True Invention: On the Highly Useful and Splendid Inventions and Arts of the German Nation

Thus Invented by Germans.

...bring general benefit, or those for which other kingdoms, lands, and provinces can show something similar. Among all excellent general goods and true inventions, the most glorious and distinguished is to be considered the invaluable, most highly esteemed majesty and dignity of the Holy Roman Empire original: heiligen Römischen Reichs, or the Roman Imperial Throne, and its appropriation. This was indeed not entirely unknown or hidden from the world eight hundred years ago, but rather—through many various attacks and devastations by the German peoples—it had fallen into the Eastern lands original: Orientalischen Landten; Maier refers to the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, becoming weakened and diminished.

In the meantime, however, various peoples—namely the Greeks, Italians, Goths, Lombards, and others—attempted to make it subject to themselves, both through pagan tyranny and through mild Christian rule. Yet the Germans original: Teutschen, or Franks original: Francken, who long ago had brought France under their power and had the rest of Germany as their support, took it away from all the others and claimed it for themselves. They elected Charlemagne original: Carolum Magnum, the son of Pippin Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, as the first German Emperor, who then, in the year of Christ 801, received the Imperial crown in Rome and was anointed original: inungiret; from the Latin inungere, to anoint with oil during a coronation.

Although all this is so certain...