and imperial peasant republics the incredibly complex Holy Roman Empire was. It's a pre-modern political structure you can't call a state and can read a dozen books on before you start to—barely ...

Byzantium, the separate empire in the east maintained a large standing army, a great central bureaucracy and a regular tax system — all things missing in the west. The Holy Roman Empire was a ...

We expect empires to have a clear and stable core inhabited by an imperial people that imposes its will on peripheral regions. But the Holy Roman Empire had no core, because it never possessed a ...