> [!quote] [the Holy Roman Empire was a federation](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ud5udl/holy_roman_empire_is_often_made_fun_of_for_being/i6gyebw/) by u/Outlander (flaired user, Czechoslovakia) via [[rAskHistorians]] > I think the best way to start understanding the Holy Roman and Habsburg Empires is as a network of localized histories. This collection of different histories makes it difficult to form a single, unified narrative of what this thing was. The Empire was not the “prisonhouse of nations” and it did have a degree of cultural hybridity, but it was no multicultural paradise either. It was a “Christian” empire, but it was not a proselytizing one. A central administration began to emerge in the 15th century under Emperor Sigismund’s rule but there was still not a central policy. After the 30 Years War, it became a sort of federation with the Emperor acting as supreme arbiter. By the 18th century, the titles and iconography of the Empire had become archaic, but the government as it was actually practiced was not. Instead, local policy was used and resolved by a traveling universal court. I could go on, but the point is that it is very difficult to come up with one narrative from all this. > > The HRE’s power was in networking, not nations. A mobile, cosmopolitan, cultural elite who operated beyond modern state-centric understanding of space, travel, power, etc. cannot be understood on those terms. And this power was crucial to the history of the later medieval/early modern period (roughly post 1550). It is easy to ignore the old history because it just doesn’t make sense to use, but the HRE’s early contract laws and federalized court system in the 16th century arguably lays some of the foundations for the modern world. My first Habsburg studies professor argued that this was the beginning of the bureaucratization of Europe. She suggested that abstracting power instead of personalizing it like the absolute monarchies did in places like France, local power can arise without singular authority and produce a more fluid and localized polity that is still durable. And the emperor who upholds the governing myth can be called up to fix things as needed. > > To summarize, I want to suggest that in the early modern period the Holy Roman Empire was not based in a physical space like a London or a Paris. Power and borders were based on large networks and contractual agreements that resisted centralization. To be clear, I am only talking about the Holy Roman Empire from the 16th century onward. But in the early modern era, the Empire did not rule by force because it was not looking to rule by force. Perhaps we could look at it as almost a coalition of regional groups with common interests. In a way, it was the most modern European government of its time.