Germany

Medieval Background

One key element conditioning the nature of the Holy Roman Empire was that the emperor had to be crowned by the pope (or by a proxy on the pope's behalf). This stemmed from the original coronation of Charlemagne, but it created endless complications not faced by kings in France or England. An Emperor simply wasn't fully legitimate unless he had papal approval. This didn't happen often before 1300, but it did happen that a pope might take measures against an emperor after he was in power and behaved in ways that incurred papal wrath.

Consequently, we find friction between pope and emperor far more often than we do with other monarchs. Relations between pope and emperor will loom large in the 14^th and 15^th centuries as well.

Because the Emperor was an overlord, the physical boundaries of his power were never clear. As King of the Germans he was the overlord of all the powers between the Rhine and the Elbe. He was theoretically also the King of Arles (Burgundy), which was the old so-called Middle Kingdom, between Germany and France. This mainly meant the Low Countries and Switzerland. He could also lay claim to be the King of Italy, which really was just Lombardy, reflecting Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombards in the 8^th century. In the 12^th and 13^th centuries, Germans pushed well east of the Elbe River, creating new principalities, which also fell under the suzerainty of the Emperor.