Page:History of the Thirty Years' War - Gindely - Volume 1.djvu/41

 it, to take a brief, preliminary survey of the parties and territories involved in the beginning of the struggle.

Charles the Great (Charlemagne), at the opening of the ninth century, made an attempt to revive the old Roman Empire. His possessions extended from the mouth of the Eider, along the North Sea and the Atlantic coast to the Ebro, in Spain. Their southern boundary was the Mediterranean. From the head of the Adriatic the line ran northward, so as to take in the territory of the later Austrian duchies and Bohemia, and strike the Gulf of Lubeck on the Baltic, crossing from the Baltic to the North Sea again on the course of the River Eider. In the year 800 he was crowned by the Pope as Roman Emperor. The partition among his sons broke up indeed this unity; but when his grandson, Lewis the German, came into possession of the territories lying chiefly eastward of the Rhine, he seemed to lay the foundation of the future German Empire, which always derived more or less additional dignity from the fiction of its relation to the old Roman Empire. It waxed or waned according to the abilities of its itinerant heads, until an interregnum led, in the year 1273, to the election of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the founder of the present Austrian dynasty, with whom began the development of the imperial dignity as it existed at the time of the Reformation and later.

I. The most important addition made at any one time to the constitutional law governing the Empire was that contained in the thirty articles of the so-called Golden Bull. This was an edict of the Emperor Charles IV. at the Diet at Nuremberg, in 1356. It fixes Frankfort-on-the-Main as the place of meeting, and determines the