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A concise, elegant and enlightening account of the immensely complex and often outright chaotic Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period (1496-1806) by the renowned German historian. Stollberg-Rilinger presents a new interpretation that reveals why it was not a failed state as many historians believe. The Holy Roman Empire emerged in the Middle Ages as a loosely integrated union of German states and city-states under the supreme rule of an emperor. Around 1500 it took on a more formal structure with the establishment of powerful institutions such as the Reichstag and the Imperial Chamber Court, that would endure more or less intact until the Empire's dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. It discusses the Empire's political culture and remarkably durable institutions and how it was a political body unlike any other - it had no standing army, no clear boundaries, no general taxation or bureaucracy. Bound together by personal loyalty and reciprocity, and constantly re-enacted by solemn rituals, we are taken from the Reform era at the dawn of 16th century to the crisis of the Reformation, from the consolidation of the Peace of Augsburg to the destructive fury of the Thirty Years' War, from the conflict between Austria and Prussia to the Empire's downfall in the age of the French Revolution. 164 pages, illus.