The Holy Roman Empire

by James Bryce

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Pages: 273

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About this book

The preface presents The Holy Roman Empire as a treatise concerned chiefly with the Holy Empire itself as an institution or system, rather than a narrative history of its countries. The preface identifies Italy during the middle ages and Germany from the ninth century to the nineteenth as the countries and periods within that stated historical scope.

The account says Christianity was already a great political force when Constantine took Christianity to be the religion of the Empire, able and willing to offer aid and submission. The discussion says the ecclesiastical organization could not be identical with the civil organization and consequently became its counterpart. A quoted argument maintains that the whole world should have one temporal head, comparing the world to a body and describing an animal with two heads as monstrous.

About the author

James Bryce

James Bryce combined the work of a historian, jurist, Liberal politician, and British diplomat whose writing joined institutional analysis with firsthand public experience.