Was the Holy Roman Empire a failed experiment in nation-building—or did its unusual structure actually help shape early ideas of German identity? New research by historian Len Scales challenges long-held assumptions about the medieval empire, revealing how a decentralized, fragmented realm still played a pivotal role in the long history of German nationhood.
Many historians—particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries—have judged the Holy Roman Empire through the lens of the modern nation-state. Its perceived weakness, lack of centralized authority, and reliance on princely power were often treated as fatal flaws, especially when compared to the trajectories of France or England. But Scales, a Professor at Durham University, argues that this view misunderstands how collective identity actually formed in the Middle Ages.
Instead of seeing the Middle Ages as a time of national failure for Germany, Scales traces how the experience of empire—especially its contested relationship with the papacy and its efforts to assert universal Christian authority—helped shape an evolving sense of Germanness. This process, he notes, was slow, uneven, and often defined in opposition to others, especially the Roman Church and neighboring kingdoms.
One of the major turning points came during the so-called Investiture Contest of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, when popes and emperors clashed over who held the right to appoint bishops. In challenging imperial authority, the papacy reframed the emperor as merely the ruler of a local “German” kingdom—an insult that ironically helped galvanize a stronger sense of collective German identity. Scales writes:
The role of the “Investiture Contest,” as the con!ict (which focused particularly on the monarch’s power to install, or “invest,” bishops) is known, as a stimulus to collective identities in the empire, is important in a number of seemingly paradoxical ways. The crucial formative interventions in imperial affairs were hostile ones, by an external actor, and they challenged some of the most explicitly universal aspects of the emperor’s titles and claims. The con!ict resulted in no imperial triumph, but rather contention and protracted instability, which threatened the empire’s prestige. But its effect was also to lend urgency to debates about the nature of the imperial monarchy and to compel the taking of sides on matters where the salvation of souls seemed to be at stake.
It was in this climate of ideological conflict that imperial defenders began to articulate more explicitly the idea that Germans had a special role in Christendom—as martial protectors of the Church and rightful heirs to the Roman imperial title. This narrative was further shaped by chronicles, legal texts, and legends that imagined the German people as a unified community forged through military service and loyalty to the emperor. The image of the emperor riding south over the Alps with his German princes—fierce, noble, and often cast as northern foils to corrupt Roman clergy—became a recurring political motif.
Frederick Barbarossa as a crusader, miniature from a copy of the Historia Hierosolymitana, 1188
By the 13th and 14th centuries, German identity had become closely tied to the unique political role of the empire’s princes. The seven prince-electors, formalized in the Golden Bull of 1356, were portrayed not just as power-brokers but as bearers of Germanness itself. As Scales puts it:
The princes, headed by the electors, were made the subject of a Germanizing political vocabulary which, in its habitual application, contrasts with the customarily Christian-Roman styles of the monarchs they created (though the princes too were often simply styled ‘imperial’). To the higher nobility was ascribed collective responsibility for the Germans’ continuing hold on the imperial title. Since ‘German’ identity was largely defined in relation to the empire, the princes became a principal repository and measure of Germanness itself.
Importantly, Scales emphasizes that this emerging identity was not static or universally embraced. Many Germans still identified more strongly with their city, region, or lord than with any abstract idea of “the nation.” And yet, by the 15th century, as the empire consolidated its authority in its northern core and institutions like the Reichstag developed, there was a growing perception that the Holy Roman Empire was a German polity.
The spread of printing, a rise in vernacular literature, and growing external threats (such as from the Ottomans and French) all contributed to a broader, more cohesive sense of German political identity by the early 16th century. By then, emperors themselves began to lean into the language of German patriotism, culminating in the adoption of the formal title “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” in 1512.
For Scales, the true significance of the medieval empire lies not in its failures as a would-be nation-state, but in its surprising success at fostering identity through imperfection:
Yet when conventional expectations about power and medieval peoples are set aside, many of the empire’s weaknesses appear instead ultimately as stimuli to a conception of nationhood. The itinerant, face-to-face character of imperial rule gave significant numbers of the emperor’s subjects an opportunity to witness the ritual staging of emperorship with their own eyes. The decentralized character of the Reich, combined with its longevity, left behind a palimpsest of sites of imperial memory extending across much of the German lands, although densest in the south and west.
In other words, Germany’s medieval Sonderweg—its so-called “special path”—was not a detour from normal state-building, but a different kind of journey altogether. The Holy Roman Empire may not have laid the foundations for a modern nation-state in the usual way, but it did create a durable framework in which collective identity could take root and evolve over centuries.
Scales’s chapter reframes the history of medieval Germany not as a story of failed centralization, but as one of layered, regionally inflected identity-making. For scholars and readers interested in how nations emerge from unlikely political circumstances, the Holy Roman Empire offers a case study in how weakness, complexity, and contradiction can be powerful forces in shaping who we think we are.
Was the Holy Roman Empire a failed experiment in nation-building—or did its unusual structure actually help shape early ideas of German identity? New research by historian Len Scales challenges long-held assumptions about the medieval empire, revealing how a decentralized, fragmented realm still played a pivotal role in the long history of German nationhood.
Many historians—particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries—have judged the Holy Roman Empire through the lens of the modern nation-state. Its perceived weakness, lack of centralized authority, and reliance on princely power were often treated as fatal flaws, especially when compared to the trajectories of France or England. But Scales, a Professor at Durham University, argues that this view misunderstands how collective identity actually formed in the Middle Ages.
Instead of seeing the Middle Ages as a time of national failure for Germany, Scales traces how the experience of empire—especially its contested relationship with the papacy and its efforts to assert universal Christian authority—helped shape an evolving sense of Germanness. This process, he notes, was slow, uneven, and often defined in opposition to others, especially the Roman Church and neighboring kingdoms.
One of the major turning points came during the so-called Investiture Contest of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, when popes and emperors clashed over who held the right to appoint bishops. In challenging imperial authority, the papacy reframed the emperor as merely the ruler of a local “German” kingdom—an insult that ironically helped galvanize a stronger sense of collective German identity. Scales writes:
The role of the “Investiture Contest,” as the con!ict (which focused particularly on the monarch’s power to install, or “invest,” bishops) is known, as a stimulus to collective identities in the empire, is important in a number of seemingly paradoxical ways. The crucial formative interventions in imperial affairs were hostile ones, by an external actor, and they challenged some of the most explicitly universal aspects of the emperor’s titles and claims. The con!ict resulted in no imperial triumph, but rather contention and protracted instability, which threatened the empire’s prestige. But its effect was also to lend urgency to debates about the nature of the imperial monarchy and to compel the taking of sides on matters where the salvation of souls seemed to be at stake.
It was in this climate of ideological conflict that imperial defenders began to articulate more explicitly the idea that Germans had a special role in Christendom—as martial protectors of the Church and rightful heirs to the Roman imperial title. This narrative was further shaped by chronicles, legal texts, and legends that imagined the German people as a unified community forged through military service and loyalty to the emperor. The image of the emperor riding south over the Alps with his German princes—fierce, noble, and often cast as northern foils to corrupt Roman clergy—became a recurring political motif.
By the 13th and 14th centuries, German identity had become closely tied to the unique political role of the empire’s princes. The seven prince-electors, formalized in the Golden Bull of 1356, were portrayed not just as power-brokers but as bearers of Germanness itself. As Scales puts it:
The princes, headed by the electors, were made the subject of a Germanizing political vocabulary which, in its habitual application, contrasts with the customarily Christian-Roman styles of the monarchs they created (though the princes too were often simply styled ‘imperial’). To the higher nobility was ascribed collective responsibility for the Germans’ continuing hold on the imperial title. Since ‘German’ identity was largely defined in relation to the empire, the princes became a principal repository and measure of Germanness itself.
Importantly, Scales emphasizes that this emerging identity was not static or universally embraced. Many Germans still identified more strongly with their city, region, or lord than with any abstract idea of “the nation.” And yet, by the 15th century, as the empire consolidated its authority in its northern core and institutions like the Reichstag developed, there was a growing perception that the Holy Roman Empire was a German polity.
The spread of printing, a rise in vernacular literature, and growing external threats (such as from the Ottomans and French) all contributed to a broader, more cohesive sense of German political identity by the early 16th century. By then, emperors themselves began to lean into the language of German patriotism, culminating in the adoption of the formal title “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” in 1512.
For Scales, the true significance of the medieval empire lies not in its failures as a would-be nation-state, but in its surprising success at fostering identity through imperfection:
Yet when conventional expectations about power and medieval peoples are set aside, many of the empire’s weaknesses appear instead ultimately as stimuli to a conception of nationhood. The itinerant, face-to-face character of imperial rule gave significant numbers of the emperor’s subjects an opportunity to witness the ritual staging of emperorship with their own eyes. The decentralized character of the Reich, combined with its longevity, left behind a palimpsest of sites of imperial memory extending across much of the German lands, although densest in the south and west.
In other words, Germany’s medieval Sonderweg—its so-called “special path”—was not a detour from normal state-building, but a different kind of journey altogether. The Holy Roman Empire may not have laid the foundations for a modern nation-state in the usual way, but it did create a durable framework in which collective identity could take root and evolve over centuries.
Scales’s chapter reframes the history of medieval Germany not as a story of failed centralization, but as one of layered, regionally inflected identity-making. For scholars and readers interested in how nations emerge from unlikely political circumstances, the Holy Roman Empire offers a case study in how weakness, complexity, and contradiction can be powerful forces in shaping who we think we are.
Len Scales’ article, “The Holy Roman Empire,” can be found in The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, edited by Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria, and Aviel Roshwald. You can read the article through Scales’ Academia.edu page.
Top Image: Map of the Holy Roman Empire in 1356 – map by Cameron Pauley / Wikimedia Commons
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