| a Germanic empire located chiefly in central Europe that began with the coronation of Charlemagne as Roman emperor in a.d. 800 (or, according to some historians, with the coronation of Otto the Great, king of Germany, in a.d. 962) and ended with the renunciation of the Roman imperial title by Francis II in 1806, and was regarded theoretically as the continuation of the Western Empire and as the temporal form of a universal dominion whose spiritual head was the pope. |
| Holy Roman Empire A loosely federated European political entity that began with the papal coronation of the German king Otto I as the first emperor in 962 and lasted until Francis II's renunciation of the title at the instigation of Napoleon in 1806. The empire was troubled by papal-secular squabbles over authority and after the 13th century by the rising ambitions of nationalistic states. By 1273 the empire consisted primarily of the Hapsburg domains in Austria and Spain. |
A major political institution in Europe that lasted from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. It was loosely organized and modeled somewhat on the ancient Roman Empire. It included great amounts of territory in the central and western parts of Europe. Charlemagne was its first emperor. In later years, the emperors were Germans and Austrians. The empire declined greatly in power after the sixteenth century.
Note: The eighteenth-century French author Voltaire once wrote that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.”