POLITICAL IDEAS, IDEALS, INSTITUTIONS 9
parochial idols had eventually been called to order by being subordinated
to the oecumenical supremacy of a Dea Rorna and a Divus Augustus;
and a post-Dioeletianic absolute version of thus consolidated worship of
the concentrated power of a politically unified Mankind was formally re-
vived in Western Christendom, a quarter of a millennium before the
revival of city-state-worship in Lombardy, when. Charlemagne was
crowned as a Roman Emperor by Pope Leo 1H in Saint Peter's on
Christmas Day A.D. 800.l

The memory of this Carolingian evocation of a 'holy' Roman ghost of
an extinct 1 Icllenic universal state cannot come into our minds without
reminding us simultaneously that, since then, the same ghost had been
re-evoked again and again in the Western World in the course of the
eleven and a half centuries that had elapsed between the date of the
coronation of Charlemagne at Rome and the time of the writing of these
lines.

The all but fatal collapse of the nascent Western Christian Civilisa-
tion itself, which had been the price of Charlemagne's failure to re-
suscitate the Roman Empire in the West effectively, did not deter a
Saxon Otto I4 front repeating his Australian predecessor's attempt; and
the subsequent failure of Otto's attempt in its turn did not deter a
Swabian Frederick I from attempting, for his part, to undo the political
effects of the humiliation of a Franconian Henry IV at Hildebrand's
hands by employing against a triumphant Iliiddbnmdine Church the
refurbished spiritual weapon of a recently disinterred Justinianean Law.3
Thereafter, when Frederick Barbarossu's experience had demonstrated
that the necromancer's wand provided by his JJolognese legists was a
broken reed, his grandson Frederick Stupor Mundi set himself to
reverse, at the eleventh hour, the cumulative disaster of Charlemagne's,
Henry IV's, and Frederick Fs successive discomfitures''—-though the
weapon in which Frederick II trusted to conjure a victory out of his
forlorn hope was one which had missed fire, more than two hundred
years back, in the hands of his Saxon predecessor Otto III.'

This imaginative tenth-century forerunner of a thirteenth-century
tStupttr J\Iufttli hud sought to condense an insubstantial wraith of a de-
funct: Imfwrium Romanum into at least a similitude of flesh and blood by
transferring the seat of a rehabilitated Western Christian 'Holy Roman
Empire* from Western Christendom's Saxon marches over against the
North European barbarians6 to her Roman march over against Orthodox
Christendom, At the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries of the
Christian Era the Ducatus Romnnus was a patch of common ground on,
which the domains of the two Christendoms overlapped;7 and, in install-
ing himself m the ci-dcvant Imperial City, Otto III had hoped to fortify
the sickly counterfeit of the Roman Imperial Power that had been

* C'h(U'k*nuiK!H.!K ttttrmpt to revive the Rwmm Empire in Western Christendom ha»
hern tUfwufwd in this HtuUy in 1, i. 343; HI, in, 37(>; IV, iv, 378-y; V. v, 477, n, x;
niul VI, vil, nj,

•* Hft* H, ii, 167 H, >t 3 Hoc IV, iv. 557, and p. 31, below,

4 Hre IV, iv, 560-7; VII, vii. S37"8* and IX. viiL 3<)4'S-

8 H«'c IV, iv, 617, n. x, 6 See II. ii, 167-9*

i Hoc IV. iv,