The Holy Roman Empire: a thousand years of Europe’s historyPETER H. WILSON (ALLEN LANE, 1,008 PP, £35)Tablet bookshop price £31.50 • Tel 01420 592974 “Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”, in the famous non-definition of Voltaire, the Empire that claimed succession to ancient Rome in medieval and early modern Europe slithers all over the map and appears to defy any attempt to pin down where or what it actually was. It is conventionally thought to have lasted for just over 1,000 years, if we start with the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome on Christmas Day 800 and conclude with its dissolution in 1806 following the defeat of the Habsburgs by a new, French emperor at Austerlitz. During that time, ideas about the nature of Christendom and about the stat