Holy Roman emperor

Holy Roman emperor, ruler and head of state of the Holy Roman Empire. In 800 Charlemagne became the first such leader when Pope Leo III proclaimed him “emperor of the Romans.” The last Holy Roman emperor was Francis II, who dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars.

Origin of the title

The Western Roman Empire disintegrated in the 5th and 6th centuries, leaving the Eastern Roman Empire, later called the Byzantine Empire, as the only successor state to the Roman Empire. After several Germanic kingdoms became established in the former territories of the Western Roman Empire, which witnessed the persecution of Roman Catholics, the Byzantine Empire under Justinian I retook some parts of western Europe in the 6th century, only for Byzantine influence there to wane over the next two centuries. Looking for support and protection for Rome, Pope Stephen II approached Pippin III, the mayor of the palace serving Childeric III, the last of the Merovingian kings. Pippin, with papal approval, seized the Frankish throne from Childeric, establishing the Carolingian dynasty. He committed to protecting Rome in return for papal sanction of the dynasty’s right to the Frankish throne.

When Pippin died in 768, the Frankish realm was divided, according to custom, between his sons Charlemagne and Carloman. However, after Carloman died in 771, Charlemagne, disregarding the rights of his brother’s heirs, took over the entire realm. Due to Pippin’s reliance on papal sanction for his deposition of the Merovingians, the Carolingians had become, in the idiom of the time, rulers “by the grace of God.” Charlemagne led successful military campaigns, including an expedition into Italy answering the appeals of Pope Adrian I for protection. That campaign resulted in Charlemagne’s assumption of the Lombard crown and his annexation of northern Italy. As Charlemagne led the Franks to a position of eminence, a new community started taking shape, comprising all who adhered to the orthodox faith proclaimed by the Roman church. The emperors of Constantinople were perceived as unfit to claim authority over this Christian community, especially after a woman, Irene, became ruler of the Eastern Empire in 797. In 799 Pope Leo III was physically attacked and fled to the court of Charlemagne, who escorted him back to Rome in 800 and assumed the “formal role” of his protector. On Christmas Day the pope crowned Charlemagne in St. Peter’s Basilica, and those assembled proclaimed him “emperor of the Romans.”

The new title provided Charlemagne with legal authority to punish those who conspired against Leo, gave him status that some saw as equal to the Eastern Roman emperor’s, and sanctioned his role as the guardian of Christendom. Debate continues today regarding the extent to which Charlemagne embraced his new title. On the one hand, he continued to follow Frankish norms of rule, such as decreeing, in 806, that his kingdom should be divided among his three legitimate sons after his death. On the other hand, he engaged in a long military and diplomatic campaign that in 812 gained his title recognition from the Byzantine Empire. In 813, several months before he died, Charlemagne bestowed the imperial crown on his only surviving son, Louis I. The lands controlled by Charlemagne at his death included only the Frankish kingdom and northern Italy, including the duchy of Rome. It is quite likely that this dominion would not have survived intact if two of his three sons had not predeceased him.

Louis’s decision to make his eldest son, Lothar I, coemperor and to give his younger sons subordinate kingdoms led to a series of civil wars. Lothar strengthened his position by being crowned by Pope Paschal I in Rome in 823, though Louis and his sons remained embroiled in conflict, disputing one another’s rights and titles until 833. Upon Louis’s death in 840, conflict between his sons resumed until two of them defeated Lothar and the three agreed to divide the empire between them, though Lothar retained the imperial title. The Carolingians continued to be crowned emperor until Charles III was deposed in 887, ending the dynasty. An interregnum followed in which the empire that Charlemagne had created was not only divided but engulfed in chaos.

In 891 Pope Stephen V, likely under duress, crowned Guy II, duke of Spoleto, emperor—the first non-Carolingian to hold the title—although his status as a Holy Roman emperor is sometimes disputed. Guy was succeeded in 894 by his son Lambert, who reigned until 898; Arnulf of Carinthia also laid claim to the imperial crown from 896 to 898. Louis III, the great-great-grandson of Louis I, was crowned in 901 and then deposed in 905 by Berengar of Friuli, who was in turn crowned in 915 and reigned until his death in 924. Charlemagne’s empire then vanished for nearly four decades.

From Otto I to Frederick II

In 936 Otto I became duke of Saxony and was elected German king. He started a campaign to unify Germany by subordinating his vassal duchies. In 955 he defeated Magyar (Hungarian) forces and drove them out of western Europe, drawing praise (in an echo of Charlemagne) as a defender of Christendom. After having conquered the kingdom of Italy in 951, he returned ten years later at the request of Pope John XII, when Otto’s Italian vassal Berengar II attempted to take control of Rome. The grateful pope crowned Otto emperor in 962. His realm was much smaller than Charlemagne’s, as it lacked the west Frankish regions and included only Germany and northern Italy, but it had earned the pope’s blessing. The Holy Roman Empire had returned.

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Otto II became co-regent with his father in 967 and then sole ruler upon his father’s death in 973, thus ensuring the continuity of the Saxon, or Liudolfing, dynasty. He married a Byzantine princess, Theophano, and attempted to expand his empire into southern Italy. His son Otto III became German king in 983 at age three and was made Holy Roman emperor in 996 by Pope Gregory V, who was Otto’s cousin—and who, in fact, Otto had installed as pope just weeks before, as part of Otto’s efforts to increase control of the Roman Catholic Church. Otto died in 1002 and was succeeded as German king by his cousin Henry II, who would become Holy Roman emperor in 1014, when he was crowned by Pope Benedict VIII. During his reign Henry sought to centralize control over the Holy Roman Empire’s territories and further strengthen imperial power over the church.

Henry II died childless, thus ending the Saxon dynasty. The princes of the kingdoms of Germany elected Conrad II as German king in 1024, and he was crowned Holy Roman emperor by Pope John XIX in 1027, thus beginning the reign of the Salian dynasty, which lasted until the death of Henry V in 1125. This period saw the Roman Catholic Church wholly controlled by the emperor, and iconography of the period shows the emperor, not the pope, as the representative of St. Peter. The emperors also appointed bishops and abbots within their domains. But the latter half of this period, during the reign of the emperor Henry IV, saw a resurgence in the power of the papacy as the emperor and the pope, Gregory VII, began an escalating tit-for-tat dispute that led to excommunications, dethronements, and rival claimants to the title of German king. The clash between pope and emperor, which started as a debate about who had the authority to “invest” bishops and abbots and evolved into an argument that only the pope could invest, and, if need be, withdraw any imperial authority, came to be known as the Investiture Controversy. The conflict was resolved in 1122 through the Concordat of Worms, agreed to by Henry V and Pope Callixtus II, which made papal authority stronger than before.

Following the reign of Lothar II (or, arguably, III) as Holy Roman emperor (a period considered the Supplinburg dynasty), the Hohenstaufen dynasty began when Conrad III gained the title German king in 1138. He designated his nephew Frederick as his successor; that nephew was elected German king in 1152, after Conrad’s death, and then, after some struggle and negotiations, was crowned emperor by Pope Adrian IV in 1155. In 1157 Frederick I added the word sacrum (“holy”) to the name of his empire, creating a Holy Empire (Sacrum Imperium) as a counter to the Holy Church (Sancta Ecclesia). (See Researcher’s Note to learn more about the history of this empire’s problematic name.) Although Frederick secured the pope’s confirmation, he and later Hohenstaufen emperors emphasized their secular foundations and asserted that the emperor was one elected by the princes and being crowned by the pope was a formality. Frederick died in 1190, and his son Henry VI succeeded him (he was formally crowned emperor in 1191); Henry expanded the empire through marriage to include southern Italy and Sicily. Henry’s death in 1197 marked the beginning of a period of internal conflicts and rival claimants to the title which Pope Innocent III played to the advantage of the papacy. Henry’s son Frederick II, who was German king from 1212 to 1250 and held the title of Holy Roman emperor from 1220 to 1250, was frequently at war with the papacy, which resulted in him being excommunicated multiple times; he also was plagued with kings and anti-kings seeking his empire. Conflicts and confusion ultimately resulted in another interregnum.

The decline and dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire

Rudolf I of the Habsburg dynasty was elected German king in 1273 and was recognized by Pope Gregory X a year later. Rudolf raised the Habsburg dynasty to prominence, forming the core of the Habsburg monarchy and the present-day country of Austria. After Rudolf’s reign, however, the man considered to be the Holy Roman emperor was only sometimes crowned by the pope or his designees. The empire and title continued primarily through the force of tradition. Rudolf was succeeded, in some senses, by Adolf and Albert I Austria. The position lost power, with the rise of France in the west and the German princes’ control of the college of electors that elected the monarch.

Charles IV, elected German king in 1346 and crowned emperor in 1355, gave up on expansion and made the empire a German institution; he also abandoned Italian land in keeping with an agreement with Pope Clement V. Under Frederick III, emperor from 1452 to 1493, the empire’s name was changed to Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Sacrum Romanum Imperium Nationis Germanicae). The Protestant Reformation during the reign of Charles V (1519–56 as Holy Roman emperor) led to Germany being split into two religious factions, reducing the emperor to being the head of only one. But Charles, in his role as Charles I of Spain, played a key role in Spanish imperial expansion and thus the spread of Roman Catholicism to the New World. The crown remained hereditary within the Habsburg dynasty until the end of the empire (albeit with one interruption by a Bavarian Wittelsbach).

Later emperors only loosely controlled a federation of the princes of Germany. Leopold I, emperor from 1658 to 1705, recovered the Kingdom of Hungary from the Ottomans. Charles VI, emperor from 1711 to 1740, died without male heirs, leading to the War of the Austrian Succession. Francis I, the husband of Maria Theresa, then became emperor in 1745. Rising French power led to French attempts to take control of the title. Eventually, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Napoleon sought to oust Holy Roman emperor Francis II and join the Holy Roman Empire to his own. Francis, powerless to defend his crown, finally decided to dissolve the empire rather than see it fall into French hands.

List of Holy Roman emperors

This table provides a list of the Holy Roman emperors from 800, when Charlemagne began his reign, to 1806, when Francis II abdicated the title: