The earliest mention of "the Holy Roman Empire of "the German Nation"" (a phrase rarely used officially) is from the 15th century and its later increasingly used shorthand, "imperium Romano-Germanicum", demonstrates that contemporaries of the empire increasingly saw the empire and its emperors not as successors of a Roman Empire that had existed since Antiquity but instead as a new entity that appeared in medieval Germany whose rulers were referred to as "emperors" for political and historical reasons.