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Peter H. Wilson

The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History Paperback – International Edition, March 28, 2017

by Peter H. Wilson (Author)

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The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806 (Studies in European History) 2nd Revised edition by Wilson, Peter H. (2011) Paperback
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THE SUNDAY TIMES AND ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 'Hugely impressive... Wilson is an assured guide through the millennium-long labyrinth of papal-imperial relations' Literary Review A great, sprawling, ancient and unique entity, the Holy Roman Empire, from its founding by Charlemagne to its destruction by Napoleon a millennium later, formed the heart of Europe. It was a great engine for inventions and ideas, it was the origin of many modern European states, from Germany to the Czech Republic, its relations with Italy, France and Poland dictated the course of countless wars - indeed European history as a whole makes no sense without it. In this strikingly ambitious book, Peter H. Wilson explains how the Empire worked. It is not a chronological history, but an attempt to convey to readers why it was so important and how it changed over its existence. The result is a tour de force - a book that raises countless questions about the nature of political and military power, about diplomacy and the nature of European civilization and about the legacy of the Empire, which has continued to haunt its offspring, from Imperial and Nazi Germany to the European Union.

Print length

1008 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin UK
Publication date

March 28, 2017
Dimensions

8.66 x 5.91 x 0.98 inches
ISBN-10

9780141047478
ISBN-13

978-0141047478
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About the Author

Peter H. Wilson is the author of the highly acclaimed Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (2009). He is the Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 014104747X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin UK (March 28, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1008 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780141047478
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141047478
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.56 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.66 x 5.91 x 0.98 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #319,356 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,677 in European History (Books)

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4.3 out of 5

303 global ratings

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Carborundum

A comprehensive history of the Holy Roman Empire

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 2, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is a very well researched and written book. It is a scholarly book that leaves nothing unmentioned, so be prepared for slow reading.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 3, 2020

By all means.

An excellent resource. A slog to read through

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 3, 2017

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An excellent resource. A slog to read through, but the prose is excellent for such a difficult and comprehensive topic. A must have for anyone interested in European history.

5 people found this helpful

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Max Rawnsley

Marvellous for serious readers

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 7, 2016

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Compulsory reading. Its heavy and such a dense subject needs patience but well worth it to get some appreciation of the influence of this mighty historical figure

9 people found this helpful

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David Mayger

An outstanding accomplishment

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 14, 2016

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Erudite without being pedantic; universal without sacrificing specificity; lucid without sacrificing profundity--an outstanding accomplishment suitable for the specialist and the general reader.

13 people found this helpful

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Giuseppe Madre

Good detailed history

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 16, 2019

Verified Purchase

Good detailed history.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2016

good

European History Covering 1006 Years

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2016

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Quite a tome and quite comprehensive of a huge topic.

4 people found this helpful

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John Fitzpatrick

Dry and academic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 27, 2018

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The Holy Roman Empire is not exactly a hot topic and most people probably have no idea of what it was. A few may have heard the cliché that “it was neither holy, Roman nor an empire” but it is difficult to understand what it really was except perhaps as a precursor to modern Germany.

Obviously, the French, Austrians, Poles, Italians, Danes and all the others involved at one time would dispute this view. The Swiss, in particular, will probably resent the author's dismissal of their idea that theirs was an egalitarian state born after brave mountain dwellers flung off the shackles of the Hapsburgs to gain their freedom, with the help of their equivalent of Braveheart, William Tell.

The “Empire”, which never had a capital or any heterogeneity, managed to last until the 19th century and shaped the modern Europe. However, I suspect the general reader will find this book rather dry and academic. Parts read as if they are translations. I quickly gave up the idea of reading it straight through and found that dipping into it here and there more rewarding.

18 people found this helpful

Peter Hargreaves

This is a great book, but not easy reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 1, 2018

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It should be read and re-read as a source book for further study.

It runs to 686 pages, plus maps, family trees, a glossary, index, notes, chronology. and lists of emperors, and German and Italian kings, The product of a lifetime’s study, it covers the thousand year existence of the Holy Roman Empire from 800 to 1806 but extends over a longer period from its antecedents into its historiography in subsequent German and European history. A thematic approach is adopted, covering law, society, territory and governance. This results in some repetition and, without regular reference to the maps and chronology, the thread can be difficult to follow.

The Empire was complex and changing covering separate and developing power structures, princely, feudal, and episcopal, urban and peasant. From it emerged the Alpine communities which became Switzerland. There also emerged Italian city states, the Hanseatic League and the Netherlands. Austria and Prussia from within the Empire included hereditary territory and power bases beyond its bounds. The rulers of England, Denmark, Sweden even Russia were all rulers of co-dominion territory, which at various times formed part of the Empire.

The concepts of empire, kingship and lordship are explained. The Holy Roman Empire and Papacy interacted and conflicted, but were interdependent. There wasn’t always an Emperor but the Empire continued. There wasn’t a dominant central city, medieval Emperors, based in different localities, progressing in person through its territories.

The Empire’s continuity provides alternatives to national history and the nation state and, through the EU, or what it becomes, a possible model for their successors

11 people found this helpful

Steve B

Unnecessarily tangled history, over-intellectualized

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

Having recently moved to Germany I was really interested to know more about the country's history. The author is clearly very knowledgeable, and I so wanted to like this book, but I have given up after reading just 15% (according to Kindle).

The biggest problem is that the book is not organised chronologically, but thematically. For the neophyte this makes it very hard to follow, and you don't get a clear sense of how and why historical figures made the decisions they did. I would have loved to have understood those themes selected, but I needed a clearer chronological history first to provide the context. This book does not present that.

Secondly, as many other reviewers have commented, the language used often obfuscates rather than illuminating due to the use of obscure intellectual terms that I presume are common in academic writing on history, but which are rarely used in more everyday language. As grating as it is, I could live with this, if it were not for the first problem.

Overall this reads like a tightly knit collection of essays of academic history; suitable for an undergraduate's studying the subject, but a poor choice for general interest / bed-time reading.

One person found this helpful

A bookworm

Needs your complete focus to understand

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 13, 2021

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This is a very exhaustively researched and comprehensive work which will definitely divide opinion with the thematic approach. Whilst an excellent book, it does come with some caveats and takes effort to make it through to the end.

The thematic approach initally works well as shows how different key structures mattered (or didn't matter) and it explains the why it happened, but it does at times obscure the when and the who. That said, the theme of each chapter perhaps works slightly chronologically in what mattered most at that time; who was king in the early days, before moving to territory, religion, law and reason. It also explains the importance of the Empire outside of 'national' histories. Its very vagueness and contradictions, alongside the idea of the Empire were often the reason that it survived until the seismic events of the Napoleonic Wars and the ideas it unleashed.

On the negative points, such is the scope of what is a millennium of Pan-european history, admirable though the effort is, I feel that two volumes have been better and it is only once you get to the very end of the book that all Wilsons arguments start to sink into place.

Whilst this is not as good as Europe's Tragedy, and if you preserve to the end, you will come away with a much better understanding of one of the mainstays of central Europe for over a thousand years.

2 people found this helpful

Kleio

Rich tapestry or moth-eaten carpet?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

Wilson clearly prefers the rich tapestry to the moth-eaten carpet of its critics. He renders valuable service in debunking much historiography which has seen German history as a 'failure' stemming from the decentralised nature of the HRE. Indeed, it is both anachronistic and profoundly unhistorical to believe that Germans spent a millennium yearning for a national state with a powerful king at its centre. The manic nationalism which led to Hitler had more immediate causes and the centralised dictatorships of both Nazi Germany and the DDR went against the grain of German history. Historical developments pushed Germany in a different direction to that pursued by the centralising monarchies of France, England and Spain. Indeed those polities today experience centrifugal tendencies while the German Federal Republic seems comfortable in a decentralised skin which took a millennium to grow. Polycentrism Rules OK!

Medieval France and England saw feuding warlords, kings toppled and conflicts with the Papacy while Reformation produced religious wars. So the HRE should not be seen as deviating from a European norm but very much within the mainstream of European history. Its decentralised structure was based very much on local 'liberties' and ideals of peace and justice enforced by a corporate view of society. As such, it helped to spawn republics in Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands as weak central power and an all-pervading notion of 'justice' combined to 'set people free'. Its demise at the hands of Napoleon in 1806 caused much regret and nostalgia. Indeed, an overcentralised, absolutist France had produced a backlash with Revolution bringing much creative destruction in its wake. If it was anything, the HRE was an organic entity which had evolved rather than stagnated. We search in vain for much that is organic in the abstract principles flowing from the Revolution. Wilson does not discuss how nostalgia for the HRE may have contributed to the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft idea of German sociologist Tonnies. Wilson does discuss the unwisdom of comparing the EU and HRE which some recent European politicians have been prone to do. If history has a purpose it is to set us free from our delusions about the past. He makes a good case for studying the HRE as a way 'we might understand current problems more clearly' by connecting citizens more intimately to the political process.

Writing about the HRE thematically may have helped Wilson to martial his vast subject but it does tend to read like a pathologists report. Dissecting different parts of a corpse and reporting in an abstract way in the manner of a social scientist may aid understanding. Nevertheless, as each section jumped through the centuries, my chronological understanding became fragmented. I would have preferred an 'eras approach' while still keeping to the themes. The Chronology section should be read first and then again at the end. I read this work slowly over several weeks. It assumes a lot of background knowledge. Highly recommended.

11 people found this helpful

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