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“…neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”

Happy 1,044th anniversary to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. On this date in 962, Pope John XII placed the crown pictured above atop the head of Otto, ruler of the East Frankish kingdom. As a result, history refers to him as Otto I, the Great - the first in a line of German imperial titleholders that would last until the old Reich’s dissolution at the hands of Napoleon in 1806.

Otto’s coronation, in a sense, marked the beginnings of the European map we recognize today. Over 160 years earlier, Pope Leo III had essentially revived the ancient Western Roman Empire when he crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne Imperator Augustus. Charlemagne’s bloody campaign of expansion and religious conversion stretched the borders of his empire to include much of mainland Europe. Years later, his empire was split among three of his grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun. The eastern portion, pictured below in blue, was given to Louis the German. It is this region, roughly encompassing today’s Germany and Austria, over which Otto the Great would someday rule, and which ultimately expanded into the massive territory that later centuries would label the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

The Holy Roman Empire, in my humble opinion, is a classic example from the history books of why the separation between church and state is of such paramount importance. Nearly a millennium of both conflict and cooperation between papal/ecclesiastical factions and European nobility gave us such memorable events as the Investiture Controversy, the Thirty Years War, and those happy little foreign relations projects known as the Crusades. Malfeasance cleverly packaged itself under the banner of the Cross, with each party involved manipulating the other in a perverted political scheme to claim legitimacy at the expense of - who else? - the peasantry.