The object in Figure 1 is found in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, Germany. It is a fragment of the decorations on the old “Ratshof” (city hall complex) in Speyer, a set of buildings which were destroyed during military operations in 1689. These buildings were the site of the Imperial Assembly held in Speyer in 1570, the year on which this research project is focused. It shows a boy holding the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire, the double-headed eagle. It was during the debates about the structures and politics of the Empire which took place in this building that various ways to imagine that empire were vetted. This piece of decoration leads us into a consideration of some of the ways this empire was depicted in a physical context which no longer exists.

It is important to imagine the spaces which made up the physical worlds of the Holy Roman Empire in the later sixteenth century, partly because these spaces have changed so much in the intervening centuries. One such space which serves both as the depository of the written records of the period and as a piece of physical evidence on its own is the City Archive of the important Free Imperial City of Schwäbisch Hall, a stopping point for the members of the Imperial court as they travelled through the Empire in 1570. Although much of the city was destroyed in major fires in 1680 and 1728, apparently this corner of the city’s market square survived.