Holomorphic principal bundles over elliptic curves

In this paper, the first of a series of three, we classify holomorphic principal G-bundles over an elliptic curve, where G is a reductive group. We also study the local and global properties of the moduli space of semistable G-bundles. We identify canonical representatives for each S-equivalence class of semistable G-bundles, and study their automorphism groups.