HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. The name now given to the Empire erected by Charles the Croat (q.v.), King of the Franks, in Western Europe, usually dated from his coronation, at Rome. by Pope Len Ill. in ROO; or. more technieally, to this Empire as revived in 962 by Otho the Great (q.v.). In theory the Holy Roman Empire was a con tinuation of the Western Empire, which was overthrown by the barbarians in 476. When Charles the Great was crowned Emperor by Leo III. he thought of himself as the successor of Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, and styled himself Augustus. This theory prevailed throughout the Middle Ages. Louis the Pious, Lothaire 1., Louis 11., Charles the Bald, and Charles the Fat were crowned as Roman emperors. After the deposition of the latter (SS7), which was followed by the disruption of the great Frankish Empire, the Imperial title was still held by a few princes, as Arnulf, King of Ger many, and Berenger I., King of Italy. In 962 Otho the Great, after wresting the royal crown of Italy from a descendant of Charles the Great, had himself crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope John XII., and inaugurated the Roman Empire of the German nation. From that time the King of Germany was usually Emperor. The Empire consisted of Italy and the lands whose rulers recognized the overlordship of the German monarch; but theoretically the Emperor was the ruler of all Christians in Western Eu rope, and some emperofs, as, for example, Henry VI.. dreamed even of a world-wide empire. At different periods the rulers of Hungary. Po land, Denmark. .Terusalem, and Cyprus were to a greater or less extent vassals of the Roman Emperor. Until the reign of Frederick Barharossa the name had been merely 'Roman Empire Frederick added the designation 'Holy,' either to vindicate its sacred character against the ex clusive pretensions of the Church, or else to describe its chief function as the protection of that Church. By the close of the thirteenth century the authority of the German emperors in Italy was reduced to a mere shadow. At the
close of the fifteenth century the Swiss cut loose completely from the Empire. In the Nether lands the Imperial authority had come to an end long before their connection with the Em pire was declared to be severed in an article of the Peace of Westphalia (164S): The early German kings were elected by the chief men of the nation with the assent of the other freemen. Gradually the chief nobles se cured almost entire control of the elections, but there was no fixed mode of procedure. At the election of Lothair in 1125, for example, a com mittee consisting of ten from each duchy was chosen to select an Emperor. In the thirteenth century—by a process of evolution, which it is not possible to trace. now—the number of elec tors had been fixed at seven, hut there was a dis pute as to who were included in the seven. This was settled in 1356 by the Golden Bull of Charles IV.. which determined that the electoral college should be composed of the Archbishops of Mainz, Treves. and Cologne, the King of Bohemia. the Count Palatine of the Rhine. the Duke of Saxony. and the Hargrave of Brandenburg. The Golden Bull also declared that the electoral votes were attached to the office, not to the persons, and de scended in the ease of the lay principalities by right of primogeniture. This continued to he the constitution of the electoral collefe until 1623, when Ferdinand 11. arbitrarily transferred the vote belonging to the Count Palatine to Maxi milian of Bavaria. At the Peace of Westphalia (164S) an eighth electorate was created for the Palatinate. In 1692 the ninth electorate, that of Hanover, was instituted. The Imperial elections were held at Frankfort-on-the-lain and the cor onation city was Aix-la-Chapelle. The Emperor at some time during his reign went to Rome to receive the Imperial crown at the hands of the Pope. The last ceremony of this kind took place in 1530, when Charles V. was crowned at Bologna by Pope Clement V1I. The successor-elect to the.limperor of the Romans was styled King of the Romans.