from Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (1946), part one, "The Formation of Mediaeval Germany," pp. 68-69. In this passage, Barraclough outlines some of the cultural, economic, and social benefits of the early Holy Roman Empire, and he downplays the concepts of the HRE as a “universal empire” or a “Christian commonwealth.”
For Otto, the extent, and therefore the the commitments of his empire were strictly limited to the lands over which he ruled or was overlord: Germany, Italy and Burgundy. And because his rule comprised three regna, his domains together formed an imperium. This imperium was, because of the traditional connexion of the imperial title with Italy, identified with the imperium Romanum; but, as one of the greatest historians of the mediaeval empire has truly emphasized, ‘it was not identical with the respublica Christiana nor co-terminous with western Christendom.’ Neither Otto I nor any of his successors during the following century entertained ambitions of dominating the western world.
There is therefore much truth in the view that service, not dominion, was the keynote of the empire, in the sense that the establishment of the empire brought a new breath of order and stability into a world racked with anarchy. And certainly we shall do well to look first at the benefits conferred rather than at the advantaged derived. Italy itself benefitted unquestionably from Ottonian government: after three generations in which it was torn by the anarchy of uncontrolled local powers and ravages from without, it passed under a superior authority capable of holding the local powers in check and establishing some form of political organization. Of even wider and more durable significance was the service of empire in rescuing the papacy from the decadence and subservience to Roman factions which seemed likely, in the first half of the tenth century, to destroy its moral power for all time: it was the emperors, supported by ecclesiastics of the calibre of Odilo of Cluny, who took in hand the reform of the papacy, who purged it of its narrow localism by securing the appointment of popes such as the Frenchman Sylvester II, the German Clement II, and the Alsatian Leo IX, and who thus raised the Roman see into a world-power strong enough to challenge the might of the empire itself. And what was done for the papacy was done for the empire also, which ceased to be a perquisite of petty Italian and Burgundian princes and rose again to European status: but for the work of the Ottonian dynasty, the empire could never have inspired the devotion and stimilated the minds of political thinkers from the time of the Investiture Contest to the days of Dante and Marsilius of Padua.
Nor can any reasonable person doubt that Germany itself derived concrete benefits as well as prestige from its association with Italy in the empire. Contact with the Mediterranean world brought on the one hand a richer culture, on the other a share in a less primitive economy. Through Italy and Burgundy, Germany secured contact with the main trade routes of the early Mediterranean world, which flowed from the east through Lombardy across the western Alps to the fairs of Champagne. Nor can it easily be maintained that these advantages were bought, during the first sentury of the empire, at too great a cost. There is little, if any, evidence to indicate that the effort entailed in establishing and maintaining German rule in Italy was in excess of German capacities or that its commitments south of the Alps prevented the German monarchy from exploiting its advantages in the north. ...