ABSTRACT
Historians of the Empire have long been aware of the importance of political space and political sites. Approaches to explaining its nature have come full circle over the past 350 years. Publicists from the late seventeenth century onwards described it as a system of many parts, bound in a whole, which stood in complex relationships to one another. There followed the lengthy aberration of nationalist historians of the nineteenth century and beyond who mostly condemned the old Empire for failing to match the achievements of supposedly absolute monarchies to the west let alone those of the second German Empire after 1871. Face to face encounters were the most politically valuable ones long after printed administrative documents and printed propaganda had become instruments of the emperor's rule from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Here the absence of a capital city for the Empire gave a greater role to imperial diets.
