Non-AH Historical Question - decline of the HRE

When do you consider the Holy Roman Empire to have ceased being an effective political entity on its own?

I say 1250, after the end of the Hohenstaufen.
 

Thande

Donor
That depends. The HRE was arguably an "effective political entity" at least up to the Thirty Years' War, in the same sense that the EU and the UN are effective political entities - it just wasn't a national one, which is I think what you meant.
 
That depends. The HRE was arguably an "effective political entity" at least up to the Thirty Years' War, in the same sense that the EU and the UN are effective political entities - it just wasn't a national one, which is I think what you meant.
I gues what I meant was how long it functioned as one state.
 

Thande

Donor
I gues what I meant was how long it functioned as one state.

In that case I would more or less cleave to your answer in the first post, with the qualifier that the definition of 'one state' back then was a bit different to that nowadays in the first place.
 
In that case I would more or less cleave to your answer in the first post, with the qualifier that the definition of 'one state' back then was a bit different to that nowadays in the first place.
Well, now that I think about it, make the definition be whatever you want it to be, otherwise the answers are much more limited. Basically, I'm looking for when most people think the HRE became a rotting corpse.;)
 
A large number of historians place the final stagnation and subsequent crippling of the HRE in the decades following the Thirty Years War. This was due to several key facts.

1. Up to one third of all Germans were killed due to famines, battles, rogue mercenaries, massacres of towns, etc...

2. Following the treaty of westphalia, the emperor retained little more than archaic ceremonial rights as his base of power. In truth, his position was promoted, supported, and if need be eliminated by the various electors throughout the empire.

3. Religion now became the choice of individual state rulers, and thus eliminated even any previous influence of the court.

4. The end of the war saw the rise of new states such as Prussia and the Hapsburg Domains, which had previously played only minor roles in the running of the ERE.

5. Armies of foreign nations now roamed at will through much of the empire's territory, with French eyeing the Rhine as a boundary, and constant conflict involving Poland, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden, to name a few.
 
IMO, it was the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia which were the nails in the coffin. the Reichsreform in the 1500s might have had a chance at pulling the HRE together again, and that was the last chance. After the PoW, the Holy Roman Empire was no longer holy, roman, or an empire.
 
Well, there's always the problem that medieval states were more conglomerates than anything. That said...

the date would be 1231 when the statutum in favorem principum was signed. After that, all attempts to unify it into a centralised state were doomed to failure.

In 1648 the last possible attempt to unify it into a halfway centralised state failed thanks to the religious split and the open disruption of the political coherence. It continued to hang on comfortably as an alliance of more or less sovereign nations (consider that especially the little princedoms depended on the HRE to exist, so there was at least some sort of coherence).

I think the seriously last chance to reunify the HRE into a coherent federal entity, which would have been able to become reasonably centralised within half a century (similarly to the 2nd Reich, which was not really centralized to begin with) died with the 7 years' war and Leopold II.

Hence is why I'm doing a timeline about the last thing. HRE ftw! :)
 
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