structural:reformatting
Early modern era and Eighteenth century

Since the 15th century, with few exceptions, the Empire's Prince-electors had chosen successive heads of the House of Habsburg from the Duchy of Austria to hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Although they initially sought to restore central Imperial power, preserving a weak and fragmented Empire was convenient for France and Sweden, and therefore, their ensuing intervention led to the Peace of Westphalia which effectively thwarted for centuries any serious attempts to reinforce the imperial central authority and petrified fragmentation, resulting in the German-speaking territories comprising on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars still more than 300 political entities, most of them being parts of the Holy Roman Empire, though portions of the extensive Habsburg Monarchy (exclusively its large non-German-speaking territories: Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen and the Austrian partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) or of the Hohenzollern Kingdom of Prussia (both the German-speaking former Duchy of Prussia and the non-German-speaking entire territory of the Prussian partition of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) as well as the German-speaking Swiss cantons were outside of the Imperial borders. This became known as the practice of Kleinstaaterei ("small-statery") As a further consequence, there was no German national identity in development as late as 1800, mainly due to the highly autonomous or semi-independent nature of the princely states; most inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire, outside of those ruled by the emperor directly, identified themselves mainly with their prince rather than with the Empire or the nation as a whole. However, by the 19th century, transportation and communications improvements started to bring these regions closer together.