THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA FROM THE LIBRARY OF PROFESSOR CARL COPPING PLEHN I 867-1 945 ^^^M^ ^^2,^^-r- y^^ V ^ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/empireromanOObrycrich THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE By JAMES BRYCE D.C.L. FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE and REGIUS PROFESSOR OF CIVIL LAIV IN THE VNiyERSITY OF OXFORD EIGHTH EDITION ,\ ^^ ^ MACMILLAN AND CO. 1880 \A.U rights reserved'\ GIFT DD?? l?.n PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 1 HE object of this treatise is not so much to give a narrative history of the countries included in the Romano- Germanic Empire — Italy during the middle ages, Ger- many from the ninth century to the nineteenth — as to describe the Holy Empire itself as an institution or system, the wonderful offspring of a body of beliefs and traditions which have almost wholly passed away from the world. Such a description, however, would not be intelligible without some account of the great events which accompanied the growth and decay of Imperial power; and it has therefore appeared best to give the book the form rather of a narrative than of a disserta- tion ; and to combine with an exposition of what may be called the theory of the Empire an outline of the political history of Germany, as well as some notices of the affairs of mediaeval Italy. To make the succession of events clearer, a Chronological list of Emperors and Popes has been prefixed. The great events of 1866 and 1870 reflect back so much light upon the previous history of Germany, and so much need, in order to be properly understood, to 673 VI PREFACE, be viewed in their relation to the character and influence of the old Empire, that although they do not fall within the original limits of this treatise, some remarks upon them, and the causes which led to them, will not be out of place in it, and will perhaps add to whatever interest or value it may possess. As the Author found that to introduce these remarks into the body of the work, would oblige him to take to pieces and rewrite the last three chapters, a task he had no time for. he has pre- ferred to throw them into a new supplementary chapter, which accordingly contains a brief sketch of the rise of Prussia, of the state of Germany under the Confederation which expired in 1866, and of the steps whereby the German nation has regained its political unity in the new Empire. The book has been revised throughout, and some additions made to it, for most of which the Author has to express his thanks to his learned German translator, Dr. Arthur Winckler, of Brunswick. He also desires to acknowledge the benefit which he derived, in pre- paring the last chapter, from the suggestions of his friend Mr. A. W. Ward, Professor of History in Owens College, Manchester, whose eminence as a historian is too well known to need any tribute from him. Lincoln's Inn, London, June 28, 1873. Note to the Sixth Edition, This Edition has been revised, and several additions and corrections made. June 12, 1876. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Introductory. CHAPTER II. The Boman Empire before the Invasion of the Barbarians. The Empire in the Second Century ■ 5 Obliteration of National distinctions 6 Rise of Christianity 10 Its Alliance with the State 10 Its Influence on the Idea of an Imperial Nationality 13 CHAPTER III. The Barbarian Invasions. Relations between the Primitive Germans and the Romans .... 15 Their Feelings towards Rome and her Empire 16 Belief in its Eternity 20 Extinction by Odoacer of the "Western branch of the Empire.. .. 26 Theodoric the Ostrogothic King 27 Gradual Dissolution of the Empire 30 Permanence of the Roman Religion and the Roman Law 31 CHAPTER IV. Bestoration of the Empire in the "West. The Franks 34 Italy under Greeks and Lombards 37 The Iconoclastic Schism 38 viii CONTENTS. Alliance of the Popes with the Fiankish Kini;s 39 The Frankish Conquest of Italy .. 41 Adventures and Plans of Pope Leo III 43 Coronation of Charles the Great 48 CHAPTER V. Empire and Policy of Charles. Import of the Coronation at Rome 52 Accounts given in the Annals of the time 53 Questions as to the Intentions of Charles 58 Legal Effect of the Coronation 6« Position of Charles towards the Church 64 Towards his German Subjects 67 Towards the other races of Europe 70 General View of his Character and Policy , 72 CHAPTER VI. Carolingian. and Italian Emperors. Reign of Lewis I 76 Dissolution of the Carolingian Empire 78 Beginnings of the German Kingdom 79 Italian Emperors 80 Otto the Saxon King 84 Coronation of Otto as Emperor at Rome 87 CHAPTER VII. Theory of the Mediaeval Empire. The World-Monarchy and the World-Religion 91 Unity of the Christian Church 94 Influence of the Doctrine of Realism 97 The Popes as heirs to the Roman Monarchy 99 Character of the Revived Roman Empire 102 Respective Functions of the Pope and the Emperor 104 Proofs and Illustrations 109 Interpretations of Prophecy 112 Two remarkable Pictures , 116 CONTENTS, ix CHAPTER VIII. The Koman Empire and the German Kingdom. The German or East Frankish Monarchy 12a Feudality in Germany 123 Reciprocal Influence of the Roman and Teutonic Elements on the Character of the Empire '. . . 127 CHAPTER IX. Saxon and Franconian Emperors. Adventures of Otto the Great in Rome 134 Trial and Deposition of Pope John XII 135 Position of Otto in Italy 139 His European Policy .' 140 Comparison of his Empire with the Carolingian 144 Character and Projects of the Emperor Otto HI I46 The Emperors Henry II and Conrad II 150 The Emperor Henry III 151 CHAPTER X. Struggle of the Empire and the Papacy. Origin and Progress of Papal Power 153 Relations of the Popes with the early Emperors 155 Quarrel of Henry IV and Gregory VII 159 Gregory's Ideas 160 Concordat of Worms 1 63 General Results of the Contest 164 CHAPTER XI. The Emperors in Italy : Frederick I arbarossa. Frederick and the Papacy 167 Revival of the Study of the Roman Law 172 Arnold of Brescia and the Roman Republicans 174 Frederick's Struggle with the Lombard Cities 175 His Policy as German King 178 X CONTENTS, CHAPTER XII. Imperial Titles and Pretensions. Territorial Limits of the Empire — Its Claims of Jurisdiction over other Countries 182 Hungary 183 Poland 184 Denmark 184 France i3.; Sweden 185 Spain 185 England 186 Scotland 187 Naples and Sicily 1F8 Venice 188 The East 189 Rivalry of the Teutonic and I'yzantine Emperors 191 The Four Crowns 193 Origin and Meaning of the title ♦ Holy Empire' 199 CHAPTER XIII. Fall of the Hohenstaufon, Reign of Hem y VI 205 Contest of Philip and Otto IV -206 Character and Career of the Emperor Frederick II 207 Destruction of Imperial Authority in Italy 211 The Great Interregnum 212 Rudolf of Hapsburg 213 Change in the Character of the Empire 214 Haughty Demeanour of the Popes 27 Protest of the Electors at Rhense 220 CHAPTER XIV. The Germanic Constitution - the Sjvcn Electors. Germany in the Fourteenth Century 221 Reign of the Emperor Charles IV 225 Origin and H 'story of the System of Election, and of the Electoral Body 225 CONTENTS. XI The Golden Bull • 230 Remarks on the Elective Monarchy of Germany 233 Results of Charles IV's Policy 236 CHAPTER XV. The Empire as an International Power. Revival of Learning 241 Beginnings of Political Thought 241 Desire for an International Power 243 Theory of the Emperor's Functions as Monarch of Euiope.. .. 245 Illustrations 250 Relations of the Empire and the New Learning 253 The Men of Letters— Petrarch, Dante 255 The Jurists 257 Passion for Antiquity in the Middle Ages : its Causes 258 The Emperor Henry VII in Italy 263 The De ilfowarcim of Dante 265 CHAPTER XVL The City of Rome in the Middle Ages. Rapid Decline of the City after the Gothic Wars 273 Her Condition in the Dark Ages 274 Republican Revival of the Twelfth Century 276 Character and Ideas of Nicholas Rienzi 279 Social State of Mediaeval Rome 281 Visits of the Teutonic Emperors 283 Revolts against them 285 Existing Traces of their Presence in Rome 287 Want of Mediaeval, and espec'ally of Gothic Buildings, in Modem Rome 290 Causes of this; Ravages of Enemies and Citizens 29a Modem Restorations 293 Surviving Features of truly Mediaeval Architecture — the Bell- towers 295 The Roman Church and the Roman City 296 Rome since the Revolution 300 Xil CONTENTS, CHAPTER XVII. The Henaissance : Change in the Chciract^r of the Empire. Weakness of Germany 304 Loss of Imperial Territories 305 Gradual Change in the Germanic Constitution 309 Beginning of the Pi"edominance of the Hapsburgs 312 The Discovery of America 313 The Renaissance and its Effects on the Empire 313 Projects of Constitutional Reform 315 Changes of Title 318 CHAPTER XVIII. The Keformation anid its Effects upon the Empire. Accession of Charles V •• 321 His Attitude towards the Refonnation 323 Issue of his Attempts at Coercion 324 Spirit and Essence of the Religious Movement 327 Its Influence on the Doctrine of the Visible Church 329 How far it promoted Civil and Religious Liberty 331 Its Effect upon the Mediaeval Theory of the Empire 3^4 Upon the Position of the Emperor in Europe 336 Dissensions in Germany 336 The Thirty Years' War 337 CHAPTER XIX. The Peace of "Westphalia : Last Stage in the Decline of the Empire. Political Import of the Peace of Westphalia 340 Hippolytus a Lapide and his Book 342 Changes in the Germanic Constitution 343 Narrowed Bounds of the Empire.. . . 344 Condition of Germany after the Peace 345 ITie Balance of Power 34^ CONTENTS, xiii The Hapsburg Emperors and their Policy 351 The Emperors Charles VII and Joseph II 354 The Empire in its last Phase 356 Feelings of the German People 357 CHAPTER XX. Fall of the Empire. The Emperor Francis II 359 Napoleon as the Representative of the Carolingians 360 The French Empire 363 Napoleon's German Policy 364 The Confederation of the Rhine 365 End of the Empire 366 The Germanic Confederation 368 CHAPTER XXI. Conclusion: General Summary, Causes of the Perpetuation of the Name of Rome 369 Parallel instances : Claims now made to represent the Roman Empire 370 Parallel afforded by the History of the Papacy 373 In how far was the Empire really Roman 376 Imperialism : Ancient and Modem 378 Essential Principles of the Mediaeval Empire 380 Influence of the Imperial System in Germany 381 The Claim of Modem Austria to represent the Mediaeval Empire 383 Results of the Influence of the Empire upon Europe 386 Upon Modern Jurispmdence 386 Upon the Development of the Ecclesiastical Power 387 Struggle of the Empire with three hostile Principles 391 Its Relations, Past and Present, to the Nationalities of Europe . 393 Conclusion 395 \1V CONTENTS. SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER. The New German Empire. Recapitulation : Stages in the Decay of the Old Empire 400 Denationalisation of Germany 401 The Margraviate of Brandenburg and the House of HohenzoUern 402 The Kingdom of Prussia 404 Character and Reign of Frederick the Great 405 Prussia during the Wars of the Revolution 407 The Congress of Vienna 410 Establishment of the Germanic Confederation 411 Anns and Efforts of the German Liberals 414 The Revolution of 1 84S-9 417 Restoration of the Federal Constitution . . , 419 The German Parties and their Policy 421 The Schleswig-Holstein War 423 Convention oi Gastein 427 War of 1866: Fall of the Confederation 429 The North German Confederation 430 The War of 1870 with France 432 Establishment of the new German Empire 434 Causes of the Progress of Germany towards Unity 435 General character of the Policy of Prussia 438 Relation of the new Empire to the ancient Holy Empire .... 440 National Unity in Germanv ar.d Italy 442 Changed Aspect of European Tolitics 444 APPENDIX. Note A. — On the Burgundies 447 Note B. — On the Relations to the Empire of the Kingdom of Denmark and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein 450 Note C. — On certain Imperial Titles and Ceremonies 452 Note D. — Hildebert's Lines contrasting the Past and Piesent of Rome 459 INDEX 461 DATES OF SEVERAL IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE. B C. Battle of Pharsalia 4^ Battle of Actium 31 AD. Council of Nic£ea ; 3^5 End of the separate Western Empire 47^ Revolt of the Italians from the Iconoclastic Emperors 7'*^ Coronation of Charles the Great < 800 End of the Carolingian Empire 888 Coronation of Otto the Great 962 Final Union of Italy to the Empire * 1014 Quarrel between Henry IV and Gregory VII 1076 The First Crusade 1096 Battle of Legnano ii;6 Death of Frederick II 1250 League of the three Forest Cantons of Switzcilai d 1308 Career of Rienzi i347-i353 The Golden .\^ull 1356 Council of Constance 1415 Extinction of the Eastern Empire 1453 Di^cowery oi America 1492 XVI DATES OF IMPORTANT EVENTS. Luthe at the Diet of Worms 1531 Beginning of the Thirty Years' War 1618 Peace of Westphalia 1648 Prussia recognized as a Kingdom 1701 End of the House of Hapsburg 1 742 Seven Years' War 1 756-1 763 Peace of Luneville 1801 Abdication of Francis II 1806 Formation of the German Confederation 1815 Establishment of the North German Confederation 1866 Establishment of the new German Empire Jan. 18th, 1871 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EMPERORS AND POPES. ■ Year of Accession. Bishops of Rome. Emperors. Year of ' Accession. A.D. B.C. Augustus. 27 A.D. Tiberius. 14 Caligula. 37 Claudius. 41. 43 St. Peter, (according to Jerome). ' Nero. 54 67 Linus, (according to Ire- naeus, Eusebiiis, Je- rome). 68 Clement, (according to Galba, Otho, VitelHus, Ves- Tertullian and Rufinus). pasian. 68 78 Anacletus (?). Titus. 79 Domitian. 81 91 Clement, (according to some later writers). 1 Nerva. 96 Trajan. 98 100 Evarestus (?). 109 Alexander (?). Hadrian. J17 119 Sixtus I. 129 Telesphorus. Antoninus Piut. 138 139 Hyginus. 143 Pius I. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF Year of Accession. A.D. Bisliops of Rome. Emperors. Year of Accession. A.D. 157 Anicetus. Marcus Aiirelius. 161 168 Soter. 177 Eleutherius. Commodus. 180 Pertinax. 193 Didius JuHanus. 193 Niger. 193 193 Victor (?). Septimius Severus. 193 202 Zephyrinus (?). Caracalla, Geta. 211 Opilius Macrinus, Diadu- menian. 217 219 Calixtus I. Elagabalus. 218 Alexander Severus. 222 223 Urban I. 230 Pontianus. 235 Anterius or Anteroi. Maximin. 235 236 Fabianus. The two Gordians, Max'- mus Pupienus, Balbinus. 237 The third Gordian. 2.^8 Philip. 244 Decius. 249 251 Cornelius. Hostilian, Gallus. 251 252 Lucius I. Volusian. 252 253 Stephen I. ^milian, Valerian, Gallienus. 253 257 Sixtus II. Gallienus alone. 260 259 Dionysius. Claudius 11. 268 269 Felix. Aurelian. 270 275 Eutychianut, Tacitus. 275 Florian. 276 Probus. 276 Carus. 282 283 Caius. Carinus, Numerian. 284 Diocletian. 284 Maximian, associated with Diocletian. 286 296 Marcellintu, 304 Vacancy. Constantius, Galerius. 305 Severus. 306 Constantine (the Great). 306 Licinius. 307 EMPERORS AND POPES. XIX Year of Accession. Bishops of Rome. Emperors. Year of Accession. A. D. A.D. 308 Marcellus I. Maximin. Constantine, Galerius, Li- cinius, Maximin, Max- ^ entius, and Maxiniian 308 reigning jointly. 309 310 Eusebius. 311 Melchiades. 314 Sylvester I. Constantine (the Great) alone. 3-3 3.^6 Marcus I. 337 Julius I. Constantine II, Constan- tius 11, Constans. 337 Magnentius. 352 Liberius. Constantius alone. 353 356 Felix (Anti-pope). Julian. 361 Jovian, 363 Valens and Valentinian I. 364 366 Damasus I* Gratian and Valentinian I. 367 Gratian and Valentinian II. 375 Theodosius. 379 384 Siricius. Arcadius (in the East), Honorius (in the West). 395 398 Anastasius I. 402 Innocent I. Theodosius II. (E) 408 4^7 Zosimus. 418 Boniface I. 418 Eulalius (Anti-pope). 422 Celestine I. Valentinian III. (W) 424 432 Sixtus III. 440 Leo I (the Great). Marcian. (E) 450 Maxinms, Avitus. (W) 455 Majorian. (W) 455 ! Leo L (E) 457 1 461 Hilaiius. Severus. (W) 461 ! Vacancy. (W) 465 b 2 XX CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF ^'ear of Accession. 468 483 492 496 498 498 5'4 523 526 530 530 532 535 536 537 555 560 574 57« 590 604 607 607 615 618 Bishops of Rome. Simplicius, Felix III*. Gelasius I. Anastasius II. Symmachus. (Laurentius, Anti-pope). Hormisdas. John I. Felix IV. Boniface II. (Dioscorus, Anti-pope). John II. Agapetus I. Silverius. Vigilius. Pelagius L John III. Benedict I. Pelagius II. Gregory I (the Great). Sabinianus. Boniface III. Boniface IV, Deus dedit. Boniface V, Emperors. Anthemius. (W) Olybrius. (W) Glycerins. (W) Julius Nepos. (W) Leo II, Zeno, BasllL^-cus, (all E) Romulus Augustulus. (W) (End of the Western line in Romulus Augustus, {Henceforth, till a.d. 800, Emperors reigning at Constantinople), Anastasius I. Justin II. Tiberius II. Maurice. Phocas. Heraclius. Year of Accession. A.D. 467 472 473 474 474 475 476) 491 518 527 565 578 58a 60a 610 • Reckoning the Anti-pope Felix (A.D. 356) as Felix II. EMPERORS AND POPES. XXI Year of Accession. Popes. Emperors. Year of Accession. 1 A.D. A.D. 625 Honorius I. 638 Severinus. 640 John IV. Constantine III, Heraceo- 641 nas, Constans II. 642 Theodorus I, 649 Martin I. 634 Eugenius I. ^t.1 Vitalianus. Constantine IV (Pogonatus). 668 672 Adeodatiis. 676 Domnus or Donus L 678 Agatho. 682 Leo II. 683 (?) Benedict 11. 685 John V. Justinian II. 685 685 (?) Conon. 687 Sergius I. 687 (Paschal Anti-pope). 687 (Theodorus, Anti-pope). Leontius. 694 Tiberius III. 697 701 John VI. 705 John VII. Justinian II restored. 705 708 Sisinnius. 708 Constantine, Philippicus Bardanes. 711 Anastasius II. 713 715 Gregory 11, Theodosius III. 716 Leo III (the Isaurian). 718 731 Gregory III. 741 Zacharias. Constantine V (Coprony- mus). 741 752 Stephen (II). 752 Stephen II (or III). 757 Paul I. 767 Constantine (Anti-pope). 768 Stephen III (IV). 773 Hadrian I. _^-- Leo IV. 775 Constantine VI. 780 795 Leo IIL Deposition of Constantine VI by Irene. 797 xxu CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF Year of Accession. Popes. Emperors. Year of Accession. A. D. A.D. Qharlesj:^(the Great). 800 {Following henceforth the new Western lt?te). Lewis I (the Pious). 814 8i6 Stephen IV. 817 Paschal I. 824 Eugenius II. 827 Valentinus. 827 Gregory IV. Lothar I. 840 844 Sergius II. ^'; • > <^ 847 Leo IV. 855 Benedict III. Lewis II (in Italy). 855 855 (^Anastasius, Anti pope). 858 Nicholas I. 867 Hadrian II. 872 John VIII. Charles II, the Bald, (W. 875 Prankish). Charles III, the Fat, (E. 881 Prankish). 882 Martin II. 884 Hadrian III. 885 Stephen V. 891 Formosus. Guide (in Italy). 891 Lambert (in Italy). 894 8q6 Boniface VI, Arnulf (E. Frankish). 896 896 Stephen VI. 897 Romanus. 897 Theodore II. 898 John IX. Lewis (the Child). * 899 900 Benedict IV. Lewis III of Provence (in 903 LeoV. Italy). 901 903 Christopher. 904 Sergius III 911 Anastasius III. Conrad 7, 9ii(?) 913 Lando. T^ ^ 914 John X. Berengar (in Italy). 915 928 Leo VI. Henry I {the Fowler). 918 • 1 rhe names in italics are those of Gernr an kings who never made any claim to the impe rial title. EMPERORS AND POPES, XXllJ Year of Accession. A.D. Popes Emperors. Year of Accession. A.D. 929 Stephen VII. 931 John XL 936 Leo VII. Otto I {the Great), crowned 936 939 Stephen VIIL E." TfaiiTcish king at 941 Martin III. Aachen. 946 Agapetus II. 955 JohnXIL Otto I, crowned Emperor at Rome. 962 963 Leo VIIL 964 (Benedict V, Anti-Pope ?). 965 John XIII. 972 Benedict VI. Otto II. 973 974 (Boniface VII, Ami pope?). 974 Doninus II (?). 974 Benedict VH. 9^3 John XIV. oito in. 983 985 John XV. 996 Gregory V. 9(^6 (John XVI, Anti-pope?). 999 Sylvester 11. 1003 John XVII. Henry II (the Saint). 1002 1003 John xvin. 1009 Sergius IV. 1012 Benedict VIIL 1024 John XIX. Conrad II (the Salic). 1024 1033 Benedict IX. 1044 (Sylvester, Anti-pope). Henry III (the Black). 1039 1045 Gregory VI. 1046 Clement II. 1048 Damasus IL 1048 Leo IX. 1054 Victor II. Henry IV. 1056 1057 Stephen IX. 1058 Benedict X. ~~ 1059 Nicholas II. /»• 1061 Alexander II. 1073 .GregarxJ/n (Hildebrand). (Rudolf of Swabia, rival). 1077 1080 (Clement, Anti-j^ ope). 1086 Victor III. (Hermann of Luxemburg, rival). 1081 1087 Urban II. (Conrad of Franconia, rival.) 1093 f XXIV CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF Year of Accession. Popes. Emperors. Year of Accession. A.D. A.D 1099 Paschal II. II02 (Albert, Anti-pope). IIO5 (Sylvester, Anti-pope). Henry V. ito6 II18 Gelasius II. -* , II18 (Gregory, Anti-pope). III9 Calixtus II. II2I (Celestine, Anti-pope). II24 Honorius II. Lothar II. 1125 1 1 30 Innocent II. (Anacletus, Anti-pope). *Conrad III. II38 II3S (Victor, Anti-pope). 1143 Celestine II. II44 Lucius II. II45 Eugenius III. Anastasius IV. 1 153 Frederick I (Barbarossa). II52 1 1 54 Hadrian IV. Ilfy Alexander III. 1 1 59 (Victor, Anti-pope). 1 1 64 (Paschal, Anti-pope). 1 1 68 (Calixtus, Anti-pope). 1181 Lucius III, ii8q Urban HI. 1187 Gregory VIII. 1187 1191 Clement III. Celestine III. HemxJa. 1 190 ♦Philip, Otto IV (rivals). II97 1198 Innocent III. Otto IV. 1208 Frederick II. I2I2 1216 Honorius III. . ' 1227 Gregory IX. 1241 Celestine IV. 1241 Vacancy. 1243 Innocent IV. (Henry Raspe, rival). 1246 (William of Holland, rival). 1246-7 •Conrad IV. 1250 1254 Alexander IV. Interregnum. 1254 * Richard (earl of Corn- 1257 wall, *Aironso (king of 1261 Urban IV. Castile 1, (rivals). * Those marked with an asterisk we re never actually crowned at Rome. EMPERORS AND POPES. XXV Year of Accession. Popes. Emperors. 1 Year of Accession. A. D. A.D. 1265 Clement IV. 1269 Vacancy. 1371 Gregory X 1276 Innocent V. •RwdolfUofJHapsburg). 127.3 1276 Hadrian V. 1277 John XX or XXI. 1277 Nicholas III. I281 Martin IV, 1285 Honorius IV. 1289 Nicholas IV. 1292 Vacancy. ♦Adolf (of Nassau). 1292 1294 Celestine V. 1294 _ Boniface VJJL— ♦Albert I (of Hapsburg). 1298 '303 Benedict XI. 1305 Clement V. Henry VII (of Luxemburg). 1308 1314 Vacancy. Lewis IV (of Fiavaria). (Frederick of Austria, rival). I3I4 1 1 1316 John XXI or XXII. 1.-.34 Benedict XII. 1 1342 Clement VI. Charles IV (of Luxemburg). 1347 •352 Innocent VI. (Giinther of Schwartz- burg, rival). 1362 Urban V. 1370 Gregory XI. 1378 Urban VI. (Clement VII, Anti-pope). *Wenzel (of Luxemburg). 1378 i3«9 Boniface IX. 1394 (Benedict Anti-pope). I 1 ♦Rupert (of the Palatinate). 1400 1404 Innocent VII. 1406 Gregory XII. 1409 Alexander V. 1410 John XXII or XXIII. Sig'smund (of Luxemburg) (Jobst of Moravia, rival). I4IO 1417 Martin V. 1431 Eugene IV. 1 ♦Albert II (of Hapsburg).t 1438 • Those n larked with an asterisk were never ac tually crowned at Rome. + All the succeeding Emperors, except Cha ries VII and Francis I, belong to the house of Hapsburg. s:xvi CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF Year of Accession. Popes. Emperors Year of Accession. A. D. 1439 (Felix V Anti-pope). ! A. D. 1447 Nicholas V. Frederick III. 1440 1455 Calixtus IV. ~ 1458 Pius II. 146 + Paul II. I47I Sixtus IV. 1484 Innocent VIII. 1493 Alexander VI. ♦Maximilian I. 1493 1503 Pius III. 16^^ Julius II. ' 1513 LeoX. fCharles V. 1519 1522 Hadrian VI. 1523 Clement VII. 1534 Paul III. 1550 Julius III. 1555 Marcellus II. 1555 Paul IV. ♦Ferdinand I. 1558 1559 Pius IV. ♦Maximilian II. 1564 1566 Pius V. 1572 Gregory XIII. ♦Rudolf II. 1576 1585 Sixtus V. 1590 Urban VII. 1590 Gregory XIV. 1 59 1 Innocent IX. 1592 Clement VIII. 1604 Leo XI. 1604 Paul V. ♦Matthias. 1612 ♦Ferdinand II. I619 1621 Gregory XV. 1623 Urban VIII. ♦Ferdinand III. 1637 1644 Innocent X. 1655 Alexander VII. ♦Leopold L 1658 1667 Clement IX. ♦ Those marked with an asterisk we re never actually crowned at Rome. t Crowned liniperor, but at Bologn a. not at Rome. EMPERORS AND POPES. xxvii Year of Accession. Popes. Emperors. Year of Accession. A.D. A.D. 1670 Clement X. 1676 Innocent Xf. 1689 Alexander VIII. 1691 Innocent XII. 1700 Clement XI. *Joseph I. 1705 ♦Charles VL I7II 1720 Innocent XIII. 1724 Benedict XIII. 1730 Clement XII. 1740 Benedict XIV. ♦Charles VII (of Bavaria). 1742 ♦Francis I (of Lorraine). 174s 1758 Clement XIII. ♦Joseph II. 1765 1769 Clement XIV. 1775 Pius VI. ♦Leopold IL 1790 ♦Francis II. 1792 1800 Pius VII. Abdication of Francis II. 1806 1823 Leo XII. 1829 Pius VIII. 1831 Gregory XVI. 1846 Pius IX. • Those marked with an asterisk we re never actually crowned at Rome. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Of those who in August, 1806, read in the Eng- lish newspapers that the Emperor Francis II had an- nounced to the Diet his resignation of the imperial crown, there were probably few who reflected that the oldest political institution in the world had come to an end. Yet it was so. The Empire which a note issued by a diplomatist on the banks of the Danube extinguished, was the same which the crafty nephew of Julius had won for himself, against the powers of the East, beneath the cliffs of Actium; and which had preserved almost unaltered, through eighteen centuries of time, and through the greatest changes in extent, in power, in character, a title and pretensions from which all meaning had long since departed. Nothing else so directly linked the old world to the new — nothing else displayed so many strange contrasts of the present and the past, and summed up in those contrasts so much of European history. From the days of Constantine till far down into the middle ages it was, conjointly with the Papacy, the recognised centre and head of Christendom, CHAT. I. THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. exercising over the minds of men an influence such as its material strength could never have commanded. It is of this influence and of the causes that gave it powei rather than of the external history of the Empire, that the following pages are designed to treat. ^ That history is indeed full of interest and brilliancy, of grand cha- racters and striking situations. But it is a subject too vast for any single canvas. Without a minuteness of detail sufficient to make its scenes dramatic and give us a lively sympathy with the actors, a narrative history can have little value and still less charm. But to trace with any minuteness the career of the Empire, would be to write the history of Christendom from the fifth century to the twelfth, of Germany and Italy from the twelfth to the nineteenth; while even a narrative of more re- stricted scope, which should attempt to disengage from a general account of the aff"airs of those countries the events that properly belong to imperial history, could hardly be compressed within reasonable limits. It is therefore better, declining so great a task, to attempt one simpler and more practicable though not neces- sarily inferior in interest; to speak less of events than of principles, and endeavour to describe the Empire not as a State but as an Institution, an institution created by and embodying a wonderful system of ideas. In pur- suance of such a plan, the forms which the Empire took in the several stages of its growth and decline must be briefly sketched. The characters and acts of the great men who founded, guided, and overthrew it must from time to time be touched upon. But the chief aim of the treatise will be to dwell more fully on the inner nature of the Empire, as the most signal instance of the fusion of Roman and Teutonic elements in modern INTRODUCTORY. civilization: to shew how such a combination was pos- sible; how Charles and Otto were led to revive the imperial title in the West; how far during the reigns of their successors it preserved the memory of its origin, and influenced the European commonwealth of nations. Strictly speaking, it is from the year 800 a.d., when a King of the Franks was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, that the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire must be dated. But in history there is nothing isolated, and just as to explain a modern Act of Parliament or a modern conveyance of lands we must go back to the feudal customs of the thirteenth century, so among the institutions of the Middle Ages there is scarcely one which can be understood until it is traced up either to classical or to primitive Teutonic antiquity. Such a mode of inquiry is most of all needful in the case of the Holy Empire, itself no more than a tradition, a fancied revival of departed glories. And thus, in order to make it clear out of what elements the imperial system was formed, we might be required to scrutinize the an- tiquities of the Christian Church; to survey the consti- tution of Rome in the days when Rome was no more than the first of the Latin cities ; nay, to travel back yet further to that Jewish theocratic policy whose influence on the minds of the mediaeval priesthood was necessarily so profound. Practically, however, it may suffice to begin by glancing at the condition of the Roman world in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era. We shall then see the old Empire with its scheme of abso- lutism fully matured; we shall mark how the new reli- gion, rising in the midst of a hostile power, ends by embracing and transforming it; and we shall be in a B 2 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. I. position to understand what impression the whole huge fabric of secular and ecclesiastical government which Roman and Christian had piled up made upon the bar- barian tribes who pressed into the charmed circle of the ancient civilization. CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS OF TUB BARBARIANS. That ostentation of humility which the subtle policy of Augustus had conceived, and the jealous hypocrisy of Tiberius maintained, was gradually dropped by their successors, till despotism became at last recognised in principle as the government of the Roman Empire. With an aristocracy decayed, a populace degraded, an army no longer recruited from Italy, the semblance of liberty that yet survived might be swept away with im- punity. Republican forms had never been known in the provinces at all, and the aspect which the imperial ad- ministration had originally assumed there, soon reacted on its position in the capital. Earlier rulers had dis- guised their supremacy by making a slavish senate the instrument of their more cruel or arbitrary acts. As time went on, even this veil was withdrawn ; and in the age of Septimus Severus, the Emperor stood forth to the whole Roman world as the single centre and source of power and political action. The warlike character of the Ro- man state was preserved in his title of General ; his pro- vincial lieutenants were military governors ; and a more terrible enforcement of the theory was found in his CHAP. 11. The Roman Empire in the second century. THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. Ohliferation xif national ■distinctions. dependence on the army, at once the origin and support of all authority. But, as he united in himself every function of government, his sovereignty was civil as well as military. Laws emanated from him ; all officials acted under his commission; the sanctity of his person bor- dered on divinity. This increased concentration of power was mainly required by the necessities of frontier defence, for within there was more decay than disaffection. Few troops were quartered through the country : few fortresses checked the march of armies in the struggles which placed Vespasian and Severus on the throne. The dis- tant crash of war from the Rhine or the Euphrates was scarcely heard or heeded in the profound quiet of the Mediterranean coasts, where, with piracy, fleets had dis- appeared. No quarrels of race or religion disturbed that calm, for all national distinctions were becoming merged in the idea of a common Empire. The gradual extension of Roman citizenship through the colonicE, the working of the equalized and equalizing Roman law, the even pressure of the government on all subjects, the move- ment of population caused by commerce and the slave traffic, were steadily assimilating the various peoples. Emperors who were for the most part natives of the provinces cared little to cherish Italy or conciliate Rome : it was their policy to keep open for every subject a career by whose freedom they had themselves risen to greatness, and to recruit the senate from the most illus- trious families in the cities of Gaul, Spain, and Asia. The edict by which Caracalla extended to all natives of the Roman world the rights of Roman citizenship, though prompted by no motives of kindness, proved in the end a boon. Annihilating legal distinctions, it com- pleted the work which trade and literature and toleration THE EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS, tal. to all beliefs but one were already performing, and left, so far as we can tell, only two nations still cherishing a national feeling. The Jew was kept apart by his religion: the Greek boasted his original intellectual su- periority. Speculative philosophy lent her aid to this general assimilation. Sioicism, with its doctrine of a universal system of nature, made minor distinctions be- tween man and man seem insignificant : and by its teachers the idea of cosmopolitanism was for the first time proclaimed. Alexandrian Neo-Platonism, uniting the tenets of many schools, first bringing the mysticism of the East into connection with the logical philosophies of Greece, had opened up a new ground of agreement or controversy for the minds of all the world. Yet | The Capl Rome's commanding position was scarcely shaken. Her actual power was indeed confined within narrow limits. Rarely were her senate and people permitted to choose the sovereign: more rarely still could they control his policy ; neither law nor custom raised them above other subjects, or accorded to them any advantage in the career of civil or military ambition. As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she might be the mistress of others, so now to be universal, she, the conqueror, had descended to the level of the conquered. But the sacri- fice had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language that had overspread the world: at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their labour : she was the head of the Empire and of civilization, and in riches, fame, and splendour far outshone as well the cities of that time as the fabled glories of Babylon or Persepolis. Scarcely had these slowly-working influences brought Diocletian about this unity, when other influences becran to threaten ""^ 9°"" '' ° stanline. THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. it. New foes assailed the frontiers; while the loosening of the structure within was shewn by the long struggles for power which followed the death or deposition of each successive emperor. In the period of anarchy after the fall of Valerian, generals w^ere raised by their armies in every part of the Empire, and ruled great provinces as monarchs apart, owning no allegiance to the possessor of the capital. The founding of the kingdoms of modern Europe might have been anticipated by two hundred years, had the barbarians been bolder, or had there not arisen in Diocletian a prince active and politic enough to bind up the fragments before they had lost all cohesion, meeting altered conditions by new remedies. By dividing and localizing authority, he confessed that the weaker heart could no longer make its pulsations felt to the body's extremities. He parcelled out the supreme power among four persons, and then sought to give it a factitious strength, by surrounding it with an oriental pomp which his earlier predecessors would have scorned. The sovereign's person became more sacred, and was removed further from the subject by the interposition of a host of officials. The prerogative of Rome was menaced by the rivalry of Nicomedia, and the nearer greatness of Milan. Constantine trod in the same path, extending the system of titles and functionaries, sepa- rating the civil from the military, placing counts and dukes along the frontiers and in the cities, making the household larger, its etiquette stricter, its offices more important, though to a Roman eye degraded by their attachment to the monarch's person. The crown became, for the fiist time, the fountain of honour. These changes brought little good. Heavier taxation depressed the THE EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS, aristocracy a : population decreased, agriculture withered, serfdom spread : it was found more difficult to raise native troops and to pay any troops whatever. The re- moval of the seat of power to Byzantium, if it prolonged the life of a part of the Empire, shook it as a whole, by making the separation of East and West inevitable. By it Rome's self-abnegation that she might Romanize the world, was completed; for though the new capital pre- served her name, and followed her customs and precedents, yet now the imperial sway ceased to be connected with the city which had created it. Thus did the idea of Roman mcmarchy become more universal ; for, having lost its local centre, it subsisted no longer historically, but, so to speak, naturally, as a part of an order of things which a change in external conditions seemed incapable of disturbing. Henceforth the Empire would be unaffected by the disasters of the city. . And though, after the partition of the Empire had been confirmed by Valentinian, and finally settled on the death of Theodosius, the seat of the Western government was removed first to Milan and then to Ravenna, neither event destroyed Rome's prestige, nor the notion of a single imperial nationality common to all her subjects. The Syrian, the Pannonian, the Briton, the Spaniard, still called himself a Roman^. ^ See the eloquent passage of Claudian, In seaiudum comulatum Stilicbonis, 129, &qq., from which the follownig lines are taken (15O- 160) :— a According to the vicious finan- cial system that prevailed, the curi- nles in each city were required to collect the taxes, and when there was a deficit, to supply it from their own property. ' Haec est in greniio victos quae sola recepit, Humanumque genus ci mmuni nomine tovit, Matris, non dominae, ritu ; civesque vocavit Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua reviuxit. Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes Quod veluti patriis re ionibus utitur hospea: lO THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. II. Chris- tianity. Its alliance ivi'h the State. For that nationality was now beginning to be sup- ported by a new and vigorous power. The Emperors had indeed opposed it as disloyal and revolutionary : had more than once put forth their whole strength to root it out. But the unity of the Empire, and the ease of com- munication through its parts, had favoured the spread of Christianity : persecution had scattered the seeds more widely, had forced on it a firm organization, had given it martyr-heroes and a history. When Constantine, partly perhaps from a genuine moral sympathy, yet doubtless far more in the well-grounded belief that he had more to gain from the zealous sympathy of its professors than he could lose by the aversion of those who still cultivated a languid paganism, took Christianity to be the religion of the Empire, it was already a great political force, able, and not more able than willing, to repay him by aid and submission. Yet the league was struck in no mere mer- cenary spirit, for the league was inevitable. Of the evils and dangers incident to the system then founded, there was as yet no experience : of that antagonism between Church and State which to a modern appears so natural, there was not even an idea. Among the Jews, the State had rested upon religion ; among the Romans, religion had been an integral part of the political constitution, a matter far more of national or tribal or family feeling than of personal^. Both in Israel and at Rome the mingling of religious with civic patriotism had been har- Qiiod sedem inutare licet : quod cernere Thiilen Lusus, et horrendos quondam penetrare recessus : Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Oronten, Quod cuncti gens una sumus. Nee terminus unquam Romanae ditionis erit.' c In the Roman jurisprudence, ius sacrum is a branch of ///* publicum. THE EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS. II monious, giving strength and elasticity to the whole body politic. So perfect a union was now no longer possible in the Roman Empire, for the new faith had already a governing body of her own in those rulers and teachers whom the growth of sacramentalism, and of sacerdotalism its necessary consequence, was making every day more powerful, and marking off more sharply from the mass of the Christian people. Since therefore the ecclesiastical organization could not be identical with the civil, it be- came its counterpart. Suddenly called from danger and ignominy to the seat of power, and finding her inex- perience perplexed by a sphere of action vast and varied, the Church was compelled to frame herself upon the model of the secular administration. Where her own machinery was defective, as in the case of doctrinal dis- putes affecting the whole Christian world, she sought the interposition of the sovereign ; in all else she strove not to sink in, but to reproduce for herself the imperial system. And just as with the extension of the Empire all the independent rights of districts, towns, or tribes had disappeared, so now the primitive freedom and diversity of individual Christians and local Churches, already cir- cumscribed by the frequent struggles against heresy, was finally overborne by the idea of one visible catholic Church, uniform in faith and ritual ; uniform too in her relation to the civil power and the increasingly oligar- chical character of her government. Thus, under the combined force of doctrinal theory and practical needs, there shaped itself a hierarchy of patriarchs, metropo- litans, and bishops, their jurisdiciion, although still chiefly spiritual, enforced by the laws of the State, their provinces and dioceses usually corresponding to the administrative divisions of the Empire. As nOi 12 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, patriarch yet enjoyed more than an honorary supremacy, the head of the Church — so far as she could be said to have a head — was virtually the Emperor himself. The apparent right to intermeddle in religious affairs which he derived from the office of Pontifex Maximus was readily admitted; and the clergy, preaching the duty of passive obedience now as it had been preached in the days of Nero and Diocletian d, were well pleased to see him preside in councils, issue edicts against heresy, and testify even by arbitrary measures his zeal for the advancement of the faith and the overthrow of pagan rites. But though the tone of the Church re- mained humble, her strength waxed greater, nor were occasions wanting which revealed the future that was in store for her. The resistance and final triumph of Athanasius proved that the new society could put forth a power of opinion such as had never been known be- fore : the abasement of Theodosius the Emperor before Ambrose the Archbishop admitted the supremacy of spiritual authority. In the decrepitude of old institu- tions, in the barrenness of literature and the feebleness of art, it was to the Church that the life and feelings of the people sought more and more to attach them- selves ; and when in the fifth century the horizon grew black with clouds of ruin, those who watched with de- spair or apathy the approach of irresistible foes, fled for comfort to the shrine of a religion which even those foes revered. But that which we are above all concerned to remark ^ Tertulltan, writing circ, ad. minus noster elegtrit. Et merito 200. says : ' Sed quid ego amplius dixerim, noster est niagis Caesar, ut de religione atque p'etate Claris- a nostro Deo cpustitutus ' — Apolo- tiana in iniperatorem queni neces&e get. cap. 34, est suspiciamus ut euni quern Do- THE EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS. 13 here is, that this church system, demanding a more rigid uniformity in doctrine and organization, making more and more vital the notion of a visible body of wor- shippers united by participation in the same sacraments, maintained and propagated afresh the feeling of a single Roman people throughout the world: Christianity as well as civilization became conterminous with the Roman Empire ^ e See the book of Optatus, bishop of Milevis, Contra Donatistas. 'Non enim respubhca est in ecclesia, sed ecclesia in republica, id est, in im- perio Romano, cum super impera torem non sit nisi solus Deus : ' (p, 999 of voL ii. of Migne's Potror logice Cursus comple/us.) The treatise of Optatus is full of interest, as shewing the growth of the idea of the visible Church, and of the primacy of Peter's chair, as con- stituting its centre aud representing its ttuitjr. CHAP. II. 7/ embraces and pre- serves the imperial idea. CHAPTER III.. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. CHAP. III. The Bar- barians, Upon a world so constituted did the barbarians of the North descend. From the dawn of history they shew as a dim background to the warmth and light of the Mediter- ranean coast, changing litde while kingdoms rise and fall in the South : only thought on when some hungry swarm comes down to pillage or to settle. It is always as foes that they are known. The Romans never forgot the invasion of .Brennus ; and their fears, renewed by the irruption of the Cimbri and Teutones, could not let them rest till the extension of the frontier to the Rhine and the Danube* removed Italy from immediate danger. A little more perseverqince under Tiberius, or again under Hadrian, would probably have reduced all Germany as far as the Baltic and the Oder. But the politic or jealous advice of Augustus^ was followed, and it was only along the frontiers that Roman arts and culture affected the Teutonic races. Commerce was brisk; Roman envoys penetrated the forests to the courts of rude chieftains; adventurous barbarians entered the provinces, sometimes to admire, oftener, like the brother of Arminius^, to take service under the Roman flag, and rise to a distinction in the legion which some feud denied them at home. This a ' Addiderat consilium coercendi intra terrninos imperii.' — Tac. Ann. i. 2, b Tac. Ann. ii. g. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. 15 was found even more convenient by the hirer than by the employed; till by degrees barbarian mercenaries came to form the largest, or at least the most effective, part of the Roman armies. The body-guard of Augustus had been so composed ;• the praetorians were generally selected from the bravest frontier troops, most of them German ; the practice could not but increase with the extinction of the free peasantry, the growth of villenage, and the effeminacy of all classes. Emperors who were, like Maximin, themselves foreigners, encouraged a system by whose means they had risen, and whose advantages they knew. After Constantine, the barbarians form the ma- jority of the troops ; after Theodosius, a Roman is the exception. The soldiers of the Eastern Empire in the time of Arcadius are almost all Goths, vast bodies of whom had been settled in the provinces; while in the West, Stilichoc can oppose Rhodogast only by summon- ing the German auxiliaries from the frontiers. Along with this practice there had grown up another, which did still more to make the barbarians feel themselves members of the Roman state. Whatever the pride of the old re- public might assert, the maxim of the Empire had always been that birth and race should exclude no subject from any post which his abilities deserved. This, principle, which had removed all obstacles from the path of the Spaniard Trajan, the Pannonian Maximin, the Numidian Philip, was afterwards extended to the conferring of honour and power on persons who did not even profess to have passed through the grades of Roman service, but remained leaders of their own tribes. Ariovistus had been soothed by the title of Friend of the Roman People ; in c Stilicho, the bulwark of the Empire, seems to have been himself a Vandal by extraction. Admitted to Roman titles and honours. i6 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, the third century the insignia of the consulship ^ were conferred on a Herulian chief: Crocus and his Alemanni entered as an independent body into the service of Rome; along the Rhine whole tribes received, under the name of Laeti, lands within the provinces on condition of military service; and the foreign aid which the Sarmatian had proffered to Vespasian against his rival, and Marcus Aurelius had indignantly rejected in the war with Cassius, became the usual, at last the sole support of the Empire, in civil as well as in external strife. Thus in many ways was the old antagonism broken down — Romans admitting barbarians to rank and office, barbarians catching something of the manners and culture of their neighbours. And thus when the final movement came, and the Teutonic tribes slowly established them- selves through the provinces, they entered not as savage strangers, but as colonists knowing something of the system into which they came, and not unwilling to be considered its members ; despising the degenerate pro- vincials who struck no blow in their own defence, but full of respect for the majestic power which had for so many centuries confronted and instructed them. Great during all these ages, but greatest when they were actually traversing and settling in the Empire, must have been the impression which its elaborate machinery of government and mature civilization made upon the minds of the Northern invaders. With arms whose fabri- cation they had learned from their foes, these dwellers in the forest conquered well-tilled fields, and entered towns whose busy workshops, marts stored with the productions of distant countries, and palaces rich in monuments of art, equally roused their wonder. To the beauty of ^ Of course not the consulship itself, but the wnamenta consularia. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. '7 statuary or painting they might often be blind, but the rudest mind must have been awed by the massive piles with which vanity or devotion, or the passion for amuse- ment, had adorned Milan and Verona, Aries, Treves, and Bordeaux. A deeper awe would strike them as they gazed on the crowding worshippers and stately ceremo- nial of Christianity, most unlike their own rude sacrifices. The exclamation of the Goth Athanaric, when led into the market-place of Constantinople, may stand for the feelings of his nation: * Without doubt the Emperor is a God upon earth, and he who attacks him is guilty of his own blood e.' The social and political system, with its cultivated lan- guage and literature, into which they came, would impress fewer of the conquerors, but by those few would be ad- mired beyond all else. Its regular organization supplied what they most needed and could least construct for themselves, and hence it was that the greatest among them were the most desirous to preserve it. The Mongol Attila excepted, there is among these terrible hosts no destroyer ; the wish of each leader is to maintain the ex- isting order, to spare life, to respect every work of skill and labour, above all to perpetuate the methods of Roman administration, and rule the people as the deputy or successor of their Emperor. Titles conferred by him were the highest honours they knew : they were also the only means of acquiring something like a legal claim to the obedience of the subject, and of turning a patriarchal or military chieftainship into the regular sway of an hereditary monarch. Civilis had long since endeavoured to govern his Batavians as a Roman general f. Alaric « Jornandes, Be Rebus Geticis, cap. 28. ' Tac. Hi&t. i. and iv. Their desirt to preserve its institU" tions. i8 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. III. became master-general of the armies of Illyricum. Clovis exulted in the consulship; his son Theodebert received Provence, the conquest of his own battle-axe, as the gift of Justinian. Sigismund the Burgundian king, created count and patrician by the Emperor Anastasius, professed the deepest gratitude and the firmest faith to that Eastern court which was absolutely powerless to help or to hurt him. ' My people is yours,' he writes, * and to rule them delights me less than to serve you; the hereditary devotion of my race to Rome has made us account those the highest honours which your military titles convey; we have always preferred what an Emperor gave to all that our ancestors could bequeath. In ruling our nation we hold ourselves but your lieutenants : you, whose divinely-appointed sway no barrier bounds, whose beams shine from the Bosphorus into distant Gaul, employ us to administer the remoter regions of your Empire : your world is our fatherland?/ A contemporary historian has recorded the remarkable disclosure of. his own thoughts and purposes, made by one of the ablest 8 ' Vaster quidem est populus meus sed me plus servire vobis quam illi praeesse delectat. Traxit istud a proavis generis mei apud vos decessoresque vestros semper animo Romana devotio, ut ilia nobis magis claritas putaretur, quam vestra per militiae titulos por- rigeret celsitudo : cunctisque auc- toribus meis semper magis ambitum est quod a principibus sumerent quam quod a patribus attulisseiit. Cumque gentem nostram videamur regere, non aliud nos quam milites vestros credimus ordinari. . . . Per nos administratis remotarum spatia regionum : patria nostra vester orbis est. Tangit Galliam suam lumen orientis, et radius qui illis partibus oriri creditur, hie refulget. Domi- nationem vobis divinitus praestitam obex nulla concludit, nee ullis pro- vinciarum terminis diffusio felicium sceptrorum limitatur. Salvo divini- tatis honore sit dictum.' — Letter printed among the works of Avi- tus, Bishop of Vienne. (Migne's Patro'ogia, vol. lix. p. 285.) This letter, as its style shews, is the composition not of Sigismund himself, but of Avitus, writing on Sigismund's behalf. But this makes it scarcely less valuable evidence of the feelings of the time. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. 19 of the barbarian chieftains, Athaulf the Visigoth, the brother-in-law and successor of Alaric. ' It was at first my wish to destroy the Roman name, and erect in its place a Gothic empire, taking to myself the place and the powers of Caesar Augustus. But when experience taught me that the untameable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to live beneath the sway of law, and that the abolition of the institutions on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the state itself, I chose the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic strength the fame of Rome, desiring to go down to posterity as the restorer of that Roman power which it was beyond my power to replace. Wherefore I avoid war and strive for peace '^Z Historians have remarked how valuable must have been the skill of Roman officials to princes who from leaders of tribes were become rulers of wide lands ; and in par- ticular how indispensable the aid of the Christian bishops, the intellectual aristocracy of their new subjects, whose advice could alone guide their policy and conciliate the vanquished. Not only is this true ; it is but a small part of the truth; one form of that manifold and overpowering influence which the old system exercised over its foes not les6 than its own children. For it is hardly too much to say that the thought of antagonism to the Empire and the b ' Referre solitus est {sc. Ataul- phus) se in primis ardenter in- hiasse : ut obliterato Romaimrum nomine Romanum omne solum Gothorum imperium et faceret et vocaret : essetque, ut vulgariter loquar, Gothia quod Romania fuis- set ; fieretque nunc Ataulphus qucd quondam Caesar Augustus. At ubi multa experientia probavisset, ne- que Gothos ullo modo parere legi- bus posse propter effrenatam barba- riem, ne ue reipublicae interdici leges oportere sinequibus respublica non est respublica, elegisse se sal- tern, ut gloriam sibi de restituendo in integrum augendoque Romano nomine Gothorum viribus quaereret, habereturque apud posteros Ro- manae restitutionis auctor postquam esse non potuerat immutator. Ob hoc abstinere a bello, ob hoc inhiare paci nitebatur.' — Orosius, vii. 43. C 3 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. The belief in its tterniiy. wish to extinguish it never crossed the mind of the bar- barians '. The conception of that Empire was too uni- versal, too august, too enduring. It was everywhere around them, and they could remember no time when it had not been so. It had no association of people or place whose fall could seem to involve that of the whole fabric j it had that connection with the Christian Church which made it all-embracing and venerable. There were especially two ideas whereon it rested, and from which it obtained a peculiar strength and a peculiar direction. The one was the belief that as the dominion of Rome was universal, so must it be eternal. Nothing like it had been seen before. The empire of Alexander had lasted a short lifetime ; and within its wide compass were included many arid wastes, and many tracts where none but the roving savage had ever set foot. That of the Italian city had for fourteen generations embraced all the most wealthy and populous regions of the civilized world, and had laid the foundations of its power so deep that they seemed destined to last for ever. If Rome moved slowly for a time, her foot was always planted firmly: the ease and swiftness of her later conquests proved the solidity of the earlier ; and to her, more justly than to his own city, might the boast of the Athenian historian be applied : that she advanced farthest in pros- perity, and in adversity drew back the least. From the end of the republican period her poets, her orators, her jurists, ceased not to repeat the claim of world-dominion, and confidently predict its eternity''. The proud belief of i Athaulf formed only to aban- Cic. Pro Domo, 33 ; Virg. Aen. ix. don it. 448 ; Hor. Od. iii. 30, 8 ; Tibull. ^ See, among other passages, ii. 5, 33; Ovid, Am. i. 15, 26; Varro, De lingua Latina, iv. 34 ; Tral. iii. 7, 51 ; and cf. in the THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. his countrymen which Virgil had expressed — • His ego nee metas rerum, nee tempora pono : Imperium sine fine dcdi ' — was shared by the early Christians when they prayed for the persecuting power whose fall would bring Antichrist upon earth. Lactantius writes : ' When Rome the head of the world shall have fallen, who can doubt that the end is come of human things, aye, of the earth itself. She, she alone is the state by which all things are upheld even until now ; wherefore let us make prayers and supplica- tions to the God of heaven, if indeed his decrees and his purposes can be delayed, that that hateful tyrant come not sooner than we look for, he for whom are reserved fearful deeds, who shall pluck out that eye in whose extinction the world itself shall perish ^* With the Digest, 1. I, 33 ; xiv. 2, 9. The phrase 'urbs aeterna* appearsin a con- stitution issued by Valentinian III. Tertullian speaks of Rome as ' civitas sacrosancta.* 1 Lact. Divin. Instit. vii. 25 : ' Etiam res ipsa declarat lapsum ruinamque rerum brevi fore: nisi quod incolumi urbe Roma nihil istiusmodi videtur esse metuendum. At vero cum caput il:ud orbis occi- derit, et pviirj esse coeperit quod Sibyllas fore aiunt, quis drbitet venisse iam finem rebus humanis, orbique terrarum ? Ilia, ilia est civitas quae adhuc sustentat omnia, precandusque nobis el adorandus est Deus coeli si tamen statuta eius et placita differri possunt, ne citius quam putemus tyrannus ille abo- minabilis veniat qui tantiim facinus moliatur, ac lumen illud effodiat cuius interitu mundus ipse lapsurus est.* Cf. Tertuil. Apolog. cap. xxxii ; ' Est et alia maior necessitas nobis orandi pro imperatoribus, etiam pro omni statu imperii rebusque Ro- manis, qui vim maximam universe orbi imminentem ipsamque clausu- 1am sseculi acerbitates horreiidas comminantem Romani imperii com- meatu scimus retardari.' Also the same writer, Ad Scapulam, cap. ii; ' Christianus sciens imperatorem a Deo suo constitui, necesse est ut ipsum diligat et revereatur et ho- noret et salvum velit cum toto Romano iniperio quousque saeculum stabit : tamdiu enim stabit.' So too the author — now usually supposed to be Hilary the Deacon — of the Commentary on the Pauline Epis- tles ascribed to S Ambrose : * Non prius veniet Doniinus quam regni Romani defectio fiat, et appareat antichristus qui interficiet sanctos, reddita Ronianis libertate, sub suo tamen nomine.' — Ad II Thcss. ii. 4.7- CHAP. m. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, Sanctity of the imperial name. triumph of Christianity this belief had found a new basis. For as the Empire had decayed, the Church had grown stronger: and now while the one, trembling at the ap- proach of the destroyer, saw province after province torn away, the other, rising in stately youth, prepared to fill her place and govern in her name, and in doing so, to adopt and sanctify and propagate anew the notion of a universal and unending state. The second chief element in this conception was the association of such a state with one irresponsible go- vernor, the Emperor. The hatred to the name of King, which their earliest political struggles had left in the Ro- mans, by obliging their ruler to take a new and strange title, marked him off from all the other sovereigns of the world. To the provincials especially he became an awful impersonation of the great machine of government which moved above and around them. It was not merely that he was, like a modern king, the centre of power and the dispenser of honour : his pre-eminence, broken by no comparison with other princes, by the ascending ranks of no aristocracy, had in it something almost supernatural. The right of legislation had become vested in him alone : the decrees of the people, and resolutions of the senate, and edicts of the magistrates were, during the last three centuries, replaced by imperial constitutions ; his do- mestic council, the consistory, was the supreme court of appeal ; his interposition, like that of some terrestrial Providence, was invoked, and legally provided so to be, to reverse or overleap the ordinary rules of law i^. From the time of Julius and Augustus his person had been ™ For example, by the ' restitutio natalium,' and the ' adrogatio per rescriptum principis,' or, as it is expressed, ' per sacrum oraculum.' THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, n hallowed by the ofTice of chief pontiff" and the tribuni- cian" power ; to swear by his head was considered the most solemn of all oaths®; his effigy was sacredP, even on a coin ; to him or to his Genius temples were erected and divine honours paid while he lived t- trn Empit e. Because it could not die, it lived. And there was in the slowness of the change and ils external aspect, as' well as in the fortunes of the capital, something to favour the illusion. The Roman name was shared by every sub- ject ; the Roman city was no longer the seat of govern- ment, nor did her capture extinguish the imperial power, for the maxim was now accepted, Where the Emperor is, there is Rome^. But her continued existence, not per- manently occupied by any conqueror, striking the nations with an awe which the history or the external splendours of Constantinople, Milan, or Ravenna could nowise in- spire, was an ever new assertion of the endurance of the Roman race and dominion. Dishonoured and de- fenceless, the spell of her name was still strong enough to arrest the conqueror in the moment of triumph. The irresistible impulse that drew Alaric was one of glory or revenge, not of destruction : the Hun turned back from Aquileia with a vague fear upon him : the Ostrogoth adorned and protected his splendid prize. In the history of the last days of the Western Em- pire, two points deserve special remark : its continued union with the Eastern branch, and the way in which its ideal dignity was respected while its representatives were despised. After Stilicho's death, and Alaric's invasion, its fall was a question of time. While one by one the provinces were abandoned by the central government, left either to be occupied by invading tribes or to maintain a precarious independence, like Britain and Armorica*, by means of municipal unions, Italy lay at the mercy of the barbarian auxiliaries and was governed by their»leaders. The degenerate line of Theodosius might « otrov &v 6 ^aaiKevs 17, (K€i ^ 'Poffuj. — Herodian. t If the accounts we find of the Armorican republic can be trusted. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. n nave seemed to reign by hereditary right, but after their extinction in Valentinian III each phantom Emperor — Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Anthemius, Olybrius — re- ceived the purple from the haughty Ricimer, general of the troops, only to be stripped of it when he presumed to forget his dependence. Though the division between Arcadius and Honorius had definitely severed the two realms for administrative purposes, they were still sup- posed to constitute a single Empire, and the rulers of the East interfered more than once to raise to the Western thrones princes they could not protect upon it. Ricimer's insolence quailed before the shadowy grandeur of the imperial • title : his ambition, and Gundobald his succes- sor's, were bounded by the name of patrician. The bolder genius of Odoacer", general of the barbarian auxiliaries, resolved to abolish an empty pageant, and extinguish the title and office of Emperor of the West. Yet over him too the spell had power ; and as the Gaulish warrior had gazed on the silent • majesty of the senate in a deserted city, so the Herulian revered the power before which the world had bowed, and though there was no force to check or to affright him, shrank from grasping in his own barbarian hand the sceptre of the Caesars. W^hen, at Odoacer's bidding, Romulus Augustulus, the boy whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native CHAP. m. « Odoacer or Odovaker, as it seems his name ought to be written, is isually, but incorrectly, described as a King of the Heruii, who led his people into Italy and overthrew \he Empire of the West ; others call him King of the Rugii, or Skyrri, or Turciiingi. The truth seems to be that he was not a king »t all, but the son of a Skyrrian chieftain (Edecon, known as one of the envoys whom Attila sent to Constantinople), whose personal merits made him chosen by the barbarian auxiliaries to be their leader. The >kyrri were a small tribe, apparently akin to the more powerful Heruii, whose name it often extended to them. 26 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, Caesar of Rome, had formally announced his resignation to the senate, a deputation from that body proceeded to the Eastern court to lay the insignia of royalty at the feet of the reigning Emperor Zeno. The West, they declared, no longer required an Emperor of its own : one monarch sufficed for the world ; Odoacer was qualified by his wisdom and courage to be the protector of their state, and upon him Zeno was entreated to confer the tide of patrician and the administration of the Italian provinces^. The Emperor granted what he could not refuse, and Odoacer, taking the title of Kingy, continued the consular office, respected the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of his subjects, and ruled for fourteen years as the nominal vicar of the Eastern Emperor. There was thus legally no extinction of the Western Empire at all, but only a reunion of East and West. In form, and to some extent also in the belief of men, things now reverted to their state during the first two centuries of the Empire, save that Byzantium instead of Rome was the centre of the civil government. The joint tenancy which had been conceived by Dio- cletian, carried further by Constantine, renewed under Valentinian I and again at the death of Theodosius, had come to an end ; once more did a single Emperor sway « Kv'^ovcirot 6 'OpiffTOV vl6» OLKOvaos Zrjvojva vaXiv ttjv fiaai- \eiav dvaK€KTTJaOai rrjs eoj. . . . f/vdyxaae t^v fiovXrjV dTroarfiXai vpeaPciav Z-qvaivi orjfiaivovaav us Idias fxkv ainois ^aaiXeias ov deoi, Koivos 6e aTToxp-qad fiuvos wv qvto- Kpcnwp en dfnl)OT6pois tois irepaai. ruv fievTOi 'Obvaxov vti^ avrujv npo- ^(^XrjaOai iKavuv ovra aw^dv tcL Trap' avTOis Trpdy/j-ara ttoXitiktjv (y^^obv vovv Koi ovvfaiv ofxov Kal fiAxnioVf KoL deioOai tov Z-qvoivot iraTpiKiov T€ avrS) dnocTeiXai d^iav Kal TTJV rwv 'ItoA-coi/ tout^ Ifp^ivat dioiKTjffiv. — Malchus ap. Photium in C'jrp. Hist. Byznnl. y Not king of Italy, as is often said. The barbarian kings did not for several centuries cniploy terri- torial titles ; the title ' king of France,' for instance, was first used by Henry IV. Jornandes s;.ys that Odoacer never so much as assumed the insignia of royalty. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, 27 the sceptre of the world, ahd head an undivided CathoHc Churchz. To those who Hved at the time, this year (476 A.D.) was no such epoch as it has since become, nor was any impression made on men's minds commen- surate with the real significance of the event. For though it did not destroy the Empire in idea, nor wholly even in fact, its consequences were from the first great. It hastened the development of a Latin as opposed to Greek and Oriental forms of Christianity : it emancipated the Popes : it gave a new character, to the projects and government of the Teutonic rulers of the West. But the importance of remembering its formal aspect to those who witnessed it will be felt as we approach the era when the Empire was revived by Charles the Frank. Odoacer's monarchy was not more oppressive than I Odoacer. those of his neighbours in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. But the mercenary fcederati who supported it were a loose swarm of predatory tribes : themselves without cohesion, they could take no firm root in Italy. During the eighteen years of his reign no progress seems to have been made towards the re-organization of society; and the first real attempt to blend the peoples and maintain the traditions of Roman wisdom in the hands of a new and vigorous race was reserved for a more famous chief- tain, the greatest of all the barbarian conquerors, the fore- runner of the first barbarian Emperor, Theodoric the | Theodcrie. Ostrogoth. The aim of his reign, though he professed allegiance to the Eastern court which had favoured his invasion^, was the establishment of a national monarchy in Italy. Brought up as a hostage in the court of Byzan- ' Cf, Sismondi, Histoire de la famulantibus.' — TheodorictoZeno: Vbute de V Empire Occiden'ale. Jornandes, De Rebus Getick, cap. a « Nil deest nobis imperio vestro 57, 28 THE flOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, tium, he learnt to know the advantages of an orderly and cultivated society and the principles by which it must be maintained; called in early manhood to roam as a warrior- chief over the plains of the Danube, he acquired along with the arts of command a sense of the superiority of his own people in valour and energy and truth. When the defeat and death of Odoacer had left the peninsula at his mercy, he sought no further conquest, easy as it would have been to tear away new provinces from the Eastern realm, but strove only to preserve and strengthen the ancient polity of Rome, to breathe into her decaying institutions the spirit of a fresh life, and without endanger- ing the military supremacy of his own Goths, to conciliate by indulgence and gradually raise to the level of their masters the degenerate population of Italy. The Gothic nation appears from the first less cruel in war and more prudent in council than any of their Germanic brethren '^ : all that was most noble among them shone forth now in the rule of the greatest of the Amali. From his palace at Veronal, commemorated in the song of the Nibelungs, he Dante. There does not appear to be any sufficient authority for attri- buting this building to Ostrogothic times ; it is very different from the representation of Theodoric's palace which we have in the contemporary mosaics of Sant' ApoUinare in urbe. In the German legends, however, Theodoric is always the prince of Verona (Dietrich von Berne), no doubt because that city was better known to the Teutonic natirns, and because it was thither that he moved" his court when transalpine affairs required his attention. His castle there stood in the old town on the left bank of the Adige, on the height now occupied by the citadel ; b ' Unde et paene omnibus bar- baris Gothi sapientiores exstiterunt Graecisque paene consimiles.' — Jorn. cap 5. c Theodoric (Thiodorich) seems to have resided usually at Ravenna, where he died and was buried ; a re- markable building which tradition points out as his tomb stands a little way out of the town, near the rail- way station, but the porphyry sar- coj hagus, in which his body is s\ipposed to have lain, has been removed thence, and may be seen built up into the wall of the build- ing called his palace, situated close to the church of Sant' Apollina.e, and not far from the tomb of* THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, 29 issued equal laws for Roman and Goth, and bade the chap. ni. intruder, if he must occupy part of the lands, at least respect the goods and the person of his fellow-subject. Jurisprudence and administration remained in native hands: two annual consuls, one named by Theodoric, the other by the Eastern monarch, presented an image of the ancient state; and while agriculture and the arts revived in the provinces, Rome herself celebrated the visits of a master who provided for the wants of her people and preserved with care the monuments of her former splendour. With peace and plenty men's minds took hope, and the study of letters revived. The last gleam of classical literature gilds the reign of the barbarian. By the consolidation of the two races under one wise government, Italy might have been spared six hundred years of gloom and degradation. It was not so to be. Theodoric was tolerant, but toleration was itself a crime in the eyes of his orthodox subjects : the Arian Goths were and remained strangers and enemies among the Catholic Italians. Scarcely had the sceptre passed from the hands of Theodoric to his unworthy offspring, when Justinian, who had viewed with jealousy the greatness of his nominal lieutenant, determined to assert his dor- mant rights over Italy ; its people welcomed Belisarius Italy re- as a deliverer, and in the struggle that followed the race ^o"?"^''f^ by yusti- and name of the Ostrogoths perished for ever. Thus j nian. again reunited in fact, as it had been all the while united in name, to the Roman Empire, the peninsula! was divided into counties and dukedoms, and obeyed the exarch of Ravenna, viceroy of the Byzantine court, it is doubtful whether any traces of longed to the fortress erected by it remain, for the old foundations Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the wbich we now see may have be- fourteenth century. 30 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. III. The Trans- alpine pro- ¥me»s. till the arrival of the Lombards in a.d. 568 drove him from some districts, and left him only a feeble authority in the rest. Beyond the Alps, though the Roman population had now ceased to seek help from the Eastern court, the Empire's rights still subsisted in theory, and were never legally extinguished. As has been said, they were ad- mitted by the conquerors themselves : by Athaulf, when he reigned in Aquitaine as the vicar of Honorius, and recovered Spain from the Suevi to restore it to its ancient masters ; by the Visigothic kings of Spain, when they permitted the Mediterranean cities to send tribute to Byzantium; by Clovis, when, after the representatives of the old government, Syagrius and the Armorican cities, had been overpowered or absorbed, he received with de- light from the Eastern emperor Anastasius the grant of a Roman dignity to confirm his possession. Arrayed like a Fabius or Valerius in the consul's embroidered robe, the Sicambrian chieftain rode through the streets of Tours, while the shout of the provincials hailed him Augustus d. They already obeyed him, but his power was now legal- ized in their eyes, and it was not without a melancholy pride that they saw the terrible conqueror himself yield to the spell of the Roman name, and do homage to the enduring majesty of their legitimate sovereign e. '' ' Tgitur Chlodovechus ab im- peratore Anastasio codicillos de consulatu accepit, et in basilica beati Martini tunica blatea induius est et chlamyde, imponens vertici diadema . . . et ab ea die tanquani consul aut ( = et) Augustus est voci- tatus.' — Gregory of Tours, ii. 58. e Sir F. Palgrave {English Com- monwealth) considers this grant as equivalent to a formal ratification of Clovis' rule in Gaul. Haliam rates its importance lower {Middle Ages, note iii. to chap. i.). Taken in connection w^ith the grant of south-eastern Gaul to Theodebert by Justinian, it may fairly be held to shew that the influence of the Empire was still felt in these dis- tant provinces. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. 31 Yet the severed limbs of the Empire forgot by degrees their original unity. As in the breaking up of the old society, which we trace from the sixth to the eighth century, rudeness and ignorance grew apace, as language and manners were changed by the infiltration of Teutonic settlers, as men's thoughts and hopes and interests were narrowed by isolation from their fellows, as the organiza- tion of the Roman province and the Germanic tribe alike dissolved into a chaos whence the new order began to shape itself, dimly and doubtfully as yet, the memory of the old Empire, its symmetry, its sway, its civilization, must needs wane and fade. It might have perished alto- gether but for the two enduring witnesses Rome had left —her Church and her Law. The barbarians had at first associated Christianity with the Romans from whom they learned it : the Romans had used it as their only bulwark against oppression. The hierarchy were the natural leaders of the people, and the necessary councillors of the king. Their power grew with the extinction of civil government and the spread of superstition ; and when the Frank found it too valuable to be abandoned to the vanquished people, he insensibly acquired the feeHngs and policy of the order he entered. As the Empire 'fell to pieces, and the new kingdomo which the conquerors had founded themselves began to dissolve, the Church clung more closely to her unity of faith and discipline, the common bond of all Christiin men. That unity must have a centre, that centre wr.s Rome. A succession of able and zealous pontiffs ex- tended her influence (the sanctity and the writings of Gregory the Great were famous through all the West) : never occupied by barbarians, she retained her peculiar thaj-acter and customs, and laid the foundations of a Lingering influences of Rome. Relig ion 32 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, power over men's souls more durable than that which she had lost over their bodies f Only second in importance to this influence was that which was exercised by the per- manence of the old law, and of its creature the munici- pality. The barbarian invaders retained the customs of their ancestors, characteristic memorials of a rude people, as we see them in the Salic law or in the ordinances of Ina and Alfred. But the subject population and the clergy continued to be governed by that elaborate system which the genius and labour of many generations had raised to be the most lasting monument of Roman greatness. The civil law had maintained itself in Spain and Southern Gaul, nor was it utterly forgotten even in the North, in Britain, on the borders of Germany. Revised editions of the Theodosian code were issued by the Visi- Igothic and Burgundian princes. For some centuries it was the patrimony of the subject population everywhere, and in Aquitaine and Italy has outlived feudalism. The presumption in later times was that all men were to be judged by it who could not be proved to be subject to some other s. Its phrases, its forms, its courts, its subUety and precision, all recalled the strong and refined society which had produced it. Other motives, as well as those of kindness to their subjects, made the new kings favour it; for it exalted their prerogative, and the sub- ' Even so early as the middle of the fifth ceiuury, S. Leo the Great could say to the Roman people, ' Isti (sc. Petriis et Paulus) sunt qui te ad hanc gloriam pro- vexerunt ut gens sancta, jopulus electus, civitas sacerdotalis et regia, per sacram B. Petri sedem caput crbis eftecta latius praesideres reli- gione divina quam dominatione ter- rena.' — Sermon on the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul. (0pp. ap. Migne. torn. i. p. 336.) s 'lus Romanum est adhuc in viridi observantia et eo iure prs- sumitur quilibet vivere nisi adver- sum probetur.' — Maranta, quoted by Marquard Freher. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, ii mission enjoined by it on one class of their subjects soon came to be demanded from the other, by their own laws the equals of the prince. Considering attentively how many of the old institudons continued to subsist, and studying the feelings of that Ume, as they are faintly pre- served in its scanty records, it seems hardly too much to say that in the eighth century the Roman Empire still existed in the West : existed in men's minds as a power weakened, delegated, suspended, but not destroyed. " It is easy for those who read the history of an age in the light of those that followed it, to perceive that in this men erred ; that the tendency of events was wholly dif- ferent ; that society had entered on a new phase, wherein every change did more to localize authority and strengthen the aristocratic principle at the expense of the despotic. We can see that other forms of life, more full of promise for the distant future, had already begun to shew them- selves : they — with no type of power or beauty, but that which had filled the imagination of their forefathers, and now loomed on them grander than ever through the mist of centuries — mistook, as it has been said of Rienzi in later days, memories for hopes, and sighed only for the renewal of its strength. Events were at hand by which these hopes seemed destined to be gratified. CHAPTER IV. RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE. The Franks, It was towards Rome as their ecclesiastical capital that the thoughts and hopes of the men of the sixth and seventh centuries were constantly directed. Yet not from Rome, feeble and corrupt, nor on the exhausted soil of Italy, was the deliverer to arise. Just when, as we may suppose, the vision of a renewal of imperial authority in the Western provinces was beginning to vanish away, there appeared in the furthest corner of Europe, sprung of a race but lately brought within the pale of civilization, a line of chieftains devoted to the service of the Holy See, and among them one whose power, good fortune, and heroic character pointed him out as worthy of a dignity to which doctrine and tradition had attached a sanctity almost divine. Of the new monarchies that had risen on the ruins of Rome, that of the Franks was by far the greatest. In the third century they appear, with Saxons, Alemanni, and Thuringians, as one of the greatest German tribe leagues. The Sicambri (for it seems probable that this famous race was a chief source of the Frankish nation) had now laid aside their former hostility to Rome, and her future repre- sentatives were thenceforth, with few intervals, her faithful allies. Many of their chiefs rose to high place : Malarich receives froui Jovian the charge of the Western provinces; Bauto and Mellobaudes figure in the days of Theodosius and his sons; Meroveus (if Meroveus be a real name) RESTORA TION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE, 35 fights under Aetius against Attila in the great battle of Chalons ; his countrymen endeavour in vain to save Gaul from the Suevi and Burgundians. Not till the Empire was evidently helpless did they claim a share of the booty; then Clovis, or Chlodovech, chief of the Salian tribe, leaving his kindred the Ripuarians in their seats on the lower Rhine, advances from Flanders to wrest Gaul from the barbarian nations which had entered it some sixty years before. Few conquerors have had a career of more unbroken success. By the defeat of the Roman governor Syagrius he was left master of the northern provinces ; the Burgundian kingdom in the valley of the Rhone was in no long time reduced to dependence : last of all, the Visigothic power was overthrown in one great battle, and Aquitaine added to the dominions of Clovis. Nor were the Frankish arms less prosperous on the other side of the Rhine. The victory of Tolbiac led to the submission of the Alemanni : their allies the Bavarians followed, and when the Thuringian power had been broken by Theo- dorich I (son of Clovis), the Frankish league embraced all the tribes of western and southern Germany. The state thus formed, stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Inn and the Ems, was of course in no sense a French, that is to say, a Gallic monarchy. Nor, although the widest and strongest empire that had yet been founded by a Teutonic race, was it, under the Merovingian kings, a united kingdom at all, but rather a congeries of princi- palities, held together by the predominance of a single tribe and a single family, who ruled in Gaul as masters over a subject race, and in Germany exercised a sort of negemony among kindred and scarcely inferior tribes. But towards the middle of the eighth century a change began. Under the rule of Pipin of Herstal and his son D 2 A.D. 486. 36 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, Charles Martel, mayors of the palace to the last feeble Merovingians, the Austrasian Franks in the lower Rhine- land became acknowledged heads of the nation, and were able, while establishing a firmer government at home, to direct its whole strength in projects of foreign ambition. The form those projects took arose from a circumstance which has not yet been mentioned. It was not solely or even chiefly to their own valour that the Franks owed their past greatness and the yet loftier future which awaited them, it was to the friendship of the clergy and the favour of the Apostolic See. The other Teutonic nations, Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Suevians, Lombards, had been most of them converted by Arian missionaries who pro- ceeded from the Roman Empire during the short period when Arian doctrines were in the ascendant. The Franks, who were among the latest converts, were Catholics from the first, and gladly accepted the clergy as their teachers and allies. Thus it was that while the hostility of their ortho- dox subjects destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa and the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, the eager sympathy of the priesthood enabled the Franks to vanquish their Bur- gundian and Visigothic enemies, and made it compara- tively easy for them to blend with the Roman population m the provinces. They had done good service against the Saracens of Spain ; they had aided the English Boni- face in his mission to the heathen of Germany a ; and at length, as the most powerful among Catholic nations, they attracted the eyes of the ecclesiastical head of the West, FxOw sorely bested by domestic foes. Since the invasion of Alboin, Italy had groaned under * ' Denique gens Francornm dendo, sed et alios saliitifere cou- multos et fcecundissimos fructus vertendo,' says the emperor Lewij Domino attulit, non solum ere- II. in a.p. 871. RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE, Z1 a complication of evils. The Lombards who had entered along with that chief in a.d. 568 had settled in considerable numbers in the valley of the Po, and founded the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, leaving the rest of the country to be governed by the exarch of Ravenna as viceroy of the Eastern crown. This subjection was, however, little better than nominal. Although too few to occupy the whole peninsula, the invaders were yet strong enough to harass every part of it by inroads which met with no re- sistance from a population unused to arms, and without the spirit to use them in self-defence. More cruel and repulsive, if we may believe the evidence of their enemies, than any other of the Northern tribes, the Lombards were certainly singular in their aversion to the clergy, never admitting them to the national councils. Tormented by their repeated attacks, Rome sought help in vain from Byzantium, whose forces, scarce able to repel from their walls the Avars and Saracens, could give no support to the distant exarch of Ravenna. The Popes were the Emperor's subjects ; they awaited his confirmation, like other bishops; they had more than once been the victims of his anger ^. But as the city became more accustomed in independence, and the Pope rose to a predominance, real if not yet legal, his tone grew bolder than that of the Eastern patriarchs. In the controversies that had raged in the Church, he had had the wisdom or good fortune to espouse (though not always from the first) the orthodox side : it was now by another quarrel of religion that his deliverance from an unwelcome yoke was accomplished c. *> Martin, as in earlier times treatise of Radulfus de Columna Sylverius. (Ralph Colonna, or, as some think, c A singular account of the de Colounielle), Z)e/ra«s/a//o«^ /^w- origin of the separation of the peril Romani {cxxcti l.^oo). 'The Greeks ai d Latins occurs in the tyranny of Heraclius,' says he, I Italy: the Lombards, T^ Popet. 38 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. IV. Tconoclasiic •ontroversy. The Emperor Leo, born among the Isaurian moun- tains, where a purer faith may yet have lingered, and stung by the Mohammedan taunt of idolatry, determined to abolish the worship of images, which seemed fast ob- scuring the more spiritual part of Christianity. An attempt sufficient to cause tumults among the submissive Greeks, excited in Italy a fiercer commotion. The populace rose with one heart in defence of what had become to them more than a symbol : the exarch was slain : the Pope, though unwilling to sever himself from the lawful head and protector of the Church, must yet excommunicate the prince whom he could not reclaim from so hateful a heresy. Liudprand, king of the Lombards, improved his opportunity : falling on the exarchate as the champion of images, on Rome as the minister of the Greek Emperor, he overran the one, and all but succeeded in capturing the other. The Pope, escaped for the moment, but saw his peril ; placed between a heretic and a robber, he turned his gaze beyond the Alps, to a Catholic chief who had just achieved a signal deliverance for Christendom on the field of Poitiers. Gregory II had already opened communications with Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, and virtual ruler of the Frankish realm^. As the crisis • provoked a revolt of the Eastern nations. They could not be re- duced, because the Greeks at the same time began to disobey the Roman Pontiff, receding, like Jero- boam, from the true faith. Others among these schismatics (apparently with the view of strengthening their poHtical revolt) carried their heresy further and founded Mohammedan- ism.' Similarly, the Franciscan Marsilius of Padua (circa 1 3 24) says that Mohammed, 'a rich Persian,' invented his religion to keep the East from returning to allegiance to Rome. It is worth remarking that few, if any, of the earlier historians (from the tenth to the fifteenth century) refer to the Emperors of the West • from Constantine to Augustulus : the very existence of this Western line seems to have been even in the eighth or ninth century altogether forgotten. *! Anastasius, VitcE Pontificum Romanoriwi, i. ap. Muratori. RESTORA TION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE, 39 becomes more pressing, Gregory III finds in the same quarter his only hope, and appeals to him, in urgent letters, to haste to the succour of Holy Church®. Some accounts add that Charles was offered, in the name of the Roman people, the office of consul and patrician. It is at least certain that here begins the connection of the old imperial seat with the rising German power : here first the pontiff leads a political movement, and shakes off the ties that bound him to his legitimate sovereign. Charles died before he could obey the call; but his son Pipin (surnamed the Short) made good use of the new friend- ship with Rome. He was the third of his family who had ruled the Franks with a monarch's full power : it seemed time to abolish the pageant of Merovingian royalty ; yet a departure from the ancient line might shock the feelings of the people. A course was taken whose dangers no one then foresaw : the Holy See, now for the first time invoked as an international power, pronounced the depo- sition of Childeric, and gave to the royal office of his successor Pipin a sanctity hitherto unknown ; adding to the old Frankish election, which consisted in raising the chief on a shield amid the clash of arms, the Roman diadem and the Hebrew rite of anointing. The com- pact between the chair of Peter and the Teutonic throne was hardly sealed, when the latter was summoned to dis- charge its share of the duties. Twice did Aistulf the Lombard assail Rome, twice did Pipin descend to the rescue: the second time at the bidding of a letter written in the name of St. Peter himself f. Aistulf could make no e Letter in Codex Carolinus, in ^ Letter in Cod. Carol. (Mur, Muratori's Scriplores Rerum I tali- R. S. I. iii [2.] p. 96), a strange zarum, vol. iii. (part 2nd), ad- mixture of earnest adjur.itsons, dressed * Subregulo Carole' dexterous appeals to Frankish CHAP. IV. The Popes: appeal 10 the Frankt. 40 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE resistance ; and the Frank bestowed on the Papal chair all that belonged to the exarchate in North Italy, receiving as the meed of his services the title of Patrician?. As a foreshadowing of the higher dignity that was to follow, this title requires a passing notice. Introduced by Constantine at a time when its original meaning had been long forgotten, it was designed to be, and for awhile remained, the name not of an office but of a rank, the highest after those of emperor and consul. As such, it was usually conferred upon provincial governors of the first class, and in time also upon barbarian potentates whose vanity the Roman court might wish to flatter. Thus Odoacer, Theodoric, the Burgundian king Sigismund, Clovis himself, had all received it from the Eastern em- peror ; so too in still later times it was given to Saracenic and Bulgarian princes h. In the sixth and seventh cen- turies an invariable practice seems to have attached it to the Byzantine viceroys of Italy, and thus, as we may con- jecture, a natural confusion of ideas had made men take it to be, in some sense, an official title, conveying an ex- tensive though undefined authority, and implying in par- pride, and long scriptural quota- tions: 'Declaratum qui pe est quod super omnes gentes vestra Franco- rum gens prona mihi Apostolo Dei Petro exstitit, et ideo ecclesiam quam mihi Dominus tradidit vobis per manus Vicarii mei commen- davi. ' g The exact date when Pipin received the title cannot be made out. Pope Stephen's next letter (p 96 of Mur. iii.) is addressed • Pipino, Carolo et Caro'omanno patriciis.' And so the Cbronicon Casinense (Mur. iv. 273) says it was first given to Pipin. Gibbon can hardly be right in attributing it to Charles Martel, although one or two documents may be quoted in which it is used of him As one of these is a letter of Pope Gregory IPs, the expl uiation may be that the title was offered or in- tended to be offered to him, al- though never accepted by him. ^ The title of Patrician appears even in the remote West : it stands in a charter of Ina the West Saxon king, and in one given by Richard of Normandy in A.D. 10x5. Du- cange, s. V. RESTORA TION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE. ticular the duty of overseeing the Church and promoting her temporal interests. It was doubtless with such a meaning that the Romans and their bishop bestowed it upon the Prankish kings, acting quite without legal right, for it could emanate from the emperor alone, but choosing it as the title which bound its possessor to render to the Church support and defence against her Lombard foes. Hence the phrase is always ' Patricius Romanorum ;' not, as in former times, ' Patricius ' alone : hence it is usually associated with the terms ' defensor ' and ^protector! And since 'defence' implies a corresponding measure of obedi- ence on the part of those who profit by it, there must have been needed to the new patrician more or Less of the positive authority in Rome, although not such as to ex- tinguish the supremacy of the emperor. So long indeed as the Franks w^ere separated by a hostile kingdom from their new allies, this control re- mained little better than nominal. But when on Pipin's death the restless Lombards again took up arms and menaced the possessions of the Church, Pipin's son Charles or Charlemagne swept down like a whirlwind from tne Alps at the call of Pope Hadrian, seized king Desiderius in his capital, himself assumed the Lombard crown, and made northern Italy thenceforward an in- tegral part of the Prankish empire. Proceeding to Rome at the head of his victorious army, the first of a long line of Teutonic kings who- were to find her love more deadly than her hate, he was received by Hadrian with distin- guished honours, and welcomed by the people as their leader and deliverer. Yet even then, whether out of policy or from that sentiment of reverence to which his ambitious mind did not refuse to bow, he was moderate in claims of jurisdiction, he yielded to the pontiff the Extinction of the Lom- bard king- dom by Charles king of the Franks. 42 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. IV. A.D. 774. Charles and Hadrian. place of honour in. processions, and renewed, although in the guise of a lord and conqueror, the gift of the Exarchate and Pentapolis, which Pipin had made to the Roman Church twenty years before. It is with a strange sense, half of sadness, half of amusement, that in watching the progress of this grand historical drama, we recognize the meaner motives by which its chief actors were influenced. The Prankish king and the Roman pontiff were for the time the two most powerful forces that urged the movement of the world, leading it on by swift steps to a mighty crisis of its fate, themselves guided, as it might well seem, by the purest zeal for its spiritual welfare. Their words and acts, their whole character and bearing in the sight of expectant Christendom, were worthy of men destined to leave an indelible impress on their own and many suc- ceeding ages. Nevertheless in them too appears the undercurrent of vulgar human desires and passions. The lofty and fervent mind of Charles was not free from the stirrings of personal ambition : yet these may be excused, if not defended, as almost inseparable from an intense and restless genius, which, be it never so un- sel'fish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix upon every- thing its gfasp and raise out of everything its monument. The policy of the Popes was prompted by motives less noble. Ever since the extinction of the Western Empire had emancipated the ecclesiastical potentate from secular control, the first and most abiding object of his schemes and prayers had been the acquisition of territorial wealth in the neighbourhood of his capital. He had indeed a sort of justification — for Rome, a city with neither trade nor industry, was crowded with poor, for whom it de- volved on the bishop to provide. Yet the pursuit was RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE, 43 one which could not fail to pervert the purposes of the Popes and give a sinister character to all they did. It was this fear for the lands of the Church far more than for religion or the safety of the city — neither of which were really endangered by the Lombard attacks — that had prompted their passionate appeals to Charles Martel and Pipin; it was now the well grounded hope of having these possessions confirmed and extended by Pipin's greater son that made the Roman ecclesiastics so forward in his cause. And it was the same lust after worldly wealth and pomp, mingled with the dawning prospect of an independent principality, that now began to seduce them into a long course of guile and intrigue. For this is probably the very time, although the exact date cannot be established, to which must be assigned the extraor- dinary forgery of the Donation of Constantine, whereby it was pretended that power over Italy and the whole West had been granted by the first Christian Emperor to Pope Sylvester and his successors in the Chair of the Apostle. For the next twenty- four years Italy remained quiet. The government of Rome was carried on in the name of the Patrician Charles, although it does not appear that he sent thither any official representative; while at the same time both the city and the exarchate continued to admit the nominal supremacy of the Eastern Emperor, employing the years of his reign to date documents. luA.D 796 Leo the Third succeeded Pope Hadrian, and signalized his devotion to the Frankish throne by sending to Charles the banner of the city and the keys of the holiest of all Rome's shrines, the confession of St. Peter, asking that some officer should be deputed to the city to receive from the people their oath of allegiance to the Accession of Pope Leo III, AJ). 796. 44 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, CHA». IV. Belief in the Roman Empire not txtinct. Patrician. He had soon need to seek the Patrician's help for himself. In a,d. 798 a sedition broke out : the Pope, going in solemn procession from the Lateran to the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, was attacked by a band of armed men, headed by two officials of his court, nephews of his predecessor; was wounded and left for dead, and with difficulty succeeded in escaping to Spoleto, whence he fled northward into the Frankish lands. Charles had led his army against the revolted Saxons : thither Leo following overtook him at Pader- born in Westphalia. The king received with respect his spiritual father, entertained and conferred with him for some time, and at length sent him back to Rome under the escort of Angilbert, one of his trustiest ministers; promising to follow ere long in person. After some months peace was restored in Saxony, and in the autumn of 799 Charles descended from the Alps once more, while Leo revolved deeply the great scheme for whose accomplishment the time was now ripe. Three hundred and twenty-four years had' passed since the last Caesar of the West resigned his power into the hands of the senate, and left to his Eastern brother the sole headship of the Roman world. To the latter Italy had from that time been nominally subject ; but it was only during one brief interval between the death of Totila the last Ostrogothic king and the descent of Alboin the first Lombard, that his power had been really effective. In the further provinces, Gaul, Spain, Britain, it was only a memory. But the idea of a Roman Empire as a neces- sary part of the world's order had not vanished : it had been admitted by those who seemed to be destroying it ; it had been cherished by the Church ; was still recalled RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE, 45 by laws and customs ; was dear to the subject popula- tions, who fondly looked back to the days when slavery was at least mitigated by peace and order. We have seen the Teuton endeavouring everywhere to identify himself with the system he overthrew. As Goths, Bur- gundians, and Franks sought the tide of consul or patri- cian, as the Lombard kings when they renounced their Arianism styled themselves Flavii, so even in distant England the fierce Saxon and Anglian conquerors used the names of Roman dignities, and before long began to call themselves imperatores and hasiJeis of Britain. Within the last century and a half the rise of Moham- medanism i had brought out the common Chrisdanity of Europe into a fuller relief. The false prophet had left one religion, one Empire, one Commander of the faithful : the Christian commonwealth needed more than ever an efficient head and centre. Such leadership it could nowise find in the Court of the Bosphorus, grow- ing ever feebler and more alien to the West. The name of ' respublica,' permanent at the elder Rome, had never been applied to the Eastern Empire. Its government was from the first half Greek, half Asiatic ; and had now drifted away from its ancient traditions into the forms of an Oriental despotism. Claudian had already sneered at 'Greek QuiritesJ:' the general use, since Heraclius's reign, of the Greek tongue, and the difference of manners and usages, made the taunt now more deserved. The Pope had no reason to wish well to the Byzantine princes, corresponded exactly to the two Khalifates of Bagdad and Cordova. * After the iramlatio ad Fran- cos of A.D. 800, the two Empires i ' Plaudentem cerne seiiatum Et Byzantines proceres, Graiosque Quirites.* In Eulrop. il. 135, Motives 0/ the Pope* 46 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. who while insulting his v/eakness had given him no help against the savage Lombards, and who for nearly seventy years ^ had been contaminated by a heresy the more odious that it touched not speculative points of doctrine but the most familiar usages of worship. In North Italy their power was extinct : no pontiff since Zacharias had asked their confirmation of his election: nay, the ap- pointment of the intruding Frank to the patriciate, an office which it belonged to the Emperor to confer, was of itself an act of rebellion. Nevertheless their rights subsisted : they were still, and while they re- tained the imperial name, must so long continue, titular sovereigns of the Roman city. Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal; without the Roman Empire there could not be a Roman, nor by necessary consequence (as men thought) a Catholic and Apostolic Churchl. For, as will be shewn more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought : Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian state : they were but two names for the same thing. Thus urged, the Pope took a step which some among his predecessors are said to have already contemplated'", and towards l« Several Emperors during this period had been patrons of images, as was Irene at the moment of which I write : the stain neverthe- less adhered to their government as a whole. 1 To a modern eye there is of course no necessary connection be- tween the Roman Empire and a catholic and apostolic Church; in fact, tho two ihings seem rather, such has been the impression made on us by the long struggle of church and state, in their nature mutually antagonistic. The interest of history lies not least in this, that it shews us how men have at dif- ferent limes entertained wholly different notions respecting the re- lation to one another of the same ideas or the same institutions. m Monachus Sangallensis, Be Geslis Karoli ; in P-rtz, Monu- vienta GermanicB Hislorica. RESTOIiA TION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE, 47 which the events of the last fifty years had pointed. The moment was opportune. The widowed empress Irene, equally famous for her beauty, her talents, and her crimes, had deposed and blinded her son Constantine VI : a woman, an usurper, almost a parricide, sullied the throne of the world. By what right, it might well be asked, did the factions of Byzantium impose a master on the original seat of empire? It was time to provide better for the most august of human offices: an election at Rome was as valid as at Constantinople — the possessor of the real power should also be clothed with the outward dignity. Nor could it be doubted where that possessor was to be found. The Frank had been always faithful to Rome : his baptism was the enlistment of a new bar- barian auxiliary. His services against Arian heretics and Lombard marauders, against the Saracen of Spain and the Avar of Pannonia, had earned him the title of Cham- pion of the Faith and Defender of the Holy See. He was now unquestioned lord of Western Europe, whose subject nations, Keltic and Teutonic, were eager to be called by his name and to imitate his customs". In Charles, the hero who united under one sceptre so many races, who ruled all as the vicegerent of God, the pontiff might well see, as later ages saw, the new golden head of a second image », erected on the ruins of that whose mingled iron and clay seemed crumbling to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks of Constantinople. " Monachus Sangallensis; ut supra. So Pope Gregory the Great two centuries earlier : ' Quanto caeteros homines regia dignitas intecedit, tantocaeterarum gentium rcgna regni Francorum culmen excelHt.' Ep. v. 6, ° Alciatus, De Formula imperii Romani. 48 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. IV. Coronation of Charles a! fiome, ■ hjo. 800. At length the Frankish host entered Rome. The Pope's cause was heard; his innocence, already vindi- cated by a miracle, was pronounced by the Patrician in full synod ; his accusers condemned in his stead. Charles remained in the city for some weeks ; and on Christmas- day. A.D. 800 P, he heard mass in the basilica of St. Peter. On the spot where now the gigantic dome of Bramante and Michael Angelo towers over the buildings of the modern city, the spot which tradition had hallowed as that of the Apostle's martyrdom, Constantine the Great had erected the oldest and stateliest temple of Christian Rome. Nothing could be less like than was this basilica to those northern cathedrals, shadowy, fantastic, irregular, crowded with pillars, fringed all round by clustering shrines and chapels, which are to most of us the types of mediaeval architecture. In its plan and decorations, in the spacious sunny hall, the roof plain as that of a Greek temple, the long row of Corinthian columns, the vivid mosaics on its walls, in its brightness, its sternness, its simplicity, it had preserved every feature of Roman art, and had remained a .perfect expression of Roman character^. Out of the transept, a flight of steps led up to the high altar underneath and just beyond the great arch, the arch of triumph as it was called : behind in the semicircular apse sat the clergy, rising tier above tier around its walls ; in the midst, high above the rest, and looking down past the altar over the multitude, was placed the bishop's throne r, itself the curule chair of some p Or rather, according to the then prevailing practice of beg'n- ning the year from Christmas-day, A.D. 801. 1 An elaborate description of old St. Peter's may be found in Buusen's and V\2i\.ntx\Beschreibung der Stadt Rom; with which compare Bun- sen's work on the Basilicas of Rome. f The primitive custom was for the bishop to sit in the centre of RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE. 49 forgotten magistrates. From that chair the Pope now rose, as the reading of the Gospel ended, advanced to where Charles — who had exchanged his simple Prankish dress for the sandals and the chlamys of a Roman patrician* — knelt in prayer by the high altar, and as in the sight of all he placed upon the brow of the barbarian chieftain the diadem of the Caesars, then bent in obeisance before him, the church rang to the shout of the multitude, again free, again the lords and centre of the world, * Karolo Augusto a Deo coronato magno et pacifico imperatori vita et victoria".' In that shout, echoed by the Franks without, was pronounced the union, so long in preparation, so mighty in its consequences, of the Roman and the Teuton, of the memories and the civiliza- tion of the South with the fresh energy of the North, and from that moment modern history begins. the apse, at the central point of the east end of the church (or, as it would be more correct to say, the end furthest from the door), just as the judge had done in those law courts on the model of which the first basilicas were constructed. This arrangement may still be seen in some of the churches of Rome, as well as elsewhere in Italy ; no- where better than in the churches of Ravenna, particular y the beau- tiful one of Sant' Apullinare in Classe, and in the cathedral of Torcello, near Venice. • On this chair were represented the labours of Hercules and the signs of the zodiac. It is believed at Rome to be the veritable chair of the Apostle himself, and what- ever may be thought of such an antiquity as this, it can be sa'is- tactorily traced back to the third or fourth century of Christianity. (The story that it is inscribed with verses from the Koran is, I believe, without foundation.) It is of oak and acacia wood, and is now enclosed in a gorgeous casing of bronze, and placed aloft at the extremity of St. Peter's, just over the spot where a bishop's chair would in the old arrangement of the basilica have stood. The sar- cophagus in which Charles himself lay, till the French scattered his bones abroad, had carved on it the rape of Proserpine. It may still be seen in the gallery of the basilica at Aachen. * Eginhard, Vita Karoli. " The coronation scene is de- scribed in all the annals of the time, to which it is therefore needless to refer more particularly. CHAPTER V. EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES. The coronation of Charles is not only the central event of the Middle Ages, it is also one of those very few events of which, taking them singly, it may be said that if they had not happened, the history of the world would have been different. In one sense indeed it has scarcely a parallel. The assassins of Julius Coesar thought that they had saved Rome from monarchy, but monarchy came inevitable in the next generation. The conversion of Constantine changed the face of the world, but Christianity was spreading fast, and its ultimate triumph was only a question of time. Had Columbus never spread his sails, the secret of the western sea would yet have been pierced by some later voyager : had Charles V broken his safe-conduct to Luther, the voice silenced at Wittenberg would have been taken up by echoes else- where. But if the Roman Empire had not been restored in the West in the person of Charles, it would never have been restored at all, and the inexhaustible train of con- sequences for good and for evil that followed could not have been. Why this was so may be seen by examining the history of the next two centuries. In that day, as through all the Dark and Middle Ages, two forces were striving for the mastery. The one was the instinct of separation, disorder, anarchy, caused by the ungoverned impulses and barbarous ignorance of the great bulk of mankind; the other was that passionate longing of the EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES. 51 better minds for a formal unity of government, which had its historical basis in the memories of the old Roman Empire, and its most constant expression in the devotion to a visible and catholic Church. The former tendency, as everything shews, was, in politics at least, the stronger, but the latter, used and stimulated by an extraordinary genius like Charles, achieved in the year 800 a victory whose results were never to be lost. When the hero was gone, the returning wave of anarchy and barbarism swept up violent as ever, yet it could not wholly obliterate the past : the Empire, maimed and shattered though it was, had struck its roots too deep to be overthrown by force, and when it perished at last, perished from inner decay. It was just because men felt that no one less than Charles could have won such a triumph over the evils of the time, by framing and establishing a gigantic scheme of govern- ment, that the excitement and hope and joy which the coronation evoked were so intense. Their best evidence is perhaps to be found not in the records of that time itself, but in the cries of lamentation that broke forth when the Empire began to dissolve towards the close of the ninth century, in the marvellous legends which at- tached themselves to the name of Charles the Emperor, a hero of whom any exploit was credible ^ in the devout admiration wherewith his German successors looked back to, and strove in all things to imitate, their all but super- human prototype. Charles — and some of them are very good — may be found in the book of the Monk of St, Gal!. Many refer to his dealings with the bishops, towards whom he is described as acting like a good- humoured schoolmaster. * Before the end of the tenth century we find the monk Bene- dict of Soracte ascribing to Charles an expedition to Palestine, and other marvellous e.\ploits. The romance which passes under the name of Ari.hbishop Turpin is well known. All the best stories about B a 52 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, Import of the corona- tion. As the event of a.d. 800 made an unparalleled impres- sion on those who lived at the tim.e, so has it engaged the attention of men in succeeding ages, has been viewed in the most opposite lights, and become the theme of inter- minable controversies. It is better to look at it simply as it appeared to the men who witnessed it. Here, as in so many other cases, may be seen the errors into which jurists have been led by the want of historical feeling. In rude and unsettled states of society men respect forms and obey facts, while careless of rules and principles. In Eng- land, for example, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it signified very little whether an aspirant to the throne was next lawful heir, but it signified a great deal whether he had been duly crowned and was supported by a strong party. Regarding the matter thus, it is not hard to see why those who judged the actors of a.d. 800 as they would have judged their contemporaries should have mis- understood the nature of that which then came to pass. Baronius and Bellarmine, Spanheim and Conring, are advocates bound to prove a thesis, and therefore believing it ; nor does either party find any lack of plausible argu- mentsK But civilian and canonist alike proceed upon strict legal principles, and no such principles can be found in the case, or applied to it. Neither the instances cited by the Cardinal from the Old Testament of the power of priests to set up and pull down princes, nor those which shew the earlier Emperors controlling the bishops of Rome, really meet the question. Leo acted not as having alone the right to transfer the crown; the practice of hereditary succession and the theory of popular election ^ Baronius, ^««., ad ann. 800; Spanhemius, De ficta tramln ione Be'larniiiius, De fratisla'ione im- imperii; Coiiriiigins, De imperio perii Romani adversjis Illyricum ; Romano Gennatiico. EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES. 53 would liave equally excluded such a claim ; he was the spokesman of the popular will, which, identifying itself with the sacerdotal power, hated the Greeks and was grateful to the Franks. Yet he was also something more. The act, as it specially affected his interests, was mainly his work, and without him would never have been brought about at all. It was natural that a confusion of his secular functions as leader, and his spiritual as consecrating priest, should lay the foundation of the right claimed afterwards of raising and deposing monarchs at the will of Christ's vicar. The Emperor was passive throughout; he- did not, as in Lombardy, appear as a conqueror, but was re- ceived by the Pope and the people as a friend and ally. Rome no doubt became his capital, but it had already obeyed him as Patrician, and the greatest fact that stood out to posterity from the whole transaction was that the crown was bestowed, was at least imposed, by the hands of the pontiff. He seemed the trustee and depositary of the imperial authority c. The best way of shewing the thoughts and motives of those concerned in the transaction is to transcribe the narratives of three contemporary, or almost contemporary annalists, two of them German and one Italian. The Annals of Lauresheim say : — * And because the name of Emperor had now ceased among the Greeks, and their Empire was possessed by a woman, it then seemed both to Leo the Pope himself, and to all the holy fathers who were present in the selfsame council, as well as to the rest of the Christian people*, that they ought to take to be Emperor Charles king of the Franks, who held Rome herself, where the Caesars had always been wont to sit, and all the other regions which ^ See especially Greeuwcod, Cathedra Petri, vol. iii. p. 109. Con'empa- rary ac- 54 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, he ruled through Italy and Gaul and Germany; and in- asmuch as God had given all these lands into his hand, it seemed right that with the help of God and at the prayer of the whole Christian people he should have the name of Emperor also. Whose petition king Charles willed not to refuse, but submitting himself with all humility to God, and at the prayer of the priests and of the whole Christian people, on the day of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ h*e took on himself the name of Emperor, being consecrated by the lord Pope Leo^.' Very similar in substance is the account of the Chronicle of Moissac (ad ann. 8oi): — * Now when the king upon the most holy day of the Lord's birth was rising to the mass after praying before the confession of the blessed Peter the Apostle, Leo the Pope, with the consent of all the bishops and priests and of the senate of the Franks and likewise of the Romans, set a golden crown upon his head, the Roman people also shouting aloiid. And when the people had made an end of chanting the Laudes, he was adored by the Pope after the manner of the emperors of old. For this also was done by the will of God. For while the said Em- peror abode at Rome certain men were brought unto him, who said that the name of Emperor had ceased among the Greeks, and that among them the Empire was held by a woman called Irene, who had by guile laid hold on her son the Emperor, and put out his eyes, and taken the Empire to herself, as it is written of Athaliah in the Book of the Kings; which when Leo the Pope and all the assem- bly of the bishops and priests and abbots heard, and the senate of the Franks and all the elders of the Romans, they took counsel with the rest of the Christian people, d Ann. Latiresb., ap. Pertz, M. G. H. i. EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES, 55 that they should name Charles king of the Franks to be Emperor, seeing that be held Rome the mother of empire where the Caesars and Emperors were always used to sit ; and that the heathen might not mock the Christians if the name of Emperor should have ceased among the Christians^.' These two accounts are both from a German source : that which follows is Roman, written probably within some fifty or sixty years of the event. It is taken from the Life of Leo III in the VitcE Pontificum Romanorum, compiled by Anastasius the papal librarian. * After these things came the day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and all men were again gathered to- gether in the aforesaid basilica of the blessed- Peter the Apostle : and then the gracious and venerable pontiff did with his own hands crown Charles with a very precious crown. Then all the faithful people of Rome, seeing the defence that he gave and the love that he bare to the holy Roman Church and her Vicar, did by the will of God and of the blessed Peter, the keeper of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, cry with one accord with a loud voice, ' To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, the great and peace-giving Emperor, be life and victory.' While he, before the holy confession of the blessed Peter the Apostle, was invoking divers saints, it was proclaimed thrice, and he was chosen by all to be Emperor of the Romans. Thereon the most holy pontiff anointed Charles with holy oil, and likewise his most excellent son to be king, upon the very day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ; and when the mass was finished, then after the Hass the most serene lord Emperor offered gifts V e Apud Pertz, M. G. H. i. f Vu. 88a. having no national basis, was the weakest of the three, and soon dissolved into the separate sovereignties of Italy, Burgundy, and Lotharingia, or, as we call it, Lorraine. On the tangled history of the period that follows it is not possible to do more than touch. After passing from one branch of the Carolingian line to another c, the imperial sceptre was at last possessed and disgraced by Charles the Fat, who united all the dominions of his great-grandfather. This unworthy heir could not avail himself of recovered territory to strengthen or defend the expiring monarchy. He was driven out of Italy in a.d. 887, and his death in 888 has been usually taken as the date of the extinction of the Carolingian Empire of the West. The Germans, still attached to the ancient line, chose Arnulf, an illegitimate Carolingian, for their king : he entered Italy and was crowned Emperor by his partizan Pope Formosus, in 896. But Germany, divided and helpless, was in no condition to maintain her power over the southern lands : Arnulf retreated in haste, leaving Rome and Italy to sixty years of stormy independence. That time was indeed the nadir of order and civiliza- tion. From all sides the torrent of barbarism which Charles the Great had stemmed was rushing down upon his empire. The Saracen wasted the Mediterranean coasts, and sacked Rome herself. The Dane and Norse- man swept the Atlantic and the North Sea, pierced France and Germany by their rivers, burning, slaying, carrying off into captivity : pouring through the Straits c Singularly enough, when one Charles the Bald was the only thinks of modern claims, the dy- West Prankish Emperor, and reigned nasty of France (Francia occiden- a very short time. taLs) had the least share of it. CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS. 79 of Gibraltar, they fell upon Provence and Italy. By land, while Wends and Czechs and Obotrites threw off the German yoke and threatened the borders, the wild Hun- garian bands, pressing in from the steppes of the Caspian, dashed over Germany like the flying spray of a new wave of barbarism, and carried the terror of their battleaxes to the Apennines and the ocean. Under such strokes the already loosened fabric swiftly dissolved. No one thought of common defence or wide organization : the strong built casLlcs, the weak became their bondsmen, or took shelter under the cowl : the governor — count, abbot, or bishop — tij^htened his grasp, turned a delegated into an independent, a personal into a territorial autho- rity, and hardly owned a distant and feeble suzerain. The grand vision of a universal Christian empire was utterly lost in the isolq^tion, the antagonism, the in- creasing localization of all powers : it might seem to have been but a passing gleam from an older and better world. In Germany, the greatness of the evil worked at last its cure. When the male line of the eastern branch of the Carolingians had ended in Lewis (surnamed the Child), son of Arnulf, the chieftains chose and the people accepted Conrad the Franconian, and after him Henry the Saxon duke, both representing the female line of Charles. Henry laid the foundations of a firm monarchy, driving back the Magyars and Wends, recovering Lo- tharingia, founding towns to be centres of orderly life and strongholds against Hungarian irruptions. He had meant to claim at Rome his kingdom's rights, rights which Conrad's weakness had at least asserted by the demand of tribute ; but death overtook him, and the plan was left to be fulfilled by Otto his son. CHAP. VI. The Ger- man King- dom. Henry the Fowler. 8o THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. VI. Otto the Great. Italian Emperors. The Holy Roman Empire, taking the name in the sense which it commonly bore in later centuries, as de- noting the sovereignty of Germany and Italy vested in a Germanic prince, is the creation of Otto the Great. Substantially, it is true, as well as technically, it was a prolongation of the Empire of Charles ; and it rested (as will be shewn in the sequel) upon ideas essentially the same as those which brought about the coronation of A.D. 800. But a revival is always more or less a revo- lution: the one hundred and fifty years that had passed since the death of Charles had brought with them changes which made Otto's position in Germany and Europe less " commanding and less autocratic than his predecessor's. With narrower geographical limits, his Empire had a less plausible claim to be the heir of Rome's universal do- minion ; and there were also differences in its inner character and structure sufficient to justify us in con- sidering Otto (as he is usually considered by his country- men) not a mere successor after an interregnum, but rather a second founder of the imperial throne in the West. Before Otto's descent into Italy is described, something must be said of the condition of that country, where cir- cumstances had again made possible the plan of Theo- doric, permitted it to become an independent kingdom, and attached the imperial title to its sovereign. The bestowal of the purple on Charles the Great was not really that * translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks,' which it was afterwards described as having been. It was not meant to settle the office in one nation or one dynasty: there was but an extension of that principle of the equality of all Romans which had made Trajan and Maximin Emperors. The * arcanum CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS, 8i imperii* whereof Tacitus speaks, ''posse principem alibi qua?n RomcB fieri ^' had long before become alium quam Romanum ; and now, the names of Roman and Christian having grown co-extensive, a barbarian chieftain was, as a Roman citizen, eligible to the office of Roman Emperor, Treating him as such, the people and pon- tiff of the capital had in the vacancy of the Eastern throne asserted their ancient rights of election, and while attempting to reverse the act of Constantine, had re- established the division of Valentinian. The dignity was therefore in strictness personal to Charles; in point of fact, and by consent, hereditarily transmissible, just as it had formerly become in the families of Constantine and Theodosius. To the Frankish crown or nation it was by no means legally attached, though they might think it so; it had passed to their king only because he was the greatest European potentate, and might equally well pass to some stronger race, if any such appeared. Hence, when the line of Carolingian Emperors ended in Charles the Fat, the rights of Rome and Italy might be taken to revive, and there was nothing to prevent the citizens from choosing whom they would. At that memorable era (a.d. 888) the four kingdoms which this prince had united fell asunder ; West France, where Odo or Eudes then began to reign, was never again united to Germany; East France (Germany) chose Arnulf; Burgundy « split up into two principalities, in one of which (Transjurane) Rudolf proclaimed himself king, while the other (Cis- jurane with Provence) submitted to BosO^; while Italy * Tac. Hist. i. 4. gundy, see Appendix, Note A. « For an account of the various *■ The accession of Boso took applications of the name Bur- place in a.d. 877, eleven years G 82 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. was divided between the parties of Berengar of Friuli and Guido of Spoleto. The former was chosen king by the estates of Lombardy; the latter, and on his speedy death his son Lambert, was crowned Emperor by the Pope. Arnulfs descent chased them away and vindicated the claims of the Franks, but on his flight Italy and the anti-German faction at Rome became again free. Be- rengar w^as made king of Italy, and afterwards Emperor. Lewis of Burgundy, son of Boso, renounced his fealty to Berengar, and procured the imperial dignity, whose vain title he retained through years of misery and exile, till A.D. 9288. None of these Emperors were strong enough to rule well even in Italy ; beyond it they were not so much as recognised. The crown had become a bauble with which unscrupulous Popes dazzled the vanity of princes whom they summoned to their aid, and soothed the credulity of their more honest supporters. The de- moralization and confusion of Italy, the shameless pro- fligacy of Rome and her pontifi"s during this period, were enough to prevent a true Italian kingdom from being built up on the basis of Roman choice and national unity. Italian indeed it can scarcely be called, for these Emperors before Charles the Fat's death. But the new kingdom could not be considered legall)'- settled until the latter date, and its establish- ment is at any rate a part of that general break up of the great Carolingian Empire whereof a.d. 88S marks the crisis. See Appen- dix A at the end. It is a curious mark of the reve- rence paid to the Carolingian blood, that Boso, a powerful and ambi- tious prince, seems to have chiefly rested his claims on the fact that he was husband of Irmingard, daughter of the Emperor Lewis II. Baron de Gingins la Sarraz quotes a charter of his (drawn up when he seems to have doubted whether to ca'l himself king), whi.ch begins, ' Ego Boso Dei gratia id quod sum, et coniux mea Irmingardis proles imperialis.' s Lewis had been surprised by Berengar at Verona, blinded, and forced to take refuge in his own kino;Jom of Provence. CAROLING/AN AND ITALIAN- E3IPER0RS. 83 were still in blood and manners Teutonic, and akin rather to their Transalpine enemies than their Romanic subjects. But Italian it might soon have become under a vigorous rule which would have organized it within and knit it together to resist attacks from without. And therefore the attempt to establish such a kingdom is remarkable, for it might have had great consequences; might, if it had prospered, have spared Italy much suffering and Germany endless waste of strength and blood. He who from the summit of. Milan cathedral sees across the misty plain the gleaming turrets of its icy wall sweep in a great arc from North to West, may well wonder that a land which nature has so severed from its neighbours should, since history begins, have been always the victim of their intrusive tyranny. In A.D. 924 died Berengar, the last of these phantom Emperors. After him Hugh of Burgundy, and Lothar his son, reigned as kings of Italy, if puppets in the hands of a riotous aristocracy can be so called. Rome was meanwhile ruled by the consul or senator Alberic h, who had renewed her never quite extinct republican institu- tions, and in the degradation of the papacy was almost absolute in the city. Lothar dying, his widow Adelheid i was sought in marriage by Adalbert son of Berengar II, the new Italian monarch. A gleam of romance is shed on the Empire's revival by her beauty and her adventures. Rejecting the odious alliance, she was seized by Berengar, escaped with difficulty from the loathsome prison where his barbarity had confined her, and appealed h Alberic is called variously sena- dolf, king of Transjurane Bur- tor, consul, patrician, and prince of gundy. She was at this time in the Romans, her nineteenth year. i Adelheid was daughter of Ru- G 2 Adelheid Qr/een of Italy. 84 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, Otto'sfirst expedition into Italy, A.D. 951. Invitntion sens by the Pope to Otto. to Otto the German king, the model of that knightly virtue which was beginning to shew itself after the fierce brutality of the last age. He listened, descended into Lombardy by the Adige valley, espoused the injured queen, and forced Berengar to hold liis kingdom as a vassal of the East Frankish crown. That prince was turbulent and faithless ; new complaints reached ere long his liege lord, and envoys from the Pope offered Otto the imperial title if he would re-visit and pacify Italy. The proposal was well-timed. Men still thought, as they had thought in the centuries before the Carolingians, that the Empire was suspended, not extinct ; and the desire to see its effective power restored, the belief that without it the world could never be right, might seem better grounded than it had been before the coronation of Charles., Then the imperial name had recalled only the faint memories of Roman majesty and order; now it was also associated with the golden age of the first Frankish Emperor, when a single firm and just hand had guided the state, reformed the church, repressed the ex- cesses of local power : when Christianity had advanced against heathendom, civilizing as she went, fearing neither Hun nor Saracen. One annalist tells us that Charles was elected 'lest the pagans should insult the Christians, if the name of Emperor should have ceased among the Christians K The motive would be bitterly enforced by the calamities of the last fifty years. In a time of disintegration, confusion, strife, all the longings of every wiser and better soul for unity, for peace and law, for some bond to bring Christian men and Christian states together against the common enemy of the faith, were Motives for reviving the Empire, f^ Chron. Moiss., in Pertz ; M. G. H. i. 305. CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS, 8.; but so many cries for the restoration of the Roman Empire^. These were the feelings that on the field of IVIerseburg broke forth in the shout of * Henry the Em- peror:' these the hopes of the Teutonic host when after the great deliverance of the Lechfeld they greeted Otto, conqueror of the Magyars, as ' Imperator Augustus, Pater Patriae i^.* The anarchy which an Emperor was needed to heal was at its worst in Italy, desolated by the feuds of a crowd of petty princes. A succession of infamous Popes, raised by means yet more infamous, the lovers and sons of Theodora and Marozia, had disgraced the chair of the Aposde, and though Rome herself might be lost to decency. Western Christendom was roused to anger and alarm. Men had not yet learned to satisfy their consciences by separating the person from the office. The rule of Alberic had been succeeded by the wildest confusion, and demands were raised for the renewal of that imperial authority which all admitted in theory i^, and which nothing but the resolute opposition of Alberic himself had prevented Otto from claiming in 951. From the Byzantine Empire, whither Italy was more than once tempted to turn, nothing could be hoped; its dangers 1 See especially the poem of dissolution of the Carolingian Florus the Deacon (printed in Empire. It is too long for quo- the Benedictine collection and in tation. I give four lines here : — Migne), a bitter lament over the 'Quid faciant populi quos ingens alhiit Hister, Quos Rhenus Rhodanusque rigant, Ligerisve, Padusve, Quos omnes dudum tenuit concordia nexos, Foedere nunc rupto divortia moesta fatigmt.* ™ Witukind, A?inales, in Pertz. phant cries of the German army. It may, however, be doubted whe- " Cf. esp. the ' Libellus de ini' ther the annalist is not here giving peratoria poiestate iu urbe Rotna,' a very free rendering of the trium- in Pertz. Condition of Italy. 86 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE, from foreign enemies were aggravated by the plots of the court and the seditions of the capital ; it was becoming more and more alienated from the West by the Photian schism and the question regarding the Procession of the Holy Ghost, which that quarrel had started. Germany was extending and consolidating herself, had escaped domestic perils, and might think of reviving ancient claims. No one could be 'more willing to revive them than Otto the Great. His ardent spirit, after waging a bold and successful struggle against the turbulent mag- nates of his German realm, had engaged him in wars wilh the surrounding nations, and was now captivated by the vision of a wider sway and a loftier world-embracing dignity. Nor was the prospect which the papal offer opened up less welcome to his people. Aachen, their capital, was the ancestral home of the house of Pipin: their sovereign, although himself a Saxon by race, titled himself king of the Franks, in opposition to the Frankish rulers of the Western branch, whose Teutonic character was disappearing among the Romans of Gaul ; they held themselves in every way the true representatives of the Carolingian power, and accounted the period since Arnulfs death nothing but an interregnum which had suspended but not impaired their rights over Rome. * For so long,' says a writer of the time, ' as there remain kings of the Franks, so long will the dignity of the Roman Empire not wholly perish, seeing that it will abide in its kings o,' The recovery of Italy was therefore to German o ' Licet videamus Roraanorum peribit, quia stabit in regibus regnum in maxima paric jam de- suis.' — Liher de Anticbrisio, ad- striictum, tameu quamdiu reges dressed by Adso, abbot of Moutier- Francorum duraverint qui Roma- en-Der, to Qi.ecn Gerbeiga (circa mim iniperium tenere debent, dig- ad. 1,50). iiius Roaiani imperii ex toto uon CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS. 87 eyes a righteous as well as a glorious design : approved c«^« v'- by the Teutonic Church which had lately been negotiating with Rome on the subject of missions to the heathen; embraced by the people, who saw in it an accession of strength to their young kingdom. Everything smiled on Otto's enterprise, and the connection which was destined to bring so much strife and woe to Germany and to Italy was welcomed by the wisest of both countries as the beginning of a better era. Whatever were Otto's own feelings, whether or not Descent of he felt that he was sacrificing, as modern writers have ^'^° ^*f thought that he did sacrifice, the greatness of his German jtaiy, kingdom to the lust of universal dominion, he shewed no hesitation in his acts. Descending from the Alps with an overpowering force, he was acknowledged as king of Italy at PaviaP; and, having first taken an oath to protect the Holy See and respect the liberties of the city, advanced to Rome. There, with Adelheid -^^ corona- his queen, he was crowned by John XII, on the day ^^JJ^^ of the Purification, the second of February, a.d. 962. [ A.D.96a. The details of his election and coronation are unfor- tunately still more scanty than in the case of his great predecessor. Most of our authorities represent the act as of the Pope's favour Q, yet it is plain that the p From the money which Otto struck in Italy, it seems probable that he did occasionally use the title of king of Italy or of the Lombards. That he was crowned can hardly be considered quite certain. 1 ' A papa imperator ordinatur,' says Hermannus Contractus * Do- minum Ottonem, ad hoc usque vocatum regem, non solum Ro- mano sed et pcene totii'S Europae populo acclamante imperatorem consecravit Augustum.' — Annal. Quedlinh., ad ann. 962. ' Benedic- tionem a domno apostolico lohanne, cuius rogatione hue venit, cum sua coniuge promeruit imperialem ac patronus Romanae effectus est ec- clesise.' — Thietmar. 'Acclamatione totius Romani populi ab apostolico lohanne, tilio Alberici, imperator et Augustus vocatur et ordinatur.* — Continuator Reginonis. And simi- larly the other ahualis.*. 88 THE IIOL V ROMAM EMPIRE. consent of the people was still thought an essential part of the ceremony, and that Otto rested after all on his host of conquering Saxons. Be this as it may, there was neither question raised nor opposition made in Rome; the usual courtesies and promises were exchanged between Emperor and Pope, the latter owning himself a subject, and the citizens swore for the future to elect no pontiff without Otto's consenL CHAPTER VII. THEORY OF THE MEDIiEVAL EMPIRE. These were the events and circumstances of the time : 'et us now look at the causes. The restoration of the Empire by Charles may seem to be sufficiently accounted for by the width of his conquests, by the peculiar con- nection which already subsisted between him and the Roman Church, by his commanding personal character, by the temporary vacancy of the Byzantine throne. The causes of its revival under Otto must be sought deeper. Making every allowance for the favouring incidents* which have already been dwelt upon, there must have been some further influence at work to draw him and his successors, Saxon and Frankish kings, so far from home in pursuit of a barren crown, to lead the Italians to accept the dominion of a stranger and a barbarian, to make the Empire itself appear through the whole Middle Age not what it seems now, a gorgeous anachronism, but an institution divine and necessary, having its foundations m the very nature and order of things. The empire of the elder Rome had been splendid in its life, yet its judgment was written in the misery to which it had brought the provinces, and the helplessness that had invited the attacks of the barbarian. Now, as we at least can see, it had long been dead, and the course of events was adverse CHAP, Vfl. Why th- revival ( f the Empire was de&ired. 90 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, .X lb tones. '^ to its revival. Its actual representatives, the Roman people, were a turbulent rabble, sunk in a profligacy notorious even in that guilty age. Yet not the less for all this did men cling to the idea, and strive through long ages to stem the irresistible time-current, fondly believing that they were breasting it even while it was sweeping them ever faster and faster away from the old order into a region of new thoughts, new feelings, new forms of life. Not till the days of the Reformation was the illusion dispelled. The explanation is to be found in the state of the human mind during these centuries. The _ Middle. Ages were jessentially unpolitical. Ideas as familiar to the commonwealths of antiquity as to ourselves, ideas of the common good as the object of the State, of the rights of the people, of the comparative merits of different forms of government, were to them, though sometimes carried out in fact, in their speculative form unknown, perhaps incomprehensible. Feudalism was the one great institu- tion to which those times gave birth, and feudalism was a social and a legal system, only indirectly and by coil- sequence a political one. Yet the human mind, so far from being idle, was in certain directions never more active; nor was it possible for it to remain without general conceptions regarding the relation of men to each other in this world. Such conceptions were neither made an expression of the actual present condition of things nor drawn from an induction of the past; they were partly inherited from the system that had preceded, partly evolved from the principles of that metaphysical theology which was ripening into scholasticism ^ Now * I do not mean to say that the deavoured to set forth in the fol- system of ideas which it is en- lowing pages was complete in this THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE. 91 the two great ideas which expiring antiquity bequeathed to the ages that followed were those of a World- Monarchy and a ^^^orld-Religion. Before the conquests of Rome, men, with little know- .edge of each other, with no experience of wide political unionb, had held differences of race to be natural and irremovable barriers. Similarly, religion appeared to them a matter pur ely local and n ational ; and as there were gods of the hills and gods of the valleys, of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced in its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of another country who worshipped other gods as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings. Such feelings, if keenest in the East, frequently shew themselves in the early records of Greece and Italy : in Homer the hero who wanders over the unfruitful sea glories in sacking the cities particular form, either in the days of Charles, or those of Otto, or those of Frederick Barbarossa. It seems to have been constantly growing and decaying from the fourth century to the sixteenth, the relative promi- nence of its cardinal doctrines vary- ing from age to age. But, just as the painter who sees the ever-shifting lights and shades play over the face of a wide landscape faster than his brush can place them on the canvas, in despair at representing their exact position at any single nio- lucnt, contents h-mself with paiiit- ing the elfects that are broadest and most permanent, and at giving rather the impression which the scene makes on him than every detail of the scene itself, so here the best and indeed the only prac- ticable course seems to be that of oCtting forth in its most self-con- sistent form the body of ideas and beliefs on which the Empire rested, although this form may not be ex- actly that which they can be as- serted to have worn in any one century, and although the illustra- tions adduced may have to be taken sometimes from earlier, sometimes from later writers. As the doctrine of the Empire was in its essence the same during the whole M dille Age, such a general description as is attempted here may, I venture to hope, be found substantially true for the tenth as well as for the fourteen h century, b Empires like the Persian did nothing to assimilate the subjecf races, who retained their own laws and customs, sometimes their own princes, and were bound only to serve in the armies and fill the treasury of the Great King. CHAP. VII. The World- Religion. 92 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. of the stranger c; the primitive Latins have the same word for a foreigner and an enemy : the exclusive systems of Egypt, Hindostan, China, are only more vehement expres- sions of the belief which made Athenian philosophers look on a state of wtir between Greeks and barbarians as natural d, and defend slavery on the same ground of the original diversity of the races that rule and the races that serve. The Roman dominion giving to many nations a common speech and law, smote this feeling on its politi- cal side ; Christianity more effectually banished it from the soul by substituting for the variety of local pan- theons the belief in one God, before whom all men are equal®. ItJs_,oii the religious life that nations repose. Because divinity was divided, humanity had been divided likewise ; the doctrine of the unity of God now enforced the unity of man, who had been created in His image^. The first lesson of Christianity was love, a love that was to join in one body those whom suspicion and prejudice and pride of race had hitherto kept apart. There was thus formed by the new religion a community of the faithful, a Holy Empire, designed to gather all men into its bosom, and standing opposed to the manifold polytheisms of the older Od. iii. 72: — .... 7} ixaipiSlais aX&XrjaOc^ oXa re KrfC Trjpes, vnelp dXa, roir aXoavTai xf^vx^s -napOi^ivoi, KaKov d\Xo8airoia-i (pipovTCSi Cf. Od. ix. 39 : and the Hymn to 1-he Pythian Apollo, 1. 274. So in II. V. 214, dWuTpios (ptos. ^ Plato, in the beginning of the Laws, represents it as natural be- tween all states : iroKffibs (Jwaei virdpx^i iipos dirdoas rds TroKeis. « See especially Acts xvii. 26 ; Gal. iii. 28; Eph. ii. II sqq., iv. 36; Col. iii. II. * This is drawn out by Laurent, Histoire du Droit des Gens; and jEgidi, Der Furstenralh nacb detn Luneviller Frieden. THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE. 93 world, exactly as the universal sway of the Caesars was contrasted with the innumerable kingdoms and republics that had gone before it. The analogy of the two made them appear parts of one great world-movement toward unity : the coincidence of their boundaries, which had begun before Constantine, lasted long enough after him to associate them indissolubly together, and make the names of Roman and Christian convertible s. (Ecume- nical councils, where the whole spiritual body gathered itself from every part of the temporal realm under the presidency of the temporal head, presented the most visible and impressive examples of their connection h. The language of civil government was, throughout the West, that of the sacred writings and of worship; the greatest mind of his generation consoled the faithful for the fall of their earthly commonwealth Rome, by describing to them its successor and representative, the CHAP. ^'1. 8 ' Romanes enim vocitant homi- nes nostrae religionis.' — Gregory of Tours, quoted by ^gidi, from A. F. Pott, Ei^say on the Words ' R'6- miscb,' ' Romanisch,' ' Roman,' ^ Romafttiscb.' So in the Middle Ages, 'Ptufiafot is used to mean Christians, as opposed to "EWrjvcs, heathens. Cf Ducange, • Roman! olim dicti qui alias Christiani vel eliam Catho- lici.' '^ As a reviewer of a former edition has understood this passage as meaning that ' people imagined the Christian religion was to last for ever because the Holy Roman Empire was never to decay,' it may be worth while to say that this is far from being the purport of the argument which this chapter was designed to state. The converse would be nearer the truth : — 'people imagined the Holy Roman Empire was never to decay, because the Christian religion was to last for ever.' The phenomenon may perhaps be stated thus : — Men who were already disposed to btlieve the Roman Em- pire to be eternal for one set of rea- sons, came to believe the Christian Church tobe eternal for another and to them more impressive set of rea- sons. Seeing the two institutions allied in fact, they took their al- liance and connection to be eternal also ; and went on for centuries believing in the necessary existence of the Roman Empire because they believed in its necessary union with tke Catholic Church. 94 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. Preserva- tion of the unify of the Church. MedicBval Theology requires One Visible Catholic Church. 'city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God\' Of these two parallel unities, that of the political and that of the religious society, meeting in the higher unity of all Christians, which may be indifferently called Catho- licity or Romanism (since in that day those words would have had the same meaning), that only which had been en- trusted to the keeping of the Church survived the storms of the fifth century. Many reasons may be assigned for the firmness with which she clung to it. Seeing one institu- tion after another falling to pieces around her, seeing how countries and cities were being severed from each other by the irruption of strange tribes and the increasing diffi- culty of communication, she strove to save religious fellow- ship by strengthening the ecclesiastical organization, by drawing tighter every bond of outward union. Necessities of faith were still more powerful. Truth, it was said, is one, and as it must bind into one body all who hold it, so it is only by continuing in that body that they can pre- serve it. Thus with the growing rigidity of dogma, which may be traced from the council of Jerusalem to the council of Trent, there had arisen the idea of supplement- ing revelation by tradition as a source of doctrine, of exalting the universal conscience and belief above the individual, and allowing the soul to approach God only through the universal consciousness, represented by the sacerdotal order : principles still maintained by one branch of the Church, and for some at least of which far weightier reasons could be assigned then, in the paucity of written ' Augustine, in the De Civitate batur et libris sancti Augustini, Dei. His influence, great through prsecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei all the Middle Ages, was greater on praetitulati sunt.' — Eginhard, Vita no one than on Charles. — ' Delecta- Karoli, cap. 24. THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE. 95 records and the blind ignorance of the mass of the people than any to which their modern advocates have recourse. There was another cause yet more deeply seated, and which it is hard adequately to describe. It was not ex- actly a want of faith in the unseen, nor a shrinking fear which dared not look forth on the universe alone : it was rather the powerlessness of the untrained mind to realize the idea as an idea._aiid-JiKe_iiLit : it was the tendency to see every thingin the concrete, to turn the parable into a fact, the doctrine into its most literal application, the symbol into the essential ceremony ; the tendency which intruded earthly Madonnas and saints between the wor- shipper and the spiritual Deity, and could satisfy its devotional feelings only by visible images even of these : which conceived of man's aspirations and temptations as the result of the direct actions of angels and devils : which expressed the strivings of the soul after purity by the search for the Holy Grail : which in the Crusades sent myriads to win at Jerusalem by earthly arms the sepulchre of Him whom they could not serve in their own spirit nor approach by their own prayers. And therefore it was that the whole fabric of mediaeval Christianity rested upon the idea of the Visible Church. Such a Church could be in nowise local or limited. /To acquiesce in the establish- ment of National Churches would have appeared to those men, as it must always appear when scrutinized, contra- dictory to the nature of a religious body, opposed to the genius of Christianity, defensible, when capable of defence at all, only as a temporary resource in the presence of in- superable difficulties. ' Had this plan, on which so many have dwelt with complacency in later times, been proposed either to the primitive Church in its adversity or to the dominant Church of the ninth century, it would have been ^ 96 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. I Idea of I political I unity vp- \heldby the rejected with horror; but since there were as yet nc nations, the plan was one which did not and could not present itself. The Visible Church was therefore the Church Universal, the whole congregation of Christian men dispersed throughout the world. Now of the Visible Church the emblem and stay was the priesthood ; and it was by them, in whom dwelt what- ever of learning and thought was left in Europe, that the second great idea whereof mention has been made — the belief in one universal temporal state — was preserved. As a matter of fact, that state had perished out of the West, and it might seem their interest to let its memory be lost. They, however, did not so calculate their interest. So far from feeling themselves opposed to the civil authority in the seventh and eighth centuries, as they came to do in the twelfth and thirteenth, the clergy were fully persuaded that its maintenance was indispensable to their own wel- fare. They were, be it remembered, at first Romans them- selves living by the Roman law, using Latin as their proper tongue and imbued with the idea of the historical con- nection of the two powers. And by them chiefly was that idea expounded and enforced for many generations, by none more earnestly than by Alcuin of York, the adviser of Charles K The limits of those two powers had become confounded in practice : bishops were princes, the chief ministers of the sovereign, sometimes even the leaders of their flocks in war : kings were accustomed to summon ecclesiastical councils and appoint to ecclesiastical offices. * • Quapropter universorum pre- cihus fideljum optandum est, ut in omnem gloriam vestram extendatur imperium, ut scilicet catholica fides . . . veraciter in una confessione cunctorum cordibus intigatur, qua- tenus summi Regis donante pietate eadem sanctae pacis et perfecta; cari- tatis omnes ubique regat et custodial unitas ' Quoted by Waitz (Deutscbi Ver/assungsgeschicble, ii. 182) froni an unprinted letter of Alcuin. THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE. 97 But, like the unity of the Church, the doctrine of a universal monarchy had a theoretical as well as an his- torical basis, and may be traced up to those metaphysical Influence oj the meta - pbysics of ideas out of which the system we call Realism developed , tie time itself. The ^beginnings of p hilosop hy, in those times were logical ; and its first efforts were to distribute and classify : system, subordijiation, uniformity, appeared to be that \yhich was most desirable in thought as in life. The search after causes became a search after principles of classification ; since simplicity and truth were held to consist not in an analysis of thought into its demerits, nor in an observation of the process of its growth, but rather in a sort of genealogy of notions, a statement of the relations of classes as containing or excluding each other. These classes, genera or species, were not them- selves held to be conceptions formed by the mind from phenomena, nor mere accidental aggregates of objects grouped under and called by some common name ; they were real things, existing independently of the individuals who composed them, recognized rather than created by the human mind. In this view, Humanity is an essential quality present in all men, and making them what they are : as regards it they are therefore not many but one, the differences between individuals being no more than accidents. The whole truth of their being lies in the universal property, which alone has a permanent and: independent existence. The common nature of the individuals thus gathered into one Being is typified in its two aspects, the spiritual and the secular, by two persons, the World-Priest and the World-Monarch, who present on earth a similitude of the Divine unity. For, as we have seen, it was only through its concrete and sym- bolic expression that a thought could then be appre- upon the \^^ theory of a World- State, 98 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. bended^ Although it was to unity in religion that the cle- rical body was both by doctrine and by practice attached, they found this inseparable from the corresponding unity in politics. They saw that every act of man has a social and public as well as a moral and personal bearing, and con- cluded that the rules which directed and the powers which rewarded or punished must be parallel and similar, not so much two powers as different manifestations of one and the same. That the souls of all Christian men should be guided by one hierarchy, rising through successive grades to a supreme head, while for their deeds they were answerable to a multitude of local, unconnected, mutually irresponsible potentates, appeared to them neces- sarily opposed to the Divine order. As they could not imagine, nor value if they had imagined, a communion of the saints without its expression in a visible Church, so in matters temporal they recognized no brotherhood of spirit without /the bonds of form, no universal humanity save in the image of a universal State i^. In this, as in so much 1 A curious illustration of this tendency of mind is afforded by the descriptions we meet with of Learning or Theology (Studmm) as a concrete existence, having a visible dwelling in the University of Paris. The three great powers which rule human life, says one writer, the Popedom, the Empire, and Learning, have been severally entrusted to the three foremost nations of Europe : Italians, Ger- mans, French. ' His siquidem tribus, scilicet sacerdotio imperio et studio, tanquam tribus virtutibus, videlicet naturali vitaH et scientiali, catholica ecclesia spiritualiter mirificatur, augmentatur et regitur. His ita- que tribus, tanquam fundamento, pariete et tecto, eadem ecclesia tanquam materialiter proficit. Et sicut ecclesia materialis uno tan- tum fundamento et uno tecto eget, parietibus vero quatuor, ita im- perium quatuor habet parietes, hoc est, quatuor imperii sedes, Aquis- granum, Arelatum, Mediolanum, Romam.' — Jordanis Chronica ; ap. Schardius, Sylloge Tractatuum. And see DolHnger, Die Vergangenbeit und Gegenwart der kaiboliscben Theologie, p. 8. ™ ' Una est sola respublica totius populi Christiani, ergo de necessitate erit et unus solus princeps et rex illius reipublicae, statutus et stabili- tus ad ipsius fidei et populi Chris- tiani dilatationem et defensionem, THEORY OP THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE, 99 else, the men of the Middle Ages were the slaves of the letter, unable, with all their aspirations, to rise out of the concrete, and prevented by the very grandeur and bold- ness of their conceptions from carrying them out in practice against the enormous obstacles that met them. Deep as this belief had struck its roots, it might never have risen to maturity nor sensibly affected the progress of events, had it not gained in the pre-existence of the monarchy of Rome a definite shape and a definite pur- pose. It was chiefly by means of the Papacy that this came to pass. When under Constantine the Christian Church was framing her organization on the model of the state which protected her, the bishop of the metropolis perceived and improved the analogy between himself and the head of the civil government. The notion that the chair of Peter was the imperial throne of the Church had dawned upon the Popes very early in their history, and grew stronger every century under the operation of causes already specified. Even before the "^Empire of the West had fallen, St. Leo the Great could boast that to Rome, exalted by the preaching of the chief of the Aposdes to be a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal city, there had been appointed a spiritual dominion wider than her earthly sway". In a.d. 476 Rome ceased to be the political capital of the Western countries, and the Papacy, inheriting no small part of the Emperor's power, Ex qua ratione concludit etiam ccclesiam.*—Engelbert (abbot of Ad- Augustinus (Z)e Civitate Dei, lib. mont in Upper Austria), De Ortu xix.) quod extra ecclesiam nunquam et Fine Imperii Romani (circa fuit nee potuit nee poterit esse 1 3 10). verum impenum, etsi fuerint im- peratores qualitercumque et secun- dum quid, non simpliciter, qui fueruut extra fidem Catholicam et In this 'de necessitate thing is included. ° See note f, p. 32. every- Tbe ideal state sup- posed to he embodied in the Roman Empire, II 2 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. drew to herself the reverence which the name of the city still commanded, until by the middle of the eighth, or, at latest, of the ninth century she had perfected in theory a scheme which made her the exact coun- terpart of the departed despotism, the centre of the hierarchy, absolute mistress of the Christian world. The character of that scheme is best set forth in the sin- gular document, most stupendous of all the mediaeval forgeries, which under the name of the Donation of Constantine commanded for seven centuries the un- questioning belief of mankind «. Itself a portentous falsehood, it is the most unimpeachable evidence of the thoughts and beliefs of the priesthood which framed it, some time between the middle of the eighth and the middle of the tenth century. It tells how Constantine the Great, cured of his leprosy by the prayers of Sylvester, resolved, on the fourth day from his baptism, to forsake the ancient seat for a new capital on the Bosphorus, lest the continuance of the secular government should cramp the freedom of the spiritual, and how he bestowed there- with upon the Pope and his successors the sovereignty over Italy and the countries of the West. But this is not all, although this is what historians, in admiration of its splendid audacity, have chiefly dwelt upon. The edict proceeds to grant to the Roman pontiff and his clergy a series of dignities and privileges, all of them enjoyed by the Emperor and his senate, all of them shewing the same desire to make the pontifical a copy of the imperial office. The Pope is to inhabit the Lateran palace, to wear the diadem, the collar, the purple cloak, to carry o This is admirably brought out by ^gidi, Ber Fursenratb nacb dem Luneviller Frieden, THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE, lOI the sceptre, and to be attended by a body of chamberlains. Similarly his clergy are to ride on white horses and receive the honours and immunities of the senate and patricians p. The notion which prevails throughout, that the chief of the religious society must be in every point conformed to "papacy ana his prototype the chief of the civil, is the key to all the | Empire. thoughts and acts of the Roman clergy ; not less plainly seen in the details of papal ceremonial than it is in the Interdepen- dence of gigantic scheme of papal legislation. The Canon law was intended by its authors to reproduce and rival the imperial jurisprudence; a correspondence was traced P See the original forgery (or rather the extracts which Gratian gives from it) in the Corpus luris Canonici, Dist. xcvi. cc. 13, 14: • Et sicut nostram terrenam im- perialem potentiam, sic sacrosanc- tam Romanam ecclesiam decre- vimus veneranter honorari, et am- plius quam nostrum imperium et terrenum thronum sedem beati Petri gloriose exahari, tribuentes ei po- testatem et glorias dignitatem atque vigorem et honorificentiam impe- rialem .... Beato Sylvestro patri noGtro summo pontifici et un ver- sali urbis Roma; papae, et omnibus eius successoribus pontificibus. qui usque in finem mundi in sede beati Petri erunt sessuri, de prsesenti contradimus palatiuni imperii nostri Lateranense, de.'nde diadema, vidc- hcet coronam capitis nostri, simulque phrygiuni, necnon et supeihumerale, verum etiam et chlamydem pur- puream et tunicam coccineam, et omnia imperialia indumenta, sed et dignitatem imperialem prasidentium cquitum, conferentes etiam ct im> perialia sceptra, simulque cuncta signa atque banda et diversa orna- meuta imperialia et omnem pro- cessionem imperialis culminis et gloriam potestatis nostrae . . Et sicut imperialis militia omatur ita et clerum sanctae Romanae eccle- siae ornari decernimus. . . . Unde ut pontificalis apex non vilescat sed magis quam terreni imperii dignitas gloria et potentia decoretur, ecce tam palatium nostrum quam Ro- manam urbem et omnes Italiae seu occidentahum regionum provincias loca et civitates beatissimo papae Sylvestro universali papae con- tiadimus atque relinquimus. . . , Ubi enim principatus sacerdotum et Christianae religionis caput ab imperatore coelesti constitutum est, iu>tum non est ut illic imptrator terrenus habeat potestatem.' The practice of kissing the Pope's foot was adopted in imita- tion of the old imperial court. It was afterwards revived by the Ger- man Emperors. I02 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. VII. The Roman Empire revived in a new cha- racter. between its divisions and those of the Corpus Juris Civilis, and Gregory IX, who was the first to consolidate it into a code, sought the fame and received the title of the Justi- nian of the Church. But the wish of the clergy was always, even in the weakness or hostility of the temporal power, to imitate and rival, not to supersede it ; since they held it the necessary complement of their own, and thought the Christian people equally imperilled by the fall of either. Hence the reluctance of Gregory II to break with the Byzantine princes q, and the maintenance of their titular sovereignty till a.d. 800 : hence the part which the Holy See played in transferring the crown to Charles, the first sovereign of the West capable of fulfilling its duties ; hence the grief with which its weakness under his succes- sors was seen, the gladness when it descended to Otto as representative of the Frankish kingdom. Up to the era of a.d. 8co there had been at Con- stantinople a legitimate historical prolongation of the Roman Empire. Technically, as we have seen, the election of Charles, after the deposition of Constan- tine VI, was itself a prolongation, and maintained the old rights and forms in their integrity. But the Pope, though he knew it not, did far more than effect a change of dynasty when he rejected Irene and crowned the barbarian chief. Restorations are always delusive. As well might one hope to stop the earth's course in her orbit as to arrest that ceaseless change and movement in human affairs which forbids an old institution, sud- 1 DolHnger has shewn in a recent work {Die Papst-Fabeln des Mittel- alters) that the common belief that Gregory II excited the revolt against Leo the Iconoclast is unfounded. So Anastasius, 'Ammonebat (sc. Gregorius Secundus) ne a fide vel amore Romani imperii desisterent. — VitcB Fomif. Rom. THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE, 103 denly transplanted into a new order of things,. frx)ai~filling its ancient place and. serving its former ends. The dic- tatorship at Rome in the second Punic war was not more unlike the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar, nor the States-general of Louis XIII to the assembly which his unhappy descendant convoked in 1789, than was the imperial office of Theodosius to that of Charles the Frank ; and the seal, ascribed to a.d. 800, which bears the legend ' Renovatio Romani Imperii r,' expresses, more justly perhaps than was intended by its author, a second birth of the Roman Empire. It is not, however, from Carolingian times that a proper view of this new creation can be formed. That period was one of transition, of fluctuation and uncer- tainty, in which the office, passing from one dynasty and country to another, had not time to acquire a settled character and claims, and was without the power that would have enabled it to support them. From the coro- nation of Otto the Great a new period begins, in which the ideas that have been described as floating in men's minds took clearer shape, and attached to the imperial title a body of definite rights and definite duties. It is this new phase, the Holy Empire, that we have now to consider. *■ Of this curious seal, a leaden one, preserved at Paris, a figure is given upon the cover of this volume. There are very few monuments of that age whose genuineness can be considered altogether beyond doubt; but this seal has many respectable authorities in its favour. See, among others, Le Blanc, Disserta- tion bislorique sur quelques Mon- noies de Charlemagne, Paris, 1689; J. M. Heineccius, De Veterihus Germanorum aliarumque nationum sigillis. Lips. 1 709 ; Anastasius, VitcB Pontificum Romanorum, ed. Vignoli, Romae, 175^; Golz, Deuiscblands Kayser-Munzen des Mittelalters, Dresden, 1827; and the authorities cited by Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgescbichte, iii. 179,8.4. 104 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. Position andfunc- lions of the Emperor, The realistic philosophy, and the needs of a time when the only notion of civil or religious order wa s submission io .aiithority, required the World- State to be a monarchy ; tradition, as well as the continuance of certain institu- tions, gave the monarch the name of Roman Emperor. A king could not be universal sovereign, for there were many kings : the Emperor must be, for there had never been but one Emperor; he had in older and brighter days been the actual lord of the civilized world ; the seat of his power was placed beside that of the spiritual auto- crat of Christendom ^. His functions will be seen most clearly if we deduce them from the leading principle of mediaeval mythology, the exact correspondence of earth and heaven. As God, in the midst of the celestial hierarchy, ruled blessed spirits in paradise, so the Pope, His vicar, raised above priests, bishops, metropolitans, reigned over the souls of mortal men below. But as God is Lord of earth as well as of heaven, so must he (the Imperator coelesiis *) be represented by a second earthly viceroy, the Emperor {Imperator terrenus t), whose authority shall be of and for this present life. And as in this present world the soul cannot act save through the 8 ' Praeterea mirari se dilecta fraternitas tua quod noii Fran- corum set Romanorum imperalores nos appellemus ; set scire te con- veiiit quia nisi Romanorum impera- tores essemus, utique nee Fran- corum. A Romanis enim hoc nomen et dignitatem assumpsimus, apud quos profecto primum tantae culmen sub.imitatis effii'sit,' &c. — Letter of the Emperor Lewis II to Basil the Emperor at Constan'inople, from Cbron. Salernit., ap. Mu'at. S. R. L * ' Illam {sc. Romanam eccle- siam) soli;s ille fundavit, et super petram fidei mox nascentis erexit, qui beato aeternae vitae clavigero terreni simul et coelestis imperii iura commisit.* — Corpus luris Canonici, Dist. xxii. c. i. The expression is not tlncommdn in mediaeval writers. So ' unum est imperium Patris et Filii et Spiritui Sancti, cuius est pars ecclesia con- stituta in terris,' in Lewis II's letter. THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE, 105 body, while yet the body is no more than an instru- ment and means for the soul's manifestation, so must there be a rule and care of men's bodies as well as of their souls, yet subordinated always to the well-being of that which is the purer and the more enduring. It is under the emblem of soul and body that the relation of the papal and imperial power is presented to us throughout the Middle Ages". The Pope, as God's vicar in matters spiritual, is to lead men to eternal life; the Emperor, as vicar in matters temporal, must so con- trol them in their dealings with one another that they may be able to pursue undisturbed the spiritual life, and thereby attain the same supreme and common end of everlasting happiness. In the view of this object his chief duty is to maintain peace in the world, while towards the Church his position is that of Advocate, a title borrowed from the practice adopted by churches and monasteries of choosing some powerful baron to protect their lands and lead their tenants in war v. The « * Merito summus Pontifex Ro- manus episcopus did potest rex et sacerdos. Si enim domitius noster lesus Christus sic appellatur, non videtur incongruum suuni vocare successorem. Corporale et tempo- rale ex spirituali et perpetuo de- pendet, sicut corporis operatio ex virtute animae. Sicut ergo corpus per aniniam habet esse virtutem et operationem, ita et temporalis iuris- dictio priiicipum per spiritualem Petri et successorum eius/ — St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principttm. ^ ' Nonne Romana ecclesia tene- tur imperatori tanqiiam suo patrouo, et imperator ecclesiam fovere et defensare tanquam suus vere pa- tronus ? certe sic Patronis vero concessum est ut praelatos in ecclesiis sui patronatus eligant. Cum ergo imperator onus sentiat patronatus, ut qui tenetur eam de- fendere, sentire debet honorem et emolumentum.* I quote this from a curious document in Goldast's collection of tracts {Monarchia Im- perii), entitled ' Letter of the four Universities, Paris, Oxford, Prague, and the" Romana generalitas ," to the Emperor Wenzel and Pope Urban,' A.r>. 1380. The title can scarcely be right, but if the document is, as in all probability it is, not later than the fifteenth century, its being io6 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. VII. Correspond- ence and harmony of the spiritual and tem- poral powers. functions of Advocacy are twofold : at home to make the Christian people obedient to the priesthood, and to execute their decrees upon heretics and sinners ; abroad to propagate the faith among the heathen, not sparing to use carnal weapons^. Thus does the Emperor answer in every point to his antitype the Pope, his power being yet of a lower rank, created on the analogy of the papal, as the papal itself had been modelled after the elder Empire. The parallel holds good even in its details ; for just as we have seen the churchman assuming the crown and robes of the secular prince, so now did he array the Emperor in his own ecclesiastical vestments, the stole and the dalmatic, gave him a clerical as well as a sacred character, removed his office from all nar- rowing associations of birth or country, inaugurated him by rites every one of which was meant to symbolize and enjoin duties in their essence religious. Thus the Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the same thing, in two aspects ; and Catholicism, the principle of the universal Christian society, is also Romanism; that is, rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its universality ; manifesting itself in a mystic misdescribed, or even its being a fensionem et provectionem sanctae forgery, does not make it less valu- universalis ecclesiae hodie Augustum able as an evidence of men's ideas, sacra vimus.' — JaiTe, Regesta Ponti- » So Leo III in a charter issued ficum Romanorum, ad ann. 800. on the day of Charles's coronation : So, indeed, Theodulf of Orleans, * , . . . actum in prsesentia gloriosi a contemporary of Charles, ascribes atque excellentissimi filii nostri to the Emperor an almost p ipal au- Caroli quern auctore Deo in de- thority over the Church itself:— ' Cceli habet hie (sc. Papa) claves, proprias te iussit habere; Tu regis ecclesiae, nam regit ille poll ; Tu regis eius opes, clerum populiimque gubernas, Hie te coelicolas ducet ad usque choros.' In D. Bouquet, v. 415. THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE, 107 dualism which corresponds to the two natures of its Founder. As divine and eternal, its head is the Pope, to whom souls have been entrusted ; as human and tem- poral, the Emperor, commissioned to rule men's bodies and acts. In nature and compass the government of these two potentates is the same, differing only in the sphere of its working ; and it matters not whether we call the Pope a spiritual Emperor or the Emperor a secular Pope. Nor, though the one office is below the other as far as man's life on earth is less precious than his life hereafter, is therefore, on the older and truer theory, the imperial authority delegated by the papal. For, as has been said already, God is represented by the Pope not in every capacity, but only as the ruler of spirits in heaven: as sovereign of earth, He issues His com- mission directly to the Emperor. Opposition between two servants of the same King is inconceivable, each being bound to aid and foster the other : the co-operation of both being needed in all that concerns the welfare of Christendom at large. This is the one perfect and Vnlon of self-consistent scheme of the union of Church and State ; ^*"^^* ^"^ for, taking the absolute coincidence of their limits to be self-evident, it assumes the infallibility of their joint go- vernment, and derives, as a corollary from that infalli- bility, the duty of the civil magistrate to root out heresy and schism no less than to punish treason and rebellion. It is also the scheme which, granting the possibility of their harmonious action, places the two powers in that relation which gives each of them its maximum of strength. But by a law to which it would be hard to find exceptions, in proportion as the State became more Christian, the Church, who to work out her purposes io8 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. had assumed worldly forms, "became by the contact worldlier, meaner, spiritually weaker; and the system which Constantine founded amid such rejoicings, which culminated so triumphantly in the Empire Church of the Middle Ages, has in each succeeding generation been slowly losing ground, has seen its brightness dimmed and its completeness marred, and sees now those who are most zealous on behalf of its surviving institutions feebly defend or silently desert the principle upon which all must rest. The complete accord of the papal and imperial powers which this theory, as sublime as it is impracticable, re- quires, was attained only at a few points in their history y. It was finally supplanted by another view of their relation, which, professing to be a development of a principle recognized as fundamental, the superior importance of the religious life, found increasing favour in the eyes of fervent churchmen^. Declaring the Pope sole repre- sentative on earth of the Deity, it concluded that from him, and not directly from God, must the Empire be held — ■ held feudally, it was said by many — and it thereby thrust down the temporal power, to be the slave instead of the sister of the spiritual*. Nevertheless, the Papacy in her y Perhaps at no more than three : in the time of Charles and Leo; again under Otto III and his two Popes, Gregory V and Syl- vester II ; thirdly, under Henry III ; certainly never thenceforth. ^ The Sacbsenspiegel {Speculum Saxonicum, circ. a.d. I ■240), the great North - German law book, says, ♦ The Empire is held from God alone, not from the Pope. Emperor and Pope are supreme each in what has been entrusted to him : the Pope in what concerns the soul ; the Emperor in all that belongs to the body and to knight- hood.' The Schwabempiegel, com- piled half a cen.ury later, subordi- nates the prince to the pontiff: * Daz weltliche Schwert des Ge- richtes daz lihet der Babest dem Chaiser ; daz geistlich ist dem Babest gesetzt daz er damit richte.' a So Boniface VIII in the bull THEORY OF THE MEDIMVAL EMPIRE. 109 meridian, and under the guidance of her greatest minds, of Hildebrand, of Alexander, of Innocent, not seeking to abolish or absorb the civil government, required only its obedience, and exalted its dignity against all save her- self b. It was reserved for Boniface VIII, whose ex- travagant pretensions betrayed the decay that was already at work within, to show himself to the crowding pilgrims at the jubilee of a.d. 1300, seated on the throne of Constantine, arrayed with sword, and crown, and sceptre, shouting aloud, ' I am Caesar — I am Emperor c.' The theory of an Emperor's place and functions . thus sketched cannot be definitely assigned to any point of time ; for it was growing and changing from the fifth century to the fifteenth. Nor need it surprise us that Proofs from me' dicEval dvt- cumenis. Unam Sanctam, will have but one head for the Christian people : •Igitur ecclesise unius et unicse unum corpus, unum caput, uon duo capita quasi nionstrum.' ^ St. Bernard writes to Conrad III : ' Non veniat anima mea in consilium eorum qui dicunt vel im- perio paceni et libertatem ecclesiae vel ecclesiae prosperitatem et exalta- tionem imperii nocituram/ So in the De Consideratiotie : ' Si utrum- que simul habere velis, perdes utrumque,' of the papal claim to temporal and spiritual authority, quoted by Gieseler. « 'Sedens in solio armatus et cinc- tus ensem, habensque in capite Con- stantini diadema, stricto dextra ca- pulo ensis accincti, ait: "Nuinquid ego summus sum pontifex ? nonne ista est cathedra Petri ? Nonne possum imperii iura tutari? ego ego sum imperator." ' — Fr. Pipinus {ap. Murat. S.R.I, ix.) 1. iv. c 41. These words, however, are by this writer ascribed to Boniface when re- ceiving the envoys of the Emperor j Albert I, in a.d. 1299. I have not been able to find authority for their use at the jubilee, but give the cur- rent story for what it is worth. It has been suggested that Dante may be alluding to this sword scene in a well-known passage of the Purgatorio (xvi. 1. 106) :— • Soleva Roma, che 'I buon mondo feo Duo Soli aver, che 1' una e 1' altra strada Facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo. L' un r altro ha spento, ed e giunta la spada Col pastorale : e 1' un coll, allro insienie Per viva forzu nial convien che vada/ no THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. we do not find in any one author a statement of the grounds whereon it rested, since much of what seems strangest to us was then too obvious to be formally explained. No one, however, who examines mediaeval writings can fail to perceive, sometimes from direct words, oftener from allusions or assumptions, that such ideas as these are present to the minds of the authors =, page 119. The Papal party sometimes insisted that both swords were given to Peter, while the imperialists assigned the temporal sword to John. Thus a gloss to Ber Sacbsenspiegel says, ' Dat eine svert hadde Sinte Peter, dat het nude paves: dat andere hadde Johannes, dat het nu de keyser.* ' a Thess. ii. 7. " St. Augustine, however, though he states the view (applying the passage to the Roman Empire) which was generally received in the Middle Ages, is careful not to commit himself positively to it. t Jordanis Chronica (written towards the close of the thirteenth century). I 2 ii6 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. Illustra- tions from MedicBval Art, how Romans and Germans were of one lineage; how Peter's staff had been found on the banks of the Rhine, the miracle signifying that a commission was issued to the Germans to reclaim wandering sheep to the one fold. So complete does the scriptural proof appear in the hands of mediaeval churchmen, many holding it a mortal sin to resist the power ordained of God, that we forget they were all the while only adapting to an existing in- stitution what they found written already ; we begin to fancy that the Empire was maintained, obeyed, exalted for centuries, on the strength of words to which we attach in almost every case a wholly different meaning. It would be a task both pleasant and profitable to pass on from the theologians to the poets and artists of the IMiddle Ages, and endeavour to trace through their works the influence of the ideas which have been expounded above. But it is one far too wide for the scope of the present treatise ; and one which would demand an ac- quaintance with those works themselves such as only minute and long-continued study could give. For even a slight knowledge enables any one to see how much still remains to be interpreted in the imaginative literature and in the paintings of those times, and how apt we are in glancing over a piece of work to miss those seemingly trifling indications of the artist's thought or belief which are all the more precious that they are indirect or un- conscious. Therefore a history of mediaeval art which shall evolve its philosophy from its concrete forms, if it is to have any value at all, must be minute in description as well as subtle in method. But lest this class of illus- trations should appear to have been wholly forgotten, it may be well to mention here two paintings in which the theory of the mediaeval empire is unmistakeably THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE, 117 set forth. One of them is in Rome, the other in Florence ; every traveller in Italy may examine both for himself. The first of these is the famous mosaic of the Lateran triclinium, constructed by Pope Leo III about a.d. 800, and an exact copy of which, made by the order of Sixtus V, may still be seen over against the fagade of St. John Lateran. Originally meant to adorn the state banqueting- hall of the Popes, it is now placed in the open air, in the finest situation in Rome, looking from the brow of a hill across the green ridges of the Campagna to the olive- groves of Tivoli and the glistering crags and snow-capped summits of the Umbrian and Sabine Apennine. It repre- sents in the centre Christ surrounded by the Apostles, whom He is sending forth to preach the Gospel; one hand is extended to bless, the other holds a book with the words 'Pax Vobis.' Below and to the right Christ is depicted again, and this time sitting : on his right hand kneels Pope Sylvester, on his left the Emperor Con- stantine ; to the one he gives the keys of heaven and hell, to the other a banner surmounted by a cross. In the group on the opposite, that is, on the left side of the arch, we see the Apostle Peter seated, before whom in like manner kneel Pope Leo III and Charles the Em- peror; the latter wearing, like Constantine, his crown. Peter, himself grasping the keys, gives to Leo the pal- lium of an archbishop, to Charles the banner of the Christian army. The inscription is, ' Beatus Petrus dona vitam Leoni PP et bictoriam Carulo regi dona;' while round the arch is written, 'Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax omnibus bonas voluntatis.' The order and nature of the ideas here symbolized is sufficiently clear. First comes the revelation of the Mosaic of the Lateral Palace at Rome. ii8 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE, Fresco in S. Maria Novella at Florence. Gospel, and the divine commission to gather all men into its fold. Next, the institution, at the memorable era of Constantine's conversion, of the two powers by which the Christian people is to be respectively taught and governed. Thirdly, we are shewn the permanent Vicar of God, the Apostle who keeps the keys of heaven and hell, re-establishing these same powers on a new and firmer basis ". The badge of ecclesiastical supremacy he gives to Leo as the spiritual head of the faithful on earth, the banner of the Church Militant to Charles, who is to maintain her cause against heretics and infidels. The second painting is of greatly later date. It is a fresco in the chapter-house of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella ^ at Florence, usually known as the Capellone degli Spagnuoli. It has been commonly ascribed, on Vasari's authority, to Simone Martini of Siena, but an examination of the dates of his life seems to discredit this view x. Most probably it was executed « Compare with this the words which Pope Hadrian I had used, some twenty-three years before, of Charles as repiesentative of Con- stantine : ' Et sicut temporibus Beati Sylvestri, Romani pontificis, a sanctae recordationis piissimo Constantino magno imperatore, per eius largitatem sancta Dei catholica et apostolica Romana ecclesia ele- vata atque exakata est, et potes- tatem in his Hesperiae partibus largiri dignatus est, ita et in his vestris felicissimis temporibus atque nostris, sancta Dei ecclesia, id est, beati Petri apostoli germinet atque exsultet, ut omnes gentes quae haec audierint edicere valeant, " Domine salvum fac regem, et exaudi nos in die in qua invocaverimus te;" quia ecce novus Christianissimns Dei Constantimis imperator his tem- poribus surrexit, per quern omnia Deus sanctae suae ecclesiae beati apostolorum principis Petri largiri dignatus est.' — Letter XLIX of Cod. Carol, A.D. 777 (in Mur, Scriptores Rerutn Italicarum). This letter is memorable as con- taining the first allusion, or what seems an allusion, to Constantine's Donation. The phrase 'sancta Dei ecclesia, id est, B. Petri apostoli,' is worth noting. '' 'i he church in which the open- ing scene of Boccaccio's Decameron is laid. ^ So Kugler (Eastlake's ed. vol. i. p, 144), and so also Messrs. Crowe THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE. 119 between a.d. 1340 and 1350. It is a huge work, covering one whole wall of the chapter- house, and filled with figures, some of which, but seemingly on no sufficient authority, have been taken to represent eminent persons of the time — Cimabue, Arnolfo, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Laura, and others. In it is represented the whole scheme of man's life here and hereafter — the Church on earth and the Church in heaven. Full in front are seated side by side the Pope and the Emperor: on their right and left, in a descending row, minor spiritual and tem- poral officials; next to the Pope a cardinal, bishops, and doctors; next to the Emperor, the King of France and a line of nobles and knights. Behind them appears the Duomo of Florence as an emblem of the Visible Church, while at their feet is a flock of sheep (the faithful) attacked by ravening wolves (heretics and schismatics), whom a pack of spotted dogs (the Dominicans y) combat and chase away. From this, the central foreground of the picture, a path winds round and up a height to a great gate where the Apostle sits on guard to admit true believers: they passing through it are met by choirs of seraphs, who lead them on through the delicious groves of Paradise. Above all, at the top of the painting and just over the spot where his two lieutenants. Pope and Emperor, are placed below, is the Saviour enthroned amid saints and angels z. Here, too, there needs no comment. The Church Mili- tant is the perfect counterpart of the Church Triumphant: and Cavalcaselle, in their New His- tory of Painting in Italy, vol. ii. pp. 85 sqq. y Domini canes. Spotted be- cause of their black-and-white raiment. ^ There is of course a great deal more detail in the picture, which it does not appear necessary to describe. St, Dominic is a con- spicuous figure. It is worth remarking that the THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. VII. Anti-na- tional cha- racter of the Empire. her chief danger is from those who would rend the unity of her visible body, the seamless garment of her heavenly Lord ; and that devotion to His person which is the sum of her faith and the essence of her being, must on earth be rendered to those two lieutenants whom He has chosen to govern in His name. A theory such as that which it has been attempted to explain and illustrate, is utterly opposed » Proclamation in Pertz, M. G. H. ii. L 2 Schemes of Otto III. Changes of style and usage. 148 THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. IX. magnificence of Byzantium, not without giving offence to many of his followers ". His father's wish to draw Italy and Germany more closely together, he followed up by giving the chancellorship of both countries to the same churchman, by maintaining a strong force of Germans in Italy, and by taking his Italian retinue with him through the Transalpine lands. How far these brilliant and far- reaching plans were capable of realization, had their author lived to attempt it, can be but guessed at. It is reasonable to suppose that whatever power he might have gained in the South he would have lost in the North. Dwelling rarely in Germany, and in sympathies more a Greek than a Teuton, he reined in the fierce barons with no such tight hand as his grandfather had been wont to do ; he neglected the schemes of northern conquest ; he released the Polish dukes from the obligation of tribute. But all, save that those plans were his, is now no more than conjecture, for Otto III, ' the wonder of the world,* as his own generation called him, died childless on the threshold of manhood ; the victim, if we may trust a story of the time, of the revenge of Stephania, widow of Cre- scentius, who ensnared him by her beauty, and slew him by a Hngering poison. They carried him across the Alps with laments whose echoes sound faintly yet from the pages of monkish chroniclers, and buried him in the choir of the basilica at Aachen some fifty paces from the tomb of Charles beneath the central dome. Two years had not passed since, setting out on his last journey to Rome, he had opened that tomb, had gazed on the great Emperor, sitting on a marble throne, robed and crowned, with the ° ' Imperator antiquam Roman- temporibus multa faciebat quae di- orum consuetudinem iam ex magna versi diverse sentiebant.'-Thietmar, parte deletam suis cupiens renovare Cbron.ix. ap. Pertz, M.G.H. iii. SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS, 149 Gospel-book open before him; and there, touching the dead hand, unclasping from the neck its golden cross, had taken, as it were, an investiture of Empire from his Prankish forerunner. Short as was his life and few his' acts. Otto III is in one respect more memorable than any who went before or came after him. None save he desired to make the seven-hilled city again the seat of dominion, reducing Germany and Lombardy and Greece to their rightful place of subject provinces. No one else so forgot the present to live in the light of the ancient order; no other soul was so possessed by that fervid mysticism and that reverence for the glories of the past, whereon rested the idea of the medioeval Empire. The direct line of Otto the Great had now ended, and though the Franks might elect and the Saxons accept Henry 11 o, Italy was nowise affected by their acts. Neither the Empire nor the Lombard kingdom could as yet be of right claimed by the German king. Her princes placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the vacant throne of Pavia, moved partly by the growing aversion to a Transalpine power, still more by the desire of im- punity under a monarch feebler than any since Berengar. But the selfishness that had exalted Ardoin soon over- threw him. Ere long a party among the nobles, seconded by the Pope, invited Henry p; his strong army made opposition hopeless, and at Rome ha received the im- perial crown, A.D. 10 1 4. It is, perhaps, more singular that the Transalpine kings should have clung so per- tinaciously to Italian sovereignty than that the Lombards should have so frequently attempted to recover their independence. For the former had often little or no Italy indf pendent. Henry 11 Emperor, • Annates Quedlinb.^ ad ann. 1002. V Henry had already entered 1 Italy in IO04. ; ISO THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, hereditary claim, they were not secure in their seat at home, they crossed a huge mountain barrier into a land of treachery and hatred. But Rome's glittering lure was irresistible, and the disunion of Italy promised an easy conquest. Surrounded by martial vassals, these Emperors were generally for the moment supreme : once their pennons had disappeared in the gorges of Tyrol, things reverted to their former condition, and Tuscany was little more dependent than France. In Southern Italy the Greek viceroy ruled from Bari, and Rome was an outpost instead of the centre of Teutonic power. A curious evi- dence of the wavering politics of the time is furnished by the Annals of Benevento, the Lombard town which on the confines of the Greek and Roman realms gave steady obedience to neither. They usually date by and re- cognize the princes of Constantinople Letter to the German bishops in Radewic; Mur., S.R.I.^ t. vi P- 833. REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA, 171 out Europe. The keen and long doubtful strife of twenty years that followed, while apparently a dispute between rival Popes, was in substance an effort by the secular monarch to recover his command of the priesthood ; not less truly so than that contemporaneous conflict of the English Henry II and St. Thomas of Canterbury, with which it was constantly involved. Unsupported, not all Alexander's genius and resolution could have saved him : by the aid of the Lombard cities, whose league he had counselled and hallowed, and of the fevers of Rome, by which the conquering German host was suddenly annihi- lated, he won a triumph the more signal, that it was over a prince so wise and so pious as Frederick. At Venice, who, inaccessible by her position, maintained a sedulous neutrality, claiming to be independent of the Empire, yet seldom led into war by sympathy with the Popes, the two powers whose strife had roused all Europe were induced to meet by the mediation of the doge Sebastian Ziani. Three slabs of red marble in the porch of St. Mark's point out the spot where Frederick knelt in sudden awe, and the Pope with tears of joy raised him, and gave the kiss of peace. A later legend, to which poetry and painting have given an undeserved currency c, tells how the pontiff" set his foot on the neck of the prostrate king, with the words, * The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet^.' It needed not this exaggeration to enhance the significance of that scene, even more full of meaning for the future than it was solemn and aff'ecting to the Venetian crowd that thronged the church and the piazza. For it was the renunciation by the mightiest prince of his time of c A picture in the great hall of the ducal palace (the Sala del Maggior Consiglio) represents the scene. See the description in Rogers' Italy, * Psalm xci. [72 THE HOL V ROAIAN EMPIRE, CHAP. XI. Revival of the study of the civil law. the project to which his life had been devoted : it was the abandonment by the secular power of a contest in which it had twice been vanquished, and which it could not renew under more favourable conditions. Authority maintained so long against the successor of Peter would be far from indulgent to rebellious subjects. For it was in this light that the Lombard cities appeared to a monarch bent on reviving all the rights his predeces- sors had enjoyed : nay, all that the law of ancient Rome gave her absolute ruler. It would be wrong to speak of a re-discovery of the civil law. That system had never perished from Gaul and Italy, had been the groundwork of some codes, and the whole substance, modified only by the changes in society, of many others. The Church ex- cepted, no agent did so much to keep alive the memory of Roman institutions. The twelfth century now beheld the study cultivated with a surprising increase of knowledge and ardour, expended chiefly upon the Pandects. First in Italy and the schools of the South, then in Paris and Oxford, they were expounded, commented on, extolled as the perfection of human wisdom, the sole, true, and eternal law. Vast as has been the labour and thought expended from that time to this in the elucidation of the civil law, the most competent authorities declare that in acuteness, in subtlety, in all those branches of learning which can subsist without help from historical criticism, these so-called Glossatores have been seldom equalled and never surpassed by their successors. The teachers of the canon law, who had not as yet become the rivals of the civilian, and were accustomed to recur to his books where their own were silent, spread through Europe the fame and influence of the Roman jurisprudence ; while its own professors were led both by their feeling and their in- REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA, 173 terest to give to all its maxims the greatest weight and the fullest application. Men just emerging from barbarism, with minds unaccustomed to create and blindly submissive to authority, viewed written texts with an awe to us incomprehensible. All that the most servile jurists of Rome had ever ascribed to their despodc princes was directly transferred to the Caesarean majesty who inherited their name. He was ' Lord of the world,' absolute master of the lives and property of all his subjects, that is, of all men ; the sole fountain of legislation, the embodiment of right and justice. These doctrines, which the great Bo- lognese jurists, Bulgarus, Martinus, Hugolinus, and others who constantly surrounded Frederick, taught and applied, as matter of course, to a Teutonic, a feudal king, were by the rest of the world not denied, were accepted in fervent faith by his German and Italian partisans. ' To the Emperor belongs the protection of the whole world/ says bishop Otto of Freysing. * The Emperor is a living law upon earth®.' To Frederick, at Roncaglia, the archbishop of Milan speaks for the assembled magnates of Lom- bardy : * Do and ordain whatsoever thou wilt, thy will is law; as it is written, " Quicquid principi placuit legis habet vigorem, cum populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem concesserit ."' The Hohenstaufen himself was not slow to accept these magnificent ascriptions of dignity, and though modestly professing his wish to govern according to law rather than override the law, was ' doubtless roused by them to a more vehement assertion of a prerogative so hallowed by age and by what seemed a divine ordinance. That assertion was most loudly called for in Italy. e Document of 1230, quoted by Von Raumer, v, p. 8l. ^ Speech of archbishop of Milan, in Radewic ; Mur., S. R. I., vi. Frederick in Italy. 174 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. Rome under Arnold of Brescia. The Emperors might appear to consider it a conquered country without privileges to be respected, for they did not summon its princes to the German diets, and over- awed its own assemblies at Pavia or Roncaglia by the Transalpine host that followed them. Its crown, too, was theirs whenever they crossed the Alps to claim it, while the elections on the banks of the Rhine might be adorned but could not be influenced by the presence of barons from the southern kingdom?. In practice, however, the imperial power stood lower in Italy than in Germany, for it had been from the first intermittent, depending on the personal vigour and present armed support of each in- vader. The theoretic sovereignty of the Emperor-king was nowise disputed : in the cities toll and tax were of right his : he could issue edicts at the Diet, and require the tenants in chief to appear with their vassals. But the revival of a control never exercised since Henry IV's time, was felt as an intolerable hardship by the great Lombard cities, proud of riches and population equal to that of the duchies of Germany or the kingdoms of the North, and accustomed for more than a century to a turbulent inde- pendence. For republicanism and popular freedom Frederick had little sympathy. At Rome the fervent Arnold of Brescia had repeated, but with far difl"erent thoughts and hopes, the part of Crescentius^. The city had thrown off the yoke of its bishop, and a common- wealth under consuls and senate professed to emulate the spirit while it renewed the forms of the primitive republic. Its leaders had written to Conrad Illi, asking him to help 8 Frederick's election (at Frank- *» See also post. Chapter XVI. fort) was made ' non sine quibus- * 'Senatus Populusque Ronianus dam Italiae baronibus.' — OttoFris.i. urbis et orbis totius domino Con- But this was the exception. rado.' REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA, 175 them to restore the Empire to its position under Con- stantine and Justinian; but the German, warned by St. Bernard, had preferred the friendship of the Pope. Filled with a vain conceit of their own importance, they repeated their offers to Frederick when he sought the crown from Hadrian the Fourth. A deputation, after dwelling in highflown language on the dignity of the Roman people, and their kindness in bestowing the sceptre on him, a Swabian and a stranger, proceeded, in a manner hardly consistent, to demand a largess ere he should enter the city. Frederick's anger did not hear them to the end: * Is this your Roman wisdom ? Who are ye that usurp the name of Roman dignities ? Your honours and your authority are yours no longer; with us are consuls, senate, soldiers. It was not you who chose us, but Charles and Otto that rescued you from the Greek and the Lombard, and conquered by their own might the imperial crown. That Fr^nkish might is still the same: wrench, if you can, the club from Hercules. It is not for the people to give laws to the prince, but to obey his command^.' This was Frederick's version of the ' Translation of the Empire'.' He who had been so stern to his own capital was not likely to deal more gently with the rebels of Milan and Tortona. In the contest by which Frederick is chiefly known to history, he is commonly painted as the foreign tyrant, the forerunner of the Austrian oppressor i^, crush- ing imder the hoofs of his cavalry the home of freedom ^ Otto of Freysing. ' Later in his reign, Frederick condescended to negotiate with these Roman magistrates against a hostile Pope, and entered into a sort of treaty by which they were declared exempt from all jurisdiction but his own. "1 See the first note to Shelley's Hella^. Sisniondi is mainly answer- able; for this conception of B.irba- rossa's position. CHAP. XI. The Lorn- hard Cities 176 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, and industry. Such a view is unjust to a great man and his cause. To the despot liberty is always licence ; yet Frederick was the advocate of admitted claims; the aggres- sions of Milan threatened her neighbours; the refusal, where no actual oppression was alleged, to admit his officers and allow his regalian rights, seemed a wanton breach of oaths and engagements, treason against God no less than himself n. Nevertheless our sympathy must go with the cities, in whose victory we recognize the triumph of free- dom and civilization. Their resistance was at first prob- ably a mere aversion to unused control, and to the enforce- ment of imposts less offensive in former days than now, and by long dereliction apparently obsolete ^ . Republican principles were not avowed, nor Italian nationality appealed to. But the progress of the conflict developed new motives and feelings, and gave them clearer notions of what they fought for. As the Emperor's antagonist, the Pope was their natural ally : he blessed their arms, and called on the barons of Romagna and Tuscany for aid ; he made * The Church' ere long their watchword, and helped them to conclude that league of mutual support by means whereof the party of the Italian Guelfs was formed. Another cry, too, began to be heard, hardly less inspiriting than the last, the cry of freedom and municipal self-government — freedom little understood and terribly abused, self-govern- >» They say rebelliously, says honestam mortem quam ut,' &c.— Frederick, * Nolumus hunc regnare Letter in Pertz, M.G.H., legg. ii. super nos ... at nos maluimus • • De tribute Caesaris nemo cogitabat ; Omnes erant Caesares, nemo censum dabat; Civitas Ambrosii, velut Troia, stabat, Decs parum, homines minus formidabat.' Poems relating to the Emperor Frederick of Hohenstaufen, pubh'shed by Grimm. REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA. 177 tnent which the cities who claimed it for themselves re- fused to their subject allies, yet both of them, through their divine power of stimulating effort and quickening sympa- thy, as much nobler than the harsh and sterile system of a feudal monarchy as the citizen of republican Athens rose above the slavish Asiatic or the brutal Macedonian. Nor was the fact that Italians were resisting a Transalpine in- vader without its effect; there was as yet no distinct national feeling, for half Lombardy, towns as well as rural nobles, fought under Frederick; but events made the cause of liberty always more clearly the cause of patriotism, and increased that fear and hate of the Tedescan for which Italy has had such bitter justification. The Emperor was for a time successful : Tortona was taken, Milan razed to the ground, her name apparently lost: greater obstacles had been overcome, and a fuller authority was now exercised than in the days of the Ottos or the Henrys. The glories of the first Frankish con- queror were triumphantly recalled, and Frederick was com- pared by his admirers to the hero whose canonization he had procured, and whom he strove in all things to imitate p. ' He was esteemed,' says one, ' second only to Charles in piety and justice.' ' We ordain this,' says a decree : * Ut ad CaroU imitationem ius ecclesiarum statum reipublicae in- columen et legum integritatem per totum imperium nostrum servareinus^: — P Charles the Great was canon- ized by Frederick's anti-pope and confirmed afterwards « Acta Concil. Hartzbem. iii., quoted by Von Raumer, ii. 6. >■ Poems relating to Frederick I, ut supra. Temporary success of Frederick. 7« THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, Victory of theLombard League. Frederick Bs German iing. * Quanta sit potentia vel laus Friderici Cum sit patens omnibus, non est opus dici ; Qui rebelles lancea fodiens ultrici Repraesentat Karolum dextera victrici.' The diet at Roncaglia was a chorus of gratulations over the re-establishment of order by the destruction of the dens of unruly burghers. This fair sky was soon clouded. From her quenchless ashes uprose Milan; Cremona, scorning old jealousies, helped to rebuild what she had destroyed, and the con- federates, committed to an all but hopeless strife, clung faithfully together till on the field of Legnano the Empire's banner went down before the carroccio^ of the free city. Times were changed since Aistulf and Desiderius trem- bled at the distant tramp of the Prankish hosts. A new nation had arisen, slowly reared through suffering into strength, now at last by heroic deeds conscious of itself. The power of Charles had overleaped boundaries of nature and language that were too strong for his suc- cessor, and that grew henceforth ever firmer, till they made the Empire itself a delusive name. Frederick, though harsh in war, and now balked of his. most che- rished hopes, could honestly accept a state of things it was beyond his power to change : he signed cheerfully and kept dutifully the peace of Constance, which left him little but a titular supremacy over the Lombard towns. At home no Emperor since Henry III had been so much respected and so generally prosperous. Uniting in his person the Saxon and Swabian families, he healed the long feud of Welf and Waiblingen : his prelates were faithful to him, even against Rome: no turbulent rebel ^ The carroccio was a waggon served the Lombards for a rallying- with a flagstaff planted on it, which point in battle. REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA, 179 disturbed the public peace. Germany was proud of a hero who maintained her dignity so well abroad, and he crowned a glorious life with a happy death, leading che van of Christian chivalry against the Mussulman. Frede- rick, the greatest of the Crusaders, is the noblest type of mediaeval character in many of its shadows, in all its lights. Legal in form, in practice sometimes almost absolute, the government of Germany was, like that of other feudal kingdoms, restrained chiefly by the difficulty of coercing refractory vassals. All depended on the monarch's cha- racter, and one so vigorous and popular as Frederick could generally lead the majority with him and terrify the rest. A false impression of the real strength of his prerogative might be formed from the readiness with which he was obeyed. He repaired the finances of the kingdom, controlled the dukes, introduced a more splen- did ceremonial, endeavoured to exalt the central power by multiplying the nobles of the second rank, afterwards the ' college of princes,' and by trying to substitute the civil law and Lombard feudal code for the old Teutonic customs, difl"erent in every province. If not successful in this project, he fared better with another. Since Henry the Fowler's day towns had been growing up through Southern and Western Germany, especially where rivers offered facilities for trade. Cologne, Treves, Mentz, Worms, Speyer, Ntirnberg, Ulm, Regensburg, Augsburg, were already considerable cities, not afraid to beard their lord or their bishop, and promising before long to counter- balance the power of the territorial oligarchy. Policy or instinct led Frederick to attach them to the throne, enfranchising many, granting, with municipal institutions, an independent jurisdiction, conferring various exemptions N 2 The Ger- man cities i8o THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE, and privileges; while receiving in turn their good- will and loyal aid, in money always, in men when need should come. His immediate successors trode in his steps, and thus there arose in the state a third order, the firmest bulwark, had it been rightly used, of imperial authority ; an order whose members, the Free Cities, were through many ages the centres of German intellect and freedom, the only haven from the storms of civil war, the surest hope of future peace and union. In them* national con- gresses to this day sometimes meet: from them aspiring spirits strove to diffuse those ideas of Germanic unity and self-government, which they alone had kept alive. Out of so many flourishing commonwealths, four only were spared by foreign conquerors and faithless princes till the day came which made them again the members of a great and real German state. To the primitive order of German freemen, scarcely existing out of the towns, except in Swabia and Switzerland, Frederick further commended himself by allowing them to be admitted to knighthood, by restraining the licence of the nobles, imposing a public peace, making justice in every way more accessible and impartial. To the south-west of the green plain that girdles in the rock of Salzburg, the gigantic mass of the Untersberg frowns over the road which winds up a long defile to the glen and lake of Berchtesgaden. There, far up among its limestone crags, in a* spot scarcely accessible to human foot, the peasants of the valley point out to tlie traveller the black mouth of a cavern, and tell * Liibeck, Hamburg, Bremen, sisters have, by their entrance first and Frankfort. into the North German confedera- [Since this was first written tion, now into the German Em- Frankfort has been annexed by pire, lost something of their inde- Prussia, and her three surviving pendence.] REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA. i8i him that within Barbarossa lies amid his knights in an enchanted sleep", waiting the hour when the ravens shall cease to hover round the peak, and the pear-tree blossom in the valley, to descend with his Crusaders and bring back to Germany the golden age of peace and strength and unity. Often in the evil days that followed the fall of Frederick's house, often when tyranny seemed un- endurable and anarchy endless, men thought on that cavern, and sighed for the day when the long sleep of the just Emperor should be broken, and his shield be hung aloft again as of old in the camp's midst, a sign of help to the poor and the oppressed. ^ The legend is one which appears under various forms in many countries. CHAP. xn. CHAPTER XII. IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. The era of the Hohenstaufen is perhaps the fittest point at which to turn aside from the narrative history of the Empire to speak shortly of the legal position which it professed to hold to the rest of Europe, as well as of certain duties and observances which throw a light upon the system it embodied. This is not indeed the era of its greatest power : that was already past. Nor is it con- spicuously the era when its ideal dignity stood highest: for that remained scarcely impaired till three centuries had passed away. But it was under the Hohenstaufen, owing partly to the splendid abilities of the princes of that famous line, partly to the suddenly-gained ascendancy of the Roman law, that the actual power and the theo- retical influence of the Empire most fully coincided. There can therefore be no better opportunity for noticing the tides and claims by which it announced itself the representative of Rome's universal dominion, and for collecting the various instances in which they were (either before or after Frederick's time) more or less admitted by the other states of Europe. The territories over which Barbarossa would have de- clared his jurisdiction to extend may be classed under four heads : — First, the German lands, in which, and in which alone, the Emperor was, up till the death of Frederick the Second, effective sovereign. Second, the non-German districts of the Holy Empire, IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. 183 where the Emperor was acknowledged as sole monarch, but in practice little regarded. Third, certain outlying countries, owing allegiance to the Empire, but governed by kings of their own. Fourth, the other states of Europe, whose rulers, while in most cases admitting the superior rank of the Em- peror, were virtually independent of him. Thus within the actual boundaries of the Holy Empire were included only districts coming under the first and second of the above classes, i.e. Germany, the northern half of Italy, and the kingdom of Burgundy or Aries — that is to say, Provence, Dauphine, the Free County of Burgundy (Franche Comt^), and Western Switzerland. Lorraine, Alsace, and a portion of Flanders were of course parts of Germany. To the north-east, Bohemia and the Slavic principalities in Mecklenburg and Pome- rania were as yet not integral parts of its body, but rather dependent oudiers. Beyond the march of Brandenburg, from the Oder to the Vistula, dwelt pagan Lithuanians or Prussians a, free till the establishment among them of the Teutonic knights. Hungary had owed a doubtful allegiance since the days of Otto I. Gregory VII had claimed it as a fief of the Holy See ; Frederick wished to reduce it completely to sub- jection, but could not overcome the reluctance of his nobles. After Frederick II, by whom it was recovered from the Mongol hordes, no imperial claims were made for so many years that at last they became obsolete, and were confessed to be so by the Constitution of Augsburg, a.d. 1566b a * Pnizzi,* says the biographer Teutonic people should have given of St. Adalbert, * quorum Deus est their name to the great German venter et avaritia iuncta cum kingdom of the present, •norte.' — M. G. H. t. iv. *> Coming, De Finibus Imperii. It is curious that this non- It is hardly necessary to observe Limits of the Empire. Hungary, i84 THE IIOL V ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. XII. Poland. Denmark. Under Duke Misico, Poland had submitted to Otto the Great, and continued, with occasional revolts, to obey the Empire, till the beginning of the Great Interregnum (as it is called) in 1254. Its duke was present at the election of Richard, A. d. 1257. Thereafter, in 1295, Duke Primislas had himself crowned king in token of emancipation (for the title of king which Otto III had granted to Boleslas I had become disused) and the country became independent, though some of its pro- vinces were long afterwards reunited to the German state. Silesia, originally Polish, was attached to Bohemia by Charles IV, and so became part of the Empire; Posen and Galicia were seized by Prussia and Austria, a.d. 1772 c. Down to her partition in that year, the constitution of Poland remained a copy of that which had existed in the German kingdom in the twelfth century. Lewis the Pious had received the homage of the Danish king Harold, on his baptism at Mentz, a.d. 826; Otto the Great's victories over Harold Blue Tooth made the country regularly subject, and added the march of Schleswig to the immediate territory of the Empire : but the boundary soon receded to the Eyder, on whose banks might be seen the inscription, — * Eidora Romani terminus imperii.* King Peter "i attended at the Diet held at Merseburg shortly after Frederick: Ps coronation, and received from that the connection of Hungary with the Hapsburgs is of compara- tively recent origin, and of a purely dynastic nature. The position of the archdukes of Austria as kings of Hungary had aided them in grasping and retain- ing the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia. c They however remained extra- imperial. d Letter of Frederick I to Otto legally with the fact that many of of Freysing, prefixed to the latter's them were also chosen Emperors, although practically their possession of the imperial crown had greatly History. Svend. Tnis king is also called IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS, 185 the Emperor, who as suzerain had been required to decide a disputed question of succession to the Danish throne, his own crown; he did homage, and bore the sword before the Emperor. Since the Interregnum Denmark has been always free©. Otto the Great was the last Emperor whose suzerainty the French kings had admitted ; nor were Henry VI and Otto IV successful in their attempts to enforce it. Boni- face VIII, in his quarrel with Philip the Fair, offered the French throne, which he had pronounced vacant, to Al- bert I ; but the wary Hapsburg declined the dangerous prize. The precedence, however, which the Germans continued to assert, irritated Gallic pride, and led to more than one contest. Blondel denies the Empire any claim to the Roman name; and in a.d. 1648 the French envoys at Miinster refused for some time to admit what no other European state disputed. Till recent times the title of the Archbishop of Treves, * Archicancellarius per Galliam atque regnum Arelatense,' preserved the memory of an obsolete supremacy which the constant aggressions of France might seem to have reversed. No reliance can be placed on the author who tells us that Sweden was granted by Frederick I to Waldemar the Dane^; the fact is improbable, and we do not hear that such pretensions were ever put forth before or after. Norway, too, seems to have been left untouched — the Emperors had no fleets — and Iceland, which had re- mained undiscovered §^ till long after the days of Charles, was down till the year 1262 the only absolutely free Republic in the world. « See Appendix, Note B. f Albertus Stadensis apud Con- fiigium, De Finibus Imperii. e The Irish however are said to have occasionally visited it; and some few Irish hermits appear to have been found there by the Nor- wegian colonists in 874. Fn Sweden, [86 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. CHAP. Xll. Spain. England. Nor does it appear that authority was ever exercised by any Emperor in Spain. Nevertheless the choice of Alfonso X by a section of the German electors, in a.d. 1258, may be construed to imply that the Spanish kings were members of the Empire. And when, a.d. 1053, Ferdinand the Great of Castile had, in the pride of his victories over the Moors, assumed the title of ' Hispaniae Imperator,' the remonstrance of Henry III declared the rights of Rome over the Western provinces indelible, and the Spaniard, though protesting his independence, was forced to resign the usurped dignity \ No act of sovereignty is recorded to have been done by any of the Emperors in England, though as heirs of Rome they might be thought to have better rights over it than over Poland or Denmark i. There was, however, a vague notion that the English, like other kingdoms, must depend on the Empire : a notion which appears in Conrad Ill's letter to John of Constantinople J ; and which was countenanced by the submissive tone in which Frederick I was addressed by the Plantagenet Henry \\K English independence was still more compromised in the next reign, when Richard I, according to Hoveden, sition. Describing the Roman coro- nation of the Emperor Conrad II, Wippo (c. 16), tells us ' His ita per- actis in duorum regum praesentia Ruodolfi regis Burgundiae et Chnu- tonis regis Anglorum divino officio finito imperator duorum regum me- dius ad cubiculum suum honorifice ductus est.' i Letter in Otto Fris. i. : 'No- bis submittuntur Francia et Hisp»- nia, Anglia et Dania.' ^ Letter in Radewic says, ' Reg- num nostrum vobis exponimus. . . Vobis im J erandi cedat auctoritas, no- bis non dcerit voluntas obsequendi. ^ There is an allusion to this in the poems of the Cid. Arthur Duck, De Usu et Authoritale luris Civilis, quotes the view of some among the older jurists, that Spain having been, as far as the Romans were concerned, a res derelicta, re- covered by the Spaniards themselves from the Moors, and thus acquired by occupatio, ought not to be subject to the Emperors. * One of the greatest of English kings appears performing an act of courtesy to the Emperor which was probably construed into an acknow- ledgment of his own inferior po- IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. 187 ' Consilio matris suae deposuit se de regno Angliae et tradidit illud imperatori (Henrico VI^o) sicut universorum domino/ But as Richard was at the same time invested with the kingdom of Aries by Henry VI, his homage may have been for that fief only; and it was probably in that capacity that he voted, as a prince of the Empire, at the election of Frederick II. The case finds a parallel in the claims of England over the Scottish king, doubtful, to say the least, as regards the domestic realm of the latter, certain as regards Cumbria, which he had long held from the Southern crown 1. But Germany had no Edward I. Henry VI is said at his death to have released Richard from his submission (this too may be compared with Richard's release to the Scottish William the Lion), and Edward II declared, * regnum Angliaef ab omni subiectione imperiali esse liberrimum "'.' Yet the idea survived : the Emperor Lewis the Bavarian, when he named Edward III his vicar in the great French war^ demanded, though in vain, that the English monarch should kiss his feet°. Sigismund^, visiting Henry V at London, before the meeting of the council of Con- stance, was met by the Duke of Gloucester, who, riding into the water to the ship where the Emperor sat, re- quired him, at the sword's point, to declare that he did not come purposing to infringe on the king's authority in the realm of England p. One curious pretension of the 1 The alleged instances of ho- mage by the Scots to the Saxon and early Norman kings are al- most all complicated in some such way. They had once held also the earldom of Huntingdon from the English crown, and some have supposed (^but on no suffic ent grounds) that homage was also done by them for Lothian. ™ Selden, Titles of Honour ^ parti, chap. ii. » Edward refused upon the ground that he was ' rest im/nc'tts.^ ° Sigismund had shortly before given great ofience in France bj dubbing knights. P Sigis.nund answered, • Nihil se contra suptrioritatem regis prae- textre.' CHAP. XU, i83 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE. imperial crown called forth many protests. It was de- clared by civilians and canonists that no notary public could have any standing, or attach any legality to the documents he drew, unless he had received his diploma from the Emperor or the Pope. A strenuous denial of a doctrine so injurious was issued by the parliament of Scotland under James III p. The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, although of course claimed as a part of the Empire, was under the Norman dynasty (a.d. 1060-1189) not merely independent, but the most dangerous enemy of the German power in Italy. Henry VI, the son and successor of Barbarossa, obtained possession of it by marrying Constantia the last heiress of the Norman kings. But both he and Frederick II treated it as a separate patrimonial state, instead of incorporating it with their more northerly do- minions. After the death of Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen, it passed away to an Angevin, then to an Aragonese dynasty, continuing under both to maintain itself independent of the Empire, nor ever again, except under Charles V, united to the Germanic crown. One spot in Italy there was whose singular felicity of situation enabled her through long centuries of ob- scurity and weakness, slowly ripening into strength, to maintain her freedom unstained by any submission to the Frankish and Germanic Emperors. Venice glories in deducing her origin from the fugitives who escaped from Aquileia in the days of Attila : it is at least probable that her population never received an intermixture of Teutonic settlers, and continued during the ages of Lombard and Frankish rule in Italy to Kegard the Byzantine sovereigns 1 Selden, Titles of Honour, part i. for a long time to style themselves chap. ii. Nevertheless, notaries in ' Ego M. auctoritate imperial] (or Scotland, as elsewhere, continued papali) notarius.' IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. 189 as the representatives of their ancient masters. In the tenth century, when summoned to submit to Otto II, they had said, ' We wish to be the servants of the Emperors of the Romans' (the ConstantinopoHtan), and though they overthrew this very Eastern throne in a.d. 1204, the pretext had served its turn, and had aided them, in defying or evading the demands of obedience made by the Teutonic princes. Alone of all the Italian republics, Ven'ice never, down to her extinction by France and Austria in a.d. 179^, recognized within her walls any secular Western authority save her own. The kings of Cyprus and Armenia sent to Henry VI to confess themselves his vassals and ask his help. Over remote Eastern lands, where Frankish foot had never trod, Frederick Barbarossa asserted the indestructible rights of Rome, mistress of the world. A letter to Saladin, amusing from its absolute identification of his own Empire with that which had sent Crassus to perish in Parthia, and had blushed to see Mark Antony ' con- sulum nostrum r' at the feet of Cleopatra, is preserved by Hoveden : it bids the Soldan withdraw at once from the dominions of Rome, else will she, with her new Teutonic defenders, of whom a pompous list follows, drive him from them with all her ancient might. Unwilling as were the great kingdoms of Western Europe to admit the territorial supremacy of the Em- peror, the proudest among them never refused, until the end of the Middle Ages, to recognize his precedence and CHAP. XU. The Easi, *■ It is not necessary to prove this letter to have been the com- position of Frederick or his niinis- Iprs. If it be (as it doubtless is) conicmporiry. it is equally to the purpose as an evidence of the feelings and ideas of the age. \s a reviewer of a former edition of this book has questioned its authentic. ty, I may mention that it is to be found not only in Hoveden, but also in the ' Itine- rarium regis Ricardi,' in Ralph de Diceto, and in the * Chronicon Terrae Sanctae.' [See Mr. Stubbs' edition of Hoveden, vol, ii. p, 356.I The Byzantine Emperoru IQO THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE, address him in a tone of .respectful deference. Very different was the attitude of the Byzantine princes, who denied his claim to be an Emperor at all. The separate existence of the Eastern Church and Empire was not only, as has been said above, a blemish in the title of the Teu- tonic sovereigns; it was a continuing and successful protest against the whole system of an Empire Church of Christendom, centering in Rome, ruled by the suc- cessor of Peter and the successor of Augustus. Inst'ead of the one Pope and one Emperor whom mediaeval theory presented as the sole earthly representatives of the invisible head of the Church, the world saw itself dis- tracted by the interminable feud of rivals, each of whom had much to allege on his behalf. It was easy for the Latins to call the Easterns schismatics and their Emperor an usurper, but practically it was impossible to dethrone him or reduce them to obedience : while even in contro- versy no one could treat the pretensions of communities who had been the first to embrace Christianity and re- tained so many of its most ancient forms, with the con- tempt which would have been felt for any Western sec- taries. Seriously, however, as the hostile position of the Greeks seems to us to affect the claims of the Teutonic Empire, calling in question its legitimacy and marring its pretended universality, those who lived at the time seem to have troubled themselves little about it, finding them- selves in practice seldom confronted by the difficulties it raised. The great mass of the people knew of the Greeks not even 'by name ; of those who did, the most thought of them only as perverse rebels, Samaritans who refused to worship at Jerusalem, and were little better than in- fidels. The few ecclesiastics of superior knowledge and insight had their minds preoccupied by the established theory, and accepted it with too intense a belief to suffer IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. 191 anything else to come intd^collision with it: they do not seem to have even apprehended all that was involved in this one defect. Nor, what is still stranger, in all the attacks made upon the claims of the Teutonic Empire, whether by its Papal or its French antagonists, do we find the rival title of the Greek sovereigns adduced in argument against it. Nevertheless, the Eastern Church was then, as she is to this day, a thorn in the side of the Papacy ; and the Eastern Emperors, so far from uniting for the good of Christendom with their Western brethren, felt towards them a bitter though not unnatural jealousy, lost no op- portunity of intriguing for their evil, and never ceased to deny their right to the imperial name. The coronation of Charles was in their eyes an act of unholy rebellion ; his successors were barbarian intruders, ignorant of the laws and usages of the ancient state, and with no claim to the Roman name except that which the favour of an insolent 'pontiff might confer. The Greeks had themselves long since ceased to use the Latin tongue, and were indeed become more than half Orientals in character and manners. But they still continued to call themselves Romans, and preserved most of the titles and ceremonies which had existed in the time of Constantin'e or Justinian. They were weak, although by no means so weak as modern historians have been tili'lately wont to paint them, and the weaker they grew the higher rose their conceit, and the more did they plume themselves upon the uninterrupted legitimacy of their crown, and the cere- monial splendour wherewith custom had surrounded its wearer. It gratified their spite to pervert insultingly the titles of the Frankish princes. Basil the Macedonian re- proached Lewis II with presuming to use the name of * liasileus,' to which Le\vis retorted that he was as good an emperor as Basil himself, but that, anyhow, Basileus Rivalry of the two Empires. t92 THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE, CHAP. XTI, was only the Greek" for rex^ and need not mean * Em- peror ' at all. Nicephorus would not call Otto I anything but ' King of the Lombards r,' Conrad III was addressed by Calo-Johannes as 'amice imperii mei Rex^;' Isaac Angelus had the impudence to style Frederick I ' chief prince of Alemannia*.' The great Emperor, half resent- ful, half-contemptuous, told the envoys that he was ' Romanorum imperator,' and bade their master call him- ' Liutprand, Legatio Constan- tinopolitana. Niciphorus says, * Vis maius scandaluni quam quod se im- peratorem vocat.' s Otto of Freysing, i. c. 30. * ' Isaachius a Deo constitutus Imperator, sacratissimus, excellen- tissimlis, potentissimus, moderator Romanorum, Angelus totius orbis, heres coronae magni Constantini, dilecto fratri imperii sui, maximo priiicipi Alemanniae.' A remarkable speech of Frederick's to the envoys of Isaac, who had addressed a letter to him as ' Rex Alemaniae,' is pre- served by Ansbert {Hhtoria de Ex- feditione Friderici Imp :r'atoris) : — ' Domiims Imperator divina se illus- trante gratia ulterius dissimulare non valens temerarium fastum regis {t-c. Graecorum) et uSurpantem vocabu- lum falsi imperatoris Romanorum, hsec inter caetera exorsus est : — •' Onmibus qui sanae mentis sunt constat, quia unus est Monarchus Imperator Romanorum, sicut et unus est pater universitatis, pontifex videlicet Romanus ; ideoque cum ego Romani imperii sceptrum plus- quam per annos XXX absque om- nium regum vel principum contra- dictione tranquille tenuerim et in Romana urbe a summo pontifice imperiali benedictione unclus sim et sublimatus, quia denique Monar- chiam praedecessores mei impera- tores Romanorum plusquam per CCCC annos etiam gloriose trans- miserint utpote a Constantinopoli- tana urbe ad pristinam sedem im- perii, caput orbis Romam, accla- matione Romanorum et principum imperii, auctoritate quoque summi pontificis et S. catholicae eccKsiae translatam, propter tardum et in- fructuosum Constantinopolitani im- peratoris auxilium contra tyrannos ecclesiae, miranduni est admodum cur frater mens dominus vester Con- stantinopolitanus imperator usurpet inefficax sibi idem vocabulum et glorietur stulte alieno sibi prorsus honore, cum liquido noverit me et nomine dici et re esse Fridericum Romanorum imperatorem semper Augustum," ' Isaac was so far moved by Fre- dericks indignation that in his next letter he addressed him as ' gene- rosissimum imperatorem Alemaniae,' and in a third thus : — ' Isaakius in Christo fidelis divi- nitus coronatus, sublimis, potens, excelsus, haeres coronae magni Con- stantini et Moderator Romeon An- gelus nobilissimo Imperatori anti- quaeRomae, regi A!em,iniae et dilecto fratri imperii sui, salutem,' &c , &c. (Ansbert, ut supra,) IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. 193 self * Romaniorum * from his Thracian province. Though chap. xii. these ebullitions were the most conclusive proof of their weakness, the Byzantine rulers sometimes planned the- recovery of their former capital, and seemed not unlikely to succeed under the leadership of the conquering Manuel Comnenus. He invited Alexander III, then in the heat of his strife with Frederick, to return to the embrace of his rightful sovereign, but the prudent pontiff and his synod courteously declined". The Greeks were, how- ever, too unstable and too much alienated froni Latin feeling to have held Rome, could they even have seduced her allegiance. A few years later they were themselves the victims of the French and Venetian crusaders. Though Otto the Great and his successors had dropped Dignities all titles save the highest (the tedious lists of imperial °"'''''^^*- dignities were happily not yet in being), they did not therefore endeavour to unite their several kingdoms, but continued to go through four distinct coronations at the The four four capitals of their Empire x. These are concisely given ^^"'"^• in the verses of Godfrey of Viterbo, a notary of Frederick's household y : — •Primus Aquisgrani locus est, post haec Arelati, Inde Modoetiae regali sede locari Post solet Italiae sunima corona dari : Caesar Romano cum vult diadeniate fungi Debet apostolicis manibus reverentur inungi.* By the crowning at Aachen, the old Frankish capital, the monarch became ' king ;' formerly * king of the Franks,* or, ' king of the Eastern Franks ;* now, since Henry H's time, * king of the Romans, always Augustus.' At Monza (or, more rarely, at Milan) in later times, at Pavia in earlier Baronius, ad ann. See Appendix, Note C. r Godefr. Viterb., Pantheon, in Mur., S. R. I., tom. vii. '94 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. times, he became king of Italy, or of the Lombards ^ ; at Rome he received the double crown of the Roman Em- pire, ' double/ says Godfrey, as ' urbis et orbis :'— • Hoc quicunque tenet, summus in orbe sedet ;* though others hold that, uniting the mitre to the crown, it typifies spiritual as well as secular authority. The crown of Burgundy » or the kingdom of Aries, first gained by Conrad II, was a much less splendid matter, and carried with it little effective power. Most Emperors never assumed it at all, Frederick I not till late in life, when an interval of leisure left him nothing better to do. These four crowns^ furnish matter of endless discussion to the old writers ; they tell us that the Roman was golden, the German silver, the Italian iron, the metal corresponding to the dignity of each realm c. Others say that that of Aachen is iron, and the Italian silver, and give elaborate reasons why it should be so^. There seems to be no doubt that the allegory created the fact, and that all three crowns were of gold (or gilded silver), though in 2 Donn'ges, Deutsches Slaats- recht, thinks that the crown of Italy, neglected by the Ottos, and taken by Henry H, was a recog- nition of the separate nationality of Italy. But Otto I seems to have been crowned king of Italy, and Muratori {Ant. It. Dissert, iii.) believes that Otto II and Otto III were likewise. * See Appendix, Note A. ^ Some add a fifth crown, of Germany (making that of Aachen Prankish), which they say belonged to Regensburg. — Marquardus Fre- herus. c ' Dy erste ist tho Aken : dar kronet men mit der Yseren Krone, so is he Konig over alle Dudesche Ryke. Dy andere tho Meylan, de is Sulvern, so is he Here der Walen. Dy driidde is tho Rome; dy is guldin, so is he Keyser over alle dy Werlt.' — Gloss to the Sacbsen- spiegel, quoted by Pfeffinger. Simi- larly Peter de Andlo. nUa; so the Scottish king must be crowned at Scone, an old seat of Pictish royalty — Robert Bruce risked a great deal to receive his crown there; so no Hungarian coronation was valid unless made with the crown of St. Step'. en; the posses- sion whereof is still accounted so valuable by the Austrian court. Great importance seems to have been attached to the imperial globe (Reichsapfel) which the Pope de- livered to the Emperor at his coro- nation. IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS. 199 could summon synods, confirm papal elections, exercise jurisdiction over the citizens : his claim of the crown itself could not, at least till the times of the Gregorys and the Innocents, be positively denied. For no one thought of contesting the right of the German nation to the Empire, or the authority of the electoral princes, strangers though they were, to give Rome and Italy a master. The republican followers of Arnold of Brescia might murmur, but they could not dispute the truth of the proud lines in which the poet who sang the glories of Barbarossai, describes the result of the conquest of Charles the Great: — * Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum Hostibus expulsis ad iios iustissimus ordo Transtulit iniperium, Romani gloria regni Nos penes est. Quemcunque sibi Germania regem Praeficit, hunc dives sunimisso vertice Roma Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordiae Rhenus.' But the real strength of the Teutonic kingdom was wasted in the pursuit of a glittering toy: once in his reign each Emperor undertook a long and dangerous expedition, and dissipated in an inglorious and ever to be repeated strife the forces that might have achieved conquest elsewhere, or made him feared and obeyed at home. At this epoch appears another title, of which more must be said. To the accustomed ' Roman Empire ' Frederick Barbarossa adds the epithet of ' Holy.' Of its earlier origin, under Conrad II (the Salic), which some have supposed "\ there is no documentary trace, I Whether the poem which Celtes as is commonly supposed, is passes under the name of Gunther for the present purpose indifierent. Ligurinus be his work or that of m Zedler, Universal Lexicon^ some scholar in a later age, Conrad s. v. Reich. CHAP. XII. The titlt 'Holy Empire.^ 200 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, though there is also no proof to the contrary". So far as is known it occurs first in the famous Privilege of Austria, granted by Frederick in the fourth year of his reign, the second of his empire, 'terram Austrise quae clypeus et cor sacri imperii esse dinoscituro:' then afterwards, in other manifestos of his reign; for example, in a letter to Isaac Angel us of Byzan- tium P, and in the summons to the princes to help him against Milan : * Quia .... urbis et orbis guber- nacula tenemus .... sacro imperio et divse reipublicae consulere debemus