DBWI: Holy Roman Empire dissolved?

The Holy Roman Empire has been around for a long time now, and it's become kind of hard to imagine how a map of Europe would look without it, but bear with me. The HRE has been plagued with all sorts of trouble recently, ranging from terrorist attacks by the Sixth Lombard League to squabbling among the great families of the Empire regarding the recent succession crisis. (They sure put a lot of emphasis on ancestry despite the Imperial title supposedly being elective :rolleyes:)

The recent Papal elections haven't helped things either; with things as chaotic as they currently are in the Empire, the Papacy has brought up the age old question of investiture once again.

These kinds of problems aren't new for the Empire though. Kind of seems it was pretty much pure luck that the Empire did so well for so long.

So yeah, how do you suppose Europe would look today if it had been dissolved or at least heavily decentralized (or if it never centralized at all, I suppose) at some point? Graubünden-wank? :p
 
Graubünden-wank? :p

Well, why not?
Nearby Helvetic Confederation used to be quite a thorn in the side for the Empire, esp. in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
I suppose that if the Houses of Austria and Burgundy never managed to get rid of that nuisance, either immediately prior or after their merger in the person of Emperor Philip the Fair, things could have gone south in all sort of messy ways.
Indeed, between the last years of Philip's reign and the first of his son Charles' of Flanders there was quite a lot of turmoil all over the Empire, with a lot of heretics sprouting around (one of the foremost ones in Helvetia).
That was actually what allowed Charles to get the Pope in line at the Second Council of Florence. It did not last, but if the Church failed to regroup and reform there, I can see all or most of the Empire stabilizing in a schism together with other Northern countries (most likely Scandinavia, Prussia and Poland, maybe England too). As it was, Scotland went her way anyway, and Denmark come really really close as well.
 
I guess you could have it so Louis II:s marriage to Princess Ayako of Nippon in 1883 really do culminate in the threatened secession of Prussia and a possible civil war thereafter, but I really see it as unlikely. There seems to be a consensus that Prussia was merely using the controversy regarding how recent Ayako's conversion to Roman Catholicism had been to barter for greater influence in Imperial Foreign Affairs and were never really prepared to leave. It kind of fits in with Jakob von Bismarck's odd Machiavellian strategies.
 
The marriage itself aside, I think Ayako's regency, however short, might have been the most fragile period in the more recent history of the Empire. That could have ended badly if she didn't prove herself as competent as she did.

As for Prussia...Their status in the Empire has always been a bit dubious, on account of not technically being within the traditional borders of the Empire. What do you suppose would happen if the Hohenzollern line responsible for secularizing it died out (it almost did OTL) and it passed to, say, the Elector of Brandenburg instead?

It's been uppity ever since it was admitted into the Empire, especially after it regained the old Teutonic Order territories of Ermland, Pomerelia etc. Imagine how the Brandenburg Hohenzollerns would act if they had a relatively large duchy under their control that wouldn't even be subject to the suzerainty of the Emperor at the time!
 
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