Gonville & Caius College Fellow Dr Vedran Sulovsky explores the rise of the Holy Roman Empire in his first book.

In Making the Holy Roman Empire Holy: Frederick Barbarossa, Saint Charlemagne and the sacrum imperium (Cambridge University Press 2024) Dr Sulovsky explores the reign of Frederick Barbarossa (1152–1190). The book “offers a new analysis of the key documents, artworks and contemporary scholarship used to celebrate and commemorate the imperial regime, especially in the imperial coronation site and Charlemagne’s mausoleum, the Marienkirche in Aachen,” publicity material for the text says.

Dr Sulovsky is the first Saunders Research Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He was the recipient of the Göppinger Stauferpreis for 2023. 

His next project, entitled From Albert of Aachen to Saint Charlemagne: Aachen and the Empire 1100 - 1215 / 1250, is about gathering the prosopographical evidence on two of medieval Europe's grandest institutions, the imperial court chapel and the city of Aachen. By compiling both, Dr Sulovsky intends to show how the elite ecclesiastical institutions in Aachen influenced and occasionally even steered imperial politics through their position at the heart of one of the largest and most central political and cultural institutions of the medieval world.