ABSTRACT
The nature and extent of imperial power; the sources of its legitimacy and authority; and its relationship to the power exercised by local rulers and communities-in the years when Theodor Mommsen grew up these were not just academic questions about longdead Roman emperors, but questions about what Germany was and what it was likely to become. The ‘Holy Roman Empire’ of Charlemagne, refounded by the Saxon Ottonian dynasty in the tenth century, had survived as the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ until 6 August 1806, when the Emperor Francis II resigned the imperial title (he had styled himself Emperor of Austria since 1804, when Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor of France). It had been replaced first by a federation under French control, the Rheinbund, and then in 1815, after Napoleon’s overthrow, by a looser federation of thirty-nine territorial states.
