heir of the Austrian Empire, at least – were inspired by the Crown of Charlemagne to create a European Union which would in some sense, encompassing a free and Christian Europe be a new version of the Holy Roman Empire.  Certainly, successive Popes had such visions for both the EU and the Union.

It was not to be.  But who knows what the future holds?  The attempt by Francis II and I to dissolve the empire was certainly ultra vires, as one can of course abdicate a throne or resign a position; but he is not able to abolish that throne he leaves.  As the great scholar of the Holy Roan Empire, Viscount Bryce, observed, legally, the Empire lives on as a sort of disembodied spirit, as it did in the West between 476 and 800.  Who knows what future Divine mandate may not bring it back into actual being, in a world more deserving of it than the one we have to-day?

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[1] From The Liturgical Year on Pope St. Leo III who crowned Charlemagne.