It survived centuries of change, the schism of the Reformation, and even the catastrophe of the thirty years’ war. Ordered imperial society encompassed diverse peoples and corporate groups, and the empire’s role was to protect their patterns and hierarchies.

Power was “local and particular”, not universal or linear. Unlike the national dominations of London and Paris, the empire had many different concentrations of power, business and culture: Vienna, Prague, Antwerp, Hamburg, Augsburg, Milan. This decentralised structure was supported and reinforced by a multicentred society. Its guiding principle was “workable compromise” (in practice, often fudge) but it was not impotent: pioneering the first commercial postal service is one of many examples of the empire’s highly developed governance. Neither a “single command chain nor a neat pyramid”, it was instead a framework, focused on consensus not coercion, accepting rather than rationalising anomalies and diversity.

For those who do, there are many interesting and provocative ideas.Ī patchwork of principalities, free cities, archbishoprics, confederations, grand duchies and even full kingdoms, the imperial system worked surprisingly well. Wilson, who is Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford, makes the complex understandable, but the sheer depth and daunting length of the book – and its focus on ideas and institutions rather than individuals and stories – may mean that only the most motivated non-academic readers are likely to reach the end. He encourages us to reassess the history of Europe with an empire state of mind. With exhaustive detail, Wilson argues that these titanic figures were wrong. And Leopold von Ranke, father of the modern study of history, thought it one long decline and failure. James Madison deemed its institutions “feeble”, its history one of “general imbecility, confusion, and misery”. Voltaire disparaged it as not holy, not Roman, and not an empire. Yet for over two centuries, the empire has had a bad reputation.

Heart of Europe by Peter H. Wilson