ABSTRACT
‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation’ as the hybrid came to be known, was doubtless a fantasy. There had been no fall of the Roman Empire in the sense of an abrupt and cataclysmic ending as there was for the end of the Byzantine empire in 1453. Looking back down the long perspective of their history, Italian historians were hard put to say just when the Empire had come to an end. There was no dramatic break, nothing clearcut, simply a redirecting of energy as men became aware there was no longer a central authority, that every man must shift for himself and that power henceforth would go to him who could grasp it. When, in AD 330, the Emperor Constantine transferred the administrative capital of the Roman Empire to his new city of Constantinople, he divided the empire in effect and created a vacuum of power in the western half.
