Here, he's a nonentity who shuffles vaguely in and out at intervals of several hundred pages. What happens here is that you leap centuries from one paragraph to the next in pursuit of details relating to (for instance) the empire's interaction with the papacy, but you never stay anywhere long enough to get a sense of the personalities or societies at play.Frederick Barbarossa, the twelfth-century emperor, should have been a shoo-in for compelling hero: a dashingly handsome, multilingual polymath who rewrote law codes and led an army on the Third Crusade. Arguably, the problem of trying to maintain a working timeline in your head is even worse than the problem of trying to maintain themes in your head when reading a chronological study.

It sounds logical but having read this, I don't think it really works.

Wilson does here: abandon chronology altogether, and structure your book entirely thematically. Another solution is to do what Simon Winder did in Danubia: throw up your hands and say, ‘Fuck it, this is impossible, so here's a few choice historical anecdotes and some postcards from my city-break to Vienna.’ This can work surprisingly well, too, if you can find a suitable prose style and if you don't mind surrendering any claim to writing an objective history.Or you can do what Peter H. She can knuckle down and simply plough through in chronological order – in the manner of, let's say, Diarmaid MacCulloch's History of Christianity (which is great). The historian facing an unmanageably large topic has a few strategies open to her. While it gradually lost the flexibility to cope with political, economic, and social changes, the Empire was far from being in crisis until the onslaught of the French revolutionary wars. Though the title of Holy Roman Emperor retained prestige, rising states such as Austria and Prussia wielded power in a way the Empire could not. The source of its continuity and legitimacy was the ideal of a unified Christian civilization, but this did not prevent emperors from clashing with the pope over supremacy. Yet the Empire remained abstract, with no fixed capital and no common language or culture. By the mid-tenth century its core rested in the German kingdom, and ultimately its territory stretched from France and Denmark to Italy and Poland. Heart of Europe traces the Empire from its origins within Charlemagne's kingdom in 800 to its demise in 1806. Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empire tells a millennial story of Europe better than the histories of individual nation-states. Voltaire quipped that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. The Holy Roman Empire lasted a thousand years, far longer than ancient Rome.

Heart of europe peter wilson