Holy Roman Empire
The thousand-year elective confederation over central Europe that was neither a state nor a nation, and whose fragmentation shaped Germany and Europe.
Voltaire's line is famous because it is almost fair: the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. What it actually was is stranger and more interesting. For roughly a thousand years, most of central Europe was covered by a single legal and ceremonial structure with an elected emperor at the top and, at the bottom, hundreds of principalities, bishoprics, duchies, and free cities that ran their own affairs. It was less a country than an operating system for a continent, and its collapse produced both modern Germany and the modern idea of the sovereign state.
What it was
The conventional starting point is Christmas Day 800, when the pope crowned Charlemagne emperor and revived a title that had been vacant in the West for three centuries. The empire in its lasting form dates from 962, when Otto I of Germany was crowned in Rome. From then on the imperial title was attached to the German kingship, and the emperor claimed to be the secular head of Latin Christendom, the counterpart of the pope.
Crucially, the crown was elective, not hereditary. The Golden Bull of 1356 fixed the arrangement: seven prince-electors, three of them archbishops, chose each new emperor. That single design choice explains almost everything about the empire. An emperor who needed the electors' votes could not simply overrule them, so imperial power was permanently negotiated. Emperors bargained, bribed, married, and litigated their way to authority rather than commanding it. From 1438 the Habsburgs won the election almost every time, but they ruled the empire as its first family, not as its owner.
And it was not a nation. At various points the empire included German, Czech, Italian, Dutch, French-speaking, and Slovene lands. Its subjects owed loyalty to their own prince first. What the empire supplied was a shared framework: an imperial diet where princes and cities argued, imperial courts that small states could actually use against large ones, and a legitimacy that let a bishop of a tiny territory survive next to a powerful duke.
Fracture
The Reformation broke it. Once princes could choose their own confession, religious identity mapped onto territorial politics, and the empire's talent for muddling through was tested past its limit. The compromise of 1555 let each prince set his territory's religion, which kept the peace for two generations and then failed spectacularly. The Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 killed a share of the German population that historians still argue about but that was catastrophic by any measure, and it drew in Spain, Sweden, France, and Denmark.
The Peace of Westphalia that ended it is usually described as the birth of the sovereign state system, and the reason is precisely what it did to the empire. The princes emerged with the right to conduct their own foreign policy and make their own alliances. The emperor remained, the institutions remained, but the practical sovereignty had moved down a level, to some three hundred separate entities. Europe learned to organize itself around territorial states with fixed borders and no superior authority because the largest structure in Europe had just been hollowed out into exactly that.
The end and the inheritance
Napoleon finished it. After crushing the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz, he assembled a bloc of German states into the Confederation of the Rhine, and on 6 August 1806 Emperor Francis II dissolved the empire rather than watch a Corsican inherit its crown. A thousand-year institution ended in a legal notice.
The inheritance is bigger than the institution. Because central Europe spent those centuries as hundreds of competing courts rather than one court, it developed a decentralized cultural geography that a unitary monarchy would have flattened: dozens of universities, dozens of orchestras, dozens of capitals. Germany today is federal, with real power in the Länder and a deliberately weak center, because that is the shape the region has held for a millennium. And Germany's unification came late, in 1871, which meant it arrived as a fully industrialized great power in an already crowded Europe, which is a large part of why the twentieth century went the way it did.
The empire is worth taking seriously as a political form rather than a joke. It managed enormous diversity for a very long time with weak central authority, overlapping jurisdictions, and courts instead of armies. Scholars of the European Union have noticed the resemblance, and they are not being flippant.