The Holy Roman Empire was one of the most unusual state formations in European history. Contemporaries struggled to explain how this state was organized, and Voltaire ironically remarked that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Starting with the War of the Austrian Succession, the empire became an arena of rivalry between Austria and Prussia, but its final verdict was delivered by France in the person of Napoleon. Read about the decline of the Holy Roman Empire in the article by Ramazan Urusov!