12 RENAISSANCES

prank of enticing fools to follow a treacherous gluam to their dculhs. But
this ideal of oecumenical unity which, on Western soil, hadhithrrto
invariably proved abortive was only one aspect of the ^host of a senile
Hellenic universal state that had been raised in St. POUT'S by Pope Km
and King Charles on Christmas Day, A.I), Soo. The absolutism of the
Diocletianic Roman Empire's demands upon its subjtvts; h;nl been an
characteristic a feature of this Late Hellenic political institution us its*
claim to world-wide dominion; and the intensive, ns \vrll as thr r\-
tensive, potency of the original had been reproduced in the wraith that
had been raised to haunt a Western Christendom.

'The Carolingian Empire . . . was conceived us the soeiety of the whnlr-
Christian people under the control of a theocratic- monarchy, and [itj
attempted to regulate every detail of life and thought, down to the mrlhmt
of ecclesiastical chant and the rules of the Monastic ()rtlet\ by lr,Mi:.lativr
decrees and governmental inspection. . . . The fusion of temporal anjt
spiritual powers was far more complete in the Carolin^ian St.itr than it
had been in the Christian barbarian kingdoms, or even in the Hy/antine
Empire.'1

Charlemagne and his successors had condemned this resuscitated Ton-
stantinian absolutism to miscarry by attempting in bring, not only every
plane of human activity, but also every geographical province of Western
Christendom, under the sway of this 'unitary Church State';' but an
auspicious difference in the circumstances in which the t'itrolinj'iitn /«wr
deforce was reattempted by Frederick 11 Hohc-nstautcn inatlc it possible
for Frederick's political oecumenicalism to fail as lamentably ;IM Charle-
magne's without involving his absolutism in the. disaster which had
overtaken both elements in the Carolinian enterprise,

When Charlemagne had ventured on his attempt to retmiu^urah* a
Constantinian absolutism throughout his wide-spread and still fast-
expanding dominions, he had hat! to start building up again, from the
foundations, a sophisticated social structure that had long since been
rased to the ground in all the former provinces of the Human Kmpho
that lay within his frontiers, and this perhaps the most thoroughly of all
in his own ancestral patrimony, Austrasia. By contrast, the, Kmprwr
Frederick II inherited, in the Kingdom of Sicily, a base of operations in
which absolutism was already a going concern, thanks to the effective,
local revival there of a Late Roman dispensation by the eiitciciM. luiiuln
of his father's Norman victims' Byzantine and Muslim prcdcccMsotx*
And, although the difference in degree of political dUeieney between u
thirteenth-century Sicily and an eighth-century Austrasiu proved not to
be great enough—vast though it was—to compensate lt»r Kredcnck !!'»
handicap in entering the lists so late in the day, the consequent failure of
his attempt to unite Central and Northern Italy with Southern Italy and
Sicily under a centralized oecumenical autocratic rule tlid not prevent
him from making, as King of Sicily, the murk on Western hintory that
he found himself impotent to make as Holy Human Kmpemr. fit other

OL* *?a0w«rn' ,9hrist°Phl!r: -RWfcww and the Rise of Western tfaltwt (Umiltw «y$o,
Sheed & Ward), pp. 13 and 89. The quotations from thin hook hww hrru itiuUr with tt«5
pertnission of the author, the Society of Authors, and the twblwhm,

» Dawson, op. cit,, p. 89. j Hctt IX, viu, vi4 5.