Problems in Understanding The Empire
Understanding the practical application of the rights of immediacy makes the history of the Holy Roman Empire particularly difficult to understand, especially among modern historians. Even such contemporaries as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottlieb Fichte called the empire a monstrosity. Voltaire wrote of the Empire as something neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire, and in comparison to the British "empire", saw its German counterpart as an abysmal failure that reached its pinnacle of success in the early Middle Ages and declined thereafter. For nearly a century after the publication of James Bryce's monumental work The Holy Roman Empire (1864), this view prevailed among most English-speaking historians of the Early Modern period, and contributed to the development of the Sonderweg theory of the German past.
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