This paper will address four books pertaining to my interest in the history of the Holy Roman Empire (c. AD 800-1806). I begin with an introduction to the Holy Roman Empire (hereafter, HRE or Empire) as a geopolitical construct, as well as the evolution of historiography of the Empire over the two centuries since its dissolution. My interest in the HRE lies primarily in the Empire’s ever-shifting political geography, and the connections across time and space which the history of the Empire’s position within Central Europe allows. Therefore, the books I address here will all be rather expansive in the scope of their approaches; Friedrich Heer’s The Holy Roman Empire, Michael North’s The Baltic, and Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe each cover approximately 1000 years of history, while Germany: A New Social and Economic History 1450-1630 (ed. Bob Scribner) comprises a set of essays on specific subjects within a narrower time span. It is also worth noting that North’s book, as the title suggests, centers on the Baltic region rather than a constituency of the Holy Roman Empire. However, beginning in the 11th century, the HRE and the Baltic region came to overlap substantially in geography, and military and political affairs. Finally, because German-controlled lands[1] formed the most reliable territorial core of the Empire, much of the analysis in this paper will address the German position in the Empire, and German historiography in the Empire’s aftermath.
Beyond the Empire itself, I also address in this paper the challenges, benefits, and shortcomings of what I will call “expansive history.” Longue durée would generally be an applicable term for all the books except Scribner’s, the subject coverage of which is quite broad despite the volume’s comparatively reduced temporal bounds. While expansive histories have the benefit of being able to cover a great deal of space and time, they are by nature severely limited in depth. In the last half century, academic historiography has moved away from the Annales School style of including “a little bit of everything”[2] in history writing. This is largely for good reason, as Big histories of Big patterns have in the past tended to leave out all but the loudest (usually, politically or economically powerful and male-dominated western European) voices. However, I argue that expansive histories still hold a valuable position in historiography, as enjoyable introductions for new students (such as myself in the recent past), and as veritable encyclopedias of patterns and cross-boundary connections for students and historians who study (or aim to study) the relevant subjects full-time (as I do now).
The Holy Roman Empire confounds any attempt at simplicity in the telling of its history. Formally founded by Pope Leo III and Charlemagne in AD 800, and dissolved in 1806 by its Habsburg emperor, the Empire (HRE for short) lasted approximately as long as Eastern Rome (473-1453). Likewise, its long history ran adjacent to those of “nations” like England, France, or Spain, all of whose narratives of gradual movement from decentralization and feudalism to centralization and absolute power may be more familiar to students of history in the US. By the late 19th century, most other European powers from those aforementioned in the west, to the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the east, had experienced some form of unification under a single sovereign hand or centralized bureaucracy. Although two similarly centralized bodies had also emerged within the HRE by the time—the kingdom of Prussia and the archduchy of Austria—these bodies nevertheless still operated under the higher auspices of the divided Empire.
Charlemagne’s empire, on his coronation as Emperor of the Romans on Christmas day AD 800 in the city of Rome, contained most of continental Western Europe between the Pyrenees in southern France and the Elbe river (which today bisects Germany). However, Charlemagne’s empire proved more of a personal ephemera than a stable and established regime. In the 843 treaty of Verdun, three years after the death of his son Louis (the Pious), the tentatively unified holdings fragmented to Louis’s three sons, and the three major inheritor kingdoms were born: West Francia (France), Lotharingia (Lorraine, Burgundy and northern Italy), and East Francia (the German kingdom). Over the following century, these individual territories also lost most semblance of centralization and fragmented further into localized holdings; no substantial centralizing forces arose within any one of these territories until the ascension of Otto I (the Great) to the German throne in 936, and his further formal ascension to the position of Holy Roman Emperor in 962. It is from Otto I, not Charlemagne, which the Germany-centered Holy Roman Empire as we now conceive it emerged. In a style which I often equate broadly with that of Confucian imperial China, the Empire and its emperors claimed and worked within a series of concentric circles of influence and control (discussed on pages 179-181 of Heart of Europe); likewise, the Empire (like Confucian Chinese empires with Asia and the world) claimed in some sense to represent or have the rights to all of Europe.[3]
However, the Holy Roman Empire even in its post-Ottonian form cannot be equated with the kingdom of Germany. Over the millennium of its history, the HRE actually contained a number of kingdoms and other lands well beyond what we know in the 21st century as Germany. Firstly, the kingdom of Germany in medieval times also included such lands as Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, all of which avoided or were left out of Otto von Bismarck’s unification of the German nation in the 19th century. At the height of its combined de facto and de jure holdings, the Emperor also presided (or claimed to preside) over the kingdoms of Italy, Bohemia, Burgundy, and Prussia;[4] other non-kingdoms such as the Low Countries also fell into imperial jurisdiction. Furthermore, the Austrian Habsburg line of Holy Roman Emperors, who held the imperial title from late medieval times through the Empire’s dissolution, controlled much of Hungary and the Balkans, despite these regions’ formal exclusions from the Empire itself. The empire also maintained a confused and intentionally hazy relationship with the German crusading orders which occupied much of the south and east coasts of the Baltic sea from the mid-13th through mid-15th centuries.[5] In fact, the Teutonic Order in late medieval Prussia provides a great model for historical analysis of many of the political relationships between the Empire’s various constituencies. Generally, constituencies from Italy, to Bohemia, to Prussia wanted the emperor to leave them alone, until they found themselves in danger of military incursion from an internal or external force, at which point they requested immediate imperial funding and levies. Even the Habsburgs themselves, who ruled the Empire for nearly half of its total duration, often found themselves more interested in territories outside the empire (like the Balkan borderlands between their archduchy and the Ottoman Empire.
As with all historiography, an approach to the study of German history requires care, caution, and critical thinking. Unlike most historiography, however, German history and historiography have the singular trait of complete inextricability from the Nazis and the monumental war crimes committed by the Nazi German Empire. As a descendant of German Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi Germany, I wholeheartedly encourage the maintenance of this inextricable link in the study of German history. This is in part because the seeds of Naziism can be traced backward well into the depths of the timespan of the Holy Roman Empire; and in part because of the hyper-nationalism, fascism, anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism (et cetera) with which German historians imbued their research and writing in the 145 years between the HRE’s dissolution and the fall of the Nazi empire. I encountered the difficulty of writing German history in another project this fall on settlement patterns in the German Holy Roman Empire northeast of the Elbe after the Wendish crusade of 1147; I only discovered halfway into the project the dataset of town charter records that I used—created in 2019 by current historians, economists, and data scientists at the University of Munich and Brown University—in fact derived much of its initial information from a series of books begun in 1939 by Nazi academic Erich Keyser. Furthermore, Keyser’s main ideological point of departure was his extreme hatred of Slavic people (and Jewish people in the Slavic world), and his desires for Germany to conquer and ethnically cleanse the non-German-controlled lands northeast of the Elbe.[6] Needless to say, I took from this a valuable lesson, to not take any part of German historiography at face value, even if it has a shiny and rigorous-sounding name like data science.
Beyond degrees of separation from Nazi ideology, however, historiography of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire falls into a number of other traps. This leads us well into a discussion of the first book in this literature review, Friedrich Heer’s The Holy Roman Empire, written in German in 1967 but published first in Britain (in English) in 1968. The Holy Roman Empire begins with the rise of the Carolingians to power in the 700s, and ends with the last decades of the empire up to 1806—it focuses almost exclusively on the higher echelons of politics and international relations pertaining to the Holy Roman Empire during that time span. Heer’s book, by my understanding, has a rather complicated relationship with the historiography of Germany and the HRE. As McGill University historian C.C. Bayley notes in his review of the book (Speculum Journal, University of Chicago Press, 2016), Heer drew heavily on the legacy of 19th-century pro-HRE historians. At the time (before Bismarck’s national unification in 1871), the dominant trend in German historiography held “that the mediaeval empire had been a millstone round the neck of the German nation and had hindered its unification.”[7] As Wilson and others have argued, the Nazi movement derived a great deal of its ideology from this latter fascist-cum-nationalist feeling of German resentment towards its surrounding—non-German—affiliates. In this sense, Heer (and his historiographic predecessors) appear to be operating in an anti-fascist intellectual space by aligning themselves with the less centralized and more politically diverse Holy Roman Empire. This is further corroborated by Heer’s belonging to the Catholic church, as the German unification project itself and proceeding fascist-nationalist development were all largely Protestant-chauvinist—and German nationalists from Bismarck to Hitler counted Catholicism as anathema to the supposed political and ethno-religious triumph of the German state. Furthermore, Heer participated directly in anti-Nazi resistance movements, and one of his most celebrated books, God’s First Love, also looks critically at anti-Semitism across history, particularly from his own Catholic church.
However, Heer’s place in the historiography is not safe from criticism of morality. In the decades after German unification, German nationalist and then Nazi historiography came to hold the Second and Third Reichs (respectively) as legitimate and spiritual successors to the imperial project of the HRE itself (the First Reich). As Bayley notes, “the Nazi regime, notably after the absorption of Austria, produced an abundant supply of eulogies of the Holy Roman Empire as the forerunner of the Third Reich.” Truly, one feels no German history is safe from the long arm of German fascist ideology.
Heer’s overt support for the Holy Roman Empire also cannot be held as seamlessly academically rigorous. Bayley addresses this in his review, but Wilson summarizes it best in his discussion of German historiography in the aftermath of that country’s defeat in the first World War:
Conservative writers tried to claim it [the Holy Roman Empire] as a civilizing mission, allowing Austria to escape its much-reduced frontiers by suggesting that the country might once again provide order for an otherwise fragmented and chaotic central Europe. Hugo Hantsch emphasized Catholicism as a unifying element, while Heinrich Ritter von Srbik stressed a common Germanum, though without racial overtones. Friedrich Heer did both in his romanticized presentation of the Empire as a benign force.[8]
Heer’s book is certainly full of individual instances of this romanticization; the following line on page 220 concisely displays Heer’s rather personal style: “[Emperor] Leopold, physically slight of stature, was forced by Louis XIV and the Turks to wage permanent war in both east and west.”[9]
Can the reader emerge from this sentence without viewing Leopold as the underdog, put-upon by his big, mean neighbors? Is Leopold’s physical stature at all relevant other than to convey this understanding? This moment grasps perfectly the difficulty of Heer’s book; I will readily admit that Heer’s informal, character-driven style gives the book a certain page-turning quality, which makes it more fun to read than its theoretical perfectly rigorous but dry and emotionless stylistic opposite. Heer’s ability to empathically link the reader to his historical subjects also cannot be discounted.
But, like many good novels, Heer also delivers a sense of good and evil—and the empathic link, while a foundational principle of historical writing,[10] naturally entails a subjectivity which many historians may (and, certainly in Wilson’s case, do) find non-rigorous. Heer’s specific choice of words for emperor Frederick I’s decision making at the peace of Venice in 1177 further corroborates this: “In 1176, after his defeat by the Lombards… the emperor at last began to realize [emphasis mine] that the long evolution by which the Italian communes had risen to a high degree of political and economic independence could not be reversed.”[11][12] How do we know with such detail Leopold’s personal thoughts? Do we have any evidence that he personally only became aware of the state of Italian politics at this moment? The reader could not know, because Heer does not discuss sources, nor provide citations. All-in-all, I do find Heer’s rather pronounced biases deterrent; his concluding remarks, that “the Empire created peace, that was its mission,” indeed sound more like a fond eulogy than historical analysis. But I cannot deny that it was his book which first lit a fire in my heart to study the HRE.
We now turn to Germany: A New Social and Economic History (vol. 1, 1450-1630). Published in 1996, this volume (ed. Bob Scribner) comprises a series of essays falling into the titular categories, with such foci as population and food, markets and “early capitalism,” and gender and social communities. I chose this book because it falls into a kind of hazy middle period of historiography between the old Heer style in which top-down, narrative longue durée studies reigned supreme, and the newer and arguably substantially more rigorous style of leaving no focal stone unturned. Columbia University’s own Volker Berghahn reviewed the third volume of this same series in 2005,[13] but his comments on the historiographic shift in which series whole series operated ring quite apt for the first volume as well:
Where historians of the 1960s and 1970s implicitly or explicitly postulated that a person’s socioeconomic situation, their tangible experience and basic existence determined their consciousness, the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s and 1990s essentially reversed this relationship… Economic performance or voting statistics have been downgraded as less interesting than the power of myths and legends, public spectacles and manifestations of the zeitgeist. Although Ogilvie and Overy do not say so explicitly, their volume appears designed to counterbalance the ‘new orthodoxies’ of the 1990s.[14]
While prioritizing ground-level socio-economic patterns over histories of powerful men and institutions, Volume 1 nevertheless maintains its focus largely on the Big Stories of German history. This is in part a fact of writing on such a relatively expansive subject matter, even though this book narrows its foci in some ways compared to Heer’s purview. Heer took as his spatiotemporal subject the entire Holy Roman Empire, and homed in specifically on its most elevated political actors; Scribner (et al.) conversely have chosen a relatively concentrated spatiotemporal field (Germany, 1450-1630) but count as their focus the entire socio-economic expanse of that space, from the consumption patterns of peasants to the imperial economic decision-making.
Such topics as geography, gender, and diet stand out particularly among the essays in Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Perhaps predicting the environmental historiography of later writers like J.R. McNeill and Jared Diamond,[15] the book opens with a chapter by Tom Scott entitled “Economic Landscapes.” “from earliest times,” Scott begins, “certain natural regions can be discerned in Germany, loosely defined by geology, geography, or climate… Upon these were later superimposed the divisions of colonization and settlement: the frontier of Roman limes, the ethnic boundary between German and Slav,” et cetera. The chapter continues in delineating different regional divisions and their associated economic positions within Germany. I do think Scott’s argument here could be labeled as environmental determinism—whether based on topography, arability of land, or other factors—I would contend that that label need not be exclusively negative. In the case of this chapter specifically, Scott’s case for the direct effects of geography on the economic character of regions feels particularly apt, and, while perhaps obvious, nevertheless an analysis of patterns in the German economy that often gets left out or glossed over. As Scott points out, the division of regional economies came from an “interplay” of a number of human and non-human factors. I also happen to be particularly interested in geography, so this synthesis of spatial and economic analysis stood out to me particularly.
Gender and gender divisions in German society compose another main theme across the book, from Chapter 2 “Population” to Chapter 8 “Gender and the Worlds of Work,” to Chapter 10 “Economic and Social Institutions.” The effects of institutions and social constructs on the experiences of the sexes stand out particularly as novel, particularly when compared to the earlier historiography in which Heer operated. All three of the above chapters address the various ways in which men and women found their activities and bodies controlled and regulated in German society, through formal (the church or legal systems) or informal (social expectations and mores) process. These arguments particularly smack of the Foucauldian psychosocial analysis which came to dominate historiography more broadly in the 1980s and 1990s; however, the authors largely do not confront the psychology of German experiences, but rather the life patterns and overt effects of social governance on life in German society. For example, family statistics and church regulations are used to understand fertility practices in Chapter 2. Likewise, gender divisions in skilled and unskilled labor form one of the main foci of Chapter 8.
Forcing an entire edited volume into a larger literature review is no easy task, given the diversity of voices and substantial jumps to and from focal points in such a volume. It is far easier to locate and capture the voice of a single book author in a paper like this. But this paper is not only a literature review of premodern German historiography; I also intend for it to bring out the complexities of writing expansive histories in general. This volume may be relatively constrained in its geography and chronology compared to all other books in this paper, but telling the history of all of Germany across nearly 200 years remains a gargantuan task. It is for this reason that I decided to bring in an edited volume, as that form allows for a unique approach to covering a broad spatiotemporal expanse. On this volume, I conclude that while each individual chapter holds the reader’s interest well, and could be used productively and enjoyably in a further project, the experience of rapidly switching between topics, voices, and styles is rather jarring. There is indeed a pronounced value in the inclusion of a variety of voices under one book title, but there is also a certain value in narrative fluidity and centralized structure. At the risk of sounding noncommittal, though, I will say that both are permitted.
Speaking of jarring transitions, we now turn to Michael North’s maximally temporally expansive The Baltic: A History. This book begins with a broad-stroke look at the political conditions of the lands surrounding the Baltic Sea in the time of the Vikings (c. AD 800), and ends a reasonably concise 320 pages later with an analysis of the economic and political positions of the states on the Baltic sea in the 21st century. I chose The Baltic two reasons. Firstly, much of my primary interest in the history of the HRE lies in the economic and geopolitical relations of north German princes and cities to their near and distant neighbors[16]—in the form of the Hanseatic league, the Northern crusades, or a number of other narratives which emerged in the 12th century. The German state’s reasonably constant—if disorganized—standing as a European “major player” throughout the last millennium means that a great deal of the book, even beyond the specific chapter on the Hanse, deals with the German position in the Baltic Sea in some form.
The Baltic occupies a rather confusing place in historiography, although the actual aims of the book are quite easy to understand. Where Heer covered a select few topics over a broad time period, and Scribner (et al.) covered a broad selection of topics over a reasonably constrained chronology, North attempts to cover many topics across an immense timespan. He does so, additionally, in less than half the number of pages which Wilson grants to his own comparably expansive history[17] (more on this later). It is for this reason that I argue North’s approach is quite easy to understand but quite difficult to situate within the field of history. His approach, similar to that championed by William McNeill in the latter’s own writing, focuses on “a little bit of everything”[18] through the lens of inter-civilizational interaction. The book’s back cover summarizes this quite nicely: “North presents the sea and the lands that surround it as a Nordic Mediterranean, a maritime zone of shared influence, with its own distinct patterns of trade, cultural exchange, and conflict.”[19] The summary’s final claim that the book “transforms the way we think about a body of water too often ignored in studies of the world’s major waterways” is worthy of particular note for a couple of reasons—the first of which is that the actual “waterway” of the Baltic Sea, and activities therein, play only a secondary role to that of the peoples and states on its shores.[20] This is a minor point of contention, if one at all, as it is obvious from the get-go that the Baltic Sea works just as well as a stand-in for transnational history as it does an actual area of operation for that history. But the point nevertheless stands that this is primarily a book on land-based subjects, not a maritime history.
North’s own self-positioning within historiography forms the second reason for the noteworthiness of the summary’s claim. North well knows the Baltic region’s peripheral status in most historiography of Europe. In his own words, “it has become conventional wisdom to view the Baltic region as the borderlands of medieval Christianity into which the Western world expanded, transforming the local cultures by conquest, colonization, and Christianization.” I can certainly corroborate the peripheral nature of the Baltic, as in all my studies of European “centralities,” the Baltic region has never emerged as more than a point of some interest at one or two degrees of removal.
North’s unspoken (but heavily implied) journey in this book is both a boon and a curse. Even just isolating from the book a list of all of North’s chapter and sub-chapter titles, The Baltic makes a successful case for the importance and enjoyability of that region’s history. Perhaps I am simply easily impressed, but the sheer catalogue of cultural and political diversity led me to accept North’s thesis—from Roman Catholicism and Scandinavian pantheism to Eastern Orthodoxy and old Slavic paganism, from English and Dutch merchants trading in east-Baltic port cities, to the multi-directional exchange of medieval architectural modes, to Russo-Swedish power struggles across the 16th through 18th centuries, the Baltic sea hosted an infinity of well-documented and interesting narratives.
But this approach holds limited depth. If North’s only goal was to prove the diversity and significance of the Baltic region writ large, then he has succeeded. But a closer reading brings out issues which one could have predicted from the beginning; the extreme spread of North’s focal points comes at the cost of cohesion and readability. At some points, a century’s worth of narratives are forced into a single paragraph, making the writing difficult to follow or keep up with.[21] The sheer diversity of sub-fields and methodologies from which North draws can feel quite jarring as well, as he jumps from Baltic archeology and anthropology in the earlier chapters, through the gauntlet of art and architectural history, economic history, social history, and more to his final landing point of 21st-century political science, and security and energy studies.
In this way, The Baltic begins to take on the shortcomings of Germany: A New History’s approach, despite its unification under one authorial voice. North simply covers too much to make this feel like a focused historical study. Perhaps this is not unintentional; North himself situates his approach with the legacy of Fernand Braudel and the latter’s longue durée history of the Mediterranean which was so quintessential Annales school. But to a professional historian, this does consign its value to that of an encyclopedia. No matter one’s interest in the Baltic region, it is more likely than not that that topic spends at least a sentence or two in the spotlight. Some topics, like the Hanse with whose history I am more familiar, even receive a focus which borders on substantial. But when a book is 329 pages long, begins with archaeology of the Viking world and ends with European Union energy policy, it is unlikely that that book holds the level of depth or fluidity which many academic historians find necessary. The Baltic is no exception. However, insofar as it made a centrality out of a periphery, North’s work still holds great value in the philosophical space of history. I also think it is fun to read about the Hanse and the European Union in the same book, but that could be personal preference.
Where The Baltic makes a passable but simple encyclopedia, Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire makes an outstanding and outstandingly complex one. Wilson’s clear writing and effortless delivery of knowledge about every historical polity under the European sun give this book a readability rivaling Friedrich Heer’s, despite Heart of Europe’s more diverse topic coverage. Furthermore, Wilson’s ability to weave in historiography keeps the relevance of his own writing to the field always in the reader’s mind—this, to my eye, is the mark of any good historian, but particularly a historian of such a pronouncedly complex recent history (and historiography) as Germany’s. Wilson looks critically at pertinent philosophy around the Empire from the time of its founding under the Carolingian dynasty, to the 21st-century theories of the HRE as a model for the European Union. His wry delivery of historiographical criticism is best encapsulated in his section on the colonization of the lands east of the Elbe river in the 1100s: “Acutely aware that Germany had lost out on the European scramble to steal other peoples’ lands, nineteenth-century historians adopted the language of high imperialism to present this migration as a legitimate ‘drive to the east’ (Drang nach Osten) to colonize ‘virgin land’ and spread a supposedly superior culture.”[22] He quickly disproves this rather Nazi-prototypical thesis, and then returns to a direct discussion of 12th-century migration patterns.
But the difficulty of writing such a massive history has not escaped Wilson’s work. Recently, academic history has experienced a marked shift in emphasis toward more focused history writing, which may more readily illuminate minority or otherwise peripheral voices. Compared to these trends, which draw heavily on the works of such philosophers as Marx and Michel Foucault, Heart of Europe fundamentally looks like an old-style political history—a history which, like Heer’s, covers a great deal of information and yet still only addresses big patterns and loud voices. Unlike Scribner’s volume, Wilson makes little mention of gender, sexuality, spheres of social activity[23] or other key parts of the lived experiences of the millions of individuals underneath the Empire’s highest echelons. This is not unintentional on Wilson’s part; he sets out from the beginning to capture the institutions of the Empire, rather than most of the participants and subjects of those institutions. But, intentional or no, Heart of Europe is not a “book of everything,” and cannot claim to grasp the full complexity of medieval and early modern history.
Furthermore, Wilson’s expansive approach also does come at the expense of easy usability. In the words of Barbara Stollberg Rilinger (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster), “his [Wilson’s] great achievement is to dismiss anachronistic views and replace them with a broader picture that is much more complex—but also much less clear… So many political entities, so many identities, so many interpretations, so many changes over time—it is difficult to keep track.”[24] Indeed, Wilson shuns from the outset the easy beginning-to-end chronology used both by Heer and North. As Stollberg Rillinger correctly notes, this approach allows Wilson to move beyond a simple arc narrative, and instead treat complicated individual themes in a more focused light. However, a progression through themes rather than chronologies or regions can at times produce transitions as jarring as those in Scribner’s edited Volume or North’s haphazard collection of methodologies. In reading Heart of Europe, I found myself reaching the same conclusion that I later found in Stollberg Rilinger’s statement: If one wants to know how Bohemia developed and was related to the Empire throughout the centuries, one has to piece together disparate passages located in various places in the book… For each [topic], the book offers incredibly rich material, but the reader has to find his or her own way through the thicket.”[25]
This approach, while at times frustrating, does not necessarily controvert Wilson’s original aims. Taken from his introduction, his main theses fall into three categories: firstly, that “the history of the Empire lies at the heart of the European [emphasis mine] experience”; secondly, that it often worked as intended and was not an “incapable,” “insecure,” or “nerveless body,” as a dominant narrative in HRE historiography has held often throughout the last three centuries; and thirdly, that it was neither a benign civilizing mission by Germans, nor a ball-and-chain on historical “attempts to construct a viable German national monarchy.”[26] In all of these aims, the complexity of Wilson’s structural narrative is largely a boon, as it allows him to center the Empire in each thematic category and then (with relative concision) connect to the Empire the innumerable loci of power across Europe. In this sense, Wilson’s goal in refocusing the historiographical spotlight sound similar to North’s. Heart of Europe aims to deconstruct past usages of the region in historical philosophy, and to instead elucidate the Empire’s history on its own terms.
What makes Heart of Europe a “good” encyclopedia is Wilson’s ability to synthesize a variety of topics across historical fields, from theological and art history, to social and economic history, without letting each field’s methodology muddle the writing. While he certainly focuses a great deal on traditional Big Ideas like politics, the Church, and military engagement, he does so in a way that critically examines the place of the imperial structure in a diverse continent, far removed from Heer’s heroes-and-villains style. Furthermore, Wilson’s analyses of identity, justice, and territorial belonging, and his constant lambasting of the German historiographical project, all serve to give his book a valuable place in current studies of the Holy Roman Empire. This is certainly not a People’s History of the HRE—which could be equally valuable—but for my interests in economic and political geography, Heart of Europe forms the best starting point that I have yet found.
Writing good longue-durée history is a fundamentally difficult exercise. Given the temporally and geographically expansive nature of the Holy Roman Empire, a historical telling of the HRE, its constituencies, or its surrounding worlds thus proves a great challenge to both authors and readers. Although the four books in this study differ from each other greatly, I believe they all represent valuable talking points for one interested in the HRE such as myself. Heer’s The Holy Roman Empire may be the least rigorous[27], but it made a good “foot-in-the-door” approach from which I dove further into the history of the Empire. Scribner’s Germany: A New Social and Economic History is certainly the most inconsistent in its voice and approach, but its style also rather uniquely allows for a few in-depth analyses rather than a great many shallow ones. North’s The Baltic, likely the most “pop-historical” on this list, is methodologically confused and rather too unfocused, but it makes a good first primer for nearly any manner of interest in the titular region (or, for my purposes, Germany’s relationship to that region). Wilson’s Heart of Europe, as a kind of “final form” of HRE geopolitical history, marks the only book on this list to which I was directed by an academic historian, and thus raised perhaps the highest expectations. Wilson’s writing never quite breaks away from the broad-but-shallow nature of the thousand-year telling of the HRE’s history; the arc of his narrative can be hard to follow; and his attentions often sideline the voices and experiences of women, minorities, lower classes, and other under-represented peoples, all of which rightfully have become critical foci of 21st-century historiography. But Wilson also accomplishes the monumental task of critically situating the Holy Roman Empire writ large into relevant historiography, and additionally provides a rigorously analyzed view of the sheer diversity of polities, cultures, and patterns across the geography of the Empire and its surrounding world.
In the end, I believe it is the joy of seeing connections across these broad expanses of space and time, covered in some form in all four of these books, which always brings me back to the study of the Holy Roman Empire. Long histories of Germany, the HRE, and Europe illuminates the multitudes within; the further challenge is to give an individual voice to each of them.
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Bayley, C.C. “The Holy Roman Empire.” Speculum 45, no. 1 (1970). https://doi.org/10.2307/2856001.
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Haar, Ingo, and Michael Fahlbusch. German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.
Heer, Friedrich. The Holy Roman Empire. London: Orion House, 1995.
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Kypta, Ulla, Julia Bruch, and Tanja Skambraks. Methods in Premodern Economic History Case Studies from the Holy Roman Empire, C.1300-c.1600. Springer International Publishing, 2019.
North, Michael. The Baltic: A History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Scribner, Bob. Germany: A New Social and Economic History, 1450-1630. Vol. 1. 3 vols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Urban, William. “The Teutonic Knights and Baltic Chivalry.” The Historian 56, no. 3 (1994). http://www.jstor.org/stable/24448704.
Wilson, Peter. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
[1] Including Austria and Switzerland, which were only later excluded from Germany proper.
[2] Quotes mine
[3] In Peter Wilson’s words, the HRE represented “an idealized universal order.” Peter Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). 176
[4] Wilson, Chapter 4
[5] Wilson, 99
[6] Keyser was born in a German family living in Poland, and more specifically wanted the German Empire to “unburden” (scare-quotes mine) German populations from their Slavic rulers.
[7] C.C. Bayley, “The Holy Roman Empire,” Speculum 45, no. 1 (1970), https://doi.org/10.2307/2856001.
[8] Wilson, 675
[9] Friedrich Heer, The Holy Roman Empire (London: Orion House, 1995). 220
[10] By my own dogma
[11] Heer, 70
[12] I encountered both of these quotes via Bayley’s specific page directions at the end of his review, although the points of contention on those pages which I make here are different from Bayley’s own. I think this merely points to the likelihood of finding Heer’s informal stylistic flair on any given page in the book.
[13] Edited by Sheilagh Ogilvie and Richard Overy, as the original editor, Bob Scribner, passed away in 1998
[14] Volker Berghahn, “Germany: A New Social and Economic History, Vol. 3,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2005), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026569140503500219. 372-373
[15] The latter of whose position in academic history is, to my understanding, somewhat controversial
[16] By the end of the 13th century, German lords controlled much of the south Baltic coast from Schleswig-Holstein on the Danish peninsula to the Prussia and Livonia in the east.
[17] 329 pages, compared to Wilson’s 686. Neither of these page numbers include both authors’ expansive indices, glossaries, and event chronologies.
[18] Scare quotes mine
[19] Michael North, The Baltic: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Back cover
[20] That is to say, The Baltic could instead be called The Land-based Polities of Northeastern Europe, with no mention in the title made of the sea itself, and not deceive potential readers.
[21] For example, I noted in the margins of the paragraph on the Varingians on page 13, “this feels hard to follow.”
[22] Wilson, 95
[23] E.g., domestic vs external
[24] “An Empire For Our Times? A Discussion of Peter Wilson’s The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History.” Central European History 50, no. 4 (2017): 547–72. doi:10.1017/S0008938917000905. 555
[25] Ibid.
[26] Wilson, 3
[27] And untenably non-rigorous by academic historical standards.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Approaches to International and Global History” at Columbia University, December 2020
Haus Lilienfeld 