I thought the Roman Empire had basically fallen by 600 AD(CE)? Someone help me out here?
There were several Roman Empires as I recall. The Holy Roman Empire started after the other ones fizzled out.
The Holy Roman Empire was founded after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. Roughly, it comprised what is now Germany and France. The Eastern Roman Empire, a.k.a. Byzantium, didn’t fall until 1453.
The Roman Empire was divided by Diocletian, who put an end to the Crisis of the 3rd Century.
The eastern R.E. (in modern times usually called the Byzantine Empire) didn’t finally fall until the Turks took Constantinople in 1453 — a mere 39 years before Columbus set sail into everlasting fame.
Charlemagne had ruled as Emperor of the Romans. The ruins of the Roman Empire are still impressive today, imagine how they must have looked (and how many more of them were around) back then.
The Holy Roman Empire was a loose confederation of the numerous Germanic states, and more or less rooted in the division of Gaul after Charlemagne died (the German side went to Louis the German).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=holy+roman+empire
https://www.germany.travel/en/cities-culture/trier.html
fun sidebars:
https://www.youtube.com/@medievalmadnesss/videos
This is the HOLY Roman Empire.
As the wags say, it was not holy, not Roman, and not an empire.
The Holy Roman Empire emerged from the “Dark Ages” and Germanic kingdoms in what we would call Central Europe. It more or less evolved into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which survived into the 20th century. Other than it being Western Christian (Roman Catholic) as opposed to Orthodox, there wasn’t much Roman about it.