The eight-century political contraption at the heart of Europe that claimed to inherit ancient Rome and the blessing of God, but was really a loose patchwork of hundreds of territories, mostly German but reaching at times into Italy, the Low Countries, and Bohemia, under an elected emperor with little central power — mocked by Voltaire as "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire," yet the durable frame of Central European law, dynasty, and identity for eight centuries.
The Holy Roman Empire confused everyone, including itself. It claimed to be the Christian successor of ancient Rome, blessed by the Pope, ruling a Christian world. In reality it was a loose web of hundreds of German-speaking territories — kingdoms, duchies, church-states, and free cities — held together by an emperor the princes elected rather than crowned by birth. The philosopher Voltaire skewered it in 1756: it was, he wrote, "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." The line is witty and not quite fair. The Empire was never a centralized state, but for more than 800 years it was the working framework of law, custom, and authority that ordered life across the German lands. Napoleon finally swept it away in 1806. Its absence left the open "German question" the next century would try, violently, to answer.